God’s Laboratories

Today on Summit Life with JD Greer. Experiencing the beauty and the love of marriage. What I am getting is a taste of the beauty and love of God. It's like I gave it to me because he wanted me to be able to taste and to feel and to sense his love in a very tangible way. Welcome back to Summit Life with JD Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. So if you were to ask most couples why they got married, they'd probably say something about being in love and making each other happy. Or if they're being really open, they might even say something about physical attraction being the key.

And of course, there's nothing wrong with any of those things. But today on Summit Life, Pastor JD Greer reveals that God actually has a much bigger purpose for our marriages, even more than our own happiness. So let's finish the week strong with the first part of a message Pastor JD titled God's Laboratories. The title of our Ephesians series that we are in and have been in is called Mystery and Clarity. Because Ephesians shows you how the deepest mysteries of God, who he is and what he has been up to, mysteries that we sometimes can't even really get our minds around, that we can't explain well, that these very mysteries are the very things that bring clarity to our lives.

And so mystery and clarity. Well, we are nearing the end of this study of Ephesians. And what we saw, how the world that we live in is toxic to the development of Christian virtue. And what we saw is that if we are going to make it spiritually, then we're going to have to fight tooth and nail. We're going to have to swim upstream, which means that we have to strive to learn and understand God's ways.

We've got to strive to bring our hearts in line with his purposes and that we've got to take active control of our schedules so that we give priority to the things that matter the most. None of these things happen naturally. It certainly doesn't for me. And evidently it didn't happen naturally for Paul, for the people that Paul was writing to.

Some of you have been wondering what's wrong with me. None of this happens naturally. It doesn't happen naturally for any of us. That's why Paul says it's a fight. It's a war. And if you are not actively fighting this battle, you are losing this battle.

So you've got to actively fight it. Well, at the end of Ephesians 5, Paul is going to give you another very important principle for spiritual growth. And I actually think it's quite fascinating, one of the most fascinating in all the Bible to me. It is something that could change your life because it is something that God has put into your life 24-7 to teach you about himself. It's all around you, everywhere, and most of us have no concept that it's even there or the reason that he put it there.

All right? And that is, what is that thing that he is going to use to teach us about God? That is our relationships. Paul takes three very common relationships, relationships that most of you will be involved in too, if not all three of these.

He takes marriage, he takes the nuclear family, and then he takes work. And he explains that these relationships are like laboratories that God has set up to make you like himself. Laboratories. We've got a lot of medical people that go here to our church and got a lot of pharmacists or what we refer to around here as legalized drug dealers.

And, right? You know what I'm talking about. And these guys, they use laboratories to work on products until you get them right. That's what a lab is for. I call the first sermon that I preach here on Saturday night my lab sermon. Because what I'm doing is I'm preaching it in a way that's testing out different things to see if they work. And so people on Saturday night know that when I'm in the middle of the sermon they will see me pull out my pen and I will mark something out and be like, I am not saying that tomorrow.

Because that totally flopped. But the whole idea is I'm working on it to create it into the masterpiece that you get to hear on Sunday morning. Right? Well we, the relationships that you and I are in are laboratories, God's laboratories that he uses to make us into the masterpiece that Ephesians 1 says that he has intended for us. So let me first review a couple of very important truths that we've already learned from Ephesians which undergird what I'm going to tell you today.

These are so important that if you don't remember these or get these you're going to not really understand how I'm going to walk us through these relationships. Here's important principle number one. God's main purpose for us, we learned in Ephesians 1, is Christ's likeness. God's main purpose is Christ's likeness. Ephesians 1 12 says that his primary purpose in salvation was to make us into people that would bring him glory. And we would do that by becoming like him in every way.

We would imitate him, we would resemble him, we would in every way be his sons and his daughters loving what he loves, reacting like he reacts, looking like him. That is a process that theologians call sanctification. Now I know sanctification is a big scary religious sounding word, but all it really means is making like God.

The process of sanctification is making you like God. Second, we learned that God is sovereign which means that nothing is outside of his control and he uses all things in our lives for that purpose. For that purpose.

Ephesians 1 11 says quote, God works all things according to the counsel of his will. To accomplish, verse 11 says, his purpose in our lives. And what was that purpose? Christ's likeness. I'm going to need a lot more response than that, I'm just going to throw that out right now. What was that purpose?

Lightness. So God is using all things in your lives for one purpose. Nothing is outside of his control. He's using all things for one purpose and that purpose is Christ's likeness.

Now, in chapters 5 and 6, he applies those two truths, that he's in control of everything and his purpose is Christ's likeness. He applies those to our relationships and shows us something fascinating. And that is that in the most basic of human relationships, God is sovereignly at work like a scientist in a laboratory making us like himself. If you write stuff down, jot this down.

Here's the thesis. God uses our relationships to teach us about himself and to make us like himself. If you don't understand his purpose or you don't understand the breadth of his control, you're not going to get that. So I went over those two truths. When you understand that, here's what he's going to show you. God uses our relationships to teach us about himself and to make us like himself. He's going to go through three examples and we're going to spend most of our time on the first one. More important than the actual examples that I'm going to give you is the principle behind these examples.

And that principle, again, is that God is using our relationships to teach us about himself and to make us like himself. Okay? You with me? Enough intro.

Let's get into the first one. Mowage. Mowage.

All right? Verse 22. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Verse 25. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies because he who loves his wife is really loving himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh but nourishes it and cherishes it just as Christ does the church.

Because we are members of his body. Therefore, verse 31, a man shall leave his father and mother. This is a quote from Genesis 2, verse 25. Leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

This mystery is profound, Paul says, because I am saying that this actually refers to Christ and the church. In other words, God gave marriage. Get this.

Get this. God gave marriage to teach us about his love for us. You know, it's not even that God looked at marriage after he had made it and thought, man, that's a great example of how, you know, I love people so let me like use this as an analogy to help them under.

That's not how it went down. God actually gave us something for the sole intention of, let me use this to teach them about my love for them. God made it.

God designed it, marriage, to teach us about himself. Now, you say how? At least three ways. How is it that marriage teaches us about God three ways? I'm going to give you. Let's start with the most fun and then we'll work our ways to the most painful.

Okay? Number one. Number one, in the delights of marriage, we get a taste of the beauty of God. Verse 32 tells us that.

C.S. Lewis said about 50 years ago, an analogy I use here quite a bit, he said that marriage to him was like a ray of sunshine that shined upon his face, that when the ray hits your face, you don't just focus on the ray, you look back up along the ray to the source. He said that's the way marriage is to me. It is a ray of the sunshine of God's love. All he was doing was really summarizing what Jonathan Edwards had said 400 years ago when Jonathan Edwards says that marriage is the ray, God's love is the sun. Marriage is the symbol. God's love is the reality.

Marriage is the stream. God's love is the ocean. And in experiencing the beauty and the love of marriage, what I am getting is a taste of the beauty and love of God.

That's why God gave it to me. Because he wanted me to be able to taste and to feel and to sense his love in a very tangible way. It is the love of God that is pictured in marriage that makes marriage so beautiful. It's why so many people cry in weddings. To you girls, if you cry in weddings, or you guys, if you watch the wedding channel and you get all teared up when you're watching the wedding channel, this is why.

This is why. You may not know it even. In fact, a lot of people don't realize this because a lot of people have no interest in God at all, but marriages are beautiful to them because whether they realize it or not, what they're experiencing in that moment is a little picture of God's love, God's type of love, and that's what makes it beautiful. Marriage pictures a love that every human being was created for. It is a love where two human beings become one.

Literally, sexually, there is a fusion of bodies. It is a love that is exclusive because she is completely mine and I am completely hers. It is a love that is unconditional. Every human being, as I've explained to you before, every human being has the desire to be known and loved.

Right? We want to be known and loved. You can't have one without the other and have real love because if you're known but not loved, that's rejection.

Right? Somebody really knows you and doesn't love you, they've rejected you. But if somebody loves you and doesn't really know you, that's just superficiality. And so we have a desire as human beings to be known and loved, but that leaves us with a dilemma, doesn't it? Because when people actually know us, they don't want to love us. Because we human beings have what we call the porcupine's dilemma.

Right? You know, porcupines need love too. Porcupines want to be close. They want to snuggle. They want to spoon. Like a 25,000 poisonous quills.

So what does a porcupine do when it's time to get up close to another porcupine? It's like I can't get you close without lacerating you. Human beings have that same issue. Marriage is a picture of being known and loved because I know you, I know your flaws, I know your weaknesses and I love you and it is beautiful. That is shadowed in marriage, but the reality that it points to is beyond itself to the love of God. And I know we got people here that you're like, I'm not really interested in God, but yeah, there's something about marriage that moves you, that's why. It is whispering in your heart and calling out to you for a love that you were created for.

And this is so very important, what I'm about to say. You should let marriage teach you about God's love, but you cannot let marriage replace God's love in your life. You cannot look to someone else to do what only God can do. When you look to someone in the place of God, they will disappoint you. The way I explain this a lot in premarital counseling is I say, here you got a guy who is floating in a sea of loneliness and insecurity and despair. He's just drowning in his own kind of insecurities and along by, hallelujah, Jehovah Jireh, along by flows a five foot two, blonde headed life preserver. Oh, salvation from my insecurity.

And he grabs a hold of her and he sucks the life out of her because she was not designed to rescue him from that ocean. I can say this as a happily married man who married way over his head. Nobody really argues about that. That lonely, insecure, obsessive single people become lonely, insecure, obsessive married people. Because problems like loneliness, insecurity, and all those things are never cured by another human being.

They're cured by God. If you cannot be happy as a single person, you will not be happy as a married person, so you might as well give it up. You do not need a relationship with a perfect man.

You need a relationship with a gracious God. That's what you're looking for. Here's number two. Number two, in the roles of marriage, we get a picture of the image of God. In the roles of marriage, roles in marriage, we get a picture of the image of God. Now, warning, this is deep, very, and highly controversial. Okay?

Fools rush in. Here we go. What we learn from Genesis is that man and woman are both created in the image of God, but differently, and this is what Paul is reminding them of in this passage, that they are different on purpose to reveal different aspects of the image of God. When God looked at man in the Garden of Eden and he said, hmm, man is alone, that is not good. He didn't fix that problem by creating somebody exactly like the man because that would have been not good, not good.

Okay? Twice not good. So what he did is he created something that complemented the man, that completed what was left out. Each of the man and woman is created differently to reveal a complementary aspect of the image of God. And when the two come together in marriage, you get a fuller picture of the image of God than you do when one is alone.

Verse 23, look at that. It says the husband plays the role of the head of the wife, like Christ is the head of the church and is himself its savior, which means he is to lead her like God leads his people. And in leading her, she gets to experience what God's leadership is like, like a ray of the sun. She gets to experience something of God in his leadership and you, the man, get to experience what it's like to love and to lead like God. When you study Genesis, you find that there are at least four ways that man was clearly designated to be the leader in that relationship. You don't have to turn back to Genesis 2.

Let me just walk you back through it. In Genesis 2, the first thing you see is that he was to be a leader in provision. That before woman was ever created, man has a job in the garden. He's working and she is brought into that relationship where he is working and producing fruit from the gardens. In other words, he has a job.

Girls, are you hearing this? He can't hold down a job. He's a bad student. Stay away from him.

You don't want to be living with him in his mama's basement sleeping on Star Trek sheets when you're 40. If that stings some of you, it probably needs to. I always think, sometimes when I say things, different people will get up and walk out and I always wonder, does this mean they're mad at what I said? I don't think anybody would walk out during that moment right there.

Just be like, oh, I'm mad about that, but I'm going to wait for a minute. Number two, he leads spiritually. He leads spiritually. When the woman is created, the man already has a relationship to God and she is brought into it.

You ever notice that? The commands given about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had already been given to man. And evidently, the man was supposed to tell her what those commands were and to lead her in obeying them. The man is to lead the woman spiritually. Paul reminds them of that here, verse 26. He says to the husband, it's your role, husband, to help your wife live faultless before God. I have to lead my family in a way that doesn't lead my wife to materialism or self-sufficiency or pride or apathy or gossip. God holds me responsible for that. When I first got married, I thought I was supposed to have no secrets in my marriage, and that's true, but I thought that what that meant was I was just supposed to tell my wife the same thing I thought about everybody.

I'm like, hey, you know, we're married. This is the one place where the no gossiping rule doesn't apply. I'm just being honest about my feelings.

But here's the problem. That didn't change the fact that I was revealing a genuine lack of love for other people and a genuine pride, which is never okay. And even worse, I was leading and causing my wife to think bad thoughts about others as I gossiped to them about them to her. I have to answer to God for that. God holds me responsible for that. I have to help protect her heart and shepherd her heart. It's like Tony Evans, the African-American preacher, says, spiritual headship is God telling the woman to duck so he can punch the man.

God holds me responsible for the spiritual temperature in my family. Number three, we see that he led in romance. He led in romance. The first human words recorded in the Bible were that of the man composing a love poem about his wife, Genesis 2.26. The man says after woman is created, this is now bone to my bone and flesh to my flesh. You say, well, that doesn't sound that romantic.

He's seen a naked woman for the first time ever cut him some slack, okay. He didn't have time to come up with several revisions of that poem. But in Hebrew it is clear this is poetry. It is a song.

Better yet, it is a love song. Girls, he is supposed to take the lead in relationships. You're like, well, is it wrong for a girl to ask a guy out? Well, put it this way.

If he doesn't have the spine to ask you out, he's probably not going to lead in romance the rest of your life. Fair? So if a guy isn't man enough to ask my daughter out, I don't expect he's going to be man enough to lead her spiritually either. I'm just free from Uncle JD. That's all I'm going to say, all right. Number four, in sacrifice. In sacrifice. Here in Ephesians you see that he is the lover like Christ loves the church, which is not in any way a domineering let me control you and use you kind of leadership, but the kind of leadership that puts her needs above his own, the kind of leadership that comes not to be served but to serve like Jesus, the kind of leadership that is the first to forgive and the first to absorb wrongdoing and the first to respond with grace.

We'll come back to that. But the point is in these four ways, husband, this is what you should hear. Your wife learns about God from you, and you are supposed to learn to be like God as you love her and lead her. We want men to lead at this church.

That's what we want. You go back to Genesis. You find that the mess we got ourselves in came from man not leading spiritually.

I know that when you begin to lead in your homes, man, you will find that the whole temperature of everything changes. And we want you to lead spiritually, all right? So some of you need to stop being deadbeats and be the leaders that God designed you to be. Wife, wife, what is your role? You are to play the role of the church. How is the woman like the church? Y'all ready for this?

I need some encouragement. Verse 24, the wife is like the church in that she submits. You're like, uh-uh. No, he didn't. Yes, he did, okay?

And I checked them to make sure this podium is bulletproof. She submits, which means, A, she surrenders her ambitions to his. She surrenders her ambitions to his. See how verse 23 says the man is the head? It says that she, in the same way, ceases to be the head of her own life. That means she ceases to build her own kingdom and yields herself to building her husband's and her family's kingdom. You know, this is my wife. My wife, she is in many ways smarter than me. She graduated about a better university. She had a higher SAT score. But she has given up any visions of her own kingdom to live for my kingdom and to live for the kingdom of my family.

Let me make this clear, because I don't want to over-speak. The Bible is not against women in careers, but it is against those who do so at the expense of their families. Marriage shows us the beauty of God, and the roles that we have in marriage show us the image of God. A new perspective from Pastor J.D. Greer today on Summit Life. To hear this program again or to download and study the free, unedited transcript, visit us at jdgreer.com. And while you're there, you can also browse through previous studies or visit Pastor J.D.

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Sign up when you go to jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch, and I'm so glad that you joined us today. Hope you have a wonderful weekend of worship and join us right back here on Monday for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.