Where Do You Get Your Beliefs About Family Life? Ephesians 5:21-6:4.

In this sermon based on Ephesians 5:21-6:4, Tim reflects on how our beliefs about family life can be shaped by experiences and media, comparing that to biblical teachings. This sermon emphasizes key biblical principles: husbands should love their wives as Christ loves the Church, wives should submit to their husbands, and parents, especially fathers, should lead their children's spiritual growth.

Tim then addresses the issue of divorce, highlighting that God does not approve of it except in a specific context of sin, and stresses the importance of forgiveness and grace through baptism. Ultimately, the message encourages following God's design for family life, rooted in love, forgiveness, and mutual respect.

This Sunday sermon, based on Ephesians 5 verses 21-6:4 , was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on October 6, 2024.  This sermon is preached by Pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)        

Transcript

Grace and peace to you from God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ, friends. Amen.

Our family recently watched Inside Out Two. I highly recommend it, I think there are many reasons to see it. It got us talking about sin and forgiveness, about human nature, about our human ability to self-delude. I won’t spoil it, here’s a very high level summary. The main character, Riley, starts the movie with the belief, “I’m a good person.” The entire movie has her wrestling with the fact that that’s not always true. In Christian terms, she learns she is a sinner. 

The movie pictures Riley’s beliefs, including her belief that she is a “good person,” as the products of her experiences. In the movie, beliefs are produced when emotions go deep inside the brain and plant a memory deep inside the brain which leads Riley to believe a certain thing about the world, the future, her place in those things. An example: The emotion Joy plants the memory of Riley winning a hockey game deep in Riley’s mind, and a new belief springs up: Riley believes, “I’m a winner.” That forms part of her overall belief “I’m a good person.”.

Beliefs can be mistaken. If your house is broken into when you’re growing up, you might believe, “The world isn’t safe.” If you get good grades without having to try very hard, you might believe, “Everyone should be able to do this.” If you hear a story from a trusted source about sin within the church not being dealt with, you might believe, “The church is evil.” But someone with the opposite experiences - a safe home, a hard time in school, a church that dealt with sin - they believe entirely the opposite. What’s really true?

Where do you get your beliefs about family life? Do they come from your parents? Do they come from a friend’s family, as you watched them interact? Do they come from families you see on TV, on YouTube, on Instagram? And what are those beliefs you have?

We heard, in our Genesis reading, that men and women are different, but they are completely compatible. We heard Jesus clearly teach that God does not approve of divorce. We heard a lot of things from the apostle Paul. He said that husbands should lead and wives should follow. He said that children should obey their parents. He said that fathers should not be harsh with their children, and that they should take the lead in their children’s spiritual formation. Do these teachings from the Bible match what we believe? 

Let’s look at that first one. “Men and women are different, but they are completely compatible.” This comes from our Genesis reading. God says, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Man and woman are different. They are also perfectly designed by the perfect Creator of all things to work together. God appoints them as the leaders in the home, and God appoints husbands as the leaders of that leading pair. 

That’s the lesson the apostle Paul tells us we need to understand from God’s words about creation. He says, Ephesians chapter five, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church.”

We need a basic understanding of the story of the Bible to make sense of those words. We don’t need to be able to cite chapter and verse of every one of Jesus’ parables, or trace Paul’s missionary journeys on a map. But if we know nothing about Jesus, or his life, we have two methods of trying to understand these words from God. First, we guess. We try our best to figure out by ourselves, based on our experiences, what it would mean to love like Jesus or submit as to Jesus. Or, second option, we ignore these words. We decide that it doesn’t really matter to us what God says about man and woman, about family life, and we go ahead with what we think is best. Both of those options are the same. Someone may claim to be following these words of God, but if they don’t know Jesus’ life, they’re just following their own best guesses about what these words mean. That’s the same thing as the person who ignores these words.

So what does it look like to “love like Jesus” and to “submit as to Jesus”? “Love like Jesus” first. Paul says, Jesus loved by “giving himself up for the church to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word,” which is baptism, “to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” To love as Jesus loves is, first, to forgive. To cover over another’s sin. Second, it is, verse twenty-eight, to “love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church.”

To forgive and to care for. That’s what God calls husbands to do in their role. What about wives? What does it mean to “submit as to the Lord”? It means to follow his leadership. I’ll point to our Gospel reading as an example. People are bringing children to Jesus for him to bless them. The disciples try to stop this. They probably had good reasons behind their objections. “He could be healing people right now.” “He could be teaching us right now!” Jesus tells them they’re off base, they’re wrong, and they listen. 

We read the story and we say, “Well, obviously the disciples were wrong.” It wasn’t obvious to them at the time. And even if it never became obvious to them that they were wrong, they were not called to evaluate Jesus’ decision. They were called to obey it.

If a man is blessed with a wife, he should regard her as the gift from God she is. He should ask for her thoughts on decisions that affect their family. He should take them into account. We learn this to be true every time that we see, in the story of the Bible, a believer coming to Jesus with a request which he answers. Jesus teaches us to pray, to tell him what we want. The church does not submit silently to Jesus. The church submits to Jesus in prayer. 

Believers are free to tell Jesus, “I think this would be best.” But we are then called to submit to his will. In the same way, wives are called to submit to their husbands. Share your thoughts, honor his leadership.

What if we don’t like the way that this arrangement, ordained by God, plays out? Well, culturally, we’re told, “Go get a divorce.” Jesus dealt with that thought in his conversation with the Pharisees. Their belief was, “Divorce is okay.” That’s a very widespread belief in our culture also. Why did the Pharisees believe this? Well, the law which God gave through Moses had included a framework for proper legal dissolution of a marriage. They cite the particular stipulation, found in Deuteronomy twenty-four.

But the Pharisees missed the context of that stipulation. The relevant portion of Deuteronomy twenty-four says that a man may give his wife a certificate of divorce if he discovers that she has been unfaithful to him. Not just suspects, but discovers. In other words, divorce is something which may take place when sin has already broken the relationship.

The Pharisees, as we see in their comment to Jesus, didn’t read Moses that way. All they saw was permission and process. But God’s Word is abundantly clear on this point: God does not approve of divorce. Even in instances where a Christian ends their marriage, it is only ever something which takes place under the auspices of sin. Divorce either serves as recognition that someone’s sin has destroyed the marriage, or the divorce itself is the sin. 

This is the point Jesus makes with the Pharisees. “What God has joined together, let no one separate.” The disciples later ask him to continue with his remarks, and he tells them, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”

Mark intentionally follows Jesus’ teaching on divorce here with an instance of Jesus teaching about the importance of children. Research consistently shows, divorce is not good for children. Yes, there are situations where children are protected when one parent removes them from the sphere of influence of the other. But God does not want us to form our beliefs - to make our decisions - about how we should live life on the basis of exceptions. Most divorces are not undertaken to protect the kids. Most divorces occur when grown adults are unwilling to keep the promises they made to one another.

There is forgiveness for divorce. The partner who was offended against in an unjust divorce often wrestles with guilt. They can know: Christ Jesus will never send them away. The one who prompts an unjustified divorce can know that there is forgiveness as well. In baptism, Christ washes away our sin and promises that we have a clear conscience in the eyes of God. This is what Paul tells us in our Ephesians reading: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word,” which is baptism, “to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” Blameless in the eyes of Jesus. 

God promises that this blamelessness is given to us in baptism. It is a gift, free and clear. We don’t need to look for anything else to make us blameless. A Christian man doesn’t need to tell himself “She’s supposed to submit!” if he sees loveless self-interest in his own actions. A Christian woman doesn’t need to redefine “submit” or “head” if she sees her own failures to respect her husband. Both of them can instead look - must look - to God’s promise of forgiveness, given in baptism.

God desires what is good for us. He has ever since he made the first man and woman. Before that, in fact. From eternity he has desired what is good for you. It is good for us to be clear on what is sin. It is good for us to be forgiven by God. Because we are, we stand before Christ, with Christ, as his church, like Adam and Eve stood with one another, feeling no shame. Amen.