Tim Keller and Kathy Keller on The Christian Marriage

I'd like to talk to you about the place of marriage in our culture today which of course is a pretty hot topic and I'll break my uh talk down into three parts three headings I'd like to talk to you about the unreal and distorted relationship our culture has with marriage now the unreal and distorted relationship secondly what the underlying beliefs and attitudes are that are causing this to story an unreal relationship and then thirdly where the Bible and the gospel can help our culture what what the Bible says that could really resolve this so first

of all when I say the unreal and distorted uh relationship of our our culture to marriage I can be brief but I also want to be real specific here are three statistics facts that the divorce rate today is about 50 percent by 50 of marriages and in divorce in 1960 and that didn't seem like a very long time to me but anyway in 1960 it was uh the divorce rate was half that here's a second one which I think is extremely important in 1960 75 percent of all U.S adults were married today it's less than

50 percent which is a huge change and then thirdly as many of you know in 1960 the percentage of people who cohabited uh men and women living together apart from Marriage without being married uh that percentage was negligible it wasn't really along the map today uh one quarter of all unmarried women ages 25 to 40 are living with a partner living with a man and over half of all women in their 20s 30s and 40s will at one time cohabit and the um those statistics are are striking the change is really big in the culture

the statistics also show a set of assumptions on the that are pretty pervasive out there a set of assumptions and here's what some of the assumptions are one is that if well one of them is that most marriages are unhappy and you can sort of see why people would think that they say well now wait a minute 50 of all marriages divorce and in divorce anyway surely a certain percentage of the others that survive aren't happy and therefore most marriages are unhappy um a second assumption is that living together living together before you get married

is a great way to figure out whether it's the right person especially if you've got the right sexual and romantic chemistry which is understood as the key to other things that if you have the right sexual and and romantic chemistry that's what you have to find in living together figures you know helps you understand whether that's there and especially if it's there in a kind of enduring way another um assumption is that the key to satisfying marriage is finding that perfectly compatible soul mate and that is defined and you can see it actually Kathy and

I have noticed for example on eHarmony there was an ad this way the the perfectly compatible soul mate that people out there looking for is someone who won't change me somebody who accepts me just as I am somebody who will affirm me not change me and release me to be myself and not shackle me now these assumptions show a real fear of marriage a real negative attitude toward marriage a real insecurity about marriage and yet here's another set of facts these are also empirical facts and listen to this first those who live together before marriage

are more likely to get divorces than those who do not in other words if you cohab before you get married you're more likely to divorce secondly in general the earlier that sex is introduced to a relationship the more likely that relationship is to break up thirdly yes it's true the divorce rate is 50 percent but the greatest percentage of divorces happen to people under the age of 18 there's quite a lot of that and people haven't completed high school and therefore if you complete your high school and college and you get married in your early

or mid-20s your chances of getting divorced are much much less than 50 percent and listen to this two-thirds of all marriages that say they're unhappy if they stay together five years later they say they're happy two-thirds and also over the last 40 years in general 62 percent of all people who are married said they were very not happy but very happy with their marriage and that's those numbers have stayed up uh and of course you've probably heard these and that is there are piles and piles of data that say that married people have a far

higher level of physical health mental health wealth accrual at every age and children who grow up with two married parents all their lives have a two to three hundred percent more likely chance of positive life outcomes you've heard that in other words my first Point's over I'm done with my first point what's the first point the first point is that even though our culture has tremendous fears about marriage tremendous uh uh lack of belief in marriage constant calls for saying marriages had it the empirical the reality is it's marriage is still the best thing possible

for you if you can get it it's a great thing so why this unreal and distorted view of marriage if it's not based in reality and it isn't why are people so negative and afraid of it why are they putting it off why are they failing to do it in such huge numbers 0.2 there are a couple of underlying attitudes and here's the main thing essentially there's been a change in our culture to the understanding of the purpose of marriage there's been a change with regard to what is understood as the purpose of marriage the

biblical idea and by the way to some degree other traditional cultures align with this but the biblical idea of marriage is that marriage is something that creates a framework for lifelong devotion of love between a man and a woman or let me break that down basically the purpose of marriage is it's a framework to do three things at least first of all it's designed to help each party subordinate their individual impulses and interests in favor of the family the relationship and growth and character see one of the purposes of marriage is make it very very

difficult to get out and therefore what's more important than my happiness at the moment is the marriage is the relationship in other words you you subordinate individual interests and you subordinate your individual impulses for the marriage the relationship and it creates character over time that's one of the designs another design is that men and women are so deeply different and yet they clash and yet they mesh their differences make them Clash on the other hand the differences make them mesh and and marriage is a way of bridging that Gap and really creating an interlockedness and

bringing uh male and female together with their different views of life and their different insights their different gifts and their different weaknesses to gather into a whole and then thirdly designed to create a long-term stable secure setting for raising children in other words marriage is a public good it's a marriage that's good for human character development it's a marriage that's good for a relationships between genders it's America marriage is a good thing for raising children and so forth however what's happened John witty who's a a scholar he's a historian basically he's a social historian and

he put it perfectly like this here's the change quote he says the older idea of marriage is a permanent contractual Union designed for the sake of mutual love procreation and protection is slowly but surely giving way to a new reality of marriage as a terminal sexual contract designed for the gratification of the individual parties that's it in other words at one point marriage was subordinate me to us subordinate me to the public good subordinate me even even my immediate interest to my long-term character development subordinate me to all these other things but today what's happened

is very very overtly marriage is about me in fact Tara Parker Pope uh last year when was this no no no no I forget two years ago maybe wrote this fascinating article in the New York Times so out there and just expressed what we all know has happened in the culture uh Tara Parker Pope wrote It's called The happy marriage it's the me marriage and here's what she said New York Times I think two years ago the notion that the best marriages are those that bring satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive after all isn't

marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first not anymore for centuries marriage was viewed as an economic and social institution and the emotional and intellectual needs of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage itself but in modern relationships people are looking for a partnership and they want Partners who make their own lives more interesting who help each of them attain valued goals therefore final quote marriage used to be about us but now it's about me that's it that's a huge huge change now the irony is if that's the if that's what's

happened the purpose of marriage is not for me to make a sacrifice certainly not to change I've got to find someone who is perfectly compatible and that means somebody who accepts me as I am somebody who affirms me somebody who helps me get to my goals that's the perfect and also somebody who with whom I have this great sexual romantic relationship because the whole purpose of marriage is fulfillment personal individual self-fulfillment and if that doesn't work if that's not what's what's ahead of me I'm not going to that marriage and if I'm in a marriage

and it stops happening then I'm out here's the problem and this is the weird and this is my main point that approach puts more pressure on marriage than the Bible puts on it or any traditional culture has ever put on marriage it puts tremendous pressure on marriage it says marriage has to provide something that no the Bible doesn't say it should provide and nobody else has ever said it should provide until tonight until now why because here think who do you have to find for married a me marriage class who do you have to find

first of all somebody who doesn't think there's anything wrong with you hardly because like you can't they don't you don't want them to come in and change you okay but that means of course that you've got to find somebody that you don't particularly want to change much either there shouldn't be a great deal of conflict and there has to be this desire constantly to jump into bed it has to be absolutely completely natural I've got a lot of Statistics that say it's exactly what everybody says they have to be do you realize what that means

no wonder nobody can find anybody like that because there's nobody like that out there secondly no wonder there's a lot of cohabitation because people say well at least I'd like to have sex with somebody but I don't want to give myself to someone like that unless there's going to be they have to be totally no low maintenance they've got to be constantly not trying to change me but let's just say this if you put on top of the culture's view of marriage which is self-fulfillment compatibility soul mate don't change me and on top of that

you try to make it virtuous by saying oh and I want to marry a Christian too in other words if you've imbibed the the values of the culture and what you say if you're Amendment there's not too many of you out there right now but if the men say oh I want to marry a Christian but she's got to be absolutely gorgeous and she can't change me and if the women just pick up what the culture says I want to marry a guy but he's got to really be quite a provider you've got to really

have a great job you've got to really you know I got to really know I'm going to be living pretty nicely and be able to raise children and have no problem sending to private school and all that stuff in other words if you imbibe the cultures incredibly self -centered me marriage and then you put on top of it the me marriage concept and then you put on top of it oh and I want to marry a Christian you're never going to find anybody or if you do and you get married and as soon as you

find it it's incredibly hard really hard you're going to say I married the wrong person what can oh dear you know of course some of you know because I put it in the book and some of it seems like a lot of you read the book um the reality is that marriage is difficult it is hard no two people are ultimately compatible because all human beings are sinners including Christians which means they're self-centered that means when you bring any two self-centered people still deeply self-centered even after they believe the gospel together it's going to be

very very difficult plus you've got the fact that men and women are different and that was that's part of the point of marriage is to bring people together who are somewhat uh mysterious to each other you really don't understand why they think that way and when you put the gender difference and you put the self-centeredness and you put all the other natural things together marriage is actually pretty hard to get to learn how to fit Stanley Howard was Duke University it's a classic statement he says the assumption is that there is someone just right out

there for you to marry and that if you look closely enough you'll find that just right person this assumption overlooks a crucial aspect of marriage it fails to appreciate the fact that you always marry the wrong person we never know who we marry we just think we do or even if we first marry the right person just give it a while and he or she will change for marriage being the enormous thing that it is means you're not the same person after you've entered it see what he's saying as you look at this prospective person

you say ah this person is characterized by x y and z great Mary and all of a sudden it's XYZ and ABC and Def because you're in there you're in the person's life marriage is so big that the minute you enter it you change the person so he says the primary challenge of marriage throughout the course of marriage is learning to love and care for the stranger you often find yourself married to now he's overstating it he even admits it by the way he's trying to get your attention there is such a thing as compatibility

you probably shouldn't be 40 years apart you probably should at least be able to speak the same language uh and I mean I'm laughing I'm pushing the envelope but then you have to say well there's other of course there's things that could be getting in the way you don't want to make the normal incompatibilities the gender difference uh the uh the temperament differences that are always there as well as the basic self-centered sin difference you don't want to aggravate that unnecessarily so it is a bit of an exaggeration but not much of one and here's

what the here's what the Bible gives us that the culture desperately needs to understand the understanding of love as a covenantal thing let me just take my last couple of minutes on this love is a covenantal thing the essence of a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the way it's covenantal language God is the witness of the first marriage you know he gives it gives the woman to the man now what is a covenant well our culture doesn't even know we don't even use the word but here here's

a little nutshell definition Covenant is an incredible unbelievable and for our society counterintuitive understanding merger of love and law together that is a covenant relationship relationship is more intense and personal and intimate than a merely contractual relationship or legal relationship but at the same time it's far more binding in solemn than a merely emotional relationship in fact a covenant relationship is more intense and more personal because it's legal see when someone says well you know I why do I have to be married why do I need a piece of paper to love somebody I'll tell

you why unless you know this other person has really said I'm committed to you I'm committed to you for my whole life I'm committed here's what a covenant is not just to feel loving to you but to be loving to be tender to be faithful to be uh to serve you regardless of how I feel that's a covenant I'm going to be tender I'm going to be affectionate I'm going to be faithful I'm going to be unselfish that's what you're promising when you get married I promise not to feel loving but to be loving regardless

of the circumstances and only when somebody does that to me then I can say now I can be myself now I'm not afraid that you're going to walk away because we don't have the right chemistry it's more intimate because you finally can let down your you can take well you can even stop fooling yourself as to who you are and you finally start to find out who that person really is that you have married I mean in other words a covenant first of all reveals us so that we can actually be who we are inside

the marriage that can never happen in cohabitation because each person knows they're basically still in marketing and promotion you've got to constantly say well this person is going to leave unless I'm constantly living up you can't let you you can never be seen without your makeup but it's not just that covenantal love also actually gives the Richer understanding of what love really is when Kathy and I first kissed and hugged and held hands years ago there was this electrical thrill and somebody says well when you hold your hand now do you get the same electrical

thrill you had when you first told touched her and the answer is heck no thank goodness and and here's and here's the reason why in fact I wrote this down and I'm reading this because it's very important to say it just the way I think I think this captures it yeah as I look back on it when we first held hands before we were married the initial thrill was not So Much from the magnitude of my love for her but from the flattery of her choice of me the reason the reason you get that Thrill

is not so much oh I'm really loving this person no it's your ego somebody I like somebody I think is pretty cool or hot or whatever your terminology is is responding to me that's not love that's ego or what a skirt tape tells you if you read a screwtape letters he says most an awful lot of what human beings call love is really hunger it's a knee it's an ego emptiness and when you feel like this person is affirming this person's actually making me feel better about myself oh my goodness you call that love that's

not love it's it's loves in there but it's largely ego no love is sacrificial service and that the light you increasingly find in someone that you've invested your life in by the way you notice it happens with children you know a little child you have a child infant how much is that infant give to you nothing how beautiful is the infant well you know if you're a woman you've got hormonal reasons why you think it's beautiful but for the rest of us you say it's just sort of a little you know the Pillsbury Doughboy you

know and yet what do you do you have to you have to sacrifice that child right away you sacrifice everything your whole life kind of goes away uh the child doesn't give you much you give and you give and you give and you give and after a while you love that child in a way evil love that child industrial strength love unconditional love it's astounding why because that's what Real Love is Real Love is sacrificial sacrificial service and then the increasing Delight that comes from someone that you've invested your life in and that's the reason

why over the years what happens is the love we feel now considering that we know who we are in fact at first you feel like I'm falling in love with this person you're falling in love with your idea of what that person who that person is not the real person as years go by you find out who you are as yours go by you both find each other's flaws you get totally disillusioned with each other then what happens is you kind of rebuild your respect for each other because you see each person holding on taking

hold giving up trying harder moving on through embracing repenting forgiving showing Grace to each other and slowly Real Love Grows and slowly you begin to admire that other person for what she's been through for you and vice versa and you know in the end that's the most sexy thing of all you know what you know what is really sexually uh intense is when someone you admire admires you the praise of the praiseworthy is above all Rewards and with that person you admire regardless of what they look like if you just admire that person because of

what you've been through and what she's done for you what you've done for her it's sexy it's sexy in the end of course what I've just said about marriage and Covenant is something that a lot of other traditional cultures believe in too in some ways traditional cultures are really more like uh Christianity than they are like modern Western culture and yet in the end Christianity gives them something gives us something that the other cultures can't give where do you get the power to do this where do you get the power to forgive where do you

get the power to keep loving even when you find out this other person isn't anything like what you wanted them to be what do you how do you keep going when you disillusion yourself when marriage brings out the worst in you and you realize that I am a far worse person I ever thought I had no idea I was capable of this kind of anger I have no idea this I was capable of this kind of lying I mean marriage will bring out the worst in you that's when you have to say Jesus Christ when

he was on the cross looked down at us he saw us betraying him denying him abandoning him and the greatest act of love in history of the world he stayed on the cross he didn't love us because we were lovely he loved us to make us lovely and when I realized what he did for me I can look at my wife and she can look at me and she could say I see you and you've hurt me but I can cover it I can forgive it because Jesus Christ looked into my heart and I caused

his death and yet he forgave me and we've got the power of Grace to make marriage into what it can be which is the greatest relationship possible apart from our relationship with God and so we pray Kathy and I that uh you will take that gospel and use it in your life in that way now Kathy's going to come up and speak to another thing uh and my wife and I have uh we went to Gordon Connell together we both had the theological training very important it's actually it really helps a great deal to our

theological Fellowship over the years and it is true that Kathy is Kathy and Tim have written all the books that only Tim's name is on but right now Kathy comes up and speaks in her own voice and stands on a stool if I can find it there it is where is it foreign boy you are invisible out there here's something I've been taught since I first became a Christian what put this closer okay okay something I've been taught since I first became a Christian that as members of Christ's body we are the hands and feet

of Jesus in this world ministering Grace to a broken and needy people you've heard that too I'm sure you've heard that the scripture makes sure that we understand this is not just a nice metaphor but a genuine reality I sense an echo should I be moving this oh that's the way it is the echo is there so in when Saul encounters the Risen Christ on the Damascus Road and Jesus question to him is Saul Saul why are you persecuting me in attacking and killing the Christians Jesus himself was feeling attacked and persecuted or at least

that seems to be the clear implication Paul after years of meditating on that initial encounter in First Corinthians 12 comes up with that whole long passage about where all the body members of the body and he concludes with now you are the body of Christ and each one of you is a part of it and there are lots of other passages too in the New Testament like Ephesians 4 that draw on the body of Christ's language we're supposed to speak the truth in love to one another because this is Ephesians 4 last verse in the

chapter 25 for we are all members of one body so my point is that the world sees us and we are Christ made visible and I want to take that one step further Christian marriage is an apologetic vehicle that is a visible window into the character and Life of Christ his work and his salvation and something which could astonish the world if we did it right just as an assign I can't see all of you but I can guess that there are some of you out there who are not currently married or who may be

in marriages that are unequal and not particularly happy you're not going to be left behind we'll get to it wait for it um everybody gets to be part of this when you go to college and you sign up for religion 101 like I did under the belief that I was going to learn about how to be a better Christian you're told that we've created an anthropomorphic God one who looks like a human being talks and acts like one and that we ascribe things to him out of our own experience we have fathers so he is

the father capital F and we have spouses so he is the bridegroom capital B and so on inequality we ascribe to God is because we're cutting and pasting it from our own experience of father-son relationships of Wrath Of Love of shepherds not that we have a lot of shepherds probably today but we're told that we've created a God in our own image C.S Lewis saved my brain in college and gave me the greatest ammunition in the world by turning this entirely on its head if God is the creator which means he was there first before

us before the world he was able to make a world any way he wanted to and to fill it with creatures and relationships of any nature he wanted to so wouldn't it make sense for him to populate our world with things that he would be able to call on when it was time to reveal truth about himself so he would have the metaphors and the images to hand since he's unknowable in his Transcendence we know him only by what he's revealed to us through his written word and through his in fleshed word Jesus but what's

written the Revelation that's written draws on analogical language made possible by God's prior creation of things like Fathers and Sons and brides and grooms and sheep and Shepherds and so on so in order to reveal truths about himself this helped me so much to get through college God has given us a world full of show and tell well of course now we have Jesus we have the very image of God and the written word eliminates the Incarnate Word but what about the part of God's world that never picks up a Bible or to whom Jesus

is just a curse word you use when you hit your thumb with a hammer the heavens are telling the glory of God and sometimes people are moved to listen but there's another way in which the character and the gospel of God can be visible before a needy World using a vehicle hand-picked by God to deliver that information and I'm speaking about the way in which the distinct roles of men and women in a marriage reveal the Gospel of Jesus here's my main point I'm indebted to Jennifer Chan a Deaconess at our church I met with

her and we were talking this that this that I finally said what I'm going to say to you I said to her and she said that's the main point of your whole book why didn't you put that sooner why didn't you say more about that because this is the best part of your book which it was too late to rewrite so anyway but I decided I would make it the main point of what I'm going to talk about if you take away nothing else just remember this in a Christian marriage each person gets to play

the Jesus role together a husband and a wife living out their roles of headship and submission can display the fullness of the glory of Christ and the gospel in a powerful way in Philippians 2 we're told about Jesus and his submission to the father dying for our salvation and rising to greater glory in Ephesians 5 we're told about Jesus in his headship of the church exercising his authority by being a servant in order to provide his bride with whatever is necessary for her growth and perfection for the sake of this discussion I'm going to assume

that we all here agree that the Bible is the Only Rule of faith in practice God's voiced Us in areas in which he wants us to be happy and therefore obedient I think I'm on safe ground there so far Let Me Go a step further and assume that we all agree that when God created US male and female to reflect his image and stamped every cell in our bodies XX or XY he meant something important by that namely that by inhabiting different gender roles we would reflect the life of the Triune God in a way

that unisex persons could not in all honesty I know that can't possibly be true for everyone and for some of you that will require a certain suspension of disbelief but if you will grant me that for a few minutes I'd like to talk about the gift to us and to the world that divinely ordained gender roles are meant to be headship and submission those nuclear words turn out to both be descriptors of Jesus and although the sinful hearts of men and women have taken those Concepts and twisted them if we discover and embrace Jesus definitions

we'll find ourselves entering into the mystery of the dance of the Trinity as well as enacting the mystery of the Gospel on the side this is a sidebar here in fact it's written on the side of my notes um if I had time and the time is rushing away then I would be more than willing I would be happy to rant against the oppression and the marginalization of women throughout the ages and especially in the church this is real and it's Grievous it's a grief to God and it's a grievous loss to the body of

Christ to amputate many of the most functional members of the body but I will confine myself to more positive formulations in the interest of time but like I said happy to rant I mean you have the baby you have the bath water okay and there are many people I've met whenever I had this discussion I do seminars on it and talks on it and I talk to every Weeping Woman and Redeemer who discovers that we don't ordain women comes my way I always end up saying look let's keep the baby and I will help you

bail the bath water there's dirty bath water here there's a lot of dirty bath water let's get rid of the dirty bath water but can we keep the baby can we keep the divinely ordained gender roles and get rid of all the twistedness that's been entered into it okay I'm ranching and I said I was going to stop um anyway more we will be embodying being the body of Christ before the world that needs to see him and see the gospel and his salvation yet has precious few opportunities to do so but wait you say

there's a church on every corner anybody's free to walk in to the church and then there's Christian TV and there's Christian radio and there's Christian books and blogs and people on the street corner with megaphones and leaflets and whatever yes but only in a marriage and only because God created marriage in order to be a vehicle for this Revelation are people able to see repentance and forgiveness operating without manipulation and the Holy Spirit supporting and sustaining our fumbling attempts to overcome the sins of dominance and over-dependence your marriage can become a window into the gospel

and into a restored and redeemed Human Society our gender roles can also lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and a deeper understanding of the joy and love and deference and exultation of the inner life of the Triune God think about your friends your families and your neighbors they see your marriage and how it works or how it doesn't work much more intimately than anything else you probably do tones of voice shrugs hugs supportive words apologies belittling comments or comments of admiration and praise all this is visible even to Casual observers so ask yourself what

should people be able to tell about the Gospel of Jesus Christ by looking at your marriage since God intended it to be a metaphor what should they be able to tell in the headship of a husband they should see the servant leadership spoken of in Ephesians 5 which I will read part of husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy cleansing her by washing her with water through the word and to present her to himself as a Radiant Church Without stain or wrinkle or

any other blemish but holy and blameless in the same way husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies he who loves his wife loves himself Christ gave himself up he died to make his bride holy and spotless that's the definition and the model of headship that husbands are given it doesn't sound much like the Archie Bunker definition of headship or sadly the one that you hear from any teachers and preachers who should know better being the head in a marriage does not mean that you are qualified to get all the perks and all

the Privileges and the little woman is around to supply them in Matthew 20 Jesus said to his disciples this is starting at verse 25 you know that the rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them and their High officials exercise authority over them so now he's going to redefine Authority okay not so with you instead whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be your slave just as the son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a

ransom for many the night before his death Jesus re-emphasized his Redemption of power and authority by washing his disciples feet that's John 13 vividly showing that he their Lord and Master was exercising his authority by being a servant and so they were obligated to act in the same way Jesus Took the ego and the self-centeredness out of authority and redefined it as the capacity and the desire to serve even to die in order to bring about the happiness and the Holiness of his church his bride his people and sidebar even though I'm focusing on marriage

here bear in mind that the church is the household of God so the authority of Elders or leaders needs to be the same kind of sacrificial servanthood the people who do the scutwork the long hours the boring painful meetings but I digress what about the submission of a wife well I'm tempted simply to say that if you have a husband who understands his headship then there can be no anxiety about submitting to a man who's willing to die for you in order to serve you but let's not leave it there if we look at Jesus

in Philippians 2 this is what we read your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself and became obedient to death even death on a cross therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name which is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow

and on heaven and on Earth and under the Earth and every tongue confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the father Jesus submission leads directly to God being glorified keep that equation in your mind the sun's equality as God was without question but he took on the role of a servant this is crucial to understanding gender roles or to any discussion of gender roles their roles roles okay roles for anyone been in the military one of the first things they teach you is you salute the uniform not the man or the woman

in it okay the role of this father and the son are until are not the role the being of the father and the son are ontologically equal there's your 20 word for the day ontological means in their Essence in their Essence the father and the son are equally God but the submission of Jesus to the father in taking the role of a servant in order to be our savior was a role he assumed willingly that he it meant that he assumed a role that was economically subordinate and economically here doesn't mean anything to do with

stocks and interest rates it means in order to accomplish a task his submission was not compelled or required of him would you please notice that it was a gift for the purpose of securing our salvation and women who choose to be submissive to the gender roles God has assigned are offering that submission to God first not to their husbands for the purpose of creating a marriage that nourishes enriches and reveals when I first wrestled with this passage my conclusion was well if submission did not injure the dignity and equality of the second person of the

Trinity then it's not likely to hurt me and I have actually kept that as kind of a mantra that I pull out when those weeping women come to me where are we with time okay I'll risk it um I would go over a lot of passages if I had more time I'll go over a couple of them which I hope you're already familiar with it talks about azer the word used for help made in Genesis 2 being a very strong word mostly used of God in the Old Testament as in oh God our help that

God has recalled our helper the same way Eve is called Adam's helper or in Galatians 3 26 to 28 that much misinterpreted passage most people go to 28 first there is neither Jew nor Greek slave nor free male or female for your all one in Christ Jesus no more gender roles start out with 26. you are all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek slave nor free male nor female for you are all one in

Christ Jesus if you belong to Christ then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise this is not a challenge to Define created gender roles but a window into how God uses them as a vehicle of Revelation you'll notice that first Paul calls us all men and women sons of God that's good because being a son in that culture meant something that being a daughter didn't and it's also okay because later on we are all also men and women called brides and Christ God is very even-handed in the way he spreads his gender-based

metaphors around he uses he calls us sheep too and I'm not going to go there I won't go into all the theological and scriptural impoverishment we face if we become just children of God that's not really false but it's also not able to carry the weight of all that it's meant to be a son and then when he says we're all Sons Jew Greek male female slave free no one's worth resides in the role in which they inhabit in Life or God regards us all as he does his own son and makes us co-heirs with

him and yet the roles don't disappear I wanted to spend some time on this although I know we're pressed for time because the distinguishing of roles from gifts and both from value untangles one of the naughtiest problems in discussing gender roles anytime the subject comes up to it and to recap men and women are equal in value and Status before God as we've just seen men and women are equally gifted by the Holy Spirit when it fell at Pentecost men and women equally displayed the gifts of the Spirit probably so much so that the early

church adopted a unisex genderless based role of ministry which Paul actually in First Corinthians 11 had to reign in a little bit and say no the gender roles still stand yes the holy spirit's given everybody gifts they need to be used but there was a point in God making you male and female let's not throw the baby out with the bath water he didn't use those exact words but that's what he meant men and women are equally called to use those gifts but in differing roles yet both are the Jesus role both men and women

get to play the Jesus role in their marriage Jesus in his sacrificial servanthood watching his disciples feet washing with his blood the sins of his bride Jesus in his submission to his father as a gift not something compelled from him joyfully who is in turn lifted up to a higher Glory I said at the beginning that those of you who are not currently married or who are not married to a man who is imitating Jesus in your marriage are not going to be left out of his drama John Newton said that the biggest danger of

a happy marriage is idolatry we forget our true spouse because our heart settles on our visible human spouse so single Christians or Christians who are unhappily married because both can be deep Wells of loneliness are uniquely placed to remind those of us who are married that we are all betrothed to our Heavenly bridegroom number of years ago I had a conversation with one of the deaconesses a redeemer and we both together had an aha moment she said that she felt that the church had no idea and by church since we were talking she kind of

meant me of the pressure being put on a 30 or 40 or older single person by the world that's telling you that you are a fool not to be having sex or at least buying a vibrator I said to her some would have a loss for anything more profound well Jesus was an unmarried man with a human body so I'm sure he knows what you're going through then it dawned on us both that Jesus still has his human body it's glorified it's resurrected it's perfected but he didn't just endure 33 years of Temptation and Chastity

longing for his bride he's still in his human body waiting for the day with a consummation of the marriage supper of the Lamb he knows what you're going through when you are remaining chaste and pure for his sake that thought needs to drive all of us single and married to yearn for that day and to prepare for it single people are placed uniquely to remind and correct us married people when we place too much of our happiness in the current circumstances and not enough in our Union with Christ married people are placed to enact the

rules of Jesus so the world sees him voluntarily sacrificing himself for the love of his bride stepping out of the joys of Heaven into the role of a servant and having paid the bride price on the cross being exalted above all other names everybody gets to play the Jesus role I'm supposed to close in prayer and remind you that the next session starts in 15 minutes after a stretch break with Don Carson back here promptly at 1 15. so let me close in prayer and then I'll give that announcement which I just gave sort of

out of order let's pray Heavenly Father Heavenly bridegroom brother friend there are so many ways in which you describe yourself using the metaphors that you put into this world so that you would be able to reveal truths about yourself that couldn't be revealed any other way we ask you to use us use our relationships use our marriages Lord or use our not being married to be a window into the gospel into the Salvation that Christ has won for a world that doesn't read their Bibles listen to sermons doesn't know about you and needs to so

desperately we ask this so that your name would be exalted above every other name and that you would be glorified and we long for the day when we will be United with you in Jesus name