Ephesians 5: 21–33 (Part 1)

What this episode covers

So Ephesians chapter 5, and reading from verse 21. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands, as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. His body, of which he is the Saviour. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church, and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing 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 this same way, husbands ought 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. for we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respond her husband. One of the most important questions for any society is this. What do they think marriage is? What is marriage? Cultures across the world and down the centuries have always had some form of marriage. And studies consistently show that marriage is good for people who are married, and children of those who are married do significantly better in life than those whose parents were not married. But what should marriage look like? What part do cultural and personal preferences play in what a marriage looks like? Actually, in the Western world, many people have quite a negative view of marriage. In a previous generation, there was maybe an overly rosy view of what marriage would be. And so this question of, what really is marriage? What are we to make of it? If you’re married, what are you aiming for in your marriage? If you’re engaged, what should you expect when you get married? If you would like to be married one day, what should you be looking for in a potential husband or wife? And equally important, what should you be like if you want to be a husband or wife? And thinking more widely, how can we support and encourage marriages to be better? Well, if we’re going to answer those sort of questions we we need to have a good grasp of what marriage actually is. Old films often portrayed marriage as the happily ever after that love would would, according to the films, inevitably blossom into. There might be a stormy path to that great day, but once you reach there, then everything is rosy. Well, the pendulum of how people view marriage has rather swung to the other extreme. People are much more cynical. They’ve moved from the unrealistic to the negative. Fewer people get married these days, and they wait longer, apparently in Spain, the average age at which she mar is 40. After all, why commit yourself to a life of boredom? If you do marry, well, we’re told, at least make it what you want it to be. And frankly, if it doesn’t work, you can always get divorced. That’s our culture’s view of marriage on the whole these days. So should we see marriage as maybe somewhere between that rather unrealistic, rosy view and the very negative cynical view of today? Is marriage really kind of a middle way between those two, a bit more realistic, but a bit more positive? No. Marriage is designed by God, is rather different to what the world has ever seen marriage to be. As someone put it, “You cannot really understand marriage unless you’re a Christian. That may seem a really stark statement, but I hope, as we go through what Paul says in Ephesians 5, that we’ll begin to see that actually, a true and full understanding of marriage is only possible for those who know Christ. Now, of course, there are many benefits, as I’ve already said, for tho

Distinct summary based on available episode metadata or transcript content.