Having Two Legs

Archives For Bible – Ephesians

Jesus Love

March 10, 2013 — 1 Comment

Daniel and Claire, you know well Paul’s command to husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her. But I wonder if we often miss just how scandalous this command is. I think perhaps our modern culture’s general aversion and disgust with Paul’s teaching on marriage is probably approaching the level of scandal that it is. But I suspect that they are actually not scandalized enough. They get hung up on the asymmetry of Paul’s language. Husbands lead like this; wives follow like that. Husbands love; wives respect.

But the scandal is deeper than that. Paul says that husbands are to love their wives like Jesus loved the Church, and when we look elsewhere, we see that the kind of love Jesus had for us when He went to the cross for us was not a reasonable sort of love, not a sensible kind of love. In Romans 5, Paul uses four different adjectives to describe our state when Jesus died for us. Paul says we were weak, we were ungodly, we were sinners, and we were enemies when Christ died for us.

The culture around us uses a word that sounds exactly like our word “love.” They spell it the same; they even pronounce it the same. But I would suggest that based on what they actually do with that word, most of the time, they mean something entirely different than we do. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Family, Lent, Marriage Bed, Wedding Exhortation

Polyphonic Love

March 9, 2013 — Leave a comment

Ethan and Caroline, Anymore, a wedding is a highly charged political statement. On the one hand, you have the complete abandonment of marriage for a many. For these people, a wedding is more like a special Valentine’s Day present, a neat little ceremony that expresses some vague notion of love. But you can just as easily live together, have children together, and have a family without it. On the other hand, and in what seems like a completely irrational stance, you have the homosexuals clambering for the right to marry also. We shouldn’t be surprised when soon all sorts of other couples want the same rights to marry several wives, near relatives, or somebody’s pet turtle or a favorite sock. In either case, these marriages are not Christian marriages. Those ceremonies, whatever they may be, are not Christian weddings. They aren’t talking about Christian love.

But rather than getting depressed and all gloomy about the state of Western Civilization, I think we should look at this state of affairs with thankfulness and hope. God is telling this story, and we should assume that there is a good reason why He put us in this chapter. And if He has piles of pagans and non-Christians clambering to talk about love and marriage and weddings and what it means to be a family, we should assume that this is precisely because God wants us to talk about it more not less.

There are many ways to come at this, but I’d like to suggest that we use a musical analogy. Christians should begin pointing out more and more that true love in Christian marriage is polyphonic not monophonic. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Family, Wedding Exhortation

Kill Your Feelings

February 27, 2013 — 3 Comments

A man is required by God to disconnect his feelings from his duty. This is not because a man doesn’t have them. A good man is not cold and heartless. But a good man represents Jesus rightly by bearing his own feelings as well as the feelings of others, specifically those people entrusted to his care. The man who dumps his feelings whether in an emotional puddle or in an outburst of anger is misrepresenting Christ. But a Christian man bears them patiently, cheerfully because He knows the gospel. He knows that he has an older brother named Jesus who has borne it all.

This is not stoicism or apathy. Rightly understood, this is just faithful obedience to our Lord. Feelings are not holy. They have no automatic rightful place in the world. Feelings may be as sinful as thoughts and actions and words. You have no innate right to your feelings. And they are not exactly the same thing as the pain you feel when you stub your toe. Of course there’s the “ouch” factor, but hurt feelings may be completely disobedient to Jesus. Anger may be in complete rebellion to Jesus. There is a time to mourn; there is a time for rejoicing. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Culture, Family, Lent, Manalive, Marriage Bed, Wisdom

We Call It Glory

February 18, 2013 — 1 Comment

Peter says that a godly man must honor his wife as the weaker vessel (1 Pet. 3:8). The fact that many Christians would turn a light shade of pink when this verse is read out loud is an indication of just how spineless and cowardly we have become. But still worse are the consequences that necessarily flow from ignoring this verse or explaining it away with footnotes and throat clearing.

This means that a man who gets up multiple times a night with young children throughout the week and continues to get up early to go to work must not complain or be bitter when his wife happens to get up once and asks to sleep in for a bit. He may not respond by pointing out how “unfair” that is. This is to ask God to flatten out the differences between men and women. This is to dishonor a woman’s glory rather than to honor it.

Let me give you another example: This means that a wife or daughter may feel free to unload her feelings, hurts, confusions, worries, and fear to her husband or father, and that man may not unload in the same way on his wife or daughter. A man must be honest, but his duty is to be strong for his wife, to be strong for his daughter. This may seem unfair to some, but it is nothing less than the gospel in operation. Paul says that a man’s example is Jesus who loved His bride and gave Himself for her (Eph. 5:25). He bears our burdens, and men must bear the burdens of those they are responsible for. To ask a man to be “transparent” and to “share his feelings” is to ask a man to disobey Jesus. There is of course a generic way in which, all Christians “bear one anothers’ burdens,” but this is not a command at odds with the way God made the world with men and women and their respective glories. Continue Reading…

In Bible - 1 Peter, Bible - Ephesians, Family, Manalive, Marriage Bed, Wisdom

David & Emily

September 16, 2012 — Leave a comment

“Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. 32 And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. 5:1 Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.” (Eph. 4:31-5:2)

David and Emily, there are really only two ways, two roads, to paths, two stories in the history of the world: the way of bitterness and the way of forgiveness, the way of wrath, anger, revenge, clamor, malice or the way of kindness, tenderness, grace.

Now stated like that, most people don’t gleefully sign up for the first list. Let me see, you mean I get to be malicious too? Wow, what a deal. Sign me up for that one. But the problem is that many people don’t really understand the second list. It’s the happy list, the gold star list, the smiley face list, with rainbows and sunsets and puppy dogs and happily ever after music playing in the background. Of course that’s what we want, we say, when we’re dressed up in fancy suits and ties and lovely dresses. Of course that’s what we want when we’re in love, when the sky is blue and there’s not a cloud in the sky.

But you can tell that people don’t really get what that means when the clouds come rolling in, when the offenses come, when sin happens, when there’s disappointment, when there’s failure, when there’s hurt. I think lots of people have somehow gotten the idea that being a Christian just means being happy. God is a big buzz word that means “sunshine and bunnies” and being a Christians means pretending the world is a Thomas Kinkade painting, complete with lamp posts on every corner and manicured lawns. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Culture, Family, Grace, Wedding Exhortation

Get Bloody

July 31, 2012 — Leave a comment

In today’s sermon text, God gives the instructions for the priests’ garments. One of the things to notice is that God wants Israel to view the priest as a sort of warrior. His garments are like armor. He wears a breastplate, shoulder guards, and a robe like a coat of mail. To be near to God, to serve God on behalf of others, to guard God’s presence necessarily means warfare, struggle, fighting. Priests busy in the tabernacle would frequently be splattered with blood, the blood of sacrifice.

But lots of Christians spend their time walking or running away from struggle, away from the fight. Many Christians are at least functional pacifists when it comes to their priestly duties. It’s easier not to speak up, easier not to comment on the silly Facebook post, easier not to get off the couch and correct your child, easier not to go to someone who has offended you. But the Christian life is not all about just keeping the peace, making sure everyone is just floating merrily down the lazy river of life.

Paul insists that we have been enlisted in the army of Jesus: put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. At the end of his life, Paul describes his whole ministry as having “fought the good fight.” Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Bible - Exodus, Culture, Exhortations, TRC

Jared & Janine

July 29, 2012 — Leave a comment

The fact that we’re standing here today like this, with smiles on our faces about to celebrate this particular marriage is a miracle. There’s no good reason for this. There’s nothing really ordinary about any wedding. When you think about all the twists and turns in peoples’ lives, decisions to move, decisions to take particular jobs, decisions to go to a particular event or not. If you think about all the ways in which something could have gone wrong, should have gone wrong, all the ways you shouldn’t have clicked, it shouldn’t have worked out, the impossibility of a wedding looms large. But sometimes the circumstances are even more obviously fantastic, obviously impossible.

And I don’t mean that anyone doubted that you liked each other. I mean the fact that you’re standing here, your parents and siblings are all around you, and you’re in fellowship with one another. You’re standing underneath a huge fountain of God’s grace and blessing that you don’t deserve, that we don’t deserve. God’s goodness is pouring out on you right now, far beyond measure, far beyond reckoning. I hope you can feel that.

But this isn’t a vague, you-won-the-lottery-lucky, the point isn’t to say, oh looky, sometimes things randomly turn out. No, the point is to say that there is a God and He has revealed Himself to us in Jesus. And Jesus is alive. He’s not dead. He’s not a mythological character. He’s not a figment of our imaginations. It’s not a name that we say like some kind of good luck charm or superstitious incantation. Jesus is God; Jesus came and died and rose again for our sins and for the sins of the world. He’s alive now in heaven, and He rules and reigns over all things. And “all things” includes our lives, in every detail. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Family, Grace, Marriage Bed, Wedding Exhortation

Dad-Shaped Holes

July 6, 2012 — Leave a comment

Fathers have an enormous responsibility in raising up children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And dads have a particularly significant role to play in raising up sons. But Christian dads frequently fail by sins of omission. They don’t usually abuse their children (though some do). They don’t usually malign them or chew them out or yell at them. Often times, Christian dads sin by failing to positively love and affirm their kids, and their sons in particular.

God made the world such that when sin entered the world, insecurity and shame came into the world. Part of that insecurity and shame results from knowing that God, their Father, didn’t approve of their actions (eating the forbidden fruit). Part of that insecurity and shame amounted to uncertainty about the future, about God’s response, about their nakedness. And ever since, people live lives full of insecurity, uncertainty, and fear. But like our first parents, we don’t just stand there in our nakedness usually. We scramble for coverings.

And since God filled the world with all kinds of cool stuff, we look for something cool that we can pull off pretty well. Some people can work out at the gym and get sculpted, sexy bodies. Some people pour lives into athletics. Others work long hours, save up tons of money and find their security in fat bank accounts, big houses, or fancy cars. We cover our insecurity and shame with something we think makes up for it. I might be scared, insecure, uncertain, but at least I eat grass fed beef. I may be scared, ashamed, worried, but at least I have these sweet tattoos. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Exhortations, Family, Grace, Wisdom

Free to Carry More

July 5, 2012 — 1 Comment

Ephesians 5 exhorts husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church. One of the fundamental lessons that Jesus gives us is prayer. Jesus is constantly disappearing early in the morning and late at night to pray.

But it’s pretty easy to tell a man to “pray about it,” and everybody’s eyes glaze over as though that was something unimportant. But men who talk to God about their families understand the grace that God gives through prayer.

One of the principle graces God gives through prayer is gracious stability. When a man has cast all his cares on God and entrusted Him with them, that man is in a position to carry a bigger load than otherwise. When a man is carrying around a pile of stress and worry and fatigue, and then his wife or a son or daughter walk in the room and toss a few more things on top, collapse is all but inevitable. But when a man is regularly giving his own concerns, his own cares, his own stresses to Jesus, His arms are free to carry more. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Exhortations, Family, Wisdom

Assurances of Salvation

June 6, 2012 — 1 Comment

Pastor Jim Wilson has a great little booklet entitled Assurances of Salvation, available here in Kindle format and available here for free download, along with a few other goodies.

The booklet lists 8 ways to have assurance of salvation but begins with the recommendation to read 1 John which is written “so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 Jn. 5:13).

Pastor Wilson continues with the following assurances:

1. The Holy Spirit seals, guarantees, and assures us (1 Jn. 4:13, Rom. 8:16-17, Eph. 1:13-14, 2 Cor. 5:5, 1 Cor. 2:11-16).
2. Change of Character: read the lists of the works of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:19-25. Which list characterizes you? Jesus saves out of the first list into the second.
3. Confessing Jesus as Lord (1 Cor. 12:3, Rom. 10:9-10, Lk. 6:45).
4. Obedience: People who are saved obey Jesus (1 Jn. 3:6, 3:9-10, 5:18, 2:3).
5. Discipline: If you are getting away with disobedience, you are not a child of God. If you are being disciplined, pay attention and repent (Heb. 12:5-11). Continue Reading…

In Bible - 1 Corinthians, Bible - 1 John, Bible - 2 Corinthians, Bible - Colossians, Bible - Ephesians, Bible - Galatians, Bible - Hebrews, bible - John, Bible - Luke, Federal Vision, Pastoral Theology, Theology - Pneumatology, Theology - Soteriology