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Marriage As It Was Meant to Be...Continued from page 1
Elisabeth Elliot, writing on "The Essence of Femininity," offers a fitting summary of God's ideal for wives:
Unlike Eve, whose response to God was calculating and self-serving, the virgin Mary's answer holds no hesitation about risks or losses or the interruption of her own plans. It is an utter and unconditional self-giving: "I am the Lord's servant … May it be to me as you have said" (Luke 1:38). This is what I understand to be the essence of femininity. It means surrender.
Think of a bride. She surrenders her independence, her name, her destiny, her will, herself to the bridegroom in marriage … The gentle and quiet spirit of which Peter speaks, calling it "of great worth in God's sight" (1 Peter 3:4), is the true femininity, which found its epitome in Mary (John Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood [Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1991], 398, 532, emphasis added).
Divine Directives for Husbands
After giving the divine guidelines for the wife's submission, Paul devotes the next nine verses of Ephesians 5 to explain the husband's duty to submit to his wife through his love for her: "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church" (v. 25). The Lord's pattern of love for His church is the husband's pattern of love for his wife, and it is manifest in four ways.
Sacrificial Love
Christ loved the church by giving "Himself up for her." The husband who loves his wife as Christ loves His church will give up everything he has for his wife, including his life if necessary.
Most of you husbands would give verbal assent to that-literally dying for your wife is such a remote possibility for most of you. But I would speculate that it is much more difficult to make lesser, but actual sacrifices for her.
Husbands, when you put aside your own likes, desires, opinions, preferences, and welfare to please your wife and meet her needs, then you are truly dying to self to live for your wife. And that is what Christ's love demands.
Purifying Love
Christ loved the church sacrificially with this goal in mind:
That He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and blameless (vv. 26-27).
Love wants only the best for the one it loves, and it cannot bear for a loved one to be corrupted or misled by anything evil or harmful. If you really love your wife, you'll do everything in your power to maintain her holiness, virtue, and purity every day you live.
That obviously means doing nothing to defile her. Don't expose her to or let her indulge in anything that would bring impurity into her life. Don't tempt her to sin by, say, inducing an argument out of her on a subject you know is sensitive to her. Love always seeks to purify.
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