Christian Marriage, Part 1

On Friday 21 January 2011, Rick Burgess of the Rick and Bubba Show made a statement with which I totally agree.  It is a way of looking at marital love which many people have never encountered. but it is based firmly in Burgess's orthodox trinitarian view of God.  And, he is correct.

The point Mr. Burgess made was that romantic love is intense and enjoyable but it really isn't something on which to build a lifelong Christian marriage because it is based on emotion.  Emotions wax and wane.

Christian love is action, not just emotion or sentiment.  This applies to Christian marital love as much as it does to any other type of Christian love.  Faith without works is dead just as love without action is just sentiment.

A Christian acts out his love for his wife and children by providing a safe and loving environment for them, an environment in which he ideally nurtures their hopes, interests, needs, and their spiritual development. 


Paul spoke of this, likening marriage to the relationship between Christ and His Church: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.  Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband." Ephesians 5:22-32


There is nothing in this biblical passage of the world's insulting caricature of a holy Christian marriage: no husband lording it over his slave of a wife who is ordered by God to indulge her husband's every whim or face the fires of Hell.  Husbands are to love their wives as Jesus loved the Church.  How did Jesus express that love?  He emptied Himself of the privileges of deity and took upon HImself the worst that the world had to offer, He accepted upon Himself the consequences of the world's sin, so that we would not have to!!


(The conclusion of this post will follow tomorrow.)