Welcome to the River City Church podcast and a message by our
lead pastor, Jason Powers. Our prayer is that this message
would inspire and encourage you, build your faith and point you
to the life changing love of Jesus.
May you enjoy the goodness of God as you follow Him today.
Glad that you're here before we stop.
We're going to do the confession here in just a second.
That's an important part of what we do.
But I want to tell you something before that Your worship is
beautiful. It is a striking offering to the
Lord. I'm standing over like I got a
million things. I'm ADD I'm old and a million.
I'm standing over there. I'm just watching and some of
you I've, you know, guys I've seen right and like to go,
you're here and I was like this, you know, and now I see and it's
even just like this. And I just want you to know I
love it. I love it.
I just want you to know that's that's the beginning of
everything. Like it's, it's imperfect.
We don't see it how how you do that.
But your worship of the Lord is beautiful and it gives me joy
and it brings me pleasure and only imagine the joy of the
father for that. And so I just want to tell you,
keep pressing in more, right? Like if you went from here to
here, maybe try this, right? Like just see what see what
happens, right. I'm grateful that you're here.
I'm grateful for the privilege of worshipping with you week
after week. So we begin with our confession
and we tell our confession because it's true.
And we tell it because sometimes we believe it and sometimes we
don't believe it, but we need to believe it.
But regardless of what we feel, we come back to truth.
And so our confession is as churches that we are badly
broken. Yes, you are.
Grace and peace to you. And there's probably nowhere the
whole idea of broken and love comes together in relationships.
That's the, the, you know, that kind of the thing, that's
actually the thing that we have a hard time getting around is
how do we love broken people and how do we love as broken people?
My wife is badly broken and deeply loved.
How does my love engage her brokenness?
How does my brokenness affect my ability to love?
See, these are all the things that are kind of running around
just under the surface of Ephesians.
What this like week, I don't know, 278 of Ephesians and we're
in only 600 weeks to go or something like that as we wind
up getting ready the whole. 1st. Half of the book in Ephesians
has been making this theological point that God has been building
this unified human expression of Jesus.
Like the idea is God's desire is always to be, has always been to
be with his people. He created the garden in Eden
and their mankind and God walked together, but there was
separation and there was division, right?
Like you see it after the fall, you see Adam and Eve covering
themselves. So there are parts of themselves
that are hidden that are separated.
There's things that Adam kept from Eve that Eve kept from.
Adam and they both kept from God and that has been the very thing
that God has been undoing. And he said from the beginning,
I'm going to put it all back together.
And that's the revelation. That's this open secret that
Paul has been talking about over and over again, that in Christ
we are the body of Christ. And in just like my body likes
to do things, my body likes to eat too much, my body likes to
watch Astros game, my body likes to do all kinds of things.
And in the same way, the body of Christ does the things that
Jesus did. And so if we are his body, we
are the expression of the ministry of Jesus in the world.
That means we continue to teach the people that Jesus would have
taught the things that. Jesus would have taught.
We love the people that Jesus would have loved with the way
that Jesus would have loved. We model not just our lives, but
our gatherings around the life of Jesus because all the things
in Ephesians that Paul tells us to do, he says you are this.
And when he says you, he means all y'all.
It is a gathering that we are his.
And so last week he was talking about this apocalypse right in
the word apocalypse is is like this revelation.
It's to have the scales fall off.
It's to just go, Oh my gosh, I see it now, but I didn't see it
before. And last week we saw this
apocalypse of love. And love is not just a warm
fuzzy feeling, thank God, because my feelings change like
the wind, like I like right now. I just feel something.
Different, right? Like.
So it's not this romantic comedy kind of love, love as Paul
described it and as Jesus enacted and enabled it says I
won't pursue my desires at your expense.
The idea is if I wake up in the morning, I don't walk through my
house believing that it's everybody else's responsibility
to meet every need of mine. I feel like a sandwich in the
morning. And the resounding echo is make
yourself. Do your thing, right?
I don't get to use my wife or my kids as an expression of my
identity. My love says I prefer the other
first. And that's kind of that passage,
this apocalypse of love, Whereas love is not emotional, but love
is this self giving position towards another.
To say I love my wife is to say that her needs and desires are
as important to me as my own. And that passage that we read
last week about the apocalypse of love ended with this crazy
verse that doesn't seem to make any sense at all.
But we're going to keep reading. And it says this in verse 21.
It says subject yourself to one another in the fear of Christ.
Some Bibles like it. This is the New American
Standard Version. But if you have like the, I
don't know, maybe the NIV or the CSB or whatever it says.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
So my pastor, Sean Azaro, he was telling the story the very first
wedding that he ever did. And some it's a couple, right?
And and so they're standing there and he goes through.
So now here's three things that you should expect from me.
Like if you asked me to do my to do your wedding, number one, I
would love to do your wedding. Like weddings are my favorite
thing to do. You should expect I'm going to
ask you to go get premarital counseling, right?
Because marriage is hard and because we need it, right?
But we have a marriage ministry. Here are Aaron and Mary in here.
I see. Yeah, in the back.
Are there we right? Yeah, I see Liz and Cody are
right here. Listen, we have a marriage
ministry. And their entire desire and
purpose is to help you do this. Well, because you know why?
Marriage is freaking hard, Hard, bro, right?
And so we have this whole marriage.
So the thing I'm going to ask, you want me to do your marriage?
I'm going to say before I marry you, will you go get marriage
counseling? The second thing I'm going to
say, you're going to come and you're going to want to do your
own vows, right? And listen, everybody's
individual vows are so great. I promise to love you when the
sink is full. That's dumb.
You're not. You won't.
I know you think you will. You won't, right?
And so listen, those vows are great.
I promise always to be your best friend.
No, but the real vows would. I promise not to.
There's a real vows of marriage vows, your personal, private,
special vows. But when we stand at the.
Altar before God and witnesses like we're going to talk about
the vows to love and honor and perish and obey death do us part
Zara who's why that's Johnny. You may have noticed my battery
is going out. And so it might be now.
Now he said, thanks, Johnny, everybody Johnny, for that.
Yeah. So anyway, Sean's talking about.
So these are the things, right? Like I I'm going to ask you to
to say the biblical vows. And the reason is because Sean
was doing this wedding and he stood there and is the first
wedding and his couple say no form.
And he gets to the vow part and he's asked the bride.
He says, do you promise to love, honor and obey your husband?
And she laughed out loud at the altar.
Where do you go from there? We can acknowledge that this is
a. Little bit these passages of
Scripture that we're going to read today, wives submit to your
husbands out of reverence for Christ.
We can acknowledge that these passages are often
misunderstood. And I can also as a husband for
a long time, I can acknowledge that these passages of
scriptures can be misapplied and misunderstood intentionally and
deliberately. And So what we want to try to do
is not do that. And really, there's this mindset
that really unravels the whole thing.
There's some. We saw a couple.
Weeks ago, Johnny was talking about counter formation, right?
Like in order us for it to be formed, in order us to have the
kind of relationships that Jesus wants to.
We have to. Unlearn about how to do
relationships as the world sees them, as they happen out there.
And there's one specific aspect of our relationship that we have
to really kind of walk back from, and it's this
understanding of power and it's this understanding of authority.
What does it mean to have power and authority in the context of
our relationship? And what I would say is.
If we opt into earth even more than it's, it's more than that.
If we don't intentionally step back and re evaluate what we
think about power and you know what power is it's strength,
your strength and my strength. Square it off.
Whose power wins if we don't rethink that whole transaction,
we're going to continue to do the things that we've done we're
going to continue to have power struggles in our marriages.
We're going to continue to have power struggles in our
relationships with our kids. We're going to continue to have
power struggles in our relationships at work.
And I do want to say, if you'll allow me, like I love you so
much, but I just want to say if I can speak honestly, I don't
think we're doing that well. And church in a place where
we're supposed to be doing it differently and better.
We're supposed to be the shiny example.
We're not really doing any different.
I love you so much, but I want you to know God has a design and
a power for your relationships that isn't just something we can
squeeze into our normal roles out there.
I include myself in this, my relationships, folks, The way
that we're doing marriage, we all y'all, me, us together, The
way that we're doing marriage, it's not working.
It's not working. The way that we're doing
parenting, it's not working. The way that we see and
understand authority, authority in the classroom, authority in
DC, authority in Austin, authority in the stoplights, the
way that we do, authority and submission, it's not working.
The way that we do truth, it's not working.
Christian homes, too many Christian homes.
Listen, there's no condemnation in any of this.
But listen, we got to shine a light on it, right?
Like we got to be willing to go. Yeah.
I think we can do better in that.
Too many Christian couples, too many Christian people come to me
and look at me and I and they talk about their home and I can
see baked into their home, resentment and loneliness, fear.
And isolation. I talked to parents of their
kids trying to make their kids do they want.
They put they parent by control or by fear.
Worse than that, they parent by passivity and permissiveness
where they're trying to control our kids and make them to do
whatever you want. But listen, you can't do it.
We'll talk about a little bit more later, but listen, if you
don't tell your kids no, the police will be happy to tell
them no. At 18 years old, be happy to.
God's desires that. You would do it first but not
know with a hammer and a sword. And like death hammer with love
and grace and peace. Too many homes are held captive
by the children or the children's hearts are neglected
and withering and drying up. Too many marriages just hold on
and cling on with self preservation power struggles.
They wake up figuring out how can I get what I need to survive
today And so they wake up and the person laying next to them
is now an obstacle to be overcome or they are some kind
of sponge to. Squeeze the goodness that we
need. And what I would say is I'm
probably not any of this is unusual to you.
You've probably seen it. The problem isn't that we don't
see it. The problem is that we see it
and we see it and we see it and it gets into our homes and it
leaks into our hearts. And we don't know what to do
about it. And we don't know how to change
it and we don't know how to overcome it.
And we don't know that we see anybody who's really thriving
and making it happen. And we're going in.
And So what happens is we just normalize it.
We just say this is what marriage is supposed to be.
And we look around the church and we say, well, it's not any
different in the church than it is out there.
And so maybe God, what God has to say about marriage, maybe
that doesn't work at all. And what I would say, CS Lewis
said this, the problem isn't that we have tried this and
found the principle wanting. The problem is that we found the
principle difficult and left it untried.
And what I want to say is this whole apocalypse of these
divisions about these unity between US and the people like
us and God and then us and each other, this apocalypse that has
everything to do with our families, not just our families,
our work relationships and where and where we where we're going.
And listen, the last thing in the world that we need is
soothing. And listen, some of you are in
here and you feel like I'm just like digging a knife in your
guts. Your kids are gone, your
marriage is failing and you just feel like weak and like a
failure. But listen, don't do that.
The last thing I want to do is come in here and say like, oh,
it's OK Everything you're doing, it's like it's OK.
You know, it's not OK. What I want to give you is hope.
I don't want to soothe you, but I also don't.
I don't want to shame you. I, I don't want you to think
that things are hopeless or that like, and, and we can
acknowledge, right, like my marriage is the result of my
decisions and my actions. I am responsible for the context
of my relationships. But listen, the whole reason
we're talking about this, the whole reason we're doing any of
this is because Jesus can change our hearts.
And what that means is that Jesus can change your
relationships. Jesus can change the.
Way that you. Talk to each other.
And so the question behind all of this as we get into these
relationships is what if God has a different idea for how
marriage looks? What if God has a different idea
for how singleness looks? Church, Listen, church sucks at
this. We're Terra.
Listen, the apostle Paul wrote the New Testament single, never
got married. You know what he said, I wish
you all were more like me. Church has done not done a great
job throughout history at painting singleness as a
beautiful portrayal of God's purpose and his vision, his
life. There are some of you in here.
I think that God is maybe impossibly called to singleness.
And what I would tell you is it's not a lesser calling and
all of these things are still relevant for you.
But as I look over here, as I think about my children, my
kids, my daughter's last week loved.
They're like you said, sex too many times.
I don't I don't ever want to hear you say, but here we are
kids. So this is listen, we can look
around, can't we? And we just like like here's the
question. What if the all good, all
benevolent creator of all things was able to do more than what we
see in the world around us? What if what if unlearning what
Paul wants to teach us here and building our lives around this
undivided body of Christ? What if that's the way to make
God's desire and his plan and his heart for us a reality in
our life? But again, like I said, there's
this one principle that all these things like we're going to
read a lot of verses today. We're going to unpack a lot.
But there's one thing, one thing behind that.
If we will unpack this thing, if we will unpack this idea, things
will begin to fall in place. And here's the idea right The.
Cross of Jesus redefined power. Authority and relational rules
redefined it. They don't mean the thing that
they meant before. So we all stand here and look
right and we look on the news and just go.
We got more guns than anybody. That's the old power.
Here's what I say we do have. Do you feel safe and secure and
stable and never afraid and never?
No, we don't, do we? We've got all this stuff.
We've got more money than any culture in the history of the
world. Do we feel at peace, at ease?
Are we nervous? We got to do right.
If we do what we've always done, we're going to get what we've
always got. If nothing changes, nothing will
change. And what I want to say is Jesus
wants to change the way that we understand power for something
that we cling to, something that we grasp to something that we
have, that we. Serve others with.
The idea is. You're home.
Are you listening? Your home is not a structure of
authority and control. Of course there is authority and
a home, but it is not about your ability to control your kids or
your money or your wife or your husband.
Similarly, your work, you're like, no, I'm the boss at my
work. Or you may say, no, I have a
boss at work. And my boss tells me all the
time that it is about authority and control.
But what if your boss doesn't know everything?
See, that's the revelation behind all of this.
The thing that Paul keeps coming back to is there's more that's
going on here. There are things underneath the
surface that if we'll bet on those and if we'll play by those
rules, all these other structures fine and fall into
place, right? Jesus, the cross redefined all
of that. And so now we're going to look
at Paul presents three different contexts, basically loosely
framed around the Greco Roman household, three different kind
of relationships which will affect every aspect of our lives
where we begin to reimagine this.
Power, right? So let's go back to what Andrew
and Jennifer read in Ephesians chapter 5, verse 21.
I'm just going to read the whole.
Thing I'm probably not. I'm going to stop because I get
distracted. My goal?
Is to read through. All of it, and then we'll talk
about it, OK. Verse 21 Subject yourselves to
one another in the fear of Christ.
Wives, subject yourself to your own husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the
head of the church, He himself being the Savior.
Of the. Body I couldn't do it remember a
couple weeks ago when we talked about Jesus in the church and we
use this Greek word kefali which means head and what we said is
in the Greek language in the Greek literature there's no use
of that word have kefali which means boss authority.
The use of kefali in the Greek, which are the Ephesian listeners
would have heard from means like source.
It's beginning. And the illustration I use is if
you go to land a park right before the Panther Creek trails,
right down there on the left there's a little looking cave
thing, and that is the head of the Komal River.
That is where all the water that comes in the Komal River, when
you go to me, it comes from that one place.
That one place is the source of the river.
And in the same way we see Jesus as the head, the source of the
church. Now, does that mean that there's
no authority? Of course there's authority.
The Hebrew understanding, as Paul would have trained in it,
that idea of headship and authority, it would have brought
authority with it. But that headship always points
to the authority of Jesus or to the authority of God, right of
the Father. And the Father's authority is
for our goodness. When he commands us to love one
another, it's for our flourishing.
When he commands us to serve others, it's for our
flourishing. So whether we ascribe the
authority of the Father to this word of headship, or the idea of
source and the headship the idea.
Either way you go it, the point isn't the husband's role isn't
to command and to control and to make his wife do whatever he
wants her to. Do.
Submit Woman. We should just get rid of that
all together. It's not even really that funny.
Right? So good someone thinks so.
That's right. Yeah.
The example is we are the head of our family and our wives in
the same degree that Jesus is the head of the church.
And so if the church resents and rejects the authority of Jesus,
well, then, OK, that's it. But we don't do that because
we're one body, we're the same, right?
So he goes on, Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also
loved the church and gave himself up for her.
You hear that? Love as Christ love.
How did Christ love? He gave himself up for her.
Your responsibility in marriage, husbands, is not to get the ham
sando anytime you want it. Your.
Responsibility in marriage is. I'll get my ham Sando later.
How can I serve you, honey? What are you dealing with,
honey? So that he might sanctify her,
having cleanse her by the washing of water with the word.
This is interesting, right? So his love has a purifying
effect on his wife. I wonder what that's about,
Verse 27, that he might present to himself the Church in all her
glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she
would. Be holy and blameless.
So husbands, this is he's saying like this is what Christ does
with the church. He purifies her, He sanctifies
her, he removes her sin, He covers her love.
So, husbands, love your wives. Remarkably, your timing is
excellent. So husbands also ought to love
their own wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his own wife loves himself.
For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and
cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church.
You know what he's saying, husbands, like in this specific
instance, he's saying the temperature of your home is up
to you. How you treat your body is how
you treat yourself. Are you miserable at home?
Is your wife just miserable? You're not doing your job.
I hate that for this reason a man shall leave his father and
his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become
one flesh. Here's the idea.
Here's the the power structure that governs Christian
marriages. Gospel.
Power operates in relationships through participation, not
through possession. So here's what Paul is doing.
Paul is speaking to thoroughly Roman people, and what he's
talking about is he's couching the.
Whole group Greco Roman household in terms of one
another. This is what they all would have
understood. In every home there would have
been a family, a marriage, there would have been slaves and
servants, there would have been children.
And that's. How the structure?
Runs and what Paul is saying is your households must come under
the authority of Jesus and what he's showing us is this is all
verse 21 submit to one another. The way that wives submit to
their husbands is respect them. The way that husbands submit to
their wives and they both submit to each other as like a mirror
so that the entire marital relationship is this circular
giving of self deferential love. And here's the deal.
When I know my wife and my wife knows me, I don't have to walk
through the door kicking down the door going where's my
sandwich when we're tied into each other when our hearts are
connected when she's not thinking about he better come
home and ask me about my day was until my hair.
She's thinking how can I welcome my husband home from work?
I know what he, I I bet Jason would love a ham sandwich.
So now I come in and she's not serving me because I'm held it
over her head. She held me because she.
Loves me. And if you don't think my love
for my wife grows when I walk into a thick, delicious ham
sandwich, you're Wildman. But do you see how the circle
goes? Do you see how the reflection of
love and respect to each other goes?
And so what's all this about sanctification, right?
About the sanctifying? Well, I want to read a quote
from NT Wright. OK, NT Wright is Anglican.
He's British. He sounds like Johnny.
He's a British scholar, He's great.
And he says kind of a long quote, right?
So I'm going to. Walk through a kind of.
Gently and just unpack it because there's a lot here.
And listen, I know I'm talking right now predominantly to
husbands and a part of that is because there's like 2 verses
for the wives and like 12 verses for the husbands, right?
So I'm just preaching biblically to you here.
Here's what NT Wright says. Paul, of course, lived in a
world where women were not only regarded as lesser beings, but
as often as not impure. So this is important.
Who did Paul talk to 1st? The wives Wives submit to your
husband in. Paul's address of the women
before men even at this point he is undermining the patriarchy.
He is talking to the wives, to the woman in the household with
a measure of agency and recognition that they wouldn't
have got in most In most other places they were seen as
property, they were seen as as they were owned.
They were just part of the household right and often
impure. A lot of this comes from the.
Law, right? Like I this is awful, but the
commands were like blood is impure.
And so the command in the law was as long as there's active
bleeding, there's impurity, you're excluded, excluded from
the from the camp, you're excluded from worship.
That kind of sucks. Huh.
See, the problem is the old view of power says we separate from
things that are impure. What we see is impurity is
danger. Right guys?
Listen, I'm going to go finish and read this in just a second,
but I just want to stop right now.
There is no woman that is a threat to your purity.
You are a threat to your purity. Your unwillingness to put guards
around your eyes and your mind and your brain and to not
meditate on things like that. That is the threat to our
security, to our purity. Like not not like a strap,
right? Like it's, it's it's.
Us so the idea here is like women were often seen as impure
their regularly body functions were deemed to make them
dangerous for a man who wanted to maintain his own purity.
We see it all kinds of stuff like that right but Paul sees
what Jesus did the actions the life and ministry of Jesus and
by parallel he has set up the action of the husband right the
he's made the connection Jesus to the church husband to the
wife. So the husband does.
The actual husband has taken the responsibility to bring the wife
into full. Purity Instead of rejecting the
wife at times of technical impurity, the husband is to
cherish and take care of her, to look after her and let her know
at. All times that she is loved and
valued. Listen, if husbands, not the
least of which Christian husbands, had even attempted to
live up to this wonderful ideal, there would.
Would be a lot less grumbling about bossy or bullying men in
the world today. Listen, guys, your wife's
spiritual flourishing is your responsibility.
Now, let me be very clear so we don't end up in some weird
codependent kind of thing. You cannot make your spouse or
your wife follow Jesus. You cannot make her connect to
Jesus. Everybody gets their own faith.
Here's what you can do. Are you ready?
I if if I take what this is, I am the head of my household.
To whatever degree I have authority in my household, the
proper exercise of my authority is to make sure that my family
has every opportunity to experience Jesus, to make sure I
can't make my wife follow Jesus. But what I can do is operate in
my home so that if she doesn't want it, she has to say no, She
has to reject Jesus. So here's what that means.
I asked her about it. How's your prayer life?
Are you talking to Jesus? How can I create time for you to
do that? How can I createspace for you to
do that? She can just say no, I haven't
prayed in months. Well, that's between her and the
Lord. And sometimes that's, you know,
I like, I get it, I know, but my job and my responsibility is to
check on and tend to and make sure that the spiritual
temperature in my house is. Right, single.
If you're over here and you're single, ladies, if you find a
man who will not prioritize your spirituality, he ain't the one.
He ain't the one. That's not the guy.
A guy who's going to take, right?
What are you going to give me? Anybody who's going to say if
you love me, you will ain't the one.
I know, I know. Wait, it'll be better.
Find someone who will love you like Jesus loves the church.
Husbands and wives, love your husband and wives as Jesus loved
the church so that our children see households with self giving,
self sacrificial love. The idea that Paul's making here
is that our purity, that my wife's purity or impurity or
whatever they are, impurity is not a reason to withdraw
impurity in my wife, her failures, her weaknesses, her
insecurities, the baggage that she got grown up, the baggage
that she picked up. Right now my job is to cover her
in those, not to take it personally and get my feelings
hurt every time she doesn't do what I want right?
To cover her because why love does what it covers a.
Multitude of sins Do your wife's sins anger you?
You can yell. At her.
How's that working? Or you can love her and cover
her now. Wives don't like if he's
covering you. Give him a break.
Right, let him do this. So let me now speak as a man,
let me wrap this up and I can just go on so much about this,
right? But let me do you know why like
men that The thing is, men either have a hit reputations
like either bluster. Watch.
Submit something like that, and they act like that or just as
total passive. Let me talk about the passivity.
Do you know why men can sometimes be passive and all
seriousness? Because we think you're better
at it than we are. Because we trust you.
Because we see wisdom in you. Because we see life in you.
Because we see goodness in you. And so when you talk about the
kids, we trust you. And so we just set back.
So here's the responsibility. Why don't you listen to me?
Talk to your husband like he's the man you want him to be.
And I'm not. And listen, if there's abuse in
your home, I'm not saying be a punching bag.
Jesus never said that. Paul never said that.
Get out of the house, go get saved.
Separate on that. But I'm talking about you just
have a marriage and you fight and he says things that are ugly
or hurtful because he's small and weak and afraid and all
this, and you take it on. You get all the stuff, right?
Like the point is love each other well, serve each other
well, be different together, draw close to each other.
In love, Love is not about getting something.
Love is not about getting something.
Love is not about being happy. Wait a minute.
Love is not about being happy. We're going to get there and
we'll talk about that in just a second, right?
But this idea of submission, the biblical idea of submission is a
choice. Why is when it says wives submit
to your husband's out of reverence to Christ, what it
means is choose to trust your husband as the head of your
household because we trust Jesus.
And here's something else that this makes very important.
If you are just smitten with somebody who could care less
about Jesus, they don't care about this either.
The reason I want my daughters to marry a Christian, the reason
I want my son to marry a Christian, is so they're
operating out of the same. Playbook If I tell my wives, Oh
yeah, my daughters, yeah, don't worry about whoever you can.
If they don't understand that their responsibility is to love
my daughters as Christ loves church, here's the deal.
Let's make it more close. Like they don't even have to
worry about how Christ love love my daughters like I love them.
You don't. You're not worthy like you're
not. You're not right?
Because here's the deal. Every time I talk poorly to my
wife, I'm talking to the precious beloved daughter of my
king, and I'll go to jail for my kids, right, I will.
I'm sorry, I Jesus doesn't want me to, but I would I if I had to
right like that. And I just want you to know if
me and my sin will fight like that over my kids, over my
daughters. Can you imagine how the eternal
creator of all things feels about his And so we get to love
each other imperfectly, but together in submission is where
Natalie just says, Jason, I trust Jesus, so I'm going to
wait for you. And and what it looks like in
the context of her home is there are things that my wife does so
much better than my wife is the heartbeat of her home.
She'll come to me sometimes and she'll be like Reagan needs to
spend time with you. That's my middle daughter.
She's one of I love to spend time with her, but I'm always
doing this right all over the place.
She's got the heart and she'll say, hey, you need to go do
that. I submit to her in that I don't
say, well I'll decide who I spend.
I mean, I can do that, but that would be dumb because she's.
Really good at that I the numbers work for me and my
brain. So when we talk about.
Financial things she'll come to me and go I really want to go do
that right and we have to that we decide right and I figure out
can we sacrifice? Do we make it right but we are
submitted to each other because we know that what we're doing is
bigger than her and what we're doing is bigger than me and
that's the idea marriage is always supposed to tell the
story of Jesus. Listen verse 22 and 23 and. 5.
No 32 and 33. This mystery is great, but I'm
speaking with reference to Christ and the Church.
When he talks about husbands and wives and the love for they
have, he's talking about Christ. Nevertheless, As for you
individually, each husband is to love his own wife the same as
himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her
husband. The point of marriage is not
happiness if you're waiting to get married so you can be happy.
As someone who's been married for 2520, how long?
A lot. Of years.
I should have got that right. I should have.
I should have hit that. It's 21 years.
It'll be 22 in March. Listen, there's nothing I
wouldn't do for my wife. Marriage is hard.
It's hard. It requires a level of grace
that I don't know that I have in me.
And most days I feel terrible at it and it drives me back to the
presence of the Lord. But here's what I have.
I have this sense that it can be different.
There's nothing that I look at in our relationship that a
difficulty. And I just go, well, you know, I
can't imagine how I could have done anything differently in
that situation. It's not like that.
What our marriage continues to require is a greater degree of
love and humility and submission by both of us to just say, it's
not about whether I feel good right now.
It's not about whether I'm happy right now because in marriage
we're going to have to suffer. This is why I don't let you do
your own vows, right? Because your vow isn't going to
say I will stay there and wipe the spit from your mouth when
the cancer has ravaged your body.
God says that hard, hard worth it.
What if we did a different, what if we chose to lift up power and
love as redemptive factors and not destroying factors and
listen and you can see how this happens as husbands and wives,
as you begin to have that kind of mutual submission and love in
your home. It absolutely flows down, right?
So Paul does another thing and picking this up chapter 6 verse
one, the first word in chapter 6 is children.
First, she talked about wives. If you thought wives were
property, children were less than property, nobody would have
even considered to talk to them. But Paul addresses them first in
the context children, he says obey your parents in the Lord
for this is right. That whole in the Lord thing is
so important because what he's saying is this obedience to your
parents. This is part of your
discipleship. Like the way that you learn
about trusting father is by trusting your parents.
Your parents didn't get it all right.
Your parents had all kinds of weird hang ups and things that
God was working on them that maybe they listened or maybe
they didn't. But here's the idea behind your
parents failures and mistakes was an omnipotent, omnipresent
God who loves you from the ends to the beginning of everything,
who was watching you regain you. Do you have wounds?
Of course you have wounds. Can Jesus heal him?
Heck yeah, he can heal him. That's a better story.
So what we want to do is we want
to show our families places that are healing, right, places that
we're growing into. And one of the things for
children is obey your parents. Your parents may be.
Awful parents may be awful, and I want you to know Jesus says
that. And this is not a mandate to
fall into sin. We don't get to ignore the
Scriptures for this. But this is saying within the
context of parents who are following Jesus, honor them.
You won't understand them. How could you?
Possibly they've been doing this longer.
They've experienced things that you haven't experienced.
It's the first one of the with a promise that it may turn out
well with you and that you may live long on the earth.
So once again, Paul treats children as moral agents, not as
possessions. And this is an absolutely
revolutionary thing that's going to come up bigger in this next
section, right? But again, the point.
Is not good behavior. Paul didn't say manage your kids
so that they never speak up in a restaurant.
He said, manage your kids so that they flourish, so that they
know that they're a part of a united world, So they're part of
a new creation. Raise them to know the love of
Jesus in their lives, to see other people, not as not by
their race or by their income, not to identify them by how they
look or how they vote or where they come from, but to recognize
in them the image of God and to believe that and to pray for
that and to call that out in people.
And what he tells parents and fathers, and he's not just this
isn't just for men. This is for the the household,
right? But he acknowledges fathers as
the as the resource. Fathers, he says, do not provoke
your children to anger. But.
Bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Do not provoke your children to anger parents.
Make sure that your kids are growing.
Make sure that they understand authority.
Because like I said, the police will happily take your children
to jail and teach them about authority if you won't.
So here's my 28 second teaching on parenting, because this is
hard. Parenting is hard, right?
Because like I've got in my house, I've got the go with the
flow, right? I've got the the quiet reserved
one. I got the bit like we got all
the kids. So here's the deal.
Are you ready? This is it clearly defined,
radically defended boundaries. Your kids need to hear you say
no, we're not going to do that. No.
We're. No, we don't do that.
Nope, it's time for bed. Nope, you have a curfew.
Nope, you'll be here. Oh, you don't have to come home
at curfew. Like your curfew's 11.
Great. At 12:30, I'll call the police.
They'll be happy to find you. Take the car away and you can
deal with that radical, clearly defined, radically enforced
boundaries. And Are you ready?
This is maybe sometimes where we miss.
Over the top, appropriate sloppy affection.
You are grounded to a night on the couch, a movie night with
the family. But I don't want to hang out
with you. I want to go.
Hang out with my. Friends, then you should have
made better choices. Harry Potter marathon in
perpetuity? We're doing this right if we
will tell our kids no to show them that there are things that
do not belong to them and they are not for them and they are
not good. Like and here's the problem.
I got teenagers now in some ways, maybe this is this is too
late, but it's not. I got to still say no to things.
I got to teach them. There are not everything is for
us and not everything is to make me feel good or to make me do
all of that right. And so trying to catch up here
and see this right. So bound is and love.
It's OK to tell your kids no. It's OK to disappoint your
children. It's OK for them to be mad at
you for a second. They won't be mad when they're
older and they go. Man, I sure am glad that you
told me that. You know why I know that?
Because I didn't do one single thing that my parents told me to
do. Ever go to church with your dad?
They said. It'll be fun, they said.
Right? Yeah.
But guess what? I'm a I'm a 49 year old man.
Grateful for parents who said no he taught me that I couldn't
just do whatever I wanted. And so this is that sense right
where we love our kids by having boundaries with them by by
loving them by if they're not our pawns, they're not for us to
get the most that we can. Adam.
It's our job as parents to train them to be who God has created
them to be. And so now it flows into one
that's difficult. It's a harder thing, right?
This is one that a lot of people have taken aim at and they're
just like the Bible is like archaic and it and it doesn't
work right, Because it's the metaphor for us, as we talked
about now is like the workplace or work relationships, bosses
and employees. But the word that Paul uses here
is slavery. And so there's been a lot of
common. And Paul, Paul had a chance.
Why didn't Paul just say slavery is evil and slavery is terrible?
I'm glad you asked. That's a good question and
there's a good answer, right? The reality is Paul could no
more imagine a world without slavery than you can imagine a
world without electricity. It was just baked into the
fabric of what? Of what they did.
It was everywhere. It was a sign.
And Paul sought it and saw it, did it.
And so one thing that we can say, though, commentarian FF
Bruce said this, Paul didn't destroy the institution of
slavery, but what Paul did do was place a time bomb at the
door of the institution and wait for it to go off.
Here's what he did. Verse 5 Slaves, be obedient to
those who are your masters according to the flesh.
First thing he does is he speaks to slaves.
He addresses them as moral agents.
He says you have the choice. You get to decide who you will
submit to. You get to decide who you will
say yes to and who you will say no to.
You get to choose. And So what he says is choose
submission. Choose to submit to the
institution that's there. That's a part of it.
Be obedient to those who are your masters with fear and
trembling in the sincerity of your heart.
As to Christ, he said not by way of eyes service or as people
pleasers, but as slaves of Christ doing the will of God
from your heart with goodwill. This is what he's talking about
with goodwill. Render services to the Lord and
not to the people. Do you see what he's telling?
He's telling these slaves act like they're your family.
Treat them like you would treat other people.
Help them, serve them, love them, be kind to them, knowing
that whatever good thing each one does, he will receive back
from the Lord, whether slave or freed.
You see what Paul's doing is he's raising their eyes.
Hey, he's saying don't look at that guy, that guy's terrible.
Jesus saying, look at me, look at me.
You've been through terrible things before.
I'm with you. We can get through this.
Again, this is so important. Are you listening?
What I am not doing and what the Apostle Paul is not doing and
what the Scripture never does is justify injustice, ever.
What Paul is doing and what I want to say to you is what Paul
is doing is showing how this apocalyptic kind of love can
literally transform everywhere we go and everything that we do.
Wives, go home. Give yourself A6 week, 6 month,
90 day. I don't know, go home.
Begin to submit biblically to your husband and see if the
temperature in your home doesn't change.
Husband, show up. Tell your boss at work.
I don't have energy to give you because I'm going to give my
best energy to my house. Show up after work ready to
contribute to the household. Ask your wife how she's doing.
How was your day today? And watch.
If your respect from her doesn't show up, you model the kind of
behavior that you want to see in your home.
And he tells the masters here at the end do the same things to
them and give up threatening. Right.
You see how this undermines Christian masters don't get to
treat their slaves as property. Treat them with kindness, with
love, knowing that, listen, both their master in yours is in
heaven and there's no partiality with him.
Do you see what he just did there?
He's like, they've got a master and you've got a master.
You know what that means? You're the same.
You both work for the same guy and his name is Jesus.
And so if you treat them as slaves, great.
It's like, listen, the guy who treats my daughters wrong, he
doesn't want to face me, right? Those who treat their workers
poorly, you don't want to face the king over and over in the
Old Testament. It comes like if you're an
employee, be kind and be good to your people.
But here's the deal. If you work at a job and you
just go like my job is terrible, there is nothing redemptive in
my job. You may be right.
I don't think probably so, but you may be right.
So here are your options biblically.
Are you ready? Your first option is to get the
heck out of there. Just go in love.
I'm quitting. I won't come to work here
anymore because it's awful. I love you.
Go with God, go do your thing, find your place.
Do that. You can do that right?
The other thing that you can do is say I will stay here as a
servant of the Lord and I will make sure that this place is the
most God honoring God fearing place as much as it depends on
me. And the way that I'll do that is
I will not gossip. I will serve those, I will bring
kindness every chance I get and I will be the love of Jesus in
this place. What you cannot do in Jesus name
is show up at your work, or at your class, or at your.
School. And be a pain in the butt.
You cannot do that. You cannot be a bad worker.
Do not March into the principal's office at your kids
school. Slam down on the table and in
Jesus name start demanding things.
You should be the one at your kids school that the.
Administrators are happy to see because you bring cookies or
whatever, now you may have to go and sit down and go and we've
had to do this and just be like, hey, I heard a thing, can we
figure this out? But that's different than
swinging from the gates and from the fence, right?
This is not power that destroys, but it's power that unites and
that unifies. So what do we do?
We let the Spirit of Jesus reshape our posture towards
power and towards authority in our relationships.
Allow me to be prophetic. We understand power primarily is
that which allows us to do what we want with other people.
And I just want to say I understand it.
It's everywhere We see it on the news, We see it everywhere we
go. I just want you just to know
that is the mindset that we must unlearn if we're going to get
this. Whatever power and authority you
have in this world, you can either use it like Jesus or you
can use it like the like to control and to men.
So here's what Jesus's love looks like, right?
Because this is the thing like I'm just going to acknowledge
you're skeptical of this. You don't think this is going to
really work. I mean, you think it'll work in
here, right? Like you think if like like if I
find my really Christian neighbor, we can like love each
other but but not. Really like, not when we're
talking about politics and elections, not when we talk
about, right, like, like angry Democrats who are mad, like,
like, and that's what we've been talking about, right?
Like those are the lines that are gone.
Those are the things that we're building up when we fight with
Republicans online or Democrats online.
We're just rebuilding the things that Jesus tore down, right?
And that's the thing that He's called us to do because we
really think if we just love our enemies, nothing will ever
change. I get it.
I understand the skepticism, but here's what I want to say.
For at least 2000 years you've been trying the other thing and
it's not working. Do we have less division and
scare and fear and all that stuff in the world or more?
Are we less divided or more? The question is, are we going to
just keep doing the same thing and hoping something changes or
are we going to say no, we're going to follow the way of Jesus
in the world. Here's what it looks like.
Jesus's very last night standing there with his friends, knowing
that the Father had handed all things over to him, and then he
had come from God and was going back to God.
I want to stop right there and point out this doesn't sound
like a guy who was wondering whether he had any authority or
not. This doesn't.
Sound like a guy who's wrestling with whether they like him or
not. He knew where he was coming
from, he knew where he was going, and with that power and
that authority and that knowledge he got up from.
Supper and laid his outer garments aside.
He took a towel and tied it around himself, and then he
poured water into the basin and began washing the disciples feet
and washing them with the towel which he tied around himself.
World only sees hierarchy and control and power, but Jesus
upended that, and the call from last week was to imitate him.
Listen, church, we can fight in all the places that we want.
We can fight with anger and power and fear and intelligence,
all of those things, and we can go and we can stand and go toe
to toe. But that's not the calling.
The calling is to engage injustice with love and with
grace. We speak truth to places that
oppose that. We hold lights up, we shine the
light of revelation on that. But what we?
Do is we go to the poor and the lost and the hurting, and we
identify with them and we feed them and we cleanse them and the
whole world is laughing and mocking.
Ha ha ha, you're so. Dumb.
The Roman Empire is gone. The Church of Jesus Christ that
washes the feet of lost and hurting disciples continues to
grow and expand today. You are either a part of a
vision and a perspective of power that will last into
eternity, or you are betting on a power structure that's already
lost and will continue to leave you frustrated and alone and
without hope in a lost and dying world.
That's why this apocalypse is such good news, because it is an
invitation to embrace a reality where every power, every
structure, every relationship is remade in the kind of love that
gives itself for the well-being in the other.
Let's pray Jesus. We like power because we've been
told and we believe that it will get us the things that we need
and the things that we want. That goes all the way back to
the Garden of Eden and the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil. We want to decide.
So Jesus, I just pray for an apocalypse.
I pray their eyes will be open to see the power that you had
and the way that you wielded it and to go and do likewise.
I pray that our marriages, Father, I pray for all of those
in here today whose marriages are upended and hard and they
maybe are losing hope or maybe 1 is here today and they're
clinging and the other one's not.
I just pray, Father, that they would hear your invitation to
love. And I pray that you would
protect them. I pray that you would surround
them and overwhelm them. Lord, give them a vision of how
this can work. But Lord, I pray for the
husbands that You would enable us to love our wives as You
loved the church. I pray for the wives to respect
their husbands with the respect it comes from love and
submission to you. I pray that our families and our
workplaces, Father, will be different because of the grace
that you've shown us. That's the power of love.
That's the power of transformation.
So let us be loved and let us love well.
Jesus, in your name and for your glory, Amen.
Thank you for joining us today. River City Church is all about
experiencing and expressing God's love in our lives and
community, and we hope that you've been able to experience
that today. As grateful as I am that you've
spent this time listening in this morning, this podcast is no
substitute for full participation in a local church.
I love it when River City people listen to other pastors, but it
is those who show up week after week faithfully giving their
support and time and resources that make all of this possible.
If we can help you get connected to a local church, pray for you,
or support you in any way, click the link in the description and
let us know. If you'd like to financially
support the ministry of River City, click the give link on our
website in the description. Don't forget to subscribe and
don't forget to share this with your friends.
Thanks so much for listening. May the Lord bless and keep you
in all grace and peace.