THE REFORMED WITNESS HOUR
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prca.orgDear Radio Friends,
How do Christian married people treat each
other in their marriage? What is the
rule of conduct for them? Do they judge
how they shall behave toward their spouse on the basis of how their spouse behaves
toward them? Do they say, “Well, if
that’s the way he is, I’ll be this way”?
Or, “Well, when she does this, then I’ll think about showing some
consideration”? No! The Bible says that that is the thinking of
the proud flesh. The rule of conduct for
Christian married people, as well as for all Christians, is that new and
blessed way revealed in the Holy Scriptures.
The apostle Paul captures it in these words in Colossians 3:13: “Even as Christ forgave you, so also do
ye.”
The rule of conduct
in Christian
marriage is that the measure of God’s grace to me in Christ must also be the
measure of my grace and kindness shown to my spouse. Or put it this way: I must consciously mirror the grace that God
has shown to me in Christ to my spouse.
And if you ask,
“Why exactly is that for marriage?” then the answer of the Bible is that
marriage has been designed by God intentionally to be the picture of Christ and
the church. Marriage is the model. Marriage is the showcase. Marriage is the mirror. Marriage is the demonstration in this present
world of what it means that Christ and the church are bound together in an
eternal, faithful covenant of love and grace.
In order to display what that means, God has given marriage. Marriage is to be a picture of Christ and the
church. And because that is so, the
foundation of marriage and the standard of conduct of all marriage in Christ’s
name is that we are to treat each other even as Christ has treated us.
Now I was saying
that the apostle Paul gives this rule of conduct both to married people and to
all Christians in Colossians 3:12 and 13:
“Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of
mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; forbearing one
another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do
ye.” The apostle Paul is saying to us
that when we know God’s forgiving grace to us personally, then
we will also follow a certain “dress code,” we will be anxious and desirous
that there be a certain inward spiritual dress code that we will put on. He says, “Put on therefore, as the elect of
God…bowels of mercies.” What he says is
very beautiful. The words of this
passage could well be used for a wedding meditation. He says, “Put on therefore, as the elect of
God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind,
meekness, longsuffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if
any man have a quarrel against any: even
as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.”
Anyone who is married can immediately sense the relevance of that
passage to married
life.
In effect, the
apostle Paul is saying to us, the first question you need to ask is: Who am I?
Before you get dressed inwardly, before you decide what you are going to
put on, what things you are going to display in your life, you need to ask the
question: Who am I by the grace of
God? What moral, spiritual attitudes
ought I to be displaying, based upon who I am in Jesus Christ. So he says, “Put on.” And he tells us what we need to put on: bowels of mercies, kindness, etc. But before he gets to what we have to put on,
that spiritual wardrobe, he says: “Put
on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved.” In other words, before I tell you what to put
on, first I need to tell you who you are.
First look in the mirror and see who you are by the grace of God—the
elect of God, holy and beloved. Remember
who you are.
Three glorious
identities must be before us before we go to the spiritual wardrobe and pick
out what we are going to display or what we are going to put on.
We must remember,
first, that by God’s grace we are the elect of God, or the chosen of God. “Put on therefore, as the elect of God.” That is a thrilling, humbling doctrine. We are God’s elect. This election, according to the Scriptures,
took place before the foundation of the world, when God chose us, out of mere
grace, to belong to Jesus Christ. The
apostle put it this way in Ephesians 1:
“According as he hath chosen us in him [in Christ] before the foundation
of the world [before God laid the foundation of the world, or before He
created, that is, before time was], that we should be holy and without blame
before him in love: having predestinated
us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the
good pleasure of his will.” Solely by
God’s pre-choice and free grace, not based upon anything in us! Simply because God would be gracious He
elected those whom He would save in Jesus Christ.
The apostle Paul
goes on to teach us in Romans 9 that this election was before we were born or
before we had done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to
election would stand, not of works, but of God who would call. Out of mere grace God chose His children.
The apostle Paul
treasured this. He saw this as the only
source and spring of salvation. He
treasured it so that, you might remember, he goes on to say in Romans 8: “Who shall lay anything to the charge of
God’s elect?” The wonder of being
invincibly loved by God, eternally loved of God, graciously loved of God—Oh, what a thrilling and what a humbling doctrine!
The apostle says,
“Put on as the elect of God, holy and beloved.”
The word “holy” is a word in the Bible that refers to something that is
separated from the common and dedicated to the special service of God. It is something that is set apart for
God. The Scriptures teach that God chose
us, He elected us, for a purpose. We read, just a moment ago in Ephesians 1:4,
that He chose us in Christ “that we should be holy and without blame before him
in love.” According to His eternal love,
He pulls us out of the world, out of the pit of sin. He works in our hearts the new life of Jesus
Christ, so that we might be set aside for His use. Listen to what Peter says in I Peter
2:9: “Ye are a chosen generation, a
royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that
ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath
called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
So, it was not that
we were first good and then God chose us out of the mob of sinners. No, God called us out of His free grace. God made us holy. God cleansed us in Christ in order that then
we might be holy in Christ.
Then he says, “Put
on, as elect of God, holy and beloved.” Loved of God. God,
the Maker of the universe, the eternal and the perfect, glorious, beautiful
God, has loved us merely out of His grace.
He willed to draw us unto Himself.
He so loved us that He gave His only begotten Son that we should not
perish but have everlasting life.
Now, husband and
wife, all of us, we must see this; we must savor this; we must get our life
from this; we must place our hope in this.
By the mercy of God we are the chosen, the holy, the
loved of God. And since that is who we
are, or who we have become by God’s mercy, on the basis of that, get
dressed. On the basis of that, put on
bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering,
forbearance, forgiveness. In other words, how does a chosen, holy,
loved child of God adorn himself? What
inward, spiritual dress does he put on?
How does he want to appear from his life?
The apostle says
that that dress can be divided into three wonderful groups, all three
possessing an inward and an outward.
The first is: bowels of mercies and kindness. That is, the inward thing will be the bowels
of mercy, the external will be kindness.
Bowels refer to one’s intestines or, literally, “guts” of mercy. Bowels is where we
feel our emotions. We say, “We feel it
in our guts, in our stomach.” It means
to be moved by the mercy of God—God’s great compassion for miserable sinners. There is something stirring in you. It is not just a notion floating in your head. It is the mercy of God to me, filling
me also with mercy, so that it comes out in kindness. When you know the mercy of God, it will be
reflected in a life of kindness. That is
how you will treat people. Especially
when you are shunned or when you are hurt, you will be kind. Kindness in the marriage,
in the home. The
feeling of mercy and kindness toward your wife or toward your husband.
Is it not strange
that we can treat people civilly almost anywhere else but not at home. The Word of God
is: “Husbands, sink your roots, by
faith, into the forgiving grace of Christ.
Become more and more a merciful person.
Express that in deeds of kindness.
The next group
is: humility of mind (that is the
inward) and meekness (that is the outward).
Inward humility of mind expressed in meekness. Humility of mind is, literally, lowliness of
mind. It is the right concept of
ourselves, so that we are not stuck on ourselves or full of ourselves or
proud. And when we are lowly of mind,
then we will express that in meekness, which counts the other better than
ourselves and wants the other to be advanced and sees ourselves as a servant of
them. That is meekness. That is what happens when we are lowly in
Christ.
We are talking here
of a miracle. This is an absolute
miracle of grace. This is impossible—to
be meek, for us to get low, to esteem someone better than ourselves, to want
them to be exalted above ourselves! We
do not want that according to our sinful flesh.
Even in those who are in Jesus Christ, that sinful flesh rages. This is not easy. We say, “Well, let him have it. Look what he did to me. I’ll give her a piece of my mind! How dare he….” Sink your roots into the gospel of the grace
of Christ. And if you are behaving in
the manner I just mentioned, out of that proud, resentful way, repent! You need to have a right mind about you, a
lowly mind, knowing the mercies of Christ expressed in all meekness.
Then, finally, the
apostle says, “Longsuffering, forbearing one another
and forgiving one another.”
Longsuffering is patience. It
means that if you have a short fuse, you must get on your knees and pray for a
really long fuse. James says in chapter
1 of his epistle that we must be slow to anger, quick to listen, slow to
speak. Anger is a marriage-killer. Where does anger come from in your
marriage? What are the roots of rage? You say, “I’m so angry, I see red. I could kill!” Anger is rooted in unbelief and in
pride. It is rooted in not embracing and
treasuring the gospel of Jesus Christ that I, by grace, am now chosen, holy and
loved of God, and forgiven. And it is
sinful pride.
Jesus spoke, in a
parable, of a man who was forgiven a great debt and went out and was angry with
his brother who owed him a little trifle.
The man grabbed his brother by the throat and cried out: “Pay me what thou owest!” Why was he so angry? You say, “Well, this is a guy who obviously
needs anger management classes. He’s got
issues.” No, the Lord says that his
anger was based in this: He did not know
what it was to be forgiven. He was proud
before God. That was the basis of his
anger. He was proud before God.
The apostle says to
us today, “Christ has forgiven you. You
are the holy and the beloved of God.”
That solves a thousand issues in your marriage and in your family or
among your teenagers and with parents.
No, those issues that I say are solved are not issues that just fade and
go away or that all of a sudden are gone.
It means that every day you need to go back to the cross and hear the
word of the cross of Jesus Christ. It
certainly means that you and your wife (husband) and family all need to go to
church your whole life long, twice on the Lord’s Day, and sit under the gospel
of the grace of God and the cross. But
it means that every day, under the gospel, under the cross, your problems
become less complicated. And to the
degree that you distance your heart from the cross, to that degree your wife
pays (or your husband pays) in your marriage.
And your marriage experiences strife and hurt and anger and resentment
and you hurt each other. Why? Because you have allowed
your heart, as a child of God, to be distant from the message of the cross.
Under the cross,
two children of God live together and glorious things can happen. We begin to behave toward each other like
Christ.
The apostle
emphasizes that, in a Christ-like behavior in marriage, we will forbear one
another. Forbear is to endure. That certainly does not sound too romantic. You have to endure with your wife and you
have to forbear your husband. Well, remember, first of all, that it is
something that Christ does all the time.
In Luke 9:41, talking to His disciples, Jesus says, “O faithless and
perverse generation, how long shall I be with you and suffer you [forbear
you]? How long shall I put up with
this?” Forbearing is a grace that we
will not need in heaven because we will be perfect. But it is a grace that we need now, and we
need lots of it, because we sin repeatedly.
Enduring, forbearing one another.
That is, stick in there, bear those sins, bear
those slights in kindness and in meekness, even as Christ to you.
You say that this
does not sound too romantic? Do you
remember what the definition of love is according to God’s Word (I Cor. 13)? Look it
up! You will find this description of
love: Bears all things, believeth all
things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Love never faileth. Forbearing one another and forgiving one
another even as Christ hath forgiven you. The word means “graciously give.”
Someone wrongs you,
someone hurts you, someone disappoints you. He is in your debt. You say, “I’ll make him pay. I’ll get the last word. I’ll mope and get my way and, oh, he’ll pay
for that (or she will pay for that!).”
Do you listen to yourself sometimes?
Listen to yourself. What are you
saying? Where would you be today if
Christ ever spoke to you that way? This
is like Christ; this is the purpose of your marriage; this models Christ and
the church: that you and I say, “I will
not treat my spouse badly because of their sins and annoying habits. I won’t do that. But I will treat them on the basis of what
Christ has done for me.”
And then I will
forbear, which means, yes, those sins and habits really bother me. But those sins and habits are not bigger than
what I have done and what Christ has done for me on the cross.
When you get
married, you do not know what it will be like in ten, twenty, or thirty
years. Our fathers crafted wedding vows
that face reality. They crafted their
vows with their face to reality. This is
the vow: “To have and to hold from this
day forward; for better, for worse; for rich or for poor; in sickness and in
health; to love and to cherish till death us do part. And, thereto, I pledge you my
faithfulness.” How can anyone vow
that? This is how. Beneath the shadow of the
cross. Under
the grace of God, knowing that we are chosen, holy, and beloved of God. When we know that we are forgiven by Christ,
then out of that experience of His perfect love we are ready to vow in undying
love for our spouse.
Let us pray.
Father, we thank
Thee for Thy Word, and we pray for its blessing upon our spirits. Make our hearts receptive to Thy Word. In Jesus’ name, Amen.