“22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body.
31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
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Radio host Casey Kasem counted down the hits to number one for almost forty years. He always had a trivia question before the commercial break. He always ended his show saying, “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.”
The last number one hit Kasem announced was Hey Ya by Outkast. The song used an upbeat and almost spastic sound in contrast with a rather profound message about romance in the early 21st century. “You think you’ve got it. Oh, you think you’ve got it, but got it just don’t get it when there’s nothin’ at all. We get together, oh, we get together, but separate is always better when there’s feelings involved. Know what they say—nothing lasts forever! Then what makes love the exception? So why are we still in denial when we know we’re not happy here?” The song is about the difficulty of romance. It is about the near impossibility of two becoming one. As the song puts it, “Thank God for Mom and Dad for sticking two together because we don’t know how.”
If you are older, please recognize that the sexual revolution which has swept through our culture during your lifetime has disintegrated almost everything that made it almost second nature for you to be able to find and keep a spouse. Outkast spoke for the children of the sexual revolution and for any number of younger people in this church. “Thank God for Mom and Dad for sticking two together because we don’t know how.”
This sermon is a bit about how. Dating is our culture’s process of sticking two together. It’s not an ideal model, but since it is the most common one, it is our focus. At its best dating is about discernment toward becoming one. That’s the claim of this sermon; dating is for discernment toward becoming one.
We will study this in two points. First: becoming one. Second: the roles. We will focus on becoming one in verses 31-33 and on the roles in verses 22-30.
First: becoming one. The goal of dating is to discern whether or not to marry this other person. This looks different in high school than in your late twenties or your late fifties, but it is the goal. It is a process with a destination and that destination is union; verse 31, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”
In Paul’s culture, the marriage union came first and then the man and woman got to know each other. We saw that with The Fiddler on the Roof in which Tevye told his wife, ‘my father and my mother said we’d learn to love each other, and now I’m asking, “Golde, do you love me?”’
They became one and then learned to love and be loved. That model has some problems and the dating model has its own. Dating tries to put love before marriage, but how do you know it’s love? Is it a feeling? Is it an epiphany? Is it comparative shopping? “How do you know?” to quote a Whitney Houston song trying to answer this very question. Again, it’s not a great model but since it is so common, let’s see how dating can move to oneness.
To know if you want to be one with this person, you need to get to know the other person. That’s the first goal of dating. That might sound obvious, but it isn’t. For a host of reasons more people than you would ever imagine are afraid or unwilling to truly know someone else or be known by someone else. Rather than using the dating process to progressively know and be known, which is the only way this model works, they wind up using the dating process to simply secure a relationship.
I did. If I liked someone, I would try to impress them enough to go on a date with me and then my goal on that first date was to perform well enough to secure another date and, in time, a relationship. The problem was that once I was in a relationship, I was like a dog who had actually caught the car; I had no idea what to do with it. I had no idea how to determine if this was love. I had no idea how I could ever know if this was “the one” I was supposed to marry—whatever that nonsense means.
This came to a head when I was dating Bethany and tried to break up with her. I wanted to break it off because I couldn’t be sure that it was love. She told me, “no”, and then told me that I didn’t even know her. I could get to know her and then break it off, but it wasn’t fair to break it off without risking knowing her and being known by her.
So I got to know her. I asked questions. She asked questions. I opened myself up. The question, ‘how will I know it’s love?’ became irrelevant because as I got to know her I realized I could trust her. As I trusted her, I came to see that I could rely on her. When I realized I could rely on her, commitment just made sense and commitment is love as we saw in Deuteronomy. It’s not about being in love. It’s about promising to love.
Without knowing it, I was practicing RAM, the relational attachment model. This first slide is from Dr. John Van Epp.
It is a picture of how relationships naturally progress. The idea is that as you properly elevate what’s on the left, what’s on the right will seem natural. As you get to know someone, you will see whether or not you should trust them, which will show you whether or not you should rely on them, which will show you whether or not you should commit to love them in terms of the commitment of marriage.
In dating, problems abound when we move what’s on the right ahead of what’s on the left. That’s what I was trying to do before I tried to break up with Bethany. I was trying to see whether or not I could move the commitment bar all the way to the top with this person—if this was love—without really knowing her or doing the uncomfortable work of actually trusting her and possibly being hurt.
When I put first things first, everything fell into place. Now that’s a lot of personal experience, but RAM describes how other relationships go. Knowledge is a prerequisite for trust in a relationship. Proverbs 13:16, “All who are prudent act with knowledge.” You don’t trust someone until you know them. You don’t rely on a woman until you know you can trust her. Proverbs 7:21, “With much seductive speech she persuades him; with her smooth talk she compels him. All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter.” You only rely once you can trust. You only trust once you know. That’s how relationships work. When you ignore that, you get burned. Throughout Proverbs, Solomon contrasts two women—a foolish, untrustworthy, unreliable woman and a wise, trustworthy, reliable woman. Guess which one he holds up as worthy of commitment?
Now what you see here on the screen is just wise, but the sexual revolution has made us foolish. We put what’s to the right ahead of what’s to the left in any number of areas. Many of us don’t even know how to get to know someone as a romantic possibility. We no longer think that reliability is necessary for commitment. Here’s the result, “You think you’ve got it. Oh, you think you’ve got it, but got it just don’t get it when there’s nothin’ at all. We get together, oh, we get together, but separate is always better when there’s feelings involved.”
Let’s throw the final category on RAM to see the logical consequence of all this. Please bring up the second slide.
Wisdom puts what’s to the left before what’s to the right on this model—knowledge before trust, trust before reliance, reliance before commitment, commitment to love—which is marriage—before physical intimacy. God isn’t a prude. He has very good reasons for His instructions. He wants to keep us from betting burned.
You get burned whenever you put what’s to the right ahead of what’s to the left. When couples are intimate the marriage commitment, they there are consequences. Some partners assume that since they’ve been intimate, they are really much more committed than they are; that leads to heartbreak. Others, and you see this throughout our culture, assume that commitment, reliance, trust, and knowing each other must not really matter because they’ve been putting physical intimacy to the top without any of that for years now. Others try to get what they want from a relationship without commitment. They enjoy relying on someone else and being known by someone else and emotional or physical intimacy without committing. This simply uses the other person. Remember the goal of dating is to move toward full oneness.
Acting like you are one when you aren’t is foolishness. That’s true with life decisions. Don’t make life decisions together unless you are married. That’s true with finances. Don’t share money unless you are married. That’s true with living arrangements. Don’t live together unless you are married; the order is clear in verse 31, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”
Living together is an attempt to enjoy the aspects of oneness that we want without the commitment and it certainly puts what’s to the right ahead of what’s to the left. That’s part of the reason that Hebrews 13:4 is now so out of step with the culture, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.” Marriage isn’t honored by the culture anymore because we’ve made peace with sexual sin.
God takes sexual sin seriously, which means that the answer is to call for repentance. Grace goes together with repentance. You can’t grace unrepentant sin. Jesus is into forgiveness, not making peace with sin.
This is why we call couples who are living together to separate. We don’t want to normalize living together within the church. Yes, we are all sinners, but the good news is not that any of us should stay in our sin; the good news is that Jesus die for sin so that we can die to sin.
We want to help in this process. If there are financial reasons that a couple is living together, we want to help them so they can obey. We want to be sensitive to unique situations involving people coming to faith out of messy backgrounds. You can make anything right if people are willing to work at it.
We aren’t trying to push anyone away, but we are trying to honor what God says about marriage and sexuality rather than what the sexual revolution demands. The sexual revolution will tell you that unless you affirm everything about a person, you can’t love them. That’s a lie. Look at Jesus.
Now ground zero for this is not ultimately the church; it is the family. When your children were baptized, you promised to do all within your power to instruct your children in the Christian faith and to lead them to be Christ’s disciples. If your teenagers have heard more about marriage and sexuality from me than from you, you can still fix that. “These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” That’s the plan. You talk with your children about these matters. “As for me and my house we will serve the Lord,” isn’t merely wall art. It’s a commitment. By and large, I fear the church in this nation hasn’t been doing this. We haven’t asked for sermon series like this one. We haven’t read books with our children like the ones in the bulletin. We’ve simply assumed that nature would take its course; it has; that’s one reason the sexual revolution has been and is cutting through the church like a chainsaw.
Now it’s very possible to do your best and still watch your kids choose sin. Plenty of wise, godly parents know that grief, but that doesn’t mean that we change what God says about sin. We don’t with homosexual behavior; we shouldn’t with other sin. Grace offers ten thousand new beginnings, but you have to take the new beginning. That’s repentance and forgiveness.
This first point was a good deal longer than the second because, “for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh,” is really the best way to come at this model of dating. It’s also longer because we’ve just spent two weeks thinking about the roles of husbands and wives so we can just apply what we’ve learned over the last two studies briefly to dating; that’s our second point: the roles.
A young man who is dating should ask himself if he really wants to become more like Jesus. In other words, he should ask himself if he really wants to commit to the following marching orders, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”
As he’s dating he should ask himself whether he wants to die to himself to find love. He should ask himself if he wants to become more selfless than selfish. He should ask himself if he actually wants to become like Jesus by treating someone else with sacrificial love. That’s part of the willingness to commit.
He should also ask himself, “how easy would it be to lead this woman?” Since, “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church,” as verse 23 puts it, “he would be wise to get to know her well enough to see if she would happily follow him. No man who is willing to lay down his life for his possible wife would be wise to choose a proud woman.
No woman who is willing to respect her possible husband’s leadership would be wise to choose a foolish man. She needs to ask herself if this is the sort of man she wants leading her for the rest of her life. She would be wise to be far more concerned with what sort of leader he would be than with what sort of car he drives or how much money he might make. She would be wise to get to know him well enough to see if she could trust him to lay down his life for her. Saying, “I do,” doesn’t turn a selfish man into a sacrificial man.
A Christian’s goal in dating is to get to know this other person to see if they actually want to obey God. Does he want to grow into the sort of man who will sacrifice for you the way Jesus laid down his life for the church? Does she want to grow into the sort of woman who will honor you because she honors Jesus? Now you don’t expect a twenty-year-old to have the maturity of a thirty-year-old, but in spiritual matters direction is much more important than position. Does this person actually want to obey? In other words, how highly would you rank obedience to God in your partner’s priorities? Be honest, how highly would you rank obedience to God in your own priorities?
Do you want a Christian marriage? First, make it your goal to be the sort of person who does put obedience to God at the top of your priority list. Second, look for someone who does the same. Isn’t that how Jesus would date, if we want to use that language? If you do that, you will see why God commands His people not to marry unbelievers. Of course, if you defy that commandment, you will also see why God commands His people not to marry unbelievers. It’s not wise to become one if you are already divided at the deepest point.
There’s a lot to think about here for anyone who isn’t married. There’s a lot to think about for parents, grandparents, and friends of anyone who isn’t married who ought to be involved in th process. The question is will we? Will we put God’s word into practice?
There is a telling line tucked away in that Outkast song. After all his reflections on love, he says, “y’all don’t want to hear me, you just want to dance.” In other words, “after all this talk, I know you aren’t going to make any real changes; you are just going to go with the flow.” That is our culture. They see and lament so many of the problems that have come with the sexual revolution, but they aren’t going to make any changes that really change anything.
The question—and perhaps the question for our age in America—is, “will the church be any different?” Will you teenagers? Will the next generation? This is an opportunity for us as a church. I’m not talking about just an understanding of dating. I’m not just talking about how to become one. I’m talking about this picture of Jesus and us—of sacrificial love, of honor, of genuine commitment unto death. That’s what this is about. Amen.