How to Love and Cherish Your Wife

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Ephesians 5:28-31

God’s Blueprint For Happy Families
Dating: Someone Who Helps You Get to Heaven
Foundation: Filled with spirit
Conflict: inherent battle of the sexes as curse
Wives: submissive hubs of the family
Husbands: Sacrificial, Purifying Love

I. Headship Means Responsibility
A. V. 22 Husband is the head of the wife
1. Responsible for success
2. Team loses, coach gets fired - GA, SC, TN?
3. Business loses money, CEO gets blamed
4. Army fails, general replaced
a. George McLellan + 7 more - Civil War
b. Douglas MacArthur - Korea, Philippines
B. Family disintegrating - look to husbands
1. Where are strong husbands?
2. Backbone, solid structure for family, society
C. Aggressive problem solvers in world
1. Innovative, inventive, successful, respected
2. Home, passive, indifferent, irresponsible
3. Prof Lawrence Fuchs: “The groundwork for the 20th Century fatherless home was set by the end of the 19th Century. For the first time, it was socially and morally acceptable for men not be involved with their families.”
4. Legacy of Industrial Revolution and materialistic world. Father left home to cultivate world independent of family
5. Real explanation: men no longer obey Word
D. Man of God: responsible for physical, emotional, spiritual well-being of wife and family
1. Love as Christ loved the church
2. Million songs written to explain love
3. Sacrificial love, purifying love

II. Godly Husbands Show a Caring Love
A. V. 28 as their own bodies ... loves himself
1. V. 29 no ever hated his own flesh
2. Pain - change it, medicate, treat
3. Hungry - feed it
4. Afraid - protect it
5. Meeting needs w/ speed and devotion
6. Treat wife w/ preoccupation we gives selves
B. Marriage makes two into one
1. Meeting her needs is meeting your needs
2. Indivisible oneness
C. Wives complain that husbands won’t engage
1. Come home, eat, watch tv, sleep
2. Afraid to engage w/ wife - guide decisions for children and family
D. Mt 18:5-6 And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me; 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
1. In marriage, wife is one w/ husband
2. In salvation, she’s one w/ Christ
3. Bound w/ her is bound w/ Christ
4. He comes to you through her and vice versa
5. How you treat her is how you treat him

III. Godly Husbands Nourish and Cherish
A. V. 29 nourishes and cherishes it
1. Nourish - ektrephei = lit. feed, rear to maturity
2. Also 6:4 “bring up”
3. Nourish wife so she can mature and flourish
4. Seriously wrong to look at wife as cook, clothes washer, babysitter, sex partner
5. Seriously wrong to use her as bread winner
6. You nourish her - provide and protect
B. Cherish - thalpei = warm w/ body, soften by heat, keep warm, as bird covering young w/ feathers
1. Warm and softer her to meek and quiet spirit
2. 1 Ti 5:8 But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
3. She’s not the provider, you are

IV. Marriage Must Be Treated As Holy
A. V. 31 quoting Gen 2:24, Garden of Eden
1. V. 32 reference to Christ and Church
2. Marriage is closest explanation
a. Holy relationship
B. Must never be broken
1. Mt 19:9