There are many, many people in this world who are desperately looking for their soul mate and some, sadly, in that desperation choose the very first person they meet. If you’re in that place let me say this to you, there’s only one thing worse than not being married and that is being married to the wrong person.

Marriage is one of those funny social institutions that’s gone through so much change over the years. At some points in history, even in some cultures today, not being married was a great source of shame and in other places and times it’s considered old hat. I mean in many Western cultures marriage rates are plummeting something that I find incredibly sad as societies go through so much change.

But marriage, it’s not really a social institution is it? It’s a deeply personal, intimate relationship; it’s about connecting with our soul mate for life. It’s joyful, it’s painful, it’s wonderful and sometimes sadly it’s disastrous. Marriage isn’t for everyone. It’s a perfectly valid thing to do to remain single or to be widowed but I believe for the most part marriage is part of Gods plan for most people and if it is part of His plan it should be sensational right?

So how do we have a stunning, sensational marriage, the sort of marriage God intended for us to have? That’s what we’ve been talking about these past few weeks on the program. People come at marriage from all sorts of different angles these days. Living together as partners, same sex relationships, divorces, these are the directions that many people are choosing as so-called lifestyle options.

Some marriages sadly are detente, really a cold war, a living hell. Many choose not to marry and in almost half that do marry in Western cultures at least end up divorced. Interestingly in India where many marriages are arranged the divorce rate is just 1.4%.

Anyhow, this week we’re going to take another look at marriage from a different perspective. Now for me I don’t think you need a PhD in biology or psychology to figure out that men and women were made to go together yet it’s sad that so many people reject the notion of marriage, the notion of a permanent, unbreakable bond between a husband and a wife.

Of course divorce happens, it’s tragic, it’s painful and it’s something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy right? But I have to tell you that I’m the most wonderfully, happily married man and my wife Jacqui and I have a great marriage. Now okay some days are tough, that’s the reality of marriage but for us it’s a deeply satisfying relationship.

There’s something about faithfulness, about permanence, about intimacy, about exclusivity in the marriage relationship that makes it just the most fantastic thing. You know I wouldn’t swap my wife Jacqui for all the wealth in the world, she’s mine and I’m hers and that’s the way it’s meant to be.

And in that special relationship as husband and wife that Jacqui and I have, well no one else can participate in that. Yeah okay we have children, we have friends, we have other family but you know what I mean, it’s an exclusive relationship, a bond between one man and one woman that nobody else is involved in.

So we’ve decided to approach this beautiful relationship from God’s perspective and this week I’d like to share some of that with you because I believe when we put Him at the centre of our marriage that’s when we truly get blessed in the marriage relationship.

But back when I was looking for a wife, when I was lonely and I yearned for a marriage that would be a blessing I had some tough decisions to make and something that a great speaker, Chuck Swindoll said when I was right in the middle of that process of looking for a wife to spend the rest of my life with, this is what he said:

The only thing worse than not being married is being married to the wrong person.

Let me say that again because if you’re out there looking for someone or you have a son or a daughter or someone who’s dear to you who’s looking for a husband or a wife this needs to sink in.

The only thing worse than not being married is being married to the wrong person.

The Apostle Paul in the Bible, 2 Corinthians chapter 6, verse 14 puts it this way:

Don’t be unequally yoked.

The picture of a yoke is a really good one because when God brings a man and a woman together in marriage they become literally one flesh; they become part of one another. Yes they’re still individuals but there is a permanent, unbreakable bond and relationship there.

It’s as though they were yoked together; and the picture of a yoke is – two oxen pulling a cart or pulling something heavy behind them and they’re joined together by this wooden yoke. They can’t walk separately; they can’t walk in different directions because they’re yoked together.

Imagine if you will a picture of being unequally yoked, of being yoked with someone who doesn’t want to go in the same direction as you, that isn’t the same height as you, that doesn’t have the same strength as you, that doesn’t have the same motivation as you, the same hopes and dreams as you, the same beliefs as you.

Being unequally yoked is what Chuck Swindoll was talking about when he said:

The only thing worse than not being married is being married to the wrong person.

That’s why choosing a husband or a wife is so important. Now they say opposites attract and that’s true, often a gentle emotional woman will marry a strong man who’s a leader. Often someone who is more of a thinker, a brain person, a detail person will marry someone who’s more of a big picture, strategic kind of person and that’s fine, that’s natural but what direction do the two of you want to head in life?

What are your ambitions? What are the things that are really important to you? What do you want to achieve? They’re important questions and they’re vital in choosing a marriage partner.

I mentioned earlier in India for instance and in other cultures too, many marriages are still arranged and yet in a country of over a billion people there’s a divorce rate of only just a bit over 1% as opposed to my country where it’s heading towards 50%.

Of course there are different cultural expectations and yet the really wise thing that happens there is the children involve their parents in the soul-mate selection. It’s something we Westerners could learn from. I spoke to an Indian friend of mine and he said, “well no one forced me to marry my wife, of course not but my parents and my brothers love me, they know me, why wouldn’t I involve them in choosing my life-long soul-mate.”

How different is that to just marrying the first person that comes along? Now maybe it sounds old fashioned and inappropriate in this day and age to say but if you’re a Christian you shouldn’t marry someone who isn’t. I can hear someone say, “oh come on, you must be kidding me” but to me this is really great godly wisdom.

Come on, if I have this desire to put Jesus first in my life, I’m passionate about Him, if I believe He’s calling me to ministry which actually He was, how could I have married someone who didn’t share that vision, who didn’t share that faith, who didn’t share that burning desire for Jesus Christ? We’d have been unequally yoked.

Listen again to what the Apostle Paul says and again if you’re someone who loves Jesus and you’re out there looking for a wife or a husband take Gods Word to heart here. Paul says:

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers for what do righteousness and wickedness have in common or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

Those who are unequally yoked will tell you that they regret their choice. Now maybe you did that, maybe you made the wrong choice, maybe you came to faith after you were married and your wife or your husband hasn’t yet come to faith and if that’s you I pray that you will know that Jesus is with you in the middle of that.

There’s enormous power in your prayer for your soul-mate but I know that if you’re at the point of making your decision or you know someone who is, have that picture of that yoke in your head and in your heart, seriously, because it will make a lifetime of difference. Remember the only thing worse than not being married is being married to the wrong person.

They say that marriage is all about give and take, you know 50/50, that’s the prevailing wisdom but, well what if it’s wrong? What if 50/50 doesn’t work? What if 50/50 only gets us a 50/50 result? Then what? Well it turns out that God has a much, much better alternative.

This whole marriage thing can be anything from an outrageous blessing to a unmitigated disaster. I wonder if you’re married where along that scale you’d put your marriage at the moment. One of the biggest factors that influences our position on that scale of satisfaction in marriage is what we ourselves put into the relationship.

As I said earlier I’ve often heard it said, maybe you have too, that marriage is about the 50/50 principle. You know, it’s give and take. You have to compromise along the way and yet these days in Western so called first-world countries at least almost half of all marriages end in divorce. It seems that the 50/50 approach gives us, well at best a 50/50 success rate.

So what if God has another plan that you and I can live out in our marriages to radically up the level of satisfaction? In marriage a 50/50 arrangement looks something like this. Well you know he’s watched football on television all afternoon so tomorrow I get to go shoe shopping. Or, she’s just spent money having lunch with her friends so I’m going to go out and buy a new cell phone. Or he should have cared that I was feeling down, it’s not fair that he didn’t notice, he owes me.

Now on the surface those responses kind of sound reasonable I guess, they’re based on the 50/50 principle. If I get something the other must also get something. If the other gets something, well I have to get my share too. It’s about trade offs all the time.

But underneath this there’s this deep destructive thing called the 50/50 mentality. See her fifty becomes conditional on his fifty and his fifty becomes conditional on her fifty. This is a relationship based on conditional trade offs, it’s a relationship based, let’s be blunt about it, on what I can get out of it.

50/50 is about saying, “you know what I’m entitled to my cut of this relationship; I’m entitled to my fifty per cent.” You get it? It’s subtle but it’s so important.

If you’re someone who’s married I’d like you to step back in time with me to what it was that you said to your husband or your wife on that day that you exchanged wedding vows, what was the vow like? Most vows go something like this.

The minister or the marriage celebrant says, “Fred, will you take Jan to be your wife? Will you love her and comfort her and honour her and protect her and forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?” Then Fred says, “yep!” And then the wife is asked exactly the same thing and she says yes and then he says, “I take you to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forth, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish ’til death us do part.”

Does it sound vaguely familiar? And then she does the same thing – I won’t do the squeaky voice impersonation. Now let me ask you something, we were talking earlier about this 50/50 mentality, tell me how much 50/50 is there in these marriage vows? I mean how many conditional statements are there?

How much is there of “well I’ll give you your fifty if you give me my fifty?” Answer? None. In fact it’s actually the opposite. It very specifically says that my vow to Jacqui and your vow to your marriage partner is totally unconditional, for better or for worse.

That means whether you’re having a bad hair day or it’s ugly, I’ll still do this. For richer or for poorer, you know even when you spend all my money on shoes or gadgets or whatever it was and we were struggling financially. In sickness and in health, well I’m not feeling up to it or maybe when you’re not feeling up to it or when we’re tired or when we’re sick or when we’re not well, I will still love you and cherish you and hold you and protect you and honour you and be faithful to you, forsaking all others for as long as we both shall live. Even when it’s tough.

This is where the rubber hit’s the road people because the moment we live our marriage relationship and let me say something, most people do it this way, the moment we live our marriage relationship as a series of points that we score then what we’re doing is we’re saying “my marriage is about what I can get out of it”.

But the promises we made on our wedding day have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with what we can get out of it. They only speak of what we will do and we will give. Is that a sobering thought or what?

Love doesn’t keep tabs, love doesn’t keep a score, love forgets wrongs, love bears all things. Here’s a radical thought, how different would your marriage be if you accepted your husband or your wife for who they are?

When we first married Jacqui discovered I love cricket. You may think it’s outrageous that any game could go on for five days but I find cricket absorbing and relaxing. See I can have a nap in front of the cricket and I can get excited by the cricket; I just enjoy this sport.

Jacqui on the other hand, her passion as you may have heard me say before is that she loves shoes. Now when we were first married I used to resent her spending some of our hard earned cash on shoes and she used to resent it when I would spend an afternoon watching the cricket.

You see this resentment comes out of the 50/50 thing, what can I get out of it? He’s watched cricket all afternoon yesterday, that’s not fair, he should have only watched cricket for one hour. You know we have these scoring things in our heads, we may never share them with our husband or our wife but they’re there. We score what we think is reasonable and I used to think, “what’s the matter with this woman, why does she have to go into another shoe shop?”

We were focusing on our own needs not on the others needs and then we said one day, you know what this is dumb, we can’t do this anymore and Jacqui’s now at the point where she says, “you know, my husband works really, really hard, he loves watching the cricket and if that’s what he wants to spend an afternoon doing and it blesses him, well I want him to be blessed”. And I took that same step on the shoe front.

We actually organised our budget so that if Jacqui wants to go and buy the odd pair of shoes provided that it works within that little budget, well she can go and do that that’s her choice and all of a sudden there’s peace. See the resentments gone and what we’re doing is we’re living unconditional love because we’re focusing not on our own blessing but on the others blessing.

You know the crazy thing that happens when we do that, your marriage partner responds because they want to bless you too. It’s a radical shift, this unconditional love, this love that’s about sacrificial giving, it’s not 50/50, this is the love that changes people and it builds marriages.

Just want to take a quick moment to read you the single most powerful thing that I think has ever been written about love. You may recognise it, 1 Corinthians chapter 13 beginning at verse 4:

Love is patient, love is kind. Love isn’t envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, it doesn’t insist on its own way. It’s not irritable or resentful, it doesn’t rejoice in wrong doing but it rejoices in truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things. Love never ends.

Now that’s love. That was the Apostle Paul and he also makes the point of saying, it doesn’t matter how clever you are, how generous you are, how many good things you do, if you don’t have that sort of love then it all amounts to nothing.

Friend Gods wisdom is a hundred and eighty degrees apposed to the 50/50 compromise that this world holds forth and since so many marriages are failing, well call me radical, call me stupid but I have this funny feeling that the 50/50 conditional love thing simply isn’t working.

Time to try something different? You think so?

Most men spend a lifetime trying to figure out their wives, I mean really. And at the same time the roles of men and women are changing all the time. So how is a man to love his wife? Come on men, how do we love our wives? Well that’s what we’re going to take a look at on the program today.

Men and women are so different aren’t they? For one thing men are physically much stronger and women, by and large, seem to have a much richer and more sensitive emotional make up than we men. Sadly the law of the jungle though has prevailed for far too long and it goes something like this. The strongest one wins.

Just take a quick look around the world today. Women are still being oppressed and abused and so often treated like chattels. One of the greatest criticisms actually of Christianity today is that it seems to reflect that sort of out-dated view of womanhood. Where the man is the head of the household and the woman should obey her husband, come on, people say.

How can we come to grips with Gods view of the man/woman husband/wife relationship when the Bible was written thousands of years ago in vastly different cultures than today? Should a person’s sex really determine their role in the family leadership structure? It’s a tough one isn’t it?

God has some great wisdom on the marriage relationship, I mean after all He made us, He invented marriage, He made us in His image, male and female He created us but Gods take on manhood and womanhood and marriage is often clouded by a whole bunch of cultural baggage that you and I are prone to carry around.

And what I’d like to do as we talk about marriage this week is separate what God actually says from the cultural baggage that we sometimes ascribe to what we think God is saying.

What does it mean to be a husband early in the 21st century? I was born in 1959 in Australia, my father was born in 1923 in Romania and his father was born in 1889 so my dad came from a different age and a different culture and I guess we all learn so much from just living with our parents, the unspoken things.

We take on their behaviours and their attitudes and I guess we men take on our model of being a husband from what we observe from our own fathers, which is what they observed from their fathers. That model may be imprinted on our brains somehow but is it still relevant today?

We’ve had the whole women’s liberation thing and today many women go to work and so we men have a confusing transition as we come to grips with our roles as husbands in the 21st century. So where do we guys begin? Well the Apostle Paul has a great beginning point, if you have a Bible you can look it up, it’s in the New Testament Book of Ephesians chapter 5, verse 25, he writes this:

Husbands love your wife as Christ loved the Church and gave himself for her.

It’s an interesting and beautiful parallel that we have here between what Jesus did for us and what God is calling us men to do for our wives. See Jesus model of leadership was servanthood. The Son of God stepped out of heaven, He became a man, was humiliated, beaten, crucified, suffered on a cross for us, that’s Gods model of leadership, it’s servanthood.

God stepped down from the supreme role in the universe to serve you and me on the cross through pain and suffering and He said to His disciples who were arguing which one of the twelve of us is going to be at the top of the heap and Jesus said, “guys don’t you get it yet, the one of you who’s going to be first will be the one who is the servant of all?”

Let’s just look at that model and apply it to our own marriages for a moment. Why is that, why does God adopt a servant model of leadership?

You know what happens when you generally serve other people? When you serve me, when you go out of your way when you sacrifice for me you’re going to get my respect and my honour and my love and my trust. When I meet you I don’t know you from a bar of soap but we develop a relationship and I discover that you’re someone who delivers value, who truly cares, someone who’s prepared to serve me, someone I can trust.

That builds relationship; that builds influence. It’s true in every relationship; this bridge of influence is what happens when we serve other people. You can’t lead someone unless they’ve opened the door of their hearts to allow your influence to come in.

We can’t lead someone unless they allow themselves to be swayed by who we are. But people don’t do that until they’ve developed enormous trust in us, until they know that we have their interests at heart, until they see us as servants. Good leaders are servants.

That’s God’s model of the husband’s leadership role in the marriage. I believe that it’s been perverted; I believe that through culture over many, many years that it has been turned into something crass and horrible whereas it’s not about servanthood but it’s about domination. You can’t lead people by domination, that’s why dictators ultimately fall.

So this whole model where even in Christendom, you know people have said, “well the husbands the head of the household and that means he’s the boss, that means he dominates it”. That’s been rejected by many societies and rightly so.

I’m not talking about that man-made model where husband is the lord of the manor, served on hand and foot by a dutiful wife. Men have strength and a sense of protection over their loved ones and a desire to provide, that’s who we men are. When we take that, when we humble ourselves at the feet of our wives in service let me tell you, that’s godly leadership. When I describe a man like that you know how many women would give their right hand for a husband just like that.

A leader never relies on his rank. They influence people in their hearts. Husbands love your wives the way that Christ loved us and gave Himself for us.

Let me tell you something men, that is not always going to be convenient, it’s not always going to be easy and sometimes it’s going to be horribly painful. That’s kind of what that Bible verse, that’s the picture that it paints but that’s what our love for our wives should look like.

Husbands love your wives as sacrificial servants. That’s how to lead a family, that’s how to bring up children, that’s how to have a good marriage; that is what your leadership in the family should look like. And it’s so powerful.

Men can I ask you a question? Today, tomorrow how can you adopt a servant leadership role in your marriage? Let me read you that Scripture again, Ephesians chapter 5, verse 25:

Husbands love your wives the way that Christ loved the Church and gave himself for her.

You know the picture that that paints right? It’s the picture of Jesus brutally nailed hands and feet to a cross. It’s the picture of the Son of God who deserves all the glory and all the honour and all the praise hanging there in absolutely excruciating pain dying for me and dying for you, gasping for breath as He suffocates in agony so that our sin could be forgiven.

And what God is saying to all the husbands today, me included, is this, that’s how I want you to love your wife, just like that, no matter how hard it is, when her hormones are all over the place, no matter how much it hurts when she pours out her emotional pain to you and you feel like she’s tearing you down.

Love hurts! Do you get that? Loving someone who’s not perfect always hurts. Look how much it hurt God, look how much it cost God to love me and to love you, look at the gruesome blood splattered image of that dead Messiah on a cross. That’s what it means to be a man who loves his wife the way God loves us.

For a man to give himself the way Christ gave Himself for us, I know, that’s maybe not what some men want to hear today. They want to hear that bit about being the head of the house but the way, the only way to be the sort of leader in a marriage in a home that God plans for a man to be is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her.

My prayer is that the Word of God is going to have a mighty brutal impact in the heart of many a husband today who’s been struggling to know how to love his wife. This is how, like Jesus loves you.

Okay, yesterday on the program we saw the powerful difference between God’s plan for how a man should love his wife and the worlds cheap 50/50 compromise imposter. But what about women? How does a woman go about loving her husband in a way that really works? Well let’s find out.

So of all the wives joining me today let me ask you, how easy or difficult do you find it to love your husband? For many it’s not that easy because this man that you’re married to is so different to his wife. So right now we’re going to look at what, on the surface, may appear to be an out-dated discussion of the wife’s role but as we unpack that, as we look at that, as we see God’s heart and intent, I think we’ll discover in there somewhere buried below our cultural misconceptions a blessing from God that might well surprise us all.

Yesterday on the program we were talking about the role of a husband as a leader in a marriage and we saw how Gods plan is for the husband not to be so much the lord of the manor, served on hand and foot by a dutiful wife, that’s not what it says, it says:

Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself for her.

That’s so contrary to the template that so many of us have in our heads about what God has to say about the husband and wife relationship. But what about the woman? Because for me this is culturally the toughest of all. In the same passage where it talks about men loving their wives sacrificially it says about women… Listen to this:

Be subject to one another out of reverence to Christ. Wives to your husbands as you are to the Lord for the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church. In everything be subject to your husband.

And then it goes on to say in the next verse, which is what we looked at yesterday:

Husbands love you wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself for her.

Now we load into that passage a whole bunch of cultural baggage because this program’s being heard right around the world in different countries and different cultures and some of us maybe want to run a million miles from this notion that the husband is the head of the wife. In some cultures that’s very much the way it works but if you live where I live maybe you want to throw rocks at that and say, well you have to be kidding me, that’s two thousand years old, that’s not relevant today, just go away.

I have to tell you the truth, I used to run a million miles from that passage too because I thought it was so yesteryear, so anachronistic because I loaded it with my cultural baggage which says, well if that’s the case then the husband gets to be the lord of the manor and he gets to ride rough shot over his wife and he gets to do all sorts of horrible things because he’s the boss.

I don’t believe that that’s what it actually says and so today we’re going to unpack that and see the reality of what God has to say on the subject.

The passage that we read starts off this way, it says:

Be subject to one another.

Can I tell you something? Even though in our household I am the head of the house I am also subject to my wife. We make decisions jointly as equals.

Some years ago we sold our house and a offer came in with a signed contract and a 10% deposit cheque, it was a pretty good offer but it wasn’t exactly as much as we wanted, it’s often the way it is when you’re selling a house, you don’t ever get quite what you wanted.

And it came to the point when Jacqui and I had to sit down and have the discussion, do we accept this offer or don’t we accept this offer? And it’s interesting how men and women, certainly Jacqui and I, look at things from quite different perspectives.

Jacqui as a woman looks at it from a more emotional perspective. For her everything’s linked together, it’s an emotional decision to let go of our house in which we’d been blessed as our home over the last five or six years. We put a lot of effort into the place making it look nice and feel comfortable and so her question was, given all of that, is this a fair price? She was emotionally attached to the house. She knew we were moving but that’s the way she looked at it.

But see I’m a man, I looked at it totally differently. I looked at it dispassionately, logically. I said, well you know irrespective of what we think it might have been worth it’s a pretty good offer. The difference between what we really would have liked to receive and what’s being offered isn’t that much. In the scheme of things it doesn’t matter, we’d bought another house anyway so lets move on. This is a good deal.

See two very different perspectives, a typical male/female role of emotional and logical and you know something, I think we need both of those in a marriage to make the whole thing work.

So how did we make the decision? We worked it through, we talked it through. I guess I brought some leadership to the discussion through my structured logic. She saw it this way, I saw it that way and then we jointly made a decision, we jointly decided yes we would accept the offer.

But what if we hadn’t agreed, what if Jacqui had said no and I said yes, how would we have handled it then? Well this is how it works in our relationship, this is how we live out this passage that I just read from Ephesians chapter 5 about being submissive to one another and yet the husbands still being the leader by serving his wife.

See if I hadn’t agreed with Jacqui then Jacqui would have left the decision to me. You may not agree but that’s what we would have done. So how would I have decided? Well I would have weighed up these two things, on the one hand the risks and benefits of selling and not selling and on the other the impact of going against Jacqui’s will.

And if Jacqui had said no I don’t think we should sell for this price, I would have said we’re not selling because I really believe that she needed to be happy with the decision and that it was more important that we were both of one mind than necessarily getting it right the way I saw it.

That’s my role as a leader, that’s what I would have done. In exercising that role God’s Word tells me I am subject to my wife, I have to take her into account, I have to love her so we do things jointly and ultimately if, as leader, I have a decision to make I still have to take her into account in making the right decision.

It’s up to each husband and wife to figure out exactly how this works in their marriage. For us we take decisions jointly, we’re involved, we discuss and most of the time we agree but every now and then we don’t and I decide and Jacqui accepts that decision. It’s resolved, we forget about it and we move on.

We just have to figure out how to apply this wisdom here and now in our marriages and maybe we’re afraid to do it Gods way but can I encourage you to ditch this cultural baggage about male domination that we read into those words perhaps and just do it Gods way, just take the step, you know something it actually works?

I get so annoyed when people dump their cultural baggage on this particular passage of the Bible, they read it without thinking and then they come to the conclusion, well I knew it, these Christians they’re from the last century, this couldn’t possibly be right, this is stupid, this is rubbish.

Of course the role of women has changed over the last ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years. I’m passionate about seeing women have careers, of making sure women are paid the same as men for doing the same jobs, I’m delighted that in many places and in many cultures there’s an emerging equality between men and women, there should be but equality doesn’t mean that men and women are the same. Equality doesn’t mean that it’s demeaning for a woman to accept the final decision from her husband, why should it?

I spent ten years as an officer in the Australian army. I was a captain and when a general told me this is the decision, you know what that was the decision, right, wrong, that was it. I didn’t feel demeaned and the good leaders, the great leaders are the ones who respect and honour others, who involve them in the decision-making process, who take advice and then show leadership and direction.

And whether you’re a general or a husband, fact, husband and wife are not always going to see eye to eye on every issue. Fact, if an issue goes unresolved it’s going to be damaging to the relationship, you know how it is when something just festers away for weeks on end without being resolved.

And so when you’re fail safe mechanism for dealing with that and God’s ideal, what I believe this passage in Ephesians chapter 5 is teaching us, is that husband and wife are subject to one another in different ways. It’s not that hard to get your mind around, really.

There are so many marriages in turmoil, struggling and even falling apart. You have to wonder, is there some way of getting this marriage thing right, are there some basic guidelines to follow, something important that maybe we’re missing? Well let’s find out.

They say that when you’re buying a house there are actually only three rules to wise real estate. Location, location and you guessed it location. When you think about it that makes a lot of sense. When you buy a house you can change the colour, you can change the basic layout, you can change the curtains and the carpet and the lighting, in fact you can change just about everything about the house except its location.

Over the last few weeks on the program we’ve been looking at marriage from a different perspective. Now marriage is much more important than buying a house right? Much. So what would the three rules of marriage be? Location is the one unchanging thing that undergirds a piece of real estate.

So what’s the one unchanging thing that undergirds marriage? Is it communication? Well, communication is very important but that’s something you can develop and change. Is it intimacy? Well that’s really important too but again that’s something you can work on and change.

Now it must be something else, something that’s so important that it should never change. Something as fundamental to love as location is to real estate. A great problem, in fact the great problem of life is our own selfishness.

See we start off in a marriage with a flurry of romance and high hopes but very soon our own selfish desires get in the road and then what happens is we end up missing the whole point of marriage because we think the way to have a fantastic marriage is keeping an eye out for what we can get out of it. We talked a bit about this the other day on the program when we discovered that the whole compromise 50/50 approach to marriage simply doesn’t work.

And the reason it doesn’t is that the 50/50 approach leads to the attitude of, well what’s in it for me? I better make sure that I get everything I want and I need out of my marriage. And in doing that, in a very real sense, we end up, as the old fairy tale goes, strangling the goose that lays the golden egg.

I want you to imagine that you plan on getting a great harvest of apples out of an apple tree that you’ve just planted. It’s a young tree, it has some growing to do and the reason you planted it is that you wanted to produce nice fresh crisp juicy sweet red apples. Here’s my question, how do you go about getting the harvest that you’re looking for?

Here’s the first approach, do you hassle the tree, do you berate the tree, do you tell it it’s no good because it hasn’t produced any apples yet and when it does produce a few apples and they’re much smaller and not as sweet as you’d hoped for do you tell it what a lousy stupid apple tree it is?

Or let’s try a different approach; do you make sure the tree is planted in good rich soil? That it’s sheltered from strong winds, well watered, well fertilised, free from pests and disease. It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? If you want to have a great harvest of apples it’s the second approach that’s going to work, anybody can see that.

And yet so many people when it comes to their marriages, so many people go with the first approach instead of the second. As though telling their soul mate what a bad job they’re doing at meeting my needs is going to solve the problem.

What’s missing in that is the essential, the three rules of having a fantastic marriage, grace, grace and grace. My dictionary tells me that grace is the free unmerited favour that one person gives to another. Now it’s not that my wife doesn’t merit my favour, she does but the point is that day to day she doesn’t have to earn it.

Any husband, any wife is going to have good days and not so good days and you know even some pretty bad days over a marriage that lasts any length of time, would you agree? We all do and so if I berate my wife for not being a great wife on her not so good or bad days, should I really expect my marriage to bear the fruit of intimacy, emotional and physical, that I really want it to? It’s as plain as the nose on my face, of course not.

On the other hand if on her off days I love her, encourage her, hug her, keep quiet about anything that perhaps has bruised me a little bit. What I’ve discovered is she bounces back soon enough and I know for my part when she does that for me it makes me feel so loved.

I know when I make mistakes in our marriage – perhaps I’m not as quite as attentive or sensitive than I should have been today; hey maybe I had a hard day at the office and I’m grumpy – and when she loves me and supports me through that I know what’s going on and it makes me feel loved and it helps me deal with the pressure and the problems, and I’m loved because I have just received the free unmerited favour of my wife.

That’s love in action and this whole thing is called grace, it’s a deep attitude of the heart. The Bible talks an awful lot about grace, God’s grace towards us. And I have to say my favourite verse on grace is in the New Testament Book of Romans chapter 5, verse 17 where it talks about, wait for this, the abundance of Gods grace.

Heaping grace on your wife or your husband as the case may be, I mean an abundance of grace, it’s like watering and fertilising and protecting that little apple tree. When we water and fertilise and protect that little apple tree you know what? It can’t help itself; it’s going to produce a great crop of apples.

And when we heap an abundance of grace on our marriage partner he or she, by and large, will produce the fruits in our marriage that we were always looking for all along. The fruits that are going to bless us, the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.

Each wife, each husband needs to put their roots down into good soil, healthy soil to become the sort of wife or husband that God always planned for them to be; to build the sort of marriage that God always planned for them to have. To engage in the sort of closeness and intimacy that is the great gift of marriage.

Let me say that again, just as there are three rules of real estate, location, location and location so there are three rules of having a fantastic marriage, grace, grace and grace. So in your marriage I encourage you to remember that little apple tree that we talked about today.

And of course a great marriage isn’t just about watering and feeding, the sort a husband does for his wife and a wife does for her husband, it’s also as I said about putting your roots down into good soil and there is simply no way of having a better marriage than putting Jesus, the foundation of grace, right at the centre of it.

Each couple needs to choose, are they going to put God first or not? There’s a great passage in the Old Testament, the Book of Joshua where Israel’s leader, Joshua, challenges the people. Now that they’ve crossed over into the Promised Land this is what he says to them, chapter 24 beginning at verse 14:

Now therefore revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity and faithfulness. Put away the foreign gods that your ancestor’s served beyond the river and in Egypt and serve the Lord. If you are unwilling to serve the Lord choose this day who you will serve, whether the gods of your ancestors in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you’re living but as for me and my household we will serve the Lord.

What about you and your household? What about you and your marriage? Who is Lord over that? Is it your own selfish whims and desires because they are sure to tear your marriage apart or is it God, the God who is love, the God who sent Jesus to die and pay for our sins, the God who pours His free unmerited favour, His grace out on each man, woman and child who puts their trust in Jesus.

When a husband and wife develop an intimate personal relationship with Jesus what they’re doing is they’re putting their roots down into good soil and that’s how they produce fruit with God’s infusion of grace into their hearts and with their soul mate’s help and encouragement and that’s going to make for a fantastic marriage, just the sort of marriage you were always meant to have.