With great power....

"Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. He Himself being the Savior of the body.

But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.

Husbands love your wives just as Christ also loved the church

and gave Himself up for her,

so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 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 ought also 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

because we are members of His body.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife and the two shall be one flesh.

This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband."

Ephesians 5:22-25

It's amazing to me the imagery that God uses in this verse. God has put it on my heart to start looking more intently on what a Godly Marriage looks like. It goes to the idea that we as Christian's need to be preparing for things that are in the future for us and at this time I clearly can tell He has put this on my heart for a reason. Not that I'm going to get married anytime soon or anything like that but, it gives us as Christians a better view of who God is and this verse I think does that better than most. I know one day, God willing, is calling me to be the best husband I can be and ,God willing, the best father I can be.

I love this passage of scripture. I hear so many people that use some of these scriptures to make sexist comments in a joking manner and it honestly makes me sick. I know, it's just a joke, but I don't see these kind of things as something to be joked about. The first part is a command and He says "Love your wife just as Christ loved the church."

Christ came to this world and was beaten, spit on, nailed to a cross, and laid down His life for others because of His love for us. This is the love that we as men are called to have for the wives in our life or will be. Not when we feel like it, not when she is being easy to love, not when everything else in my life is going good but all the time. This is something that NEEDS to be a constant thing and a daily thing as men, dying to ourselves and our own needs for that other person.

In this specific passage of scripture it's so clear to me that as a man I'm going to have an incredible responsibility in my life if I get married. God has put an incredible burden on the man basically saying "Hey you're in charge of this". It's an incredible amount of pressure and power in our lives as men to be a reflection of Christ's relationship with the church. We are called to show the world His relationship with the church through the idea of marriage! It's a picture of something greater and I'm called to represent that? That's a scary thing! See in the 21st century marriage is just another thing but what marriage is supposed to do in these verses of ch.5 is to represent to the world Him and the church becoming one!

My love for the other person is supposed to point to something bigger than just two people living the rest of their lives together, it's to paint a vivid picture of Christ's love for the church!

Marriage can't be an answer to the question "How can I be happy" because happiness isn't the design of marriage.

It's called be the most beautiful picture of surrender that people have ever seen!