Ephesians 5:22-6:4 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost Sunday, October 6, 2024 “Learn How To Love Your Family”
There is no shortage of advice available concerning marriage and children. I suppose it is true of other areas of life as well, but you can find entire shelves of books with advice for married couples regarding their lives together. And you can find entire shelves of books with advice for parents raising children. That doesn’t even take into account all the other sorts of advice. There are websites devoted to these topics, radio shows, professionals to work with, blogs, and even casual conversation. If you want to learn what someone believes to be good advice concerning marriage or children, it really shouldn’t be a problem. What can be a problem, though, is making sure that you have found the right advice. Certainly not every book on the shelf or every website on the internet offers the same advice to spouses or parents. No doubt some pieces of advice are much more valuable than others. The most valuable advice of all, however, is more than just advice. It’s found in our readings and hymns today. It is more than advice because it provides a sort of user’s manual for marriage and children. And You can be certain that this is the good stuff, because it comes from the Creator himself. And that is completely literal. This is the one who created marriage. He created man and woman. He created children and families. And God tells us exactly how to love our families. He wants us to learn and to know and to put into practice what he teaches. He teaches us concerning our individual roles, and he teaches us about the example of Jesus Christ. You heard the marriage and family advice that Paul first shared to the Ephesian Christians. That was our Second Reading, including parts of chapters 5 and 6 of Ephesians. It’s good to note that by the time we’re reading those portions of Ephesians, we’ve already heard Paul explain things like he does in Ephesians 2: “Indeed, it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (vs 8-9). Paul is not teaching people how to become Christians. He is not teaching how to earn God’s favor. He is teaching people who are saved by grace in Christ Jesus how to live a life of thankfulness. And that starts in the home. Paul, really God through the writing of the apostle, discusses several roles that people have in the family. He talks to wives, husbands, children, and fathers. And to all of them he says something about submission and authority. Children are to obey parents. Wives are to submit to the leadership of their husbands. God has set things up this way. Most people who hear that children have a role of submission and obedience to their parents probably take that in stride. That makes sense. We understand that children have growing up to do. But when you start saying that wives should submit to their husbands, that usually elicits a different response. It makes people uncomfortable. They think that is backwards. It isn’t keeping up with the times. It doesn’t understand that women are talented and capable. It doesn’t sound like what women deserve to hear according to our society today. And there may be a lot of women and wives who don’t like to hear that direction. To be fair, there are a lot of people who also bristle at the suggestion that children should obey their parents. Those people tend to be children. They find all sorts of situations in which they believe they understand and mom or dad just doesn’t get it. That behavior is stereotypically teenage behavior, but it can show up well before that, too. Who among us likes being told what to do? Who of us wants to listen to someone else or have someone else in charge of us? It doesn’t really matter our particular station in life, we don’t tend to appreciate someone else’s authority over us. Some of that is simply our own selfish pride raising its ugly head. “You can’t tell me what to do!” But there are other factors, real factors. Parents make mistakes. Husbands mistreat their wives. People abuse their authority, and that makes us even more concerned about any authority or any position. But God tells us that he’s designed these things for our good. He invites wives to submit to their husbands as the church