The Christian Husband

How can we men learn to be the husbands we ought to be? This is an especially important question for those of you who grew up in a home without a good model of Christian manhood. Philip Yancey wrote:

One couple I talked to described a horrible two-year period of angry quarrels, temper tantrums, and walkouts. The wife, Beth, had come from a troubled family. Her father had left and her mother had died. Beth used the first few years of marriage to unleash her pent-up anxieties. She would fly into irrational rages over insignificant details. Somehow Peter rode out the violence of those first few years and continued to show her love. Today they have one of the happiest marriages I know of.

I asked him, ‘Peter, how did you do it? What kept you from cracking in those long months of giving a lot and getting very little in return?’

He then told me the story of his conversion, when God tracked him down after months of angry rebellion. ‘The most powerful motivating force in my life,’ he concluded, ‘was the grace of God in loving me and giving himself for me. When I hated coming home to face Beth, I would stop for a moment, think of God’s sacrifice on my behalf, and ask him for strength to duplicate it.’

Did you know this is exactly the way the Bible tells husbands to live? We men are to look at the way God loves us and then reflect to our wives what we experience from God. Ephesians 5:25 (NLT) says, “You husbands must love your wives with the same love Christ showed the church.” We simply need to look at the way we are loved by God and then mimic that in our own marriage.

This Sunday we’ll look at the four ways God loves his Bride—four things that we husbands are to mimic in our own marriages: unconditional love, covenantal love, incarnational love, sacrificial love.

After last Sunday’s message on the ideal wife, it’s time to review what the Bible says about the ideal husband. Join us together @ 10am!

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