God chose my profession for me – Part 2

In part one, I explained there was a time when I came to see the classic Ephesians 5 passage through new eyes. It struck me that a full five-sixths of the passage is specifically directed toward husbands, not wives. What I unpacked next from Paul’s word to husbands is that Christ is our Pioneer...

A new song

The next key to strike me from the husbands passage is that Christ is our Pioneer. He has set the scene. We are to love our wives as Christ loved the church. Here we have a picture of sacrificial love. It is not just a case of, do I love my wife enough to die for her? Many men would boldly claim that they did. The more penetrating question is, do I love my wife enough to live for her? Do I love her enough to pick up the teatowel? Do I love her enough to rearrange my schedule? C.S Lewis reportedly said if men wish to tenaciously hold to the belief that as head they wear the crown, it is a crown of thorns, a crown of sacrifice and servant-hood.

Maybe Paul hoped the christian husbands reading the letter would flip their minds back to what he had written only a little earlier: “Do as God does. After all, you are His dear children. Let love be your guide. Christ loved us and offered His life for us as a sacrifice that pleases God.” (Ephesians 5:2, CEV)

Before we shifted house, I had taken a rusty old nail and for some months had placed it on my bedside table as a perpetual reminder that God calls me to love my mate with the same sacrificial love Christ showed for me when He hung upon the Cross in my place. The nail is gone now but I have never forgotten the divine imperative.

We can be part of our wife’s sanctifying process, as we engage her with what God is saying to us through His Word. If God has touched us with encouragement or challenge, pass it on. Build her up in her most holy faith (Jude 20). As Christ cleanses us – His church – with the washing of His Word, at the same time He models for us as husbands something we can do within the marriage relationship. Build her up, pass it on! Of course, we can all do this for one another. Our daughter Emilie at a very significant time in my life wrote me out a verse on a card. It was Jeremiah 29:11, and I was reminded of a truth I desperately needed to hear again – the Lord was constantly thinking thoughts of peace towards me, to give me a future and a hope. You never know how timely a word that the Lord has given you may be in the life of your wife. And remember, there’s a world of difference between “washing” with the Word and clouting with the Word.

The Message version alludes here to another thought and that is how we can minister to our wives with the words we use in daily conversation – words of comfort, of strength, of appreciation, of acceptance, of exhortation, of affirmation. Peterson refers to Christ our model: “His words evoke her (the church’s) beauty” (Ephesians 5:26, The Message). I heard my friend Tony Collis preach and he had the congregation repeat after him, “My words have power!” The simplicity of repeating those words out loud really drove it home.

When we learned this power in family life, we adopted Ephesians 4:29 as our life-verse and I have encouraged many couples to do likewise (husbands leading the way). You might like to look it up and memorise from your favourite translation.

It talks about using only kind, helpful words that build up, and are fitting for the need of the moment and impart grace to the hearer. Here’s a challenge, try evoking your wife’s inner beauty (as above, 5:26) through the power and grace of your words.

This is the profession to which God has called every christian husband.
We are to tend to the garden of our marriage.

We then have an amazing word-picture from Paul (verse 29). We are to nourish or nurture our relationship. I was once reading Gary Smalley and noted that he points out the Greek word for “nurturer” means husbandman, ie. a professional tiller of the soil concerned with giving life and growth to the soil.

This is the profession to which God has called every christian husband. We are to tend to the garden of our marriage.

The Apostle compares it to the pampering we give our body. Ephesians 5:28, 29 (Phillips) read this way: “So men ought to give their wives the love they naturally have for their own bodies. The love a man gives his wife is the extending of his love for himself, to enfold her. Nobody ever hated his own body…”

When I first started going to the gym, I was amazed at the attention and pampering a lot of the guys were giving to their bodies. Profuse sweat, ultra-heavy muscle building exercises and weights, hard at it day after day – some on their path back to wellness, some to get back into shape, some to keep in shape, some to impress the ladies, some for their own reasons after that rippling physique but all focused on their bodies right down to the after-shave that wafts from the younger men as they walk out the door. I wonder how many of the guys I saw were giving their wives or partners the same amount of attention, protection and devotion. “The love a man gives his wife is the extending of his love for himself to enfold her.”

Many men still have the idea it is all about “bringing home the bacon.” Yes, our wages are important but they aren’t what nourish the relationship. We are responsible for understanding what ingredients cause this marriage to grow and flower – and providing these on a consistent basis. It will require persistent hard work, toiling the soil and investing in the life of the relationship.

Once years ago on a business trip accompanied by my pregnant wife and two year old son, we needed to get from Whakatane to Wairoa in the North Island of New Zealand and I was reticent to take us through Rotorua and on the long Taupo-Napier road. Looking long and hard at the map, I convinced myself we could take a shorter route around Lake Waikaremoana and through the Ureweras. It has forever gone down in living memory as the most torturous journey of our lives. We were beset with gravel roads, wild horses, a leaking petrol tank (and only one fill-up stop at the halfway point), our little son vomiting at what seemed every corner, a distraught tear-stained wife experiencing morning sickness for the length of the journey, and frayed tempers, finally limping into Wairoa after seven hours comprising one nightmare trip. What a hard lesson I had to learn, that shortcuts aren’t always the better course.

Many men have learned, to their detriment, that you cannot expect to feed your relationship emotionally and get there through taking a shortcut. It simply doesn’t work. This will take time; a tree takes more than one season to bear fruit. Take the time to nurture your relationship or you may discover at great pain to yourself she will find the time to have an affair.

In Solomon’s words to his beloved: “You are like a private garden, my treasure, my bride! You are like a spring that no one else can drink from, a fountain of my own” (Song of Songs, 4:12, New Living). If we attend to the garden of our relationship, the grass will never look greener on the other side of the fence. We will get our spouse’s undying faithfulness into the bargain.

And cherish her. What does cherish mean? The answer might come easier if we were to put the question to our wife, what would make you feel cherished? You might be surprised what you hear. She may say, when you accompany me and support me where there’s something tough I’ve got to do. She may say, when you pamper me and spoil me. She may say when you acknowledge me in public. So many wives find their husbands dismissive of them in public. She may say, when you massage me on my neck and shoulders at the end of a difficult day. She may say, when you praise me and compliment me or brag on me in the presence of others, What if you hear words as simple as, when you want to stay home with me and keep me company, or when you spend time comforting me. Place a premium on cherishing your wife. She is your prize. She is your “forever bride.”

More than any other thing, every woman needs to feel chosen. Never forget that out of all the strong, rugged handsome looking fellows out there, she chose you. That may not mean very much to you but let me tell you, it means a whole lot to your wife. Ten years, twenty years, thirty years after you have married, nothing has changed. Your wife needs to know you have chosen her above all others for that moment, for that hour, for that day and every day. We can hear Jesus’ words to Peter repeated as the recurring refrain in every woman’s mind: “Do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15) – than your business, than your wider family, than the other men or women who regularly pay you attention? It’s a daily re-choosing. I sometimes challenge a man who has subtly been drawn into that “taking for granted” trap: see your wife, your lover, your life-partner through another man’s eyes.

God’s time is always NOW. Again and again in Scripture we hear the words, “Now is the time.” If we stilled our hearts and listened carefully enough, I believe we would catch the divine whisper in this context: “Now is the time to start loving your wife the way I always intended, just as Christ nourishes and cherishes His body, His bride.”

Be that fountainhead of love
Show some servant leadership
Adapt yourself to her needs, her desires and her dreams
Be sacrificial in your loving
Build her up spiritually
Nurture her emotionally
Cherish her

“Let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, savour you, bless you, before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it will not always be so. One day, I shall dig my fingers into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky, and want more than all the world: your return.”²

¹  Gretchen Gaebelein Hull, Equal to Serve: Women and Men Working Together Revealing the Gospel
(Tarrytown: Fleming H. Revell Co., Baker Books 1998) p.252

²  Mary Jean Irion, yes, World: A Mosaic of Meditation
(R.W.Baron Bus.Co; First Edition 1970)