9-28-08
One Flesh (cont’d)
Building a Joyful Marriage: Part 12
Ephesians 5:24-32

Summary: Emotional and relational closeness are hindered by apathy and anger.  Anger is caused by lusts (solution: humility – which submits to God and accepts suffering from His hand), and is fueled by unforgiveness (which builds resentment that can’t be escaped from).  Be patient for sanctification.  The fourth way to live up to one flesh status is body-like harmony in purpose, warfare and roles.  The fifth is sharing everything, like Christ and the Church. Privacy must give way to intimacy.

1.	Seek Grace
2.	Set Priorities
3.	Strive for emotional, relational closeness
The Cause of Anger: Lusts
Accept suffering
The fuel for anger: Unforgiveness
The problem is you
Don’t let resentment build
Patience for Sanctification
4. Pursue Harmony (body analogy)
Oneness in purpose
Spending money
Discipline
Oneness in Warfare
Harmony in Roles
5. Share Everything (Christ and the Church)
Conclusion
Devotionals
Day 1: Defeating Anger
Day 2: The fuel for anger: Unforgiveness
Day 3: Harmony
Day 4: Share Everything
Day 5: Share Everything
 
Genesis 2:23-24 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

Ephesians 5:28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- 30 for we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32 This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church. 

1.	Seek Grace
2.	Set Priorities
3.	Strive for emotional, relational closeness
We left off last time talking about how to live up to our one-flesh status in our marriages.  To do that you need grace from God, you need to set your spouse as your highest earthly priority, and you need to strive for emotional, relational closeness.  Do not let anything get between you.  Do not let anything steal the warmth from your expressions of love.
Let’s pick up the discussion right there this morning by asking this question: What is it that usually steals warmth from your love?  Isn’t it usually either anger or apathy?
Apathy kills intimacy because without constant nurture a love relationship will cool off.  You just get so wrapped up in work, or a project, or a hobby, or the kids, or ministry, or whatever, and you just don’t put forth the effort to nurture your relationship with your spouse, and so the fires of your love just kind of die down.  And when it goes unchecked the end result is you look at your spouse one day and there isn’t slightest flicker of attraction or desire or delight. 
If you feel yourself somewhere on that path of apathy, I hope this series has awakened you to the fact that apathy is not acceptable in God’s sight in your marriage.  It is not enough to just stay married.  God is not satisfied with mere avoidance of divorce.  He calls for intimate and passionate love, and anything short of that is sin.  And apathy falls well short of intimate and passionate love, which means it is sin.  So if that is you, go back to part 1 of this study and do all you can do to stir up passionate, joyful love for your spouse.
The other big killer of one flesh intimacy is anger.  Your spouse does something that hurts you and you become annoyed or irritated.  And the next kiss from you ends up being a little on the cold side.  Or maybe you are really mad and the kiss doesn’t happen at all.  If the problem is anger, there are a number of different principles Scripture gives us for dealing with that, but one of the most basic is in James 3.
The Cause of Anger: Lusts
Jas.4:1,2  What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You want something but don't get it. 

If you are constantly mad at your spouse, it is not because of your spouse failing to change.  It is not because your spouse is failing to love you properly.  Your spouse might be doing a whole lot of things wrong, but none of those are the reason why you are angry.  The reason you are angry is not because of your spouse; it is because of you.  James says it is because of the desires that battle within you.
The word for desires is actually the word lusts.  The reason you quarrel and fight is because of your lusts.  We usually think of lust as sexual desire, but the word refers to any strong desire.  Any time a desire is elevated to the level where you must have it fulfilled in order to be happy, it has become a sinful lust.
And the issue here is usually desire for a certain kind of treatment.  Those lusts (the lust for kind words, the lust for affection, the lust for respect, the lust for understanding or consideration or attention or companionship) rage inside you, and when they go unfulfilled there will be anger toward the one who is blocking the fulfillment of those desires.  If you tie your happiness to a person, and you put your hope in a person, as long as he is still a sinner you will never be happy.
Most people think the solution to their anger is to get their lusts satisfied.  If you want your husband to be a better listener, and his poor listening is making you mad, it seems like the solution is for him to start listening better.  The solution to your anger is for your spouse to shape up.  That is like saying, “I would be a much more patient person if people would stop being annoying.”  If people stopped being annoying that would not make me more patient – it would just hide the fact that I lack patience.
The solution James gives us for the problem of anger is not getting your lusts fulfilled.  Instead he rebukes us for living for those lusts.  He calls it friendship with the world and spiritual adultery.  If you are looking to kind words from your spouse, or compassion or understanding or respect or affection or any of that for your joy, and you have an attitude that assumes you cannot have joy without that, that is idolatrous because it places something besides God in the role of being the source of your joy.  The one legitimate desire that should drive our lives is our desire for God, and when I am not satisfied with Him, and can find happiness only in some earthly thing or relationship, I am committing adultery against Him.
So the solution is not for my spouse to change.  The solution, according to James, is the grace from God that I will get when I learn humility.

James 4:4-6 You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely? 6 But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." 7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. 

The solution to anger is humility.  Pride thinks the most important thing in the world is for me to be treated right.  But the more I learn humility the more my attention shifts from how you are treating me to how I am treating you.  And when that shift takes place, I will receive grace from God.  And until that shift takes place God will oppose me.

Accept suffering
And key result of humility in the heart is in verse 7 – submission to God.  The proud heart rails against what God does when suffering is involved.  But the humble heart accepts anything that comes from the hand of God – including the suffering that goes along with being married to a sinner.  Some people can handle all kinds of suffering in the rest of their life, but for some reason they think differently about suffering in their marriage.  When they face sickness and financial loss and hardship at work or whatever, they see that as a trial coming from the hand of God and they accept that from God’s hand.  But they do not have the same attitude toward the suffering in their marriage, because they think of the suffering in their marriage as coming from their spouse rather than coming from God.
Your spouse is only a secondary cause.  The first cause is God.  He is the one in charge of all your suffering.  And everything God does is good.

Deuteronomy 32:4 His works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong

When God allowed your husband to be inconsiderate toward you last week, or lie to you or hurt you in some other way, God was not doing something wrong.  When God allowed your wife to get angry at you or belittle you or treat you like a child – God was not making a mistake.  That was just the right suffering for you at that moment in your life, and it was jammed full of God’s perfect purposes for you.  The suffering that God is doling out to you right now through your spouse is very carefully designed by God for your highest good.  Which means your situation would be worse if you didn’t have that suffering right now.
Go ahead and ask for God to bring it to an end.  There is nothing wrong with doing that, as long as your attitude is, “God, I desire relief, but even more than that I desire Your perfect plan so if Your perfect plan for me at this time is for the suffering to continue, by all means let it continue.  Because I don’t want any part of anything that would be outside Your will.”  And then just sit back and trust Him to do what is best.  And take delight in the fact that you serve a God into whose hands you can entrust your wellbeing.
So how do you deal with anger?  Pinpoint the out-of-control desires in your heart, repent of them, and fix all your desire on God alone.  And then humble yourself and accept from God’s hand any suffering with the joyful faith that knows it is what is best for you.
The fuel for anger: Unforgiveness
So it is idolatrous desires, or lusts that cause anger in the first place, and then, once the anger is there, there is another sin that throws fuel on the fire of that anger to keep it from dying down and going away.  And that fuel is unforgiveness. 

Ephesians 4:31-32 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
You get rid of anger through forgiveness.  Forgiveness is when you let someone off the hook for something they have done that hurt you.  And if they are truly off the hook in your heart, then you are not angry anymore.

The problem is you
So again, if you have sinful anger it is not because of your spouse – it is because of you.  You are not angry because your spouse is a sinner; you are angry because you are a sinner.  God has said, “I’ll forgive your infinite debt, and in return I want you to forgive each other’s relatively tiny debts,” and you have rebelled against that command.  God has said, “The blood of Christ pays for your sin and your spouse’s sin,” and you have said, “No, the blood of Christ was sufficient to cover my sin, but it is not sufficient to cover hers!”  That is what you are saying when you refuse to forgive.
The real issue in your marriage is not how godly your spouse is.  It is how forgiving you are.  If you do not learn forgiveness, then you will be miserable even if you are married to the godliest person on the planet because even the godliest person in the world is still a sinner.
If you are struggling to forgive your spouse or anyone else right now, take a moment to think about that line from the song we sang earlier: “…the innocent seeking the guilty to be reconciled.”  If it was not beneath Christ to do that for us it certainly is not too much for Him to ask that we do it for one another.  If you are the innocent party then go seek after the guilty party to be reconciled. 

Don’t let resentment build
I am guessing that you forgive most of the sins that are committed against you.  But there are certain sins that for whatever reason you just really have a hard time forgiving – and in those areas resentment starts to build up in your heart – like corrosion on a car battery.
You have some lust in your heart – some desire that you feel you have to have fulfilled by your spouse in order for you to be happy, and your spouse robs you of the fulfillment of that desire again and again and again, and each time a tiny little speck of resentment is added to the pile.
And when that pile finally gets big enough it shorts out the affections in your heart toward your spouse, and it feels impossible to love him/her.  And resentment is a real killer, because once resentment become entrenched in your heart, no matter what your spouse does, it does not satisfy you.  Even if they do something really good, instead of causing joy in your heart it causes even more anger.  He does some nice thing and all you can think is, “What an anomaly that was.  It will never last.  Sure, he does one good thing, but what about all these other things?  He always does this – one little effort to change, then right back to his old patterns.”  And the next thing you know you are furious with him over this act of kindness!  And it becomes impossible to appreciate any progress.
A man and wife fight about him coming home late from work all the time.  And so he makes some changes at work that he thinks will make a big difference.  But the result is not as big a difference as he hoped.  Now he is coming home late 14 nights per month instead of 20.  But his wife has built up so much resentment and bitterness that she is focused on those 14 nights and she cannot see anything else.  To her it seems like nothing has changed.  Every one of those 14 nights adds to her resentment and anger.  Every minute he is late she is thinking, See, nothing ever changes” - even though the reality is a 30% improvement.
It is vitally important that you never get into a pattern of having a building anger.  If anything is left unresolved and unforgiven, it does not matter how small it is or how infrequent, eventually the pile will get to be so big that your spouse will be helpless to do anything about it.
Think about it.  What can he do about a pile of 500 past sins?  He can apologize and repent over this last one that set you off, but you won’t be satisfied with that, because of the other 499.  He can discover another 200, and try to do something about all those, but that still leaves 300.  So no matter what he does and how much he changes, it will never seem to you like he is changing.  When you allow things to build up, you are putting your spouse in a hole that there is no way out of.

Patience for Sanctification
So a big part of forgiveness is patience – trusting God in the pace in which the Holy Spirit is sanctifying your spouse.  Sanctification is not an overnight process.  You don’t just say, “Hey, I think I’ll change” and it’s done.  You should know that from your own life, right?  It is just as hard for your spouse to truly change as it is for you.  So even after a hugely successful day of sanctification, your spouse is going to be almost as sinful as he or she was the day before.  Expecting your spouse to be radically transformed after hearing one sermon or having one conversation is kind of like the 90-pound teenager who looks at his muscles for progress after one day of lifting weights.   It doesn’t happen in one day. 
So if you find yourself saying, “He keeps saying he will do this and that, but nothing ever changes.”  Is that really true?  It might be if he is an unbeliever.  But for Christians – is that really true?  Do you suppose the sanctification process that God has promised for every believer – that day by day we are being transformed into the image of Christ – is that process malfunctioning?  No.  If the person is a Christian he is being sanctified.  But sanctification is not a simplistic, easy, overnight process.  We are in a war against an enemy who is very powerful and very skilled at impeding our progress.
If you are angry at your spouse for how slow the sanctification process is going, remind yourself of how it as going in your own life.  Don’t you have spiritual weaknesses and sins that you have made barely any progress on in the last five years?  Think of how patient God is being with you!
Your role is not to condemn your spouse for lack of progress.  Your role is to help your spouse make progress.  And so if progress is not being made, maybe the kind of help you are giving isn’t the best approach.
My advice, if there are a whole bunch of problems, is to take them one at a time.  Making spiritual changes at the heart level is very difficult, and rarely can you focus on more than one at a time.  Plus, if you pick the right one – the most basic and essential one, usually that will clear up most of the others.  So a very helpful practice is to just sit down with your spouse and agree on which character flaw is the most urgent for you to address, and which is the most urgent for your spouse to address.  And then come up with a clear, reasoned, step-by-step process for making progress in that area and set measurable goals so you can tell if you are making progress.  And if you re not sure what the goal should be or what action steps will actually lead to that goal, get together with your small group leader or your pastor or some friends and see if they have any insights.
And then spend yourself on making progress on your area of weakness, and providing encouragement and strength for your spouse’s efforts to make progress.  And be content for your spouse to make progress on that one area.  Do not expect change in all the other areas just yet.  Resist the temptation of lumping all your spouse’s faults into one giant massive pile.

4. Pursue Harmony (body analogy)
The most obvious observation about the meaning of the one-flesh relationship in marriage is that it approximates the relationship of body parts within the body.  I say it is obvious because that is what “flesh” means – the body.  God made Eve from Adam’s body so when Adam saw her the first thing he said was, “Behold, this is now flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.”  And then it goes on to say that for this reason couples will become one flesh.  So because of the way God created Eve – that is why married couples become one flesh.
And when Paul discusses one flesh in Ephesians 5 he shows us some of the significance of that.

Ephesians 5:28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- 30 for we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 

So the one-flesh relationship means that the man and wife should function together with a harmony and cooperation that is similar to the way body parts function together.
Oneness in purpose
And that kind of harmony begins with oneness in purpose.  In a Christian marriage the man and wife should have exactly the same ultimate goals.  A partnership does not work if you have conflicting objectives.
Imagine two people pulling something up a hill with a rope.  If they are perfectly aligned and they are both pulling in exactly the same direction, all their energy goes into pulling the load.  But if he is pulling slightly to the left and she is pulling slightly to the right, some of their energy is taken away from pulling the load and is wasted countering the other partner.  And if they get to the point where he is pulling straight north and she is pulling straight south, then no force is exerted on the load at all.  It just stays still and all their energy is exerted pulling against each other.
All Christians have the same goal in life: the will of God.  If that is not the goal of your life then you are not a Christian.  So as Christians we have the same ultimate goal, but we are not always agreed on the best way to reach that goal.  Part of living as one flesh means living in harmony on that question.  Being in agreement and pulling the same direction with regard to…
What is the wisest course? 
Which way should we go?
What should we do right now?
When we are unified on those questions then we waste no energy pulling against each other, and we combine all our strength in the task God has given us.  If your master gives you a rope and tells you and a fellow slave to pull a heavy load up the hill, he is not going to be happy if he returns and finds you and the fellow slave in a tug of war and the load still sitting there at the bottom of the hill.
And if you understand how God guides us through headship then you know this is possible.  When you do not agree on which is the wisest course, the husband works hard at bringing about agreement and oneness of heart, and the wife, from the time the disagreement starts until the time it is resolved, during that interval of time where you disagree with one another, you respectfully offer your counsel, and then you joyfully, happily, enthusiastically submit to and support your husband’s decision (unless it would be a sin to do so).  And you can do that because you understand that God’s way of leading you in the marriage is through your husband’s decision-making.  So you do not have to second-guess his decision, because you understand that it is God’s will for you both to be unified in following the course your husband chooses unless it would be sin to do so.
For many years I was a whitewater rafting guide, and so when I am in a raft I have some very definite opinions about how a particular rapid should be run.  However, if someone else is guiding the boat, and I am just a paddler, and he chooses a bad line through the rapid, I enthusiastically follow his commands.  In fact, I am usually even more enthusiastic about it because I know it is going to take some extra hard paddling for us to make it through on the foolish line that he is taking.  Everybody in the boat being fully committed to a bad line is far better than everyone in the boat trying to paddle in different directions. 
So it is good to support your husband’s decisions for that reason.  But even beyond that, you can be even more enthusiastic when you understand that God has promised to lead you through the decisions of those in authority over you.  God has not given that promise to people in a raft, but He has given it to wives.  So strive for harmony in your goals and all that you do.

Spending money
Tracy and I talk about everything.  We don’t spend $20 without talking to the other one about it first.  And men, if you hear that and think, “Wait a minute, I’m the head of the home.  That means I get to spend whatever I want whenever I want” - you need to understand that taking resources and going off by yourself is not leadership.  It is just selfishness.  Leading is when you conceive of a good direction, and you help those under your care to see the goodness of that direction, and then when they are on board you set the pace in going in that direction.  “But what if my wife just can’t see the goodness of my idea of buying a $40,000 sports car with no back seat instead of a minivan when we have three toddlers?”  If you are incapable of showing your wife the goodness of the idea, maybe the idea is not actually all that good.  We should strive for such oneness in our finances that no energy at all is wasted pulling against our spouse and 100% of our energy goes into the fulfillment of our God-given task.  And if you think your husband’s decisions are going to cause a disaster, paddle all the harder and support him all the more and the place all your trust in God.

Discipline
The same goes for our parenting.  If one spouse has one philosophy and the other has another that is a tug of war that is going to get the family nowhere.  You need to be in agreement on what sorts of behaviors call for what sorts of discipline.  When do you spank?  When do you take away a privilege?  When do you extend grace?  If you do not agree on those things then sit down and talk it over and come to agreement.  And seek help from more seasoned parents if you need to.
Oneness in Warfare
So to function with the kind of harmony that the one-flesh relationship calls for we need to have oneness of purpose.  Secondly, we need oneness in warfare.  I believe one of the biggest problems with most Christian marriages is lack of fighting.  There is not enough fighting!  And where there is fighting, most couples are not fighting hard enough.  We need to become much more effective in our fighting, so that we win.
And the most important way to become more effective in that area is to start fighting the right enemy.  I watched a movie recently in which some Nazis were trying to take over the world, and the Nazi leader said, “Hitler was a fool.  You don’t fight the United States and Russia; you get them to fight each other and destroy each other.”  And so he came up with this plan to get Russia and the US to engage in a nuclear war against each other by setting off a nuclear bomb in the US that seemed like it came from Russia.  Satan has the exact same strategy for destroying your marriage.  He attacks your marriage, and then cons you into retaliating against your spouse!
Our struggle is not against flesh and blood.  Your spouse is not the enemy.  It is never a good thing to fight against your spouse.  When I read marriage books that say it is OK to fight each other as long as you fight fair I just cringe.  How could anyone read what Scripture says about marriage and interpret that to mean it is appropriate to fight each other!  If you fight your own flesh, by definition you are guaranteed to lose!  If you are one flesh with your spouse then what happens to your spouse happens to you.  So if your spouse loses a fight that means you have suffered a loss.  So you literally cannot win when you are fighting against your spouse.
So don’t fight with your spouse.  But don’t be content to just that.  I meant what I said about the problem of not enough fighting.  It is important that you fight hard and tenaciously against the enemy who is attacking your marriage.  So the second area where we should strive for harmony is in spiritual warfare.
You would not believe the difference it will make when you stop fighting face-to-face and start fighting side-by-side.  Instead of becoming angry at your spouse when some sin or problem invades your marriage, look at that sin or problem as a common enemy that you and your spouse need to team up to fight against.
Every couple faces trials and difficulties that are a threat to the marriage.  You don’t have enough money to pay the bills.  Or one of the kids is rebelling or being irresponsible.  Or your system for keeping the house clean isn’t working.  Or the husband’s job keeps him away from the family too much – or whatever.  Satan loves to take those trials and use them as weapons against your marriage.
So you get angry at each other because of the money problem.  You start to resent everything your spouse buys, or you get upset because your spouse does not seem to be taking the problem seriously.  Or you get mad at your husband for being gone at work so much.  And you get mad at your wife for not understanding that you have to make a living, and that you don’t have the option of just leaving work at whatever moment you please.  And so Satan has got you fighting each other, face-to-face.
Why not join hands with your spouse and fight back against Satan side-by-side as a team?  You see this threat and instead of having anger toward your husband you have compassion and sympathy, because you understand the predicament his job situation puts him in.  And the husband sees what is going on and is full of compassion and sympathy for his wife, who has to suffer because of this trial.  So instead of attacking your spouse and defending yourself you can show compassion toward each other and support each other and encourage each other and strengthen each other and walk with each other through the trial.  And Satan will be fighting against two superpowers at the same time and he will flee from you.
You can even have that attitude when the trial that is threatening your marriage is a sin.  One spouse falls into some sin, and the other one has a response of compassion.  And instead of being angry or bitter, you see this sin as an attack from Satan on your own flesh and bone, and you do all you can to stand by your spouse and fight against the sin as a common enemy.  “Honey, I’m here for you.  I know this area is hard for you – just like my areas of sin are hard for me.  What can I do to help you gain strength against this temptation?”  You have compassion and understanding.  You know what it is like when you have been overtaken by sin, and in love you desire to do all you can to strengthen and encourage your spouse to rise up and fight against that sin.

Harmony in Roles 
Another area where we need to be in harmony is in our roles in the home.  Talk it over and make sure you are in agreement on what it means for the man to be the head of the home and for the wife to be a suitable helper – and what does it mean for the wife to be the homemaker.  And make no mistake - there is no question that Scripture calls for women to be homemakers.

1 Timothy 5:14 So I counsel younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their homes and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander.

The norm for a young woman is to get married, have kids, and manage the home.  There are some unusual cases in which God calls a woman to remain single, or some unusual case in which God wants a couple to be childless.  But the norm for a woman is to get married, have children, and manage the home.

Tit.2:4-5 …train the younger women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home... 

While it is the man’s role to take ultimate responsibility for the management of the entire household (1 Ti.3:5), it is specifically the woman’s area to care for, watch over, guard and manage the home.
The idea that a woman’s primary arena of operation is in the home is not chauvinistic.  Whoever was the first person to suggest that homemaking was somehow a menial or degrading pursuit should have his head examined.  Can you think of any concept or any word in the English language that has a more pleasant association to more people than the word home?  Home is where you wish you were when you are tired or scared.  Home is a place of safety, comfort, provision, warmth and love.  When I was a kid and there were bullies in our neighborhood, I was afraid right up until I walked through the doors of our home, and then I was perfectly at rest.  It is where I went to eat; it is where I went if it started raining or was too cold, hot, windy, etc.  If I got lost, the reason I was distressed was I couldn’t go home.  It is fun to stay in a hotel once in a while, but it does not take too many nights of that and you get so you want more than anything just to be home.  Kids at camp get homesick, but as much as kids love camp, I have never seen a kid get campsick when he was at home.  Home is where you get home-cooking.  Home is where you can relax, and take off your shoes and be yourself.
So what on earth could possibly be a more noble pursuit than being a homemaker!  - to be the creator and maintainer of a place like that?  What possible line of reasoning could lead a person to the conclusion that it is more noble and meaningful and fulfilling for a woman to go out and sell widgets? - or manufacture widgets, or broker big widget deals, or be the senior VP in charge of widget operations…?
It is not glamorous and it is not applauded by our twisted, blind culture, and nobody pays you to do it.  And like any job it has its mundane aspects.  But look at what it accomplishes: the creation of a home! – which enables the nurture of a family!
This is why God made women more concerned than men on average about the environment they live in.  When we first got married the idea of spending money for decorations for our apartment was a very hard thing for me to swallow.  The aesthetics of our living space was so far down on my priority list, it just grated on my soul to spend money on that.  But eventually I learned that when my wife wants to spend some money to increase the beauty of the home, that is part of her God-ordained role.  It is part of being a homemaker.  (Now, when something looks perfectly good but she wants to spend money to change it just because she is getting tired of it, that still grates on my soul a little bit.  But even that rises from her God-given affections that delight in beautiful surroundings.)
So it is definitely the wife’s role to be a homemaker.  A woman’s place in this world is the most wonderful place God every created in this world – the home.  So we joyfully embrace the roles that God has laid out in Scripture for men and women in the family, but wisdom is still required in discerning what the best way is in your particular family to live that out.  Which household chores make the most sense to fall to which partner?  If there is a chore that both of you tend to think of as the responsibility of the other one, it is going to be a constant source of irritation.  Or if there is something that the man thinks of as being the wife’s job, so that if he does it occasionally he thinks of it as a special favor to her; but the wife thinks of it as just as much his responsibility as hers, so if he doesn’t do it at least half the time it seems to her like he is neglecting his responsibility, then what he thinks is a special favor for his wife is actually a source of irritation to her.  That is why, again, it s so important for you to talk to each other about even small sources of irritation, so that differences like that can be ironed out because part of what it means to be one flesh is to function harmoniously, like the parts of a body.  Function harmoniously in purpose, in warfare, and in roles.

5. Share Everything (Christ and the Church)
So, if you want to live up to your one-flesh status seek grace from God.  Make your spouse your highest earthly priority.  Strive for emotional, relational closeness.  Work together harmoniously like the parts of a body; and now let’s add a fifth way.  In 1Corinthians 7:4, when Paul was writing about the physical union in marriage, he said The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.  If that is true of your body, certainly it is true of the rest of you – your heart and soul and mind.  So a big part of one-flesh intimacy is sharing absolutely everything in your life.  Whatever you have belongs to your spouse.  
Physically, your body.  
Spiritually, your spiritual gifts.  
Mentally and emotionally - Your thoughts.  
(Which is another reason why communication is so crucial.  Your thoughts do not belong to you alone.  They also belong to your spouse.)
We have been reminded in this study again and again that the purpose of all this oneness is to display the oneness between Christ and His people. 

Ephesians 5:30 we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32 This is a profound mystery-- for I am talking about Christ and the church.

Think of the sharing that takes place between Christ and the Church.  Everything that is His is yours.
•	All His riches are yours.
•	His kingdom is yours.
•	His house is yours.
•	His family is yours.
•	His wisdom is yours.
•	His heaven is yours.
•	His creation is yours.
•	His inheritance is yours.
•	His angels are at your service.
He who didn’t spare His own Son will certainly give you all things.  Everything He has is yours.
And everything you have is His.  All your sorrow, all your fears, all your anxiety, all your worry – He will take it all.  Even your sin and your punishment He bore on His body on the tree.  Everything that is His is yours and everything that is yours is His.
That is the kind of sharing that marriage is supposed to reflect.  You do not have separate bank accounts – his money and her money.  You are one flesh and you have one home and one set of resources, not two.  You share everything.
One sign that something is way off in your one flesh relationship is when you start concerning yourself with privacy rather than intimacy.  Privacy is the killer of intimacy.  Privacy says “keep out” and intimacy says, “come on in.”  If it would bother you to find out that your spouse has opened your mail or read through your emails, that is a very bad sign.  That should not bother you.  A body has nothing to hide from itself. 
The first response to the fall was to exchange intimacy for privacy.  Adam and Eve went from naked and unashamed to fig leaves - intimacy gave way to privacy.  
Think of what ridiculous concept privacy in marriage is – hide something from your own flesh?  I believe the need for privacy is a result of the fall.  Privacy is the enemy of intimacy.  This is not to say you don’t need some time alone – you do.  It is to say, though, that no part of your life is off-limits to one another.  One-flesh union means sharing everything.
•	Seek Grace from God  
•	Set your spouse as your highest earthly priority
•	Strive for emotional and relational closeness
•	Function together as a team with the harmony of body parts working together
•	Share everything
There is one last part of one-flesh intimacy that Scripture speaks of, and that is physical intimacy and the Lord willing we will wrap up this series with that next week.

Conclusion
A Christian couple that is living up to their one-flesh status is one of the most beautiful displays of the glory of God in this world.  John Eadie wrote: “What a union of two believers, with one hope, one discipline, one service, one spirit, and one flesh!  Together they pray, together they prostrate themselves, and together keep their fasts, teaching and exhorting one another, and sustaining one another.  They are together at the church and at the Lord’s Supper; they are together in straits, in persecutions, and refreshments.  Neither conceals anything from the other; neither avoids the other…Christ rejoices on hearing and beholding such things; to such persons He sends His peace.” (p.254)  Christ rejoices in it because it is a reflection of His relationship with His people.  So let us close this morning by thinking about this: If it is so important to God that marriages be characterized by intimacy because they illustrate the relationship of Christ and the Church, how important do you think it is to Him that the Church itself have intimacy with Christ?  If the illustration is so important to God, how important must the reality be?  How important it is that we live in intimacy with the Lord our God!

Benediction – Heb.13:20,21  May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, 21 equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Devotionals
Day 1: Defeating Anger
James 4:1, 2  What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You want something but don't get it. 

If you are constantly mad at your spouse, it is because of the desires (lit. lusts) that battle within you.  Those lusts (the lust for kind words, the lust for affection, the lust for respect, the lust for understanding or consideration or attention or companionship) rage inside you, and when they go unfulfilled there will be anger toward the one who is blocking the fulfillment of those desires. If you tie your happiness to a person, and you put your hope in a person, as long as he is still a sinner you will never be happy.
The solution James gives us for the problem of anger is not getting your lusts fulfilled.  Instead he rebukes us for living for those lusts.  He calls it friendship with the world and spiritual adultery.  If you are looking to kind words from your spouse, or compassion or understanding or respect or affection or any of that for your joy, and you have an attitude that assumes you cannot have joy without that, that is idolatrous because it places something besides God in the role of being the source of your joy.  The one legitimate desire that should drive our lives is our desire for God.  And when I am not satisfied with Him, and can find happiness only in some earthly thing or relationship, I am committing adultery against Him.
So the solution is not for my spouse to change.  The solution, according to James, is the grace from God that I will get when I learn humility.

James 4:4-6 You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely? 6 But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." 7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. 

The solution to anger is humility.  Pride thinks the most important thing in the world is for me to be treated right.  But the more I learn humility the more my attention shifts from how you are treating me to how I am treating you.  And when that shift takes place, I will receive grace from God.  And until that shift takes place God will oppose me.
And key result of humility in the heart is in verse 7 – submission to God.  The proud heart rails against what God does when suffering is involved.  But the humble heart accepts anything that comes from the hand of God – including the suffering that goes along with being married to a sinner.
Some people can handle all kinds of suffering in the rest of their life, but for some reason they think differently about suffering in their marriage.  When they face sickness and financial loss and hardship at work or whatever, they see that as a trial coming from the hand of God and they accept that from God’s hand.  But they do not have the same attitude toward the suffering in their marriage, because they think of the suffering in their marriage as coming from their spouse rather than coming from God.
Your spouse is only a secondary cause.  The first cause is God.  He is the one in charge of all your suffering.  And everything God does is good.

Deuteronomy 32:4 His works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong

When God allowed your husband to be inconsiderate toward you last week, or lie to you or hurt you in some other way, God was not doing something wrong.  When God allowed your wife to get angry at you or belittle you or treat you like a child – God was not making a mistake.  That was just the right suffering for you at that moment in your life, and it was jammed full of God’s perfect purposes for you.  The suffering that God is doling out to you right now through your spouse is very carefully designed by God for your highest good.  Which means your situation would be worse if you did not have that suffering right now.
Go ahead and ask for God to bring it to an end.  There is nothing wrong with doing that, as long as your attitude is, “God, I desire relief, but even more than that I desire Your perfect plan.  And so if Your perfect plan for me at this time is for the suffering to continue, by all means let it continue because I don’t want any part of anything that would be outside Your will.”  And then just sit back and trust Him to do what is best.  And take delight in the fact that you serve a God into whose hands you can entrust your wellbeing.

Day 2: The fuel for anger: Unforgiveness
Ephesians 4:31-32 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

You get rid of anger through forgiveness.  Forgiveness is when you let someone off the hook for something they have done that hurt you.  And if they are truly off the hook in your heart, then you are not angry anymore.  So again, if you have sinful anger it is not because of your spouse – it is because of you.  You are not angry because your spouse is a sinner; you are angry because you are a sinner.  God has said, “I’ll forgive your infinite debt, and in return I want you to forgive each other’s relatively tiny debts,” and you have rebelled against that command.  God has said, “The blood of Christ pays for your sin and your spouse’s sin,” and you have said, “No, the blood of Christ was sufficient to cover my sin, but it is not sufficient to cover hers!”  That is what you are saying when you refuse to forgive.
The real issue in your marriage is not how godly your spouse is.  It is how forgiving you are.  If you do not learn forgiveness, then you will be miserable even if you are married to the godliest person on the planet –because even the godliest person in the world is still a sinner.
If you are struggling to forgive your spouse or anyone else right now, take a moment to think about that line from the song This Fathomless Love: “…the innocent seeking the guilty to be reconciled.”  If it was not beneath Christ to do that for us it certainly is not too much for Him to ask that we do it for one another.  If you are the innocent party then go seek after the guilty party to be reconciled. 
There are certain sins that for whatever reason you just really have a hard time forgiving.  And so in those areas resentment starts to build up in your heart – like corrosion on a car battery.
You have some lust in your heart – some desire that you feel you have to have fulfilled by your spouse in order for you to be happy, and your spouse robs you of the fulfillment of that desire again and again and again, and each time a tiny little speck of resentment is added to the pile.
And when that pile finally gets big enough it shorts out the affections in your heart toward your spouse, and it feels impossible to love him/her.  And resentment is a real killer, because once resentment becomes entrenched in your heart, no matter what your spouse does, it does not satisfy you.  Even if they do something really good, instead of causing joy in your heart it causes even more anger.  He does some nice thing and all you can think is, “What an anomaly that was.  It will never last.  Sure, he does one good thing, but what about all these other things?  He always does this – one little effort to change, then right back to his old patterns.”  And the next thing you know you are furious with him over this act of kindness!  And it becomes impossible to appreciate any progress.
A man and wife fight about him coming home late from work all the time, so he makes some changes at work that he thinks will make a big difference.  But the result is not as big a difference as he hoped.  Now he is coming home late 14 nights per month instead of 20.  But his wife has built up so much resentment and bitterness that she is focused on those 14 nights and she cannot see anything else.  To her it seems like nothing has changed.  Every one of those 14 nights adds to her resentment and anger.  Every minute he is late she is thinking, See, nothing ever changes” - even though the reality is a 30% improvement.
It is vitally important that you never get into a pattern of having a building anger.  If anything is left unresolved and unforgiven, it does not matter how small it is or how infrequent, eventually the pile will get to be so big that your spouse will be helpless to do anything about it.
Think about it.  What can he do about a pile of 500 past sins?  He can apologize and repent over this last one that set you off, but you won’t be satisfied with that, because of the other 499.  He can discover another 200, and try to do something about all those, but that still leaves 300.  So no matter what he does and how much he changes, it will never seem to you like he is changing.  When you allow things to build up, you are putting your spouse in a hole that there is no way out of.
So a big part of forgiveness is patience – trusting God in the pace in which the Holy Spirit is sanctifying your spouse.  Sanctification is not an overnight process.  You do not just say, “Hey, I think I’ll change” and it is done.  You should know that from your own life, right?  It is just as hard for your spouse to truly change as it is for you.  So even after a hugely successful day of sanctification, your spouse is going to be almost as sinful as he or she was the day before.  Expecting your spouse to be radically transformed after hearing one sermon or having one conversation is kind of like the 90-pound teenager who looks at his muscles for progress after one day of lifting weights.  It doesn’t happen in one day.
So if you find yourself saying, “He keeps saying he will do this and that, but nothing ever changes.”  Is that really true?  It might be if he is an unbeliever.  But for Christians – is that really true?  Do you suppose the sanctification process that God has promised for every believer – that day by day we are being transformed into the image of Christ – is that process malfunctioning?  No.  If the person is a Christian he is being sanctified.  But sanctification is not a simplistic, easy, overnight process.  We are in a war against an enemy who is very powerful and very skilled at impeding our progress.
If you are angry at your spouse for how slow the sanctification process is going, remind yourself of how it is going in your own life.  Don’t you have spiritual weaknesses and sins that you have made barely any progress on in the last five years?  Think of how patient God is being with you!
Your role is not to condemn your spouse for lack of progress.  Your role is to help your spouse make progress.  And so if progress is not being made, maybe the kind of help you are giving isn’t the best approach.
My advice, if there are a whole bunch of problems, is to take them one at a time.  Making spiritual changes at the heart level is very difficult, and rarely can you focus on more than one at a time.  Plus, if you pick the right one – the most basic and essential one, usually that will clear up most of the others.  So a very helpful practice is to just sit down with your spouse and agree on which character flaw is the most urgent for you to address, and which is the most urgent for your spouse to address and then come up with a clear, reasoned, step-by-step process for making progress in that area.  Set measurable goals so you can tell if you are making progress, and if you are not sure what the goal should be or what action steps will actually lead to that goal, get together with your small group leader or your pastor or some friends and see if they have any insights.
Then spend yourself on making progress on your area of weakness, and providing encouragement and strength for your spouse’s effort to make progress.  And be content for your spouse to make progress on that one area.  Do not expect change in all the other areas just yet.  Resist the temptation of lumping all your spouse’s faults into one giant massive pile.

Day 3: Harmony
Ephesians 5:28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- 30 for we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 

The one-flesh relationship means that the man and wife should function together with a harmony and cooperation that is similar to the way body parts function together and that kind of harmony begins with oneness in purpose.  In a Christian marriage the man and wife should have exactly the same ultimate goals.  A partnership does not work if you have conflicting objectives.
Imagine two people pulling something up a hill with a rope.  If they are perfectly aligned and they are both pulling in exactly the same direction, all their energy goes into pulling the load.  But if he is pulling slightly to the left and she is pulling slightly to the right, some of their energy is taken away from pulling the load and is wasted countering the other partner.  And if they get to the point where he is pulling straight north and she is pulling straight south, then no force is exerted on the load at all.  It just stays still and all their energy is exerted pulling against each other.
All Christians have the same goal in life: the will of God.  If that is not the goal of your life then you are not a Christian.  So as Christians we have the same ultimate goal, but we are not always agreed on the best way to reach that goal.  Part of living as one flesh means living in harmony on that question.  Being in agreement and pulling the same direction with regard to…
What is the wisest course? 
Which way should we go?
What should we do right now?
When we are unified on those questions then we waste no energy pulling against each other, and we combine all our strength in the task God has given us.  If your master gives you a rope and tells you and a fellow slave to pull a heavy load up the hill, he is not going to be happy if he returns and finds you and the fellow slave in a tug of war and the load still sitting there at the bottom of the hill.
And if you understand how God guides us through headship then you know this is possible.  When you do not agree on which is the wisest course, the husband works hard at bringing about agreement and oneness of heart, and the wife, from the time the disagreement starts until the time it is resolved, during that interval of time where you disagree with one another, you respectfully offer your counsel, and then you joyfully, happily, enthusiastically submit to and support your husband’s decision (unless it would be a sin to do so).  And you can do that because you understand that God’s way of leading you in the marriage is through your husband’s decision-making.  So you do not have to second-guess his decision, because you understand that it is God’s will for you both to be unified in following the course your husband chooses unless it would be sin to do so.
For many years I was a whitewater rafting guide, so when I am in a raft I have some very definite opinions about how a particular rapid should be run.  However, if someone else is guiding the boat, and I am just a paddler, and he chooses a bad line through the rapid, I enthusiastically follow his commands.  In fact, I am usually even more enthusiastic about it because I know it is going to take some extra hard paddling for us to make it through on the foolish line that he is taking.  Everybody in the boat being fully committed to a bad line is far better than everyone in the boat trying to paddle in different directions. 
So it is good to support your husband’s decisions for that reason.  But even beyond that, you can be even more enthusiastic when you understand that God has promised to lead you through the decisions of those in authority over you.  God has not given that promise to people in a raft, but He has given it to wives.  So strive for harmony in your goals and all that you do.
So to function with the kind of harmony that the one-flesh relationship calls for we need to have oneness of purpose.  Secondly, we need oneness in warfare.  I believe one of the biggest problems with most Christian marriages is lack of fighting.  There is not enough fighting!  And where there is fighting, most couples are not fighting hard enough.  We need to become much more effective in our fighting, so that we win.
But we must fight the right enemy: Satan. Satan attacks your marriage, and then cons you into retaliating against your spouse! Our struggle is not against flesh and blood.  Your spouse is not the enemy.  It is never a good thing to fight against your spouse.  If you fight your own flesh, by definition you are guaranteed to lose!  If you are one flesh with your spouse then what happens to your spouse happens to you.  So if your spouse loses a fight that means you have suffered a loss.  So you literally cannot win when you are fighting against your spouse.
Stop fighting face-to-face and start fighting side-by-side.  Instead of becoming angry at your spouse when some sin or problem invades your marriage, look at that sin or problem as a common enemy that you and your spouse need to team up to fight against.
Every couple faces trials and difficulties that are a threat to the marriage.  You don’t have enough money to pay the bills.  Or one of the kids is rebelling or being irresponsible.  Or your system for keeping the house clean isn’t working.  Or the husband’s job keeps him away from the family too much – or whatever.  Satan loves to take those trials and use them as weapons against your marriage.
Why not join hands with your spouse and fight back against Satan side-by-side as a team?  You see this threat and instead of having anger toward your husband you have compassion and sympathy, because you understand the predicament his job situation puts him in.  And the husband sees what is going on and is full of compassion and sympathy for his wife, who has to suffer because of this trial.  So instead of attacking your spouse and defending yourself you can show compassion toward each other and support each other and encourage each other and strengthen each other and walk with each other through the trial.  And Satan will be fighting against two superpowers at the same time and he will flee from you.
You can even have that attitude when the trial that is threatening your marriage is a sin.  One spouse falls into some sin, and the other one has a response of compassion.  And instead of being angry or bitter, you see this sin as an attack from Satan on your own flesh and bone, and you do all you can to stand by your spouse and fight against the sin as a common enemy.  “Honey, I’m here for you.  I know this area is hard for you – just like my areas of sin are hard for me.  What can I do to help you gain strength against this temptation?”  You have compassion and understanding.  You know what it is like when you have been overtaken by sin, and in love you desire to do all you can to strengthen and encourage your spouse to rise up and fight against that sin.

Day 4: Share Everything

In 1Corinthians 7:4, when Paul was writing about the physical union in marriage, he said The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.  If that is true of your body, certainly it is true of the rest of you – your heart and soul and mind.  So a big part of one-flesh intimacy is sharing absolutely everything in your life.  Whatever you have belongs to your spouse.  
Physically, your body.  
Spiritually, your spiritual gifts.  
Mentally and emotionally - Your thoughts.
(Which is another reason why communication is so crucial.  Your thoughts do not belong to you alone.  They also belong to your spouse.)
We have been reminded in this study again and again that the purpose of all this oneness is to display the oneness between Christ and His people. 

Ephesians 5:30 we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32 This is a profound mystery-- for I am talking about Christ and the church.

Think of the sharing that takes place between Christ and the Church.  Everything that is His is yours.
•	All His riches are yours.
•	His kingdom is yours.
•	His house is yours.
•	His family is yours.
•	His wisdom is yours.
•	His heaven is yours.
•	His creation is yours.
•	His inheritance is yours.
•	His angels are at your service.
He who didn’t spare His own Son will certainly give you all things.  Everything He has is yours.
And everything you have is His.  All your sorrow, all your fears, all your anxiety, all your worry – He will take it all. Even your sin and your punishment He bore on His body on the tree.  Everything that is His is yours and everything that is yours is His.
That is the kind of sharing that marriage is supposed to reflect.  You do not have separate bank accounts – his money and her money.  You are one flesh and you have one home and one set of resources, not two.  You share everything.
One sign that something is way off in your one flesh relationship is when you start concerning yourself with privacy rather than intimacy.  Privacy is the killer of intimacy.  Privacy says “keep out” and intimacy says, “come on in.”  If it would bother you to find out that your spouse has opened your mail or read through your emails, that is a very bad sign.  That should not bother you.  A body has nothing to hide from itself. 
The first response to the fall was to exchange intimacy for privacy.  Adam and Eve went from naked and unashamed to fig leaves - intimacy gave way to privacy.  
Think of what ridiculous concept privacy in marriage is.  Hide something from your own flesh?  I believe the need for privacy is a result of the fall.  Privacy is the enemy of intimacy.  This is not to say you don’t need some time alone – you do.  It is to say, though, that no part of your life is off-limits to one another.  One flesh union means sharing everything.

Day 5: Share Everything
Hebrews 7:18-19 The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless  19 (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.

Hebrews 10:22 Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith,

James 4:8 Come near to God and he will come near to you

A Christian couple that is living up to their one-flesh status is one of the most beautiful displays of the glory of God in this world.  John Eadie wrote: “What a union of two believers, with one hope, one discipline, one service, one spirit, and one flesh!  Together they pray, together they prostrate themselves, and together keep their fasts, teaching and exhorting one another, and sustaining one another.  They are together at the church and at the Lord’s Supper; they are together in straits, in persecutions, and refreshments.  Neither conceals anything from the other; neither avoids the other…Christ rejoices on hearing and beholding such things; to such persons He sends His peace.” (p.254)
Christ rejoices in it because it is a reflection of His relationship with His people.  So let’s close this morning by thinking about this: If it is so important to God that marriages be characterized by intimacy because they illustrate the relationship of Christ and the Church, how important do you think it is to Him that the Church itself have intimacy with Christ?  If the illustration is so important to God, how important must the reality be?  How important it is that we live in intimacy with the Lord our God!