Nurturing Marital Harmony: Insights from Ephesians

So today is going to be my honor to have Mike Flores bring the word. But I wanted to give a prophetic word that was given to this House at the beginning of the year, and we wanted to wait to give this to this house until we got to this place because I believe so strongly that families and marriages are such a strength to God’s people and such a strength to culture and are going to be part of the mechanism.

Strong individuals with strong families that bring the message of God coming. And so there was a prophetic word to the House given at the beginning of the year that says husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. I’m calling the husbands and wives to a deeper realm of prayer for, in prayer together, you will strengthen your bond of love.

I’m calling you to commune with me together, says your Heavenly Father. I’m calling you and wives to put aside any and all resentment for one another as I have forgiven you and leave no place for the wicked one, for the enemy of your soul is seeking to destroy the Holy covenant of marriage. He wants to break down and bring division to my Holy covenant with you.

His onslaught is going to intensify more than ever before. So I call you to remember your vows to one another and how you promised to love one another and to love me; therefore, cover one another in prayer, pray together, and stay together and say together, ‘Abba Father, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power forever and ever. Amen.’

This was a warning, a word of warning to our house that the Lord is challenging us to bring strength to marriages and families. And so we wanted to ask, and it was not a coincidence the Lord put on their hearts to do a marriage life group. And that just started a couple of weeks ago. And so with that, I would like to ask one of our awesome elders. He and his wife are the elders’ council marriages in our church. So please stand to your feet and welcome Mike Flores. Am I on? Am I on? Well, go, team. Yeah. Hey, I got to tell you, I came in this morning and I got reamed royally. Pastor Charlene is a solid 49ers fan. She said, ‘What’s up with those colors?’ She was having, you know, flying the colors. I’m sorry. I was thinking I needed this to calm everybody down, too. But no, there’s no calming down in this crowd. We are fanatics, right? We’re fanatics for Jesus. We’re fanatics for the Niners. But I just wanted to unashamedly wear the colors of the winning team for today, so.

Okay. All right. This comes off. I got to get serious here, so I’m trying to, Okay. All right, can you still hear me? Yeah. All right, so enough of that. Let me bring this. My pager. See, I’ve got this super iPad because these things are getting worse and worse. I need to be able to see. So I got this thing that I can blow up the Bible scriptures.

So I am so thankful for our pastors, for Peyton, Celine’s John and Shelly, Bob, Dave, because they bring us the words so faithfully, they see God. And I’ve been listening back and we pick really good the list back to some of the messages that have been spoken in the past few weeks because they are powerful instructions for our lives today.

You know, Pastor Pat started with it. He called God called us out of darkness into his light. But he said, we are light. He is light, and we are light. So he wants us to walk as children of light. Right? I love what Shelly said last week. I think I listened to your message three times already, and it is so powerful.

She started somewhere on the phone with this quote from I don’t know who. I didn’t catch that. But she said the light of God is given. But it does not free us from the responsibility of thought and choice. That’s our responsibility. And towards the end, she also said maybe we’re not clear on everything because we’ve not brought it into the light.

Take everything to the light so you can expose the darkness, explore, expose any flaws, the desires, and choices of those who walk in the light must be governed by their choice to please the Lord and not themselves. Can I say that again? The desires and choices of those who walk in the light must be governed by their choice.

It’s our to please the Lord and not ourselves. And then she ended with this. Ephesians calls us to a life of intentional discernment, to spiritual clarity, to a walk of wisdom, a walk of surrender to the Spirit’s leading, transforming how we live. I think I read that ten times. I had to keep listening to that.

He brings us instruction to walk it out as relates to marriage, and that’s the whole thing. It’s a powerful revelation of how it relates to marriage. Right? So today, I want to talk about how marriage, what marriage looks like under the instruction of the Holy Spirit. So I want to start by sharing that.

You know, my wife, Kelly, and I have been married for 27 years. We are in the home stretch of finishing strong, and I’ll tell you, it has not been easy. When I look back, there’s a lot of warfare, there’s a lot of change. I think about things that were different when we were married and 27 years later.

So I’ll give you an example. When we got married, when I was in my 20s, 26, we got married. We got married with hair. We got married with different hair. I didn’t have gray hair. Now we’ve been married 27 years, and we have no hair. Go figure, right? We’ve got kids who are adults who were once small and like this.

And now they’re adults, and they’re raising their own families. That’s different. I think back to the place where we met. The Lord brought us together. We met in singles. There’s no such thing as singles today. Can I get an amen? No such thing as singles, we’re not single. We’re the body of Christ.

And so back in the day, we met in singles, and that was the only singles place we knew where to meet. We’d go there, and there were all these, we were on this journey of being Christian singles and what it was like. And it was just crazy because it was a meat market. We were learning how to deal with that.

We learned to deal with what it’s like to have that thing that God has put in us. And there’s a burning desire to have relationships. We didn’t understand it. We didn’t know. We didn’t get it, but that’s where God brought us. And so we were in a relationship, but it was so crazy because it was so full of people, and it was so full of baggage and stuff that you didn’t even know was in you.

But that’s where God brought us, and so I’m so thankful for that. And I think about what it’s like to have a blended family. You know, we met, and we both had kids. And so it’s kind of like, you know, it’s kind of like you’re taking all the beautiful, shiny, broken pieces of glass, and God says, here, make something of this.

And so, and so we’re on this journey, and so we have different, we have different trials. We have different challenges. We have different hurdles. We have different opportunities, and we have different victories because we’re different people. We have a different wiring, and we have different backgrounds, and we come from different places.

And so I’m so thankful for my bride. Kelly, can you stand up, please? This is my bride. She’s amazing. She’s the love of my life. And you know what I love about my bride? She is committed to Christ. She loves the Lord. She is, she’s a light. She’s beautiful. She’s amazing. She’s amazing. She’s amazing. She’s amazing.

I can go on and on and on and on about my bride. But I’ll tell you, it hasn’t been easy. We’ve had trials. We’ve had challenges. We’ve had victories. And you know, the key to all of this is we’ve learned how to fight for our marriage. We’ve learned how to fight for our marriage because we’ve learned how to fight the enemy together.

And so when I think about that, I think about this scripture in Ephesians chapter five verse 21. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.

Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word and to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church for we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. So that’s the scripture that God has put in my heart, to share with you today, to talk to you about what it looks like to have a marriage that is under the instruction of the Holy Spirit.