The Great Mystery (Part 1)

Oh how I love mysteries! This one is my favorite of all, since I truly do not understand it completely, though I know someday I will!

A wise woman understands that her husband’s need to be honored is not based on his performance, but on his nature and his God-ordained position. She learns quickly to defer to his ideas or plans with enthusiasm. She looks for ways to reverence him. She knows this is God’s will for her life.

  “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church….and the wife see that she reverence her husband.” Ephesians 5:32-33

Jesus wants us for a friend. He wants a companion, someone with whom to discuss ideas. He wants a playmate, someone with whom to laugh and enjoy life. He wants a buddy with whom to spend time. He wants a lover, someone to care about and someone to care about him. He wants a help meet, someone to share in his work of creation and management. He wants to be a groom, and he wants the Church to be his bride. This is the great mystery. He seeks to create in me and my relationship to my husband a working scale model of his relationship to the Church throughout eternity. <— Truth! Share it! 

Amazing as it sounds, marriage between a man and a woman is what God chose as the closest example of Christ’s relationship to his bride, the Church. You are part of eternity when you submit to your husband. Submission, reverence, and honor are virtues God seeks to establish in his Son’s bride. Your marriage to your husband is preparing you for your marriage to Christ. You may say, “But it would be easy being married to Christ.” Then you don’t know your Bible. What if your husband required you to off your son upon an altar as a burnt sacrifice? That is what God required of Abraham. What if your husband killed you for lying? That is what God did to Sappihra.

Reverence: to revere, to be in awe; fear mingled with respect and esteem

1. Obedience is doing what you know the other person wants you to do

2. Submission is your heart giving over to the other person’s will

3. Reverence is more than just doing what a man expects or demands. It is an act of the woman’s will to treat him with a high degree of regard and awe.

A wife is reverencing God by reverencing her husband, not because her husband is a fit representative of Christ, and not because he is a worthy substitute, but because God placed her in subjection to her husband.   

If her faithfulness is never rewarded with a new-birth change in her husband, her commitment will not be wasted, for the grace that God is working in her heart is making her supremely fitted to be the bride of Christ.

In what ways do you see your husband recognize your respect? Your reverence?

What are your thoughts on The Great Mystery?

Past Marriage Monday Studies through Debi Pearl’s, “Created to be His Help Meet”

Photo Credit

3 Gifts Autumn…..

The brisk cool air

The leaves showing their true colors

The promise of new life to come again!