Let's read now God's Word, first from Ephesians 5. Read Paul's summary comments here on this section where he's giving admonitions to husbands and wives. We'll turn back to Genesis 3. We'll read 1 through 21. We'll actually read the last verse of chapter 2 through 3, verse 21. Give your attention now as an act of worship to God's Word. Ephesians 5, beginning in verse 31. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless, let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband." Turn back to Genesis 1, chapter 2, verse 25. We'll read most of chapter 3. Here again God's holy word. And they, that is the man and the woman, were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, Has God indeed said, You shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat, the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die. Then the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened. They knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves covering. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam, and He said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat? And the man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and you shall eat the dust all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception in pain. You shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. Then to Adam he said, because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return. And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. Also for Adam and his wife, the Lord God made tunics of skin and clothed them. The grass withers, the flower fades. God's Word endures forever. Amen. Please be seated and let's pray. Our God, we pray now for a measure of grace by Your Spirit. We remember that no one can understand the things of the Spirit of God because they're discerned by Him. And so we ask You for help now. Attend the preaching of Your Word with unction and with power. Give us humility to receive and ears to hear these principles that we would learn from Your Word. In Jesus' name, Amen. This is the third sermon of an indeterminate amount of sermons in our series on marriage. The two shall become one flesh. I want to remind you that we have covered two different topics thus far. We first looked at Genesis 2, the first marriage of how God brought the man and the woman together. And we looked at basic principles of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, how did God make Adam and then make Eve, although she was not named that yet. We learn that about Adam, the man, he was a covenant head and covenant steward. That is, he was given authority over all things that God had committed to him, and therefore as a steward was responsible for all things over which he was appointed. And then, because it was not good for man to be alone, God made for him, out of him, a woman to complete him. She is called and equipped to be a covenant helper. and a completer of this man, to help him fulfill his task, that humanity might live as God designed them to live. We then looked at the last time we were in this text, looking at the purposes of marriage. We looked at four purposes that God designed marriage in His wisdom to be for companionship between the man and the woman, for procreation, for sanctification that is holiness, and for a demonstration we would learn in the Gospel Age of the mystery of Christ and the Church. We start in Genesis 2. This is before the fall. This is before sin has worked its way into this world. Because there we find the ideals upon which reality is based. And I want you to take note of something very important as we descend into the nine ideals, non-ideals, which is our experience post-fall. It is very important that you do not place a hard wedge between the biblical ideals and what we would call reality. Because these righteous principles that we're considering are the ultimate realities. This is what God made the world to be. This is how God designed men and women to live and to interact ideally. This is reality. Our problem is not the reality is not real. Our problem is that our experience is distorted and corrupted by sin. It's our struggle against sin internally and with sinners externally. It's these things that run against the original pristine and perfect design that God established at the beginning. What we're going to be looking at today is this reality, our experience post-fall, and how different it is from what God designed it to be at the beginning. Our major theme this morning is that men and women must be aware of the devastating effects of sin. and of the means of deliverance from them. That men and women must be aware of the devastating effects of sin and the means of deliverance from them. And obviously, as we're in this series on marriage, we're going to be looking particularly how these things apply to marriage, whether you are preparing for it, whether you are engaged in it, whether you ought to hold it in honor, which would cover every single person in this room. This text, and some of the hard things we're going to talk about from it, they demand humble circumspection. That is, a humble, low, that is, as my friend Nick Thompson likes to say, a downward disposition of a Godward self-perception, looking at ourselves rightly in the presence of God, and then looking all around us, looking at the source of our existence, humanly speaking, from Adam and Eve, and then also our tendencies to human sin. Octavius Winslow said that the principle of self-confidence is the natural product of the human heart. We naturally trust ourselves and our own inclinations. He goes on to say that the great characteristic of our apostate race is a desire to live, think, and act independently of God. and it is breaking down this monument of human rebellion that is the first activity that must occur in order for someone to live humbly and faithfully before God and by faith. This is what God deals with, breaking down the towers of pride that we might begin to make strides in holiness. And I would urge you that as some of the things we'll talk about today are strangely controversial in the church, obviously controversial in the world, that you would be humble before these principles insofar as they are consistent with God's Word. So the way we're going to look at this is not a straight exposition of the text we've just read. We're going to be pulling from different sections as they apply, and pertain to marriage. We're going to look broadly at the effects of sin. We're then going to be a bit more specific in how they actually interact with marriage and then talk about the remedies for them. That's the movement, but I'll give you our headings as we move through. So we're going to look a broad look at sin in general, we're going to look specifically at marriage in particular, and then some remedies of those things. And our first heading is this, that sin effected, that is, it caused, sin effected indiscriminate devastation upon the created order. Sin effected or caused, and indiscriminate, that means it doesn't play favorites. an indiscriminate devastation upon the created order. We need to think about this generally because the Bible teaches us that generally, that is universally, the world has been subjected to futility. This is the language from Romans chapter 8. The world itself, the cosmic order that God had made, has been subjected to futility. I think the most simple and perhaps memorable way of understanding what this actually means is that nothing is as it once was. Nothing is. Now, you might taste a fruit and that fruit might taste the same way as it did in the beginning, but our propensity not to be grateful for that taste is not as it ought to be. The subjectivity of things or the subjecting of things to decay and to destruction and the groaning of creation that happens as a result of these things are not what originally was. We can measure the differences and the problems that now exist because of sin by thinking about what I've taught you as those principles of order or those creation ordinances that God established at the very beginning. Whether you view life as a creation ordinance or as simply a principle of existence, God is the creator of life. And now because of sin, life is both fraught with difficulty, sorrow, and suffering, and has a hard stop at the end of it, which we call death. This is not what used to be. God made work. meaningful, gainful employment for the hands and for the mind. And now work is mixed up with our own failures, our laziness, our incapacity to do certain things, or it's forced upon us and it is not a joyful labor. work is subject to the futility of this cosmic order. We can think of another ordinance, the Sabbath, where God created, He sanctified the seventh day before there was sin, that man might enjoy a particular communion with Him, but now, post-fall, we want to rest when we ought to work, we want to work when we ought to rest, and that communion that we ought to enjoy with God is attended by any number of difficulties and distractions and problems because of our sin and guilt. If you think about those three principles, life, work, Sabbath, the fourth of those creation ordinances, marriage, it should not be surprising to you that marriage then would be also subject to this cosmic disordering caused by sin. Man is the one who uniquely enters into this institution, and man as image-bearer, the culmination of creation, the steward of creation's order, is now the villain responsible for its unraveling, and therefore mankind as such is forever changed. It's impossible for it to be contrary. This is an accurate depiction of our experience. Generally, the world is in subjection now to futility. But more specifically, relationally, relationally, man now experiences an injection of alienation and strife. That is all the relationships that God designed man to have. are infused with this foreign reality of alienation. That means this strangeness, this strife, this tension, this difficulty that didn't used to be there. We can think about man's relation to himself. Not that there are these bi-personalities, but God made man that is generally upright. And what we see is that man was originally, man and woman in verse 25, male and female were naked, not ashamed. They had no guilt. They had no shame. They had no occasion for those things. But once they sinned and rebelled against Almighty God, this dark, foreboding sense filled their minds and filled their souls. This shame and guilt, these are the two words I want you to hold on to as we think about man's relationship to himself. Shame and guilt, this problem of guilt, a moral responsibility before the holiness of God, and then the result, this shame, this sense of fear of exposure, the fear of disgrace began to eat away at the peace of conscience that so many don't have now. Michael Morales in his book Exodus Old and New says that Adam's sin changed the nature of humanity, corrupting it with the principle of rebellion and the power of sin. And as a consequence, the human couple was spiritually severed from God, whose purity and holiness were now a threat, which brings us to that second relationship, not only with themselves in this sense subjectively, individually of shame and guilt, but with God himself. And we see this because what are Adam's and Eve's actions after their sin? First they cover themselves from one another, and then they hide from God. That blissful communion that they once enjoyed is shattered. It's destroyed. It's distorted. It's polluted. and now in place of joy and longing and enjoyment, one with another as creator and creature, as God and subject, now there's fear and suspicion and separation. This is all, again, caused by the shame and guilt that set itself upon the soul. Herman Boving, the great Dutch theologian, said that this shame and guilt makes them, humanity, fear and flee and hide themselves from God's presence. Shame over their nakedness and the fear of God are rooted in their violation of the divine law and are proof that both their communion with each other and with God has been broken by sin. I want to make one side application here that we might understand again, biblically, what the Bible teaches. You see, this action, running from God, suspicion of God, hatred of God, fear of God, not the godly fear but the slavish fear, this is the native disposition of natural humanity post-fall. There's none of this neutral will business that Arminianism teaches. It's not that you can choose good or you can choose evil. No. Adam hated God's presence and he ran from Him. Eve hated God's presence and she ran from Him. This is what every natural son and daughter of Adam and Eve do until God graciously and sovereignly initiates that movement of redemption and the drawing back of them and kindness. This is what Paul is saying when no one seeks after God. Why? Because we're busy rebelling against God and running from Him, not desiring what is good. This is not pessimism. This is what the Bible teaches us about the human heart, the human affections, and the human will. The relationship with self, destroyed. The relationship with God, shattered. Even the relationship with creation is distorted. You see it in God's dealing with the vessel of temptation, the serpent itself. That serpent as part of God's creation is cursed. There's an enmity between that creature and the rest of creation, even as snakes are always portrayed as those villains. There's a cursing of the ground. where Adam is to work it, what used to produce its fullness without thorns and without difficulty is now cursed, and there's a tension there. Food will be brought by, God will provide it, but it will come through hardship, and even His very life, His body, part of creation, is now subject to decay and death. That creation relationship is also distorted. And so once again, let's think about the principal part here of our application. If relationship with self is distorted, with God is destroyed, with creation is muddled, what about the creation one with another, the relationship one with another? This too is completely inverted. We have an inversion of human nature. This Thomas Manton also says in his commentary on the book of James, he says that man fallen is but man inverted, turned upside down. His love is where his hatred should be, his hatred is where his love should be, his glory where his shame should be, and his shame where his glory should be. And isn't that true? I just ask you for a moment for your conscience, isn't that true? How often have you found yourself glorying in what you should detest? Reluctant and perhaps even detesting those things that you should love? This is how twisted and mixed up we are. And so, this relationship between the man and the woman, the man who would love this woman, the woman who would help this man, it's all destroyed. And we see that played out, don't we? Because when we see God coming to Adam in judgment, but also with tidings of mercy. We see Adam throwing his wife out to the judgment of God. We see Eve, we see her going out from the leadership of her husband, and everything is mixed up. Let me make a few broad applications before we move to the particular applications for marriage. Broadly, I need you to understand a few things. Earlier I told you from our confession that this law, the law that God has given, the law that was written on Adam's heart, is the same law that our Lord Jesus summarized for us as having two principal commandments. Do you remember what they were? Children, what are the two great commandments? The first is, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Remember this, the second commandment is not the first great commandment, as our society tries to remind us. Let's focus on that second table, though. Who was Adam's neighbor? It was his wife. Who is the closest neighbor for any man or woman in marriage or preparing to be so? What is that spouse? And what this means is as natural children of Adam, that second table of the law is something that we do not naturally seek to obey. It's something that we naturally have great difficulties abiding by. Now, with those general principles set before you, I want you to think about a few things. First, there's a danger, I've told you this for some months now, there's a danger, I think broadly in Christianity, our denomination, of something that I've called the Christianity of non-application. You can hear some of the principles I'm setting before you, sin has corrupted everything, relationships are mixed up, and you can give assent to those things generally. But you need to understand they are true of you. You, individually, particularly. Indiscriminately, universally, everything's messed up. But you are no exception. If you're honest with your own heart before the Lord, you yourself do have a preference. And that's a preference not to confess your own sins and examine your own sins, but to confess or focus upon or think about the sins of others. You love to cover over your own transgressions and highlight the transgressions of others, just as Adam blamed his wife and, in fact, God for his own transgression. You know, if you're honest with yourself, that naturally you would rather flee from God's presence than draw near to His presence in humility with a humble confession of your sins. If you do not acknowledge these things to be true, not merely generally, but personally, you are as blind as Bartimaeus, and you need to see. These things are true of each one of you, and of me. And the solution is not to sew together the fig leaves of our own works, it's not to pull ourselves up to make strides in these minuscule efforts of self-improvement, but it's humbly to acknowledge our absolute depravity before God and plead for mercy in Christ's name. You see, that's why I read verse 21, the covering over Adam and Eve's nakedness was a covering given graciously by God, looking forward to that covering that a sinner must receive from Christ Jesus himself. You need the Lord Jesus, His cleansing blood and His covering righteousness. Jesus alone is the curse reverser. Jesus alone is the sin, the sinner restorer. Some people think, it's even been published in our denominational magazine, that saying that the gospel, that the gospel is a solution to great problems like these kinds of things or like racism is a historically rooted trope. Actually, it's a historically rooted truth. It's the truth of the Word of God. You must look to Christ for these solutions. Now there are many, many, many implications and complications from the fall. This narrative here is the fountainhead of all devastation that we experience and see. Every cancer cell, every cavity, every conflict, every show of disrespect, every sensation of pain, loss, guilt, envy, every tear, every funeral. All of it began right here because of the actions of our first father in Genesis 3. And we could spend weeks examining the reach of the fall, but our catechism summarizes it like this, that all mankind first, the great problem is we lost communion with God. And for that purpose, because of our guilt, we are under His wrath and curse. And for that reason, all of us are made liable to all the miseries of this life, all the miseries of this life. And there's more, but I want to focus upon those miseries and how they particularly manifest themselves in men and women in marriage. So we've thought generally first, sin effected an indiscriminate devastation upon the created order. There is nothing accepted, nothing left out. Secondly, dear congregation, sin erupts in particular manifestations in men and women in marriage, and as men and women in marriage. Sin erupts in particular manifestations in men and women in marriage. We're going to look at the text here a little bit more carefully, and we're going to look at how there's a manifestation of sin and misery in marriage for the woman, and then how there's a manifestation of sin and misery in marriage for men. And then we're going to talk about some obstacles for believing what the Bible teaches about these things. You can turn to verse 16 and you'll see how uniquely the manifestations of sin show themselves in misery in marriage for women. Remember, God is coming to Eve as the paradigmatic and fountainhead woman. He says to the woman, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception in pain. You shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. And what you should see here, first of all, is that he deals with Eve first as mother of all, and as wife. Woman, as a woman in this context, is subjected to futility, is visited and punished for her sin, first as mother. to her, and uniquely only to her, has the gift of life been given. The gift of being able to conceive and bring forth and to nurture life. And now, that unique and glorious gift, not even given to angels, is baptized in sorrow. Those of you who have actually gone through this mysterious and glorious and arduous process of conception and nurture and delivery know experientially the sorrow and pain of that part of it. There is pain in the body, bodily woes, bodily changes, difficulties. There are also, attendant to it, spiritual burdens as only a mother can carry for her children. There is then the ardor and the difficulty of child labor and the pain that attends to it. Yes, we know that there can often be a deliverance through that, and God blessing, in the midst of that, but we know it is greatly painful. But we also know that attendant to this unique gift given to women are also those unique and painful experiences of loss and sorrow, including miscarriages and stillborns and barrenness. The inability to do those things, all of this, every single woman who is at all related to this part of life, which is everyone, experiences to some degree this pain. and this bitterness, whether it's through not being able to enjoy the joys of it, or whether it's through being affected through its sorrows, whether it is through having children and then as the mother's heart watching your wayward children go aside, these things attend the gift of life that God has given uniquely to woman as mother. God also punishes the relationship of wife. Now this is a battleground text, Genesis 3, 16b, the second portion. Your desire shall be for your husband and He shall rule over you." And I want you to think about the flow, and I want you to think about the context where we are. God has dealt with her in her context as mother. God is now dealing with her in her context as wife. While there are promises through the first pain, through the first punishment of childbearing, that there will be children. I believe that the promise here is that there still will be an order that God will maintain despite the strife that is introduced into the marriage relationship. And so where, for as a mother, the gift of life is baptized in sorrow, now what we find is as a wife, the calling to be helpful or the calling to help is sullied with strife. This relationship that she once enjoyed with her husband, the man for whom she was made and to whom she was brought, this relationship had a perfect harmony, a perfect willingness, an endless joy, is now subject to hardship and strife and frustration. Mother Henry says that if the man had not sinned, he would always have ruled with wisdom and love. And if the woman had not sinned, she would always have obeyed with humility and meekness, and then the dominion would have been no grievance. But our own sin and folly make our yoke heavy. Those wives who do not only despise and disobey their husbands, but domineer over them, do not consider that they not only violate a divine law, but thwart a divine sentence. I do believe that what Genesis 3.16 is teaching is that now, sinfully, there is a predisposition in the woman to want to usurp or to distort that relationship between her and her wife. If that confuses you or you object to that, I have much more to say about that in just a moment. These are the particular manifestations of sin and misery in marriage for women as mother and as wife. But God then turns and deals with the man. And just so you know, we're not done dealing with either of you yet. To the man, God punishes him in two particular relationships as well. And I want you to remember the two things that God invested Adam with from the beginning, as covenant head and as covenant steward. Adam is punished, first of all, because of his abdication of his calling as covenant head. Look back at verse 6, it says that God, that when the woman saw the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and the tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. And instead of guarding and watching over the garden, he stood by silently watching as his dear bride was about to plunge herself into absolute ruin. He abdicated his position of authority and clearly as steward. In verse 17, God alludes to this when it says that because you heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I command you not to eat, he then curses the ground because of him. Adam should have opened his mouth, should have spoken, but instead, he initiated that weak and directionless, spineless existence that so often plagues many men in life. God had called him and required him to guard and to keep, and instead of opening his mouth to speak a word of direction and warning, he opened his mouth and take a bite of something God had forbidden him, and in him all mankind fell. And then, and then, the abdication continues as he blames God and his wife for his own sins, as we read earlier in verse 12. The manifestations of sin and misery in marriage for men is that abdication of the calling to be a covenant head, to lead and to rule well. But secondly, and relatedly, a manifestation of sin and misery in marriage for men is the abuse of his trust as covenant steward. The one who is not merely over things in position is responsible for things in his conduct. He is to care for it. He is to rule over it. He is to govern it. He is to lead it for good. And yet, what we see in verse 12, as covenant steward, he becomes the villain, throwing his wife before the judgment of God. He went from singing praise of his dear bride just a few verses prior in chapter 2, verse 23, to then asking God to execute her for her sins while seeking to avoid blame for himself. And this is the beginning of so many evils that attend to the lives of men with respect to women. the physical sins that men have committed against women, the brutalizing, the beating, the carelessness, the abandonment, the sexual abuse, the objectification, and the perversity that has destroyed nations. While women have a part, men are deeply, deeply complicit. There are many ways that men have preyed upon women and where the man is called to cultivate, to lead, to love, and to cherish This is corrupted by the grievous effects of sin, whether they be by his omission or the inexcusable abandoning of his responsibility, or it's by his commission, by his heinous and hell-worthy battering of that person who is the weaker vessel. I've set before you two things about each man and woman. As mother and his wife, these relationships for the woman are subject to the miseries of this life. As covenant head and covenant steward, Adam is subjected to these miseries that attend humanity. But we have obstacles to believe in these things. There's disagreement in the exegesis of 3.16, for example. There's disagreement because of very many things. But I want you to understand something as we make some rather searching and lengthy applications to men and women at this point. First, there is an equality before the law, an equity before the law of both man and woman, as man and woman. The woman is guilty for what she has done, and she's punished accordingly. Adam is guilty for what he has done, and he's punished accordingly. But there are three hindrances I'd like to point out that are difficulties for believing these things. And the first is pride. That pride of active rebellion, a refusal to acknowledge that these weaknesses and these miseries that have corrupted human existence might not merely be true generally, but are true of you. Men, husbands in particular, is it your pride that causes you to turn a blind eye to your responsibility to lead your home in a Christ-like manner? Is it pride? Is it in pride that you fail to acknowledge your harshness, your anger, and your brutal treatment of those who are under your care? And your mind, to do so, would begin to relinquish that iron-fisted authority over your petty kingdom that you've built as you seek to live and maintain appearances. You think that man should be the strong, silent-type emphasis upon silence. And while there is virtue and wisdom and the care and contemplation before you speak, you need to remember that Christ Himself was not coldly silent. Is it pride that hinders you from facing the realities of your faults and your fears and your past failures or present failures? Is that the real problem, that you don't want to repent of your pride? Now, if that's the case for you this morning, you need to get down on your face before the Lord Jesus Christ. You need to recognize that your wife is silent around you, not out of respect, because she's afraid that Mount St. Husband will erupt when she would dare to speak a word. Your children are silent, not because of respect, because of fear, and your iron-fisted use of authority. You might respond, well you don't know what my wife is like, you don't know what my children are like, you don't know these things, she's difficult, she never affirms, she never initiates. Well I want you to think about something. Those things might be true and they might be difficult. But I want you to consider where you would be if the Lord Jesus Christ used the exact same rationale. Where would you be? Where the Lord Jesus Christ came from heaven and he sought out a bride who was covered in blood of her impurity, whoring after every conceivable false god. And it's in that condition from heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride. And I would urge you to consider then the proactive, righteous, and perfect tenderness that attended Christ Jesus that perfect righteousness and gentleness with which he dealt with those closest to him, which was in no way inconsistent with the vehemence with which he contended with those who were opposed to him." Ladies, is it the pride of your own act of rebellion that causes you to refuse that the word submit does in fact chafe against your human nature? Do you refuse to look into your heart of hearts using the Word of God as your guide, the Spirit as your illuminator, and see that actually the distorted patterns of your first mother are alive and unwell in your own life and heart. Do you see that perhaps that those principles, those tendencies might have passed down through the generations because your subtle or not so subtle grumblings or laziness or sneers or gossip, or the undermining of the order that God has established in your home, our great sins against Him? Do you perhaps want to pretend that the Proverbs don't address these particular sins of women? Where it does say, it is better to dwell in the corner of a rooftop than with a brawling and contentious woman. Do you think, well that applies to all others, but not to me. You might think, well, it's just easier, you know, it's just easier to insult my husband in front of others than to preserve his honor, what little of it there is to preserve. It's easier to hold on to grudges, to rule my home with an icy coldness, with a fiery fury of emotional manipulation. Whatever that might hit home in your life, Pride is an obstacle to come to grips with these realities, and I would urge you in Christ's name to lay yourself low before His feet and before His cross. Well, there's another hindrance. There's another hindrance that keeps people from believing that these things actually explain and are applied in this way to the human heart, and that is fear. That's fear. particularly in the realm of passive rebellion. Men, is it your fear of coming to grips with your failures and with your rejections, your fear of possible rejection, your fear of not dealing with past faults that continue to weigh around your neck like an albatross of guilt? Is it your fear of failure that keeps you illegitimately from beginning to lead your home in a way that's fitting for a man of God? Because to do so would be to acknowledge your years of failure and woeful inadequacies, wouldn't it? Is it the fear that you would actually have to stand before the ire of your wife and you would have to stop being lazy and seek to bring godly order to your home and actually positively to cultivate the hearts of your children and discipline them in the ways of the Lord. Do you fear to face the vacuum that your abdication has created? You need to stare it in the face and then fill it with righteousness. Ladies, if you're not actively, subtly, or clearly, explicitly sabotaging your husband, I wonder, are you living in sinful fear? You say that to speak up, to articulate your opinions, well, this is a lack of submission, but that's not true. It's fear. It's a servileness. It's actually a lack of courage. Now, men, especially in your relationship with your wives, you must, absolutely must, cultivate an environment in your homes where your wife can speak and does speak to you without the fear of reprisal right before her. And if you have a wife that does that, as God's appointed helper, then you need to repent of your unwillingness to heed. When Adam is condemned here for heeding the voice of his wife, it is not then a prohibition ever to listen to the voice of his wife. But my sisters, I want to encourage you with something that there is a positive role you are to take in your marriage in the efforts of working towards sanctification. And you can look in vain through the Word of God for that asterisk by these commandments of submission and obedience to your husbands where it says you can only do so and ought only do so when it is easy. You will not find it. Whether it's pride, an act of rebellion, whether it's fear and passive rebellion, these are hindrances to us coming to grips with these realities in our hearts. But there's one more hindrance. There's one more hindrance. You might look in your life with sincerity. And you might say, Mike, I don't seek actively to undermine my husband. Mike, I'm seeking actively to lead and cultivate the hearts of my wife and my children. I'm seeking to do these things. The hindrance can be your own practical, functional innocence in your own life. You don't see these tendencies, and so you think these tendencies are not real. But brothers and sisters, if these tendencies are not dominating your lives or detracting from your lives, then you have one reason to give thanks to God. Brothers, if you would never lay a hand on your wife in violence or in anger, and if you are striving according to the grace of God at work in you to lead and cherish and cultivate and love, then you give thanks to God for His mercy to you. Because this is an exception to what is almost always universally true of sinful humanity. And sisters, you may look at your life and think, I don't really want to usurp the position of my other. I don't want to dishonor him. I don't want to bring him down. I don't want to control him. I don't want to do these things. And if that's the case, then praise God for the grace at work in your life. It is not a natural ethic that we find in humanity. Your congregation, God's order has been corrupted by sin and these applications, these heart-searching questions, which probably not all of them are true of every single one of you, but I'm sure some of them are true of every single one of you. These things are counter-cultural and sadly, counter-ecclesiastical in our day. And I would simply just ask you, if you're not convinced from the scriptures about these things, I would ask you to look to your right and to your left broadly in society. Do you not see this as a general rule in marriages in the world? And sadly, many marriages in the church. You see doormat wives abused by their dominant and wicked husbands. You see controlling wives domineering over their couch potatoes, spineless husbands. Do you not see this as the great catalysts of breakdown in marriage in society everywhere? If you want to know which one's more prevalent in America, it's that latter one. Domineering women and weak, feckless men. And these things ought not to be so. We've talked broadly. The whole cosmic order is subjected to sin and futility. We've talked specifically, how do these things manifest themselves uniquely between men and women? Perhaps you're thirsty for some remedies. And to this I'd like to turn for a few moments. Sin effected indiscriminate devastation upon the created order. Sin erupts in particular manifestations in men and women in marriage. Thirdly, dear congregation, grace transforms that post-fall sinful predisposition of men and women. That's a bit of a mouthful and I want to say it again because I want you to remember this as a paradigm for you to think through this world. Grace transforms the post-fall sinful predisposition of men and women. Why is it so necessary for us to consider these things, and I would say to believe these things, about natural human nature and the necessity of grace's transforming effects? Well, I believe it is absolutely necessary because whether you're entering into marriage or whether you are still enduring long within marriage, this can bring rise to several questions. There's a popular Christian talk show or podcast guy, Todd Pruitt, who said about this very interpretation that I gave to you. He said, this kind of view will cause suspicion of one another in marriage. It will cause you to suspect your wife of trying to get you and suspect your husband of trying to get you. No, dear saints, listen. This kind of view should not cause suspicion. It should elicit compassion, one for another. You must understand each other's weaknesses, that you might then help one another grow in godliness and grace. That's part of being in companionship within marriage. A wife, if she knows that her husband is prone to avoid those hard things from time to time, needs to encourage him to take hold of these things. A husband who knows that his wife might be inclined either to being emotionally unstable or cold, needs to know how to cultivate her heart and lead her in the right way. How to stand before ire or how to be wise in every instance. You see, this kind of view of humanity does not arouse suspicion. It ought not. But if you're a Christian, it should teach you, here's how I need to be helping my wife. Here's how I need to be helping my husband. Here's how I need to be preparing myself for this man or for this woman and young people. Those of you who don't have a person in mind, you need to come to grips with those proclivities of the post-fall predisposition in your life. Yours will probably be different from mine. You could probably imagine which way I tend. I know the way some of you tend. Your congregation Husbands and wives are called to help one another, not fight one another. God gave the woman to the man to complete him. God gave the man to the woman to protect her, to lead her. This is how God made man and woman to live together. This is how the Gospel is the remedy for these things. It's the Gospel, the Spirit's work of regeneration and the renovation of life that changes people. A new nature is established. This creation that is subjected to futility and mixed up and twisted with sin, the Spirit comes uniquely, individually upon each heart of those chosen people and He brings them life and light in the Gospel. And so as this great God of grace who regenerates Jesus Christ the King comes and rules in righteousness and in grace and in truth. And since these things are so, since these things are so, don't cover your transgressions because the Proverbs say you won't prosper. Don't wink at them. Don't pretend like they're not true or not real. Confess them. Confess them. Forsake them. Because whoever forsakes them, the Proverbs say, will obtain mercy. Confess your pride. Confess your fear. Whatever it may be. Know that as you confess and as you repent, God forgives sinners and restores sinners and renews sinners. And your marriage that is halting along like a three-legged race trying to go in opposite directions, God can restore you. to work together, to work in righteousness. That gospel, which brings new life, then effects and brings about new conduct. I want you to think, this is our last point for this morning. I want you to think just about the logic of how Paul and Peter and the other scripture writers in the New Testament work. Every time, every time, without exception, that one of these apostles addresses wives, you know what he tells them to do? Submit. And we have women saying, oh, it's not about submission. Yeah, it is. Read the Bible. Every time the apostles deal with husbands, you know what they say? Love. Well, that's kind of girly. No, seriously, love. That love is not this impotent, doing whatever your wife says. No, it's leading and loving as Christ loved the church, led her, taught her, washed her with the water of the word. Listen, read the Bible, Colossians, Ephesians, 1st Peter, everywhere, you see these admonitions given. Why? Because this is, this is the ethic of gospel living. Because it is the produce of gospel power. Why? Because this is how Adam and Eve would have lived pre-fall. Do you follow that logic? These commandments are given so that renewed people might actually live as renewed people, not as people who have one foot in the kingdom and one foot in the world. The point of this sermon was not unnecessarily to denigrate anybody, but sinners need denigration from time to time, don't we? We need to be laid low in the dust before God and His law. We might receive His mercy. and stand, and live as we are actually made, and for Christians redeemed to live. So I would urge you today, recognize, yes, confess, sin corrupts everything, and a part of everything is you, and your marriage, and your conduct within that marriage as a man or as a woman. But then, simultaneously, and more importantly, recognize that Christ changes everything. And just as He will remove the thorns far as the curse is found, that great song says. He'll remove the thorns of your rebellion, fear, and pride, and cowardice, and whatever other false instincts in you by His grace over time. Believe these things, dear saints, and let's let our marriages shine as distinct in this world. Amen. Father in heaven, Lord, these are hard things. And we pray that You would enable each one who has heard humbly to lay himself down before You, confessing our sins. Lord, we pray for the husbands, future husbands in this congregation, that they would recognize these natural post-fall predispositions, and that by Your grace and work of Your Spirit, That you would not only remove and eradicate them from our lives, but you would replace them with that godly conduct that reflects the glory and kindness and grace of Christ. Lord, we pray for the wives and future wives in this congregation. And that they would recognize the unique applications of sin in their own lives and those post-fall predispositions that might nag at their own hearts and come out of their own mouths in conduct. Lord, we plead with you that by your grace and spirit we would actually live as submissive wives and leading loving husbands, not giving in to the cultural pressures that would seek, according to what Satan has done, to upend the order that you have established. Thank you, O Lord Jesus, that you rule and govern. Lord, that you restore those things that we have so distorted. And would you please use as a fruit of this sermon today, would you please use this to upend our lives, to reestablish them in righteousness, that you might be honored, and that our families might thrive. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen.