A friend of mine is a professor of New Testament. He was writing a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. He was working on this passage of Scripture, which is not easy to handle because Paul talks about husbands and wives, and then he uses the analogy of Christ and the Church, and then he gets carried away with his analogy. Sometimes you don’t know whether he's talking about Christ and the Church, or the husband and wife, and then he says, “It’s a  great mystery” (Eph. 5:32). You’ve got that right, Paul!

But my friend is a serious New Testament scholar, so he was exegeting this passage. As he was working on it, it suddenly struck him that Christ was working with the Church that it might eventually be a radiant Church. He turned away from his computer, and he called to his wife, who was in another part of the house, and he said, “Honey, can I ask you a question? Do I make you ‘radiant’?”

There was silence, and then she said, “What did you say?” He said, “I asked you, do I make you radiant?” She said, “Why are you asking me that?” So he explained. She said, “Do you really want me to answer that?” He said, “Yes, I do, I need to know!”

She said, “All right I’ll tell you. Frankly, no you don’t.” He said, “Why not?”

She said, “Well, we’ve been married all these years. We’re married, we’ll stay married, we’re together. But for years our marriage has run on parallel tracks – you do your thing, and I do my thing. The reason I’m doing my thing is I know you’re going to do your thing. What happens is this marriage operates basically on the basis of what you want, and I just fit in. I’m rarely consulted, and if I do express an opinion, it’s usually overridden or ignored. I find, therefore, that the easiest thing to do is say nothing, and just go along with what you want to do.”

She said, “You are incredibly self-centered. If there are two options, we do something that you’re asked to do, and something that I’m asked to do; but it never occurs to you that we might not ask what you were asked to do, in order to do what I’m asked to do, because you simply run the show, and I am simply subservient. The result is that I live a life of frustration, a sense of being unfulfilled, bordering on resentment.”

My friend the professor told me, “I had a wake-up call.” Men, this is your wake-up call from the Lord! The secular culture and the secular norm is producing utter disaster in marriages and families. We’d better get our act together.

“Husbands, love your wives.” Paul goes on to say this: as in the same way husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. That’s interesting!