Put On Your Marriage Clothes

About this sermon

Introduction: Marriage doesn’t just DISPLAY the gospel; marriage DEPENDS on the gospel. To say it another way, marriage doesn’t just display Christ and the church, marriage requires that we live in a way that accords with that relationship. I’m speaking now to Christian people. You don’t just know about that relationship; you’ve been brought into that relationship. We need to understand it, and we need to live in a way that accords with it. That’s what we saw this morning when we saw what new life in Christ produces, and how that new life is the context for the marriage specific instruction that Paul gives. Our new life in Christ motivates a right approach to marriage, but it also serves as the means for that approach. What we want to do, now, is focus specifically on a new set of clothes that should characterize the Christian. It is a clothing analogy that Paul uses. Twice we are told to “put on” these things, just as if we are putting on a set of clothes. Our culture has largely forgotten this, but it’s still true to say that there are times when you ought to dress for the occasion. Clothing can make a statement that you understand where you are and what you’re participating in. The Christian life is a life of responsibility. God wants us to recognize that there’s a certain kind of living that matches the life that we’ve been brought into. That kind of living is compared to clothing. It’s interesting, however, that before Paul describes what the Christian is to put on, he reminds the Christian who he is. • AN IDENTITY NECESSARY FOR MARRIAGE (vs.12) Now, it probably goes without saying, but I want to make clear that what he’s describing in these verses is meant to be on display IN THE CHURCH. This is how we live together as believers. But as I’ve often told people in marriage counseling, the best thing you will ever do in marriage is live the Christian life at home. What we’re doing tonight is taking what we must practice in all aspects of the Christian life and thinking about the fact that we must apply it in marriage also. It’s interesting that when Paul describes who the Christian is in verse 12, it’s after he has described what the Christian is not, in verse 11. If you are willing to hear it, this is the answer to all the identity uproar that dominates our world to this day and becomes the ground for virtue signaling by many popular preachers. Paul states plainly that if we are thinking biblically, we are no longer ranking ourselves as Greeks or Jews, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free. It ought to be quite clear that Paul could not mean that such things no longer had any objective reality. Or that Christians would be sinning to acknowledge those objective realities. Paul acknowledged he was still a Jew. Paul still spoke to matters that had to do with Jews and Gentiles. Circumcision and uncircumcision are obviously objective realities in the body. But his last statement in verse11 makes unmistakably clear exactly what he’s saying. He’s saying that such things don’t MATTER to any great degree. He’s saying there’s no division in the body of Christ around such things. WHAT MATTERS TO THIS NEW PEOPLE IS JESUS CHRIST. Jesus is everything, and He’s in every one of His people. In other words, Christians don’t think about themselves in the way a lost and dying world does. Christians have a different view of those things by which people distinguish themselves in this world. It makes me very sad when I see Christians not only still paying GREAT ATTENTION to such things, but they also actually try turn their focus on such things into some kind of mark of righteousness. And they say that we must all make much of it too, or else we’re not really concerned about righteousness. I say that their approach to those things troubling the world is entirely wrongheaded. It doesn’t match the mindset that we see here at all. We have not only been made new people, we have an entirely new perspective of the old order. But if I don’t consider myself, chiefly, in those terms by which the world identifies people, then how do I consider myself? • ONE CHOSEN BY GOD (vs.12) I am someone who has a relationship with God that is explained entirely by God’s own grace. I am reminded that God has related me to Himself as He has, not because I chose it, but because He chose it. The story of love is not my love for God, but God’s love for me. And when the Christian brings into this title — “God’s chosen ones”— the fullness of what God has revealed about the doctrine of election, then the Christian is reminded of what a helpless state he was in apart from God’s choice to deliver him. The Christian is humbled. THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION IS NOT JUST TRUE, IT WAS NECESSARY FOR SALVATION.

Topics

• Marriage