In this sermon, the preacher begins by discussing the concept of freedom mentioned in the 8th chapter of the Gospel of John. He highlights the importance of truth in experiencing true freedom. The preacher then digresses into various unrelated topics, such as a recent sports event and personal anecdotes. He briefly mentions the challenges of life and how believers should respond to them. The sermon concludes with a call to wake up from spiritual slumber and an invitation to attend another session later in the day.

I was sitting behind a singer one time, up in Picton, Ontario, and I was as close as I was to Brutus Cufelt, and I was humming the bass to a song she was singing. She stopped in the middle of the song and turned around and said, Shut up! So I did. You can't keep still, you know, when you're singing a pretty song. Somehow or other, I can't get out of my spirit. I want to talk to you this morning about the Gospel of John. You ever notice a horse in a pasture? It takes a bite here and then over here it takes a bite. It could stand in the same place for a long time and get plenty of grass, but it doesn't do that. It wanders all over the place taking a bite here and a bite there, so I'm going to do that in the Gospel of John for a few minutes with you. In the first place, there are two freedoms mentioned in the 8th chapter of John. At verse 32, you read a very interesting thing. If the truth shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. But in verse 32... Well, something happened between last night and this morning, and it's just about gone. So, you listen carefully or fall asleep. I don't think there's going to be much choice between it because I'm not going to be able to do much in the way of projection, but I don't know what happened. Maybe it's too much shouting during the tug-of-war yesterday when we beat that other team. Of course, I don't know how we could have lost. We outweighed them by about a thousand pounds. You know, who said that? Blessing Cape Girardeau. But anyway, so that was fun. And I did not leave a crater that was not already there. I understand Luke Clarkson hit about the same place a few years ago, and so I just deepened it. And at least there was no comment about me looking like a beached whale. One small plug for the seminar this afternoon. It's on humanism. I know you're all getting tired and things like that, but if you can get back from the baptism and you've got the time before supper, I would encourage you to come. And it's not going to be just totally a lecture time. I like us to have a little bit of conversation back and forth that I am deeply, deeply concerned about humanism in our country. And it seems like Christians are just starting to wake up to what's going on, and this is not brand new stuff. It's stuff that's been going on, and the problem is we just have waked up. You know, that this appeal in the end that we saw here in the book of Ephesians, the wake up sleeper, you know, that I think that we have seen the church of the Lord Jesus Christ has been very, very sleepy. And I encourage you, if you've got time, to come and be with us this afternoon at 4.15. Now, I have a subject here that we're going to try to cover, and we're just going to be able to run right across the top of it. You ever heard of the North Platte theory of studying the Bible? The North Platte River, I understand, is about a mile wide and about six inches deep. And I think that's what we're going to be doing today, that we're going to go about a mile wide and about six inches deep because there's so much more to what we're going to be discussing that we won't even be able to come close to studying. But this passage that we're going to have in the Word of God is a passage that I turn to more often, it seems like, than any other passage in the Word of God in counseling, both premaritally and maritally, and not just for young couples. I'm talking about with retired couples, people that are still married after 30 and 40 years and they're still working on their marriage and this passage in the Word of God. So let's begin reading. And why don't we do me a favor, okay? Would you all do me a favor here? Let's read it out loud together. Let's begin Ephesians chapter 5, verse 22, and we'll go down through Ephesians chapter 6, verse 9. Ephesians 5.22 through Ephesians 6.9. And let me get you started, and then would you just kind of keep it going, okay? And somebody speak nice and loud so they can follow you. That way I can save my voice a little bit. Let's get started. Ephesians 5.22. Wives. For the woman hath never yet made it her own, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they who shall be one flesh. This is the greatest mystery that I see concerning Christ and the Church. Nevertheless, let every one of you and the wives be that you reference for others. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for living is right. Honor thy father in the house, and ye fathers, for both not give children to wrath, but bring them up into the church, and have servants. Be obedient to them that are with you, with fear and trembling, and singleness of your heart, as not with Christ's servants, as man's leaders, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God upon our hearts. Listen to the will of the Lord, and not to men. Nor men are whatever for others with him. The same shall he who be with the Lord, whether he be bond or free. And he matters to the same things unto them, for they are in blessing. Neither is there respect of persons with him. Thank you. And while you were reading there, I couldn't help but hearing our brother Strachman. And I want you to know that not all of us from up north talk like we're from Jersey. Or from the Bronx. Some of us are from Chicago. And we've got different Midwestern twangs and things like that. You know, the statistics on marriage are absolutely distressing. Approaching one out of two marriages in the world today are ending up in divorce. But the thing that distresses me even more than the one out of two in the world is the fact that in the evangelical community, divorce has hit the proportion of what it was in the world ten years ago. One out of four. What also distresses me is the fact that in the evangelical community, between the high school and college years, 80% of our children chuck the faith. Turn it over. And quit. They drop out. Maybe not necessarily by their lips, but at least by their life. The home is under attack. And I would think that we're on the downside that we're in a tug of war and the first three men are in the mud pit. We're slipping quick. And it looks like we almost have lost it altogether. But you know, I am confident of this, that when you get like Eliezer in the Old Testament, the whole nation of Israel ran and tucked their tails, but he stood all by himself in the barley field with the king. All by himself. One man with the king. And they won the battle. And I am confident that one man with the Lord Jesus Christ, one woman with the Lord Jesus Christ can be the one that can turn the tides of battle. And you know what? That battle was won not only for Eliezer and David, but that battle was won for the entire nation of Israel. The whole Philistine army was set in route. And I think we're desperately in need of Christian men and women who will take a stand for the standards of God's Word concerning the marriage, concerning the family, concerning employment, and that we live according to God's Word. And I believe there is a possibility with God that this can be turned around and we can go back toward God's standards in our country on marriage and the family. Now, isn't it interesting here that the first thing that after we talked about the filling of the Spirit, he describes it with four participles as we read in verses 19, 20, and 21. These four different participles that are descriptions of the filling of the Holy Spirit. But now, the first thing he talks about where the filling of the Holy Spirit is to be made manifest is in the places where we spend time in our families. Husband, wife. In fact, isn't it interesting, he starts with the one who is under the authority first and then he picks up the one who's in authority. Wife, husband. Child, fathers. And it's interesting that he says fathers there and not parents. And then servants to masters. But he doesn't sit there and ask, well, be filled with the Spirit when you preach the Word. He doesn't say be filled with the Spirit when you go out and witness on the street corner. Be filled with the Spirit when you go down to the Dale Prophet Fair in St. Louis and hand out tracts. Be filled with the Spirit when you're at a Christian campground like this. Be filled with the Spirit when you go to heaven and be with the Lord Jesus. I mean, he doesn't talk about those situations in the being filled with the Holy Spirit. Where he talks and starts off right away is in the home. With the husband-wife relationship. With the parent-child relationship. And at your place of employment. Where do you spend your time? We spend the bulk of our time not in the assembly of the Christians, but we spend the bulk of our time in our home and where we work. Shani yesterday recommended Howard Hendricks, well Kevin helped the home and one year down the seminary he came back from the Los Angeles Sunday School Convention. He said he would go out there and go to the Los Angeles Sunday School Convention and they got something like 16,000 people at the convention. He said when you get standing up behind a pulpit and you speak to 16,000 people he said you're filled with the Spirit. You don't have any choice. You've got to be filled with the Spirit. You know what I mean? And he came back and he comes back from the convention. He gets off the airplane and his beautiful wife Jeannie meets him there and as they're walking back to the car she says, Oh by the way honey, we've got a problem with the sewer, the house. He says, Oh fine, we'll call the plumber. And she said, I did. And it cost about five or six hundred dollars to do it. He said, Oh, we'll do it. So they got home and he and his son got out the shovels and if you've ever dug dirt in Texas you know it's like digging rock anyplace else. It's this Texas gumbo. It is something else. And they got down about six foot into the ground. They found the sewer line and by this time the sweat's running freely and you're hot and tired and all different kinds of things. And they find the sewer line and his son looks at his dad and says, Dad, that sewer line is going downhill isn't it? And it's getting deeper all the way. Is that right? He says, Right. So they sat there and they kept digging along this line and throwing this dirt up and they huge piled the dirt up on either side. You don't need to worry about shoring up the walls down in Texas. They just stay there and they're rock hard. And so they're going down there and they finally find the break in the line. And so they get the dirt cleared away from the break in the line and it's too high to climb back up over the hole right now. So they're sitting there in the middle of this trench with this broken sewer. They're mopping their brow and all of a sudden somebody inside the house flushed the toilet. And the question he posed to us he says, You know how to be filled with the spirit when you're speaking to 16,000 people to go out there You know what it's like to be filled with the spirit when you're eight foot underground and somebody flushes their toilet in a broken sewer. And see that's where the rubber meets the road isn't it? I mean that's where life is made up of. We've got those kind of situations. You get out and the car doesn't start. How do you do? Somebody drops your china on the floor. How do you do? That your children don't want to get up and go to school. How do you do? That your husband comes home and he's tired and cranky. How do you do? You come home and dinner's not quite ready and you're starved. How do you do? How does the filling of the Holy Spirit affect your marriage? How does the filling of the Holy Spirit affect your family? And how does the filling of the Holy Spirit affect you where you work day in and day out 40 hours or more per week? And that's what he's talking about here. He talks about the first thing he says the filling of the Holy Spirit is practical. It's meaningful. It brings the power that's necessary for living the everyday life. That Christianity if it's not real in the home I don't believe it's real in the church. And I believe Christianity has all the potential and power to be real in the home as we wish it to be. As we're willing to be yielded and controlled and filled right out to our fingertips with the Spirit of God in our lives. So he goes and he talks about these relationships. Now I find it very interesting here that the King James text that they took a liberty here that you don't know about. Liberty is they put the word submit there in verse 22 in regular words. It's not in italics. And they should have put it in italics. Because the word is not there. It just says wife to your husband. You know it just says wife to your husband. But what it is it's an outgrowth of verse 21. In fact, this whole section it's the new man. The new man is to be filled by the Holy Spirit. The new man who is filled by the Holy Spirit the last participle says submitting yourselves one to another. Now the submitting yourselves one to another is to submit in terms of your God-given role. Your God-given design. The way God made you as a man. The way God made you as a woman. That that is the way you submit yourselves one to another. Now there's a doctrine today called the doctrine of mutual submission. Now if we were to have the freedom of defining that in our own terms it would be a good doctrine. But the problem is that mutual submission is taught in the terms of what they call an egalitarian marriage. Where there's no real difference between male and female except physical. And everything else role definition function definition is something that ups the couple to determine. Now that kind of mutual submission is non-biblical. It's wrong. And it's an outgrowth of women's liberation which is crept into a thing called the Christian women's liberation. And that is not a biblical definition. But if we're willing to find that mutual submission is on the basis of a man is a function according to the design that God made him and woman is a function according to the design that God made her and it's not just a physical difference but there's a role definition. There's a functional definition given by God and that liberty within the marriage is not doing your own thing but functioning according to design. Functioning according to definition the way God has defined it. And the illustration of course that some people use you know when is a locomotive free? Is a locomotive free like what is that little toot or whatever it is you know that goes running around the curves and sees all the flowers out there so decides to jump the track and go out and pick and smell the flowers. Well you know a locomotive can't do that as soon as it jumps the track like they do regularly in the Missouri Pacific Railroad around St. Louis it bogs down it's got real problems and getting it back on the track is the whole thing you've got to get it back on the track and you get that thing in between those tracks and man it's free I mean crank that throttle down and off you go but you jump the track get outside of the definition and that locomotive has got all kinds of problems and the same way with male and female it's not a question of inferiority or superiority even though the word head here is used in verse 23 but if we sit down and go back to 1 Corinthians chapter 11 and show that this is not a question of inferiority or superiority where it says here in 1 Corinthians 11.3 but I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ and the head of the woman is the man and the head of Christ is God now if we're to take this word kephale the word head and say that therefore the man is superior to the woman then we would be by inference saying that therefore God is superior to Christ that's heresy it's not a question of inferiority superiority it's a question of function it's a question of design it's a question of role and I want you to know that there is absolutely no superiority in heaven because of male or female and there is no superiority in the body of Christ today because of male or female but I want to tell you that God holds the man primarily responsible for the functioning of the marriage and in the family because the command this word submit is not there in the Greek text if you don't believe me my brother who gives out beautiful songs he's got his Greek testimony that he's checking me out to that word is not there it is there in verse 24 but it's not there as a command so since the women they seem to have a natural heart toward God and they you know they've heard sermons from the men all the time being submission and by the way I can remember when I first heard this verse I used to go on to my wife as lovingly as she was being submissive to me when I'd say be submissive and I always kind of got discouraged I never seemed to have the exact response that I was anticipating until all of a sudden I began even in the English text it says submit yourself or you know the command is the wife that is something that she does voluntarily and I found out the more that I'm like Jesus Christ now I've got a long long way to go the less problems she has being submissive to me so I like to talk to men in fact that's what the Apostle Paul does anyway there's three verses here for the wives and nine for the men who do you think he's laying the bigger ax on? okay nine verses on the men and he does come up with the command and let's see how you're doing here now we got here in verse 25 husbands love present active imperative not passive this time present active imperative present what does that mean? what? continuous okay active remember we did talk about it yesterday even though yesterday play Rao was a present passive imperative active subject does the action that means who does the action here? husbands okay and he does it continuously imperative is the command you don't have an option on this guys okay okay now think back in the Ephesian context okay here you are you reach the ripe old age of 17 or 18 and you show up at the marriage ceremony and you wonder who has mom and dad picked out for me to marry you know and you get there and she's back there in her nice white gown about six foot wide and you say I hope that's all petticoats and and she looks down there and she sees something up there anyway and she comes walking down the aisle and you say oh no and then the veil lifts up her husband to love her husband it's the word the only command is in the book of Titus and it's a different word it's the word fillet which is the emotional family type love but of course all the commands to agape one another in the testament would certainly be applicable to wife but isn't it interesting that that command is not given to wife and you wonder why I think here's the reason why and the reason why is because God has made the woman to respond if the man loves his wife with Christ like agape love she's gonna respond with the same thing because the biblical principle is as you sow you reap you sow agape love and you're gonna get agape love reflected back to you from your wife now the sad thing is is that women are having to go to and they're not responding to husbands agape love they respond to agape love of God and they love their husbands who are not loving them like Christ loved the church but that puts tremendous pressure on the marriage husbands have agape love continuously and you do it no option for your wife and you do that by giving now this is purposeful giving and there's three purpose clauses here that we can see the first one is in verse 26 that and then verse 27 that down down toward the end of verse 27 that so those are three what they call in the Greek language purpose clauses to give the purposes for this giving love this self-sacrificing unconditional love that we've talked about first purpose is that that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word now the it does not refer to the wife ok the it refers to the church but of course the church to Christ is an illustration of wife to husband and the marriage relationship is not just a self-fulfilling type thing but the Christian marriage is to give an illustration of the world of the relationship of Christ to the church now the wife relationship to the husband is an illustration of the life of Christ but the husband's relationship to the wife is an illustration of the death of Christ so as the husband loves his wife as Christ of the church he illustrates the death of Christ and as the wife responds to the death of her husband in the self-sacrificing giving love that she demonstrates the life that he has given to her by responding back in a loving way so here we see that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word now those are some big words there but you get the idea here that sanctify that he sets her apart and you know what that we men have to be very careful of is we don't set our wives apart sometimes very well we can go walking down the hallway of a shopping mall and you have this roving eye you know what I'm talking about don't you you're not looking at the plant on the side here are you and when your wife sees that in fact there's another thing that's very interesting you're sitting at a restaurant across from your wife and all of a sudden she turns around and looks at what you were just looking at and how did she know what you were looking at that was coming in the restaurant door it's because she is very sensitive to the pupils of your eye and all of a sudden the pupil of your eye has gotten wider and she sees the pupil of your eye getting wider and she turns around and she's caught you I mean you didn't think that she would see that girl that was walking behind her going down there like that and she saw see that kind of stuff we're letting our wives know that we've got a roving eye and that roving eye is not setting apart your wife your mind there is nobody who can replace you you belong to me forever forever forever forever and you're setting that wife apart and you belong to me that's sanctifying and cleansing her by the washing of the water of the word you know Billy Graham quoted some statistics a few years ago and I don't know how they've changed but he was back in his quote in one out of four marriages now it's one out of two marriages you know and in divorce in the world he says but one out of every one hundred where they go to church regularly and in divorce and one out of every one thousand where they go to church regularly and pray and read the word of God together regularly and in divorce well I mean if you're just if you believe in using gimmicks I mean hey listen that's salvation I mean and one man was