This sermon closes a four-part exposition of Ephesians 5:21-33 on marriage, focusing on verses 28-33. The preacher briefly recaps the previous week's point from verses 28-29: a husband who loves his wife as his own body is, in effect, loving himself, since the two have been joined into one flesh. To refuse that love is therefore not only sin against God but self-destructive folly. The sermon illustrates this with the recent public confession of a well-known Christian author who admitted, at 76, to an eight-year affair, betraying a 55-year marriage, his readers, and God. The point is not to condemn but to sober the congregation: no one, however seasoned in ministry, is beyond this danger, and unfaithfulness wounds the unfaithful as much as it wounds the betrayed. The sermon holds up Timothy Keller and John Piper as examples of persevering faithfulness, and urges the congregation not to anchor their faith in any human teacher but in Christ alone, the bridegroom who cannot betray his bride.

The sermon then turns to verse 31, where Paul cites Genesis 2:24 ("a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh"). The argument moves in a direction that reverses ordinary intuition: marriage is not the illustration that helps explain the mystery of Christ and the church; rather, the eternal, pre-creation reality of Christ's union with his church is the pattern that marriage was designed, from Eden onward, to follow and display. The "mystery" language means something previously hidden in God's eternal plan and now unveiled in Christ, not something eerie or occult. Even before Christ came, marriage was already patterned after a union that existed in God's mind from before the foundation of the world.

Examining "one flesh," the sermon draws on Matthew 19:4-6, where Jesus quotes the same Genesis text to establish that God himself joins husband and wife, so man must not separate what God has united, and on 1 Corinthians 6:15-17, where Paul argues that believers' bodies are members of Christ and must never be joined to a prostitute, because sexual union creates a real "one flesh" bond. This shows that one-fleshness encompasses the whole of married life, emotional, social, spiritual, financial, and intellectual, and not merely the physical, yet the sexual union remains a sacred and essential part of that unity, a real joining of two bodies that must only occur within marriage, since marriage alone was designed to portray the beauty of Christ's self-giving love for his church. The sermon offers a positive counterpart to the earlier failure: Nancy DeMoss, who had taught the beauty of marriage for decades as a single woman, married Robert Wolgemuth at 57 after a dying friend's request that he consider her, finally experiencing personally what she had long proclaimed.

Coming to verse 33, the sermon reads Paul's "however" (or "nevertheless") as a deliberate return from the larger, deeper mystery of Christ and the church back to the practical charge: husbands must love their wives as themselves. The final observation is that the word rendered "respect" for the wife's posture toward her husband is, in the Greek, phobeo, "fear," the same term used in verse 21's call to mutual submission "out of reverence for Christ." This is not the fear of a tyrant but the fear a redeemed sinner has toward a Savior who loved and gave himself up, illustrated by the story of a husband who fought off a shark to save his drowning wife. Because the husband represents Christ to the wife, her fear toward him parallels a believer's fear of dishonoring the Lord. The sermon closes with a firm word that "divorce" should never be spoken by either spouse, granting only the exception of adultery (and possibly life-threatening abuse), and cites the wounded but resolute letter of the unfaithful author's own wife, who refuses to break her 55-year vow and prays for grace to forgive despite unfathomable trauma. The sermon exhorts every family present, married or not yet married, to build their households in the fear of the Lord, so that marriage continues to display the glory of Christ's covenant love to a watching world.

Bible Verses Used

• Ephesians 5:28-29: Recap of last week's point that a husband who loves his wife as his own body is loving himself, since the two are one flesh.

• Ephesians 5:31: Cites Genesis 2:24 to show marriage was designed from creation to follow the pre-existing pattern of Christ's union with the church, not the reverse.

• Ephesians 5:32: "This mystery is profound" — the once-hidden, now-revealed reality that marriage portrays Christ and the church.

• Genesis 2:24: The foundational statement that a man leaves father and mother and is joined to his wife, becoming one flesh, quoted by both Paul and Jesus.

• Matthew 19:4-6: Jesus affirms marriage as God's own joining of two into one, which man must not separate.

• 1 Corinthians 6:15-17: Grounds one-fleshness in the believer's union with Christ, warning that sexual union with a prostitute wrongly joins Christ's own members to another, unlike the sacred one-flesh union of marriage.

• Ephesians 5:21-22: The wife's submission and "fear" toward her husband parallels the mutual submission of believers "out of reverence for Christ."

• Ephesians 5:33: The concluding charge — husbands love your wives as yourselves, and let the wife see that she fears her husband — read with the deeper sense of reverent fear rather than mere respect.