BBC Sermon Cast

God has some supernatural advice for you—truths to help you deal with your most formidable personal challenges. Do you know how to get to those truths?

In the psalmist’s petition to experience God’s love, we find the true context for our prayers. And within this context we find the commitment of the Christian—as a result of this context. Only the experience of God's love will lead to a true commitment to serve him.

Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with heart, soul, mind and strength (Matthew 22:37–38). The best place to learn this love—and the associated love for neighbour as self—is in the Christian home. This seems to be a major underlying idea behind Paul’s exhortation to children and to parents in Ephesians 6:1­–4.

Marriage, God’s way, is a miraculous thing, but it can also be incredibly mundane at times. Marriage is not a fairy tale—a Hollywood production. Marriage, God’s way, is a miracle—both majestic (vv. 28–32) and mundane (v. 33).

Innate to every person’s core is the desire to be happy. Though there are many perceived ways to gain this happiness, there is only one way to truly achieve it—and that is through knowing God and doing what he commands. To do anything else is to be foolish, but to be wise is to do as his commandments instruct us to do.

Life is precious, but circumstances are sometimes desperate. Life can seem pretty hopeless at times. It can hit us so hard that the force of its punch can put us face down on the mat of circumstances. And it appears that our only hope for recovery is a miracle. But what is recorded in Psalm 119:25–32 is much more truthful, and therefore it is much more hopeful, than our circumstances might lead us to believe.

Marriage God’s way is the gospel way. This is fundamental to both husband and wife, but fundamentally so for the husband. That is, since he is the leader of the home, he needs to lovingly lead by the gospel. This means that he must learn the gospel and then live in accordance with the gospel.

The gospel driven marriage is marriage God’s way. And when the gospel is stewarded by both husband and wife, then the marriage is graced, the family is blessed, the church is strengthened and the Lord is glorified. But, as Paul here makes, the final responsibility for this is on the shoulders of the husband. And that responsibility is simply and soberly, husband, love your wife.

Psalm 119 encourages the believer to pray for open eyes. We are able to pray for open eyes because of the bountiful grace of our master. We need open eyes because we are strangers in the earth. And the benefit of open eyes is that we can behold wonderful things out of God’s law: the wonderful character of God; the wonderful promises of Christ; the wonderful rule of life; and the wonderful redemption, through Christ, from the penalty, the power, and the presence of sin.

Submission, properly understood, is God’s gift to the women in a marriage relationship. It is also a gift to the husband. When he receives this gift, another gift is often reciprocated back to her. She gets two gifts! When submission is properly understood, and when it is appropriately exercised, wife and husband are blessed.