Your Marriage Is Telling a Story

Before Paul tells husbands how to love and wives how to submit, he does something surprising. He pulls back the curtain.

For eleven verses he's been talking about marriage, and then in Ephesians 5:32 he says: "This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church."

He wasn't really talking about marriage at all. He was talking about the Gospel.

This one verse reframes everything. Marriage isn't primarily about your happiness. It isn't primarily about companionship, romance, or even raising a family. Marriage exists to display the Gospel — to make visible, in the flesh, the invisible reality of Christ's love for His people.

Every Christian marriage is a living picture. The husband portrays Christ's sacrificial headship. The wife portrays the Church's glad submission. And together, whether they realize it or not, they are telling the watching world a story about a Bridegroom who loved His Bride enough to die for her.

This is exactly what the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 means when it says marriage is "God's unique gift to reveal the union between Christ and His church." Not just a gift — a revelatory gift. Something that shows something. Something that displays something.

The Puritans grasped this deeply. Richard Baxter called the Christian home "a church... a society of Christians combined for the better worshipping and serving God." Jonathan Edwards said every Christian family should function "as it were, a little church." William Gouge went further still, calling the family "the seminary of the Church and commonwealth."

They understood that what happens in your living room on Tuesday afternoon is not separate from your spiritual life — it is your spiritual life.

Scripture makes this concrete in 1 Timothy 3:5: "If anyone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?" Before examining a man's theology or his pulpit gifts, Paul says to look at his home. The family is the proving ground.

Here's the sobering implication: When we get marriage wrong, we get the Gospel wrong.

When a husband leads with harshness and pride, he paints a portrait of Christ as a tyrant rather than a Savior. When a wife resists with contempt and resentment, she paints a portrait of the Church as rebellious rather than redeemed. When marriages disintegrate, the watching world looks at the wreckage and draws its own conclusions about what Christ and the Church must be like.

But when it works — when a husband leads with tender strength and a wife responds with joyful trust — something genuinely beautiful breaks through. The world catches a glimpse of heaven. They see, in real human flesh, what it looks like for a Bride to love her Bridegroom.

This is the foundation everything else is built on. Not a set of rules. Not a social structure. Not a traditional arrangement. The Gospel itself, acted out in your kitchen and your bedroom and your back porch every single day.

The question isn't whether your marriage is telling a story. It is. The question is whether the story is true.