Laying Down One’s Life

The Key: The Husband in a Marriage Model

Part III

When Jesus died on the cross he bore the sins of the entire world upon his shoulders.  He carried all of mankind’s sins.  He became 100% responsible for those sins and was willing to carry that responsibility because of His obedience to His Father.  None of those sins were “his fault”, for He was without sin, sinless.  He carried 100% of the responsibility with 0% being His fault.  You have to see the revelation that He got from His Father to reveal to the world: 100% responsibility with 0% fault.  There lies the revelation that unlocks the mystery of marriage and the relationship of the Church.

Men, as head of your Christian households, are you willing to take 100% of the responsibility for your wife even when it is not your fault.  This whole business about being “Christ like” has nothing to do with faults and blame.  It is about taking on your responsibility for you and your wife, 100% of it!  When you do that, I guarantee that she will be 100% willing to submit to you.

I can hear you crying even now, “That is not fair!”  True, the cross was never fair.  Everything possible was stacked up against Jesus, the physical, the emotional, the spiritual realms were all in opposition to what He was doing the day that He died on the cross.  The physical and mental torture that He went through from the time that He was in the Garden of Gathsemene until his death on the cross is indescribable, but He did it out of obedience to the Father, to reveal His Father’s heart, and it was totally unfair to Him because He was sinless.  If the cross was fair, then you would have to have died for your own sins, but Romans 5:8 states, “God demonstrates his own love [the heart of the Father] for us in this:  While we were still sinner, Christ died for us.”   So, He died, for your sins and mine, and that wasn’t fair.  Fairness is not part of being Christ like.

Our Christian marriages should also reflect this same Christ like attitude, “revealing the heart of the father” to my wife so much that I am willing to take 100% responsibility for her even though it may not be any of my fault, not because she loves me (which would be conditional love) but because I want to be obedient to the Father and am willing to lay down my life unconditionally.  I am not doing this as a reaction to her, but as an action from the Father.  I love my wife enough to lay down my life for her in obedience to the Father. Now this would mean that as a man, a husband, I have to nurture an intimate relationship with the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, so that I would look to Him and expect to hear from Him about every area and every situation in my life, my wife’s, and my children’s.  My acts of obedience to Him would produce only one reaction from my wife, submission.  Isn’t it amazing that usually the times she chooses not to submit is the very same time when I have chosen not to be obedient to the Father and not be Christ like.  I guarantee you that if we men would act out of obedience to our Father in a Christ like attitude, having the mind of Christ towards our wives, revealing the Heart of the Father, they would come running to us obediently, which is known as submission.  But guys, it takes our actions for their reactions.

 Christ loves “revealing the heart of the Father to” you, me, and the Church, by laying down His life for you, me, and the Church because He was obedient to the Father, not you, not me, nor the Church.  Jesus’ actions was purely done in obedience to His Father, so must ours.