It tells us, too, that it took two different modalities to represent this divine image, It took male and female. Why? Is God a sexual being? Wouldn't a sexless, or perhaps a single-celled being have been a more appropriate image? What can male and female possibly have to do with the image of the almighty and eternal God?
---It wasn't the time to point out the difference between not liking and not agreeing. I find that my students in the seminary often confuse the two. Dislike is a mere matter of taste. Nobody can argue with tastes. Disagreement requires refutation. You've got to be able to show the holes in the logic and present a case that demolishes the other's.
---Nothing that God does is unstructured.
In order to make a holy people out of the Israelites, He gave them ten major commandments and hundreds of lesser ones. "If He had wanted them to live in a world without moral absolutes," said Daniel Weiss, president of Eastern College, "He would have given them the Ten Suggestions."
---You may remember a story your uncle Add used to tell. When he was dean of a small college in Pennsylvania, he learned that the walls of a certain men's dormitory were smeared with shaving cream, peanut butter, and jelly. He went over to investigate. Of course not a soul around had any idea how it could possibly have happened. In room after room he met with surprised innocence.
He had several options. He could make every man in the dormitory go to work and clean it up, He could call the custodian. It happened that the custodian was a very good worker, an amiable and therefore a very valuable man. To scrub up the mess would have been beyond the call of duty, but he would have done it. There was a third option. Add went and got a bucket and a brush and set to work himself. One by one doors opened, heads popped out, word spread of what the dean of the college was doing, and soon he was not alone in the scrub job. The power of servanthood. It commands respect. It does not demand it.
---A careful look at those shows that a man's will has to come into play. Sometimes we treat the royal summons as though it were an invitation that it would be more polite (or more self-effacing) to decline. We don't have that option. Men don't have the option of taking charge or not taking charge in the home and in the church. Responsibility is laid upon them. Responsibility has been the mark of a man from the moment when God shaped a woman to fit Adam's need and presented her to him and Adam recognized her and accepted her and named her. Responsibility is the refusal to drift or delay or pass the buck.
---The real test of manhood, it seems to me, is not the Boston Marathon, but "the race that is set before you," mentioned in Hebrews 12.
---Christ's willingness to be Head over the Church was a part of His submission to the Father. A man's willingness to be the head of his wife is a matter of submission—to Christ. For her to oppose his authority is to oppose God. For him to refuse it is to disobey God.
---You want your wife to submit? Then take a long, steady look at the sort of love Christ gave. It was based on self-sacrifice. That is the basis for authority. It starts with sacrifice. It is maintained by sacrifice. Napoleon once said that he had built an empire on force, while Jesus built one on love. For two millennia since, there has never been a time when there were not hundreds of thousands willing to die for Him. No force on earth can compare with the force of sacrificial love.
---Divorce is not an option. God hates it. In freedom you choose a woman; and you then bind yourself, by vows before God and witnesses, that you will love, honor, and cherish her till death you do part. You promise to forsake all others.
Nobody can stick to such vows in his own strength. "The arm of flesh will fail you. Ye dare not trust your own," as the old hymn says. Those who overcome do so not by force of will or strength of superior character, but by the blood of the Lamb. Sacrifice was required of His love for us. Nothing less than sacrifice will be required of us if it is our serious intention to love for a lifetime.
---One of the sacrifices love makes is privacy.
---Courtesy is sacrificial symbolism.
---"Good morning, darling, how are you this morning?" is a convention, of course. (Conventions have only become conventions because they have worked and have meant something for a long time.) But if you think about it, you could, by that conventional greeting, be meaning, "My feelings are not my primary interest this morning. Yours are."
---There's no easy answer, but there is a simple one: endurance.
---Sometimes obedience means willingness to do the apparently useless thing, in order that God may do the great thing.
---First off, be a man. I've said that in a hundred ways, but I'll say it again. You expect her to be a real woman, but you can't expect that if you're not a real man. It is in response to the fullest expression of your manliness that she will be most womanly. When she's not living up to your expectations, check yourself out first. Are you taking the lead as you ought to, with an attitude of humility and submission to Christ? Are you remembering that you're the one responsible for her?
---Another way is to be courteous. Courtesy is a way of reminding each other that you're a gentleman and a lady. No matter how "old shoe" you both like to be—casual, unstructured, simple sincere, "just me," or whatever—you'll be surprised what pleasures will unfold if you treat each other with a little special consideration. I've already mentioned some of the specifics: Pull out her chair for her at the table, open a door. Keep on remembering the little things after you're married. They often have a way of vanishing, one by one, as familiarity breeds slobbism. Get up some morning, make coffee, and bring a cup to her in bed, with a daisy or a book on the tray. She'll be amazed.
---Fourth, love her with the love described in 1 Corinthians. Try putting your own name in place of the word love: "Pete is slow to lose patience, has good manners, knows no limit to his endurance...." How does it work?
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