Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Western culture’s movement away from God provides a rich opportunity for Christian men and women to reveal what following God’s loving, self-sacrificing, unique design can really look like. By embracing the unique aspects of male and female and understanding God’s design for sex, we can begin to reveal God’s heart. The opportunity must be seized—and by God’s grace, it can be.
Husbands have the distinctive opportunity to reveal God’s movement into people’s lonely hearts by the way they treat their wives. Wives have the unique opportunity to reveal God’s invitation for empty people to be filled with His strengthening presence by the way they respond to their husbands.
God’s unique design for men and women
At the risk of being a little bit inappropriate, I believe God designed the physical relationship of a husband and wife as a metaphor for their personal relationship. I believe the primary things my wife, Rachael, wants (the things that she’s open to receiving from me) are to be noticed, treasured, and cherished in the deepest part of her soul. And God has designed me, as her husband, to remember His design and move into the deepest parts of her emotional being.
The woman is open to receiving. The man is designed to move. When I recognize that Rachael longs to rest in the presence of a man who’s strong enough not to be thrown by the difficulties of life and still move toward her, then she can rest in the strength of that man. That’s what she longs for. So, do I remember how God has designed my wife, and do I see her and desire to embrace what is deepest within her?
God’s design for sex demonstrates His heart for us
Perhaps as never before in the history of Western culture, we need to recapture a fundamental truth about Christianity: God always does what He does for His own glory.
Let me express that same thought another way: Because God, as the three-person divine community, is the supreme model of perfect and joyful relating, He created us, male and female, not merely to have fulfilling relationships, procreate, and enjoy passion and pleasure, but to put His relational style on display, especially in marriage.
Husbands display the traits of Jesus
Jesus, under authority from His Father and in the power of the Holy Spirit, moved from heaven’s joy-filled community into earth’s misery-stained chaos to sacrifice himself for the eternal joy of God-rejecting rebels. The Hebrew word for male in Genesis 1: 27 implies one who moves. It follows that husbands, uniquely designed to reveal God’s way of relating, are called to display the way Jesus moved to meet others’ needs by moving sacrificially toward their wives with her well-being in view.
Wives display the traits of Jesus
Now resurrected and returned to the divine community, Jesus invites us to move toward the Father with confidence that He will warmly receive us and, by His Spirit, provide everything we need to carry out His plan for us. The Hebrew word for female in Genesis 1:27 implies one who is open to receive. It follows that wives are specially designed to open themselves, not to all movement, but only to godly movement from their husbands, and to receive such movement with godly delight. In so doing, wives reveal the way Jesus opened himself to invite our movement into the relational joy of His divine community.
Couples model how God relates to us
Movement and invitation: the two-part rhythm of how God relates to us. The Gospel of Christ reveals the nature of divine relating: movement into the heart, invitation to delight. The marriage of a man and a woman puts divine relating on display for others to see and to be drawn into the relational beauty of God. It can only achieve God’s purpose when a marriage is a God-glorifying covenant between a male and a female.
God’s design for sex is sheer beauty, and it leads to joy. Both male and female are called to equally high ground in God’s plan, to the privilege of putting Jesus on display by how each gender relates. Christian men and women have the opportunity to show the satisfying beauty of God’s design nowhere more clearly than in a Christian marriage.
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