Sacrifice is absolute. It is life and death. It is an unconditional giving of ourselves. It is an unreserved entrusting of ourselves to another person.
It is on this basis that we should enter into marriage.
People get married for all sorts of different reasons: because of romantic love; because of lust; because it is “the right thing to do”; because the woman has become pregnant … There is greater or lesser validity to all these reasons, but when a Christian enters marriage, the primary reason should be a determination to serve another person completely for the rest of his or her life.
And this isn’t a one way street.
The focus in Ephesians 5 is on the way a husband is to love his wife, but the wife is also to respect her husband. Just as the church honors Jesus, so a wife should honor her husband, and that kind of respect requires sacrifice too.
Understanding this has a profound impact upon how we approach sex. What should be obvious is that sex is not meant to be about self-assertion. Sex too often is a selfish thing. When we talk about sex, we too often talk about “our needs.” And sex, too often, is about power—the politics of the bedroom—as husband and wife either demand, offer or refuse sex as a means of control and manipulation.
Sex in marriage should not to be like this. Rather than being demanding, sex should be sacrificial—an offering to one another.
This sacrificial offering raises sex from the level of being purely biological and makes it spiritual. It becomes an act in which husband and wife seek out one another’s souls as well as one another’s bodies. It becomes an act in which the “one flesh” bond between husband and wife is affirmed and strengthened. It becomes something which once again truly enjoys the blessing of God.
Sacrificial sex is life-affirming. It is good, holy and pure. Sacrificial sex is not merely a physical act—it is a complete giving of one to another. It is truly becoming one flesh.
This is how sex should be, and that means that sex is something that should only take place within marriage. A sexual relationship is a serious thing. It is meant to involve a lifelong pursuit of one another. It is meant to be exclusive—between one man and one woman, until death.
And we see in Ephesians 5 the particular things husband and wife are to offer one another if they are to reflect the relationship between Christ and the church. In verse 33, it says that the husband must love his wife and the wife must respect her husband.
These are the fundamental emotional requirements of a successful marriage. For a wife, the most devastating thing she could hear her husband say is, “I respect you, but I don’t love you,” while the most devastating thing a husband could hear from his wife is, “I love you, but I don’t respect you.” Wives need to know the unconditional, tender, strong love of their husbands, and husbands need to know the genuine respect of their wives.
This is important when it comes to sex because an unloved wife will not be a liberated lover. And a disrespected husband is not going to have any confidence in bed.
Sex is meant to be sacrificial. It is to reflect the relationship between Christ and his church. It is only within marriage that such a relationship can exist—a relationship that is exclusive, life-long and entirely self-giving.
