nd walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma (Ephesians 5:2).
Be such a believing husband to your believing wife that she may say, "God has not only given me a husband, but such a husband as preaches to me every day the way of Christ to His church." John Bunyan
How would you describe the spiritual aroma of your home? When visitors arrive, before virtually anything is said or done, what is one of the first things they notice about your family? It is the aroma. Do they feel as though a bad attitude crawled under your refrigerator and died? Or do they think someone has been baking spiritual bread in the kitchen all afternoon?
Perhaps you are not in the best position to say what this aroma is like. Aromas are the sorts of things you get used to; what immediately strikes a visitor may not be noticed (consciously) by the residents of the home. So if there is a problem with the aroma of the home, it can be a difficult problem to solve; there is no easy formula. But nevertheless, the Bible does teach on it. In our text above, it says that when Christians walk in love they are doing what Christ did. And the sacrifice of Christ was a pleasant aroma to God. We can conclude that walking in love produces this sort of aroma before God, and consequently before man.
In other words, keeping God's law with a whole heart (which is what love is) is not only seen in the overt act of obedience. There is a collateral effect to obedience this is the aroma of obedience. One of the marks of Pharisaism is the hypocritical desire to be known by others as a keeper of God's law, which, of course, can be faked in its external manifestations. What cannot be faked is the distinctive aroma of pleasure to God.
In the home, where should this obedience begin? Jesus taught us, with regard to individuals, that cups must be cleaned from the inside out. If we apply this principle to the home, we can see that the "inside" of a family is, of course, the relationship between husband and wife. The health of all other relationships in the home depends upon the health of this relationship. The key is to be found in how the husband is treating his wife. Or, put another way, when mamma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Later in Ephesians 5, Paul tells husbands to love their wives as they love their own bodies. He then goes on to point out that each person nourishes and cherishes his own body. The word for cherishes here is thalpo, which literally means to keep warm. Consequently, we may say that one of the fundamental duties of husbandry is for the husband to keep his wife warm. When that is done, the rest of the home is warm.
But how can he keep her warm? Notice that our text says that we are to walk in love. A wife is not kept warm in the securing love of a husband if he is erratic in how he loves her. If he is harsh with her or ignores her, but occasionally shows her love, he is not walking in love. The kind of love Paul requires here is constant. So godly husbandry is constant husbandry.
And as the context makes clear, the love in this passage is also imitative. It is learned from a Person; it is learned through watching Jesus Christ. As children learn from their parents through watching them, so Christians are to learn from Christ. This means that a husband who loves his wife is not a pioneer. It has all been done before. Christ has loved the Church in the same the way He wants men to love their wives; He has done so as an example. The love and affection of Christ has been set upon His people alone; in the same way, husbands are to love their wives alone.
It should be obvious from all this that such obedience is not contained by the external requirements; godly obedience will always bring in its train a host of intangibles. These intangibles are what constitute the aroma of obedience, and it is this aspect of true obedience that is so frustrating to the Pharisaical mind. When it comes to the externals, the mere moralist can always say of himself what the unregenerate Saul could say "concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." But it does not matter how hard the moralist tries, he cannot produce the aroma of godliness. So the obedience of the Christian man is not limited to new actions actions which, after all, can be copied by a mere moralist. Of course those godly actions must be there, but in order to produce this distinctive aroma, they must proceed from new hearts. As William Tyndale put it, when God "buildeth he casteth all downe first. He is no patcher."
In the same way, the love of the Christian husband does not proceed from reading the right books, or going to the right seminars. God will not patch His grace onto some humanistic psychological nonsense even if that nonsense is couched in Christian terminology. It proceeds from an obedient heart, the greatest desire of which is the glory of God, not the happiness of the household.
In the world God made, if a creature worships anything other than the Creator God, then ultimately he loses the very thing he worships. Husbands must love their wives; they must not worship them. Those who lose their lives find it, and those who seek to find it lose it. Those who place their wives before God will lose their wives. Those who glorify God will of course obey Him in their love for their wives. It goes without saying that wives greatly profit when they are "number two."
So when a husband seeks to glorify God in his home, he will be equipped to love his wife as he was commanded. And if from a new heart, he loves his wife as commanded, the aroma of his home will be pleasant indeed.
