Text:  Ephesians 5: 23,25,28, "For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body.  Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it;  so ought men to love their wives as their own bodies.  He that loveth his wife loveth himself." 

These are heavy-duty texts.  If we get them right, our homes could actually be a little bit of heaven on earth.  Get them wrong or ignore them, and home can be more like hell than heaven. 

In the first place it says that the husband is the head of the house.  But when I am talking to our Spanish-speaking brothers, I remind them that it is not being the head of the house "al estilo Fidel Castro."  In case Spanish is not your second language, that means that the Bible doesn't give us permission to be the head of our homes like Fidel Castro was the head of Cuba.  Do I need to say more about that! 

The really heavy-duty concept comes next, and it is the part that says that we are supposed to love our wives. (Did you know that the Bible doesn't call on the women to love their husbands but rather to respect them?)  The point is that God knows where our weaknesses lie as husbands and as wives.  I don't need to tell you that we men don't have to make a special effort to use our wives or to take advantage of them.  That seems to come with being a man and is, needless to say, testosterone driven.  What doesn't come natural for us is to really love our wives as a person and not as just an object.  Real love doesn't come from hormones; neither do more hormones or less hormones affect true love.  True love is something else.  It is about self-sacrificing friendship and commitment.  That kind of relationship is not helped along by a subscription to Playboy Magazine.  

The Bible has given us an awesome responsibility to be the captain of the home team.  But the condition is that we be men who love.  Men who are unselfish.  That kind of man is not the natural man but can only be developed when we men make a commitment to Jesus.  Come to think of it, it is the man Jesus--who is also the Son of God--Who can make us men the real men that God intended us to be.  Notice that, in the two great commandments, love for God comes before love for each other.  That is because a true love for God is what makes possible true love for our families and each other.