He said, “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God,” and in the good pleasure of His will Christ became the shelter of the church. That is a solemn word when one looks around the world on all the miseries of domestic life and sees how little the husbands know how to be the shelter of their wives. My arm ought to be like the wing of the hen for her chickens, the place of shelter for my wife. Of course, with that comes authority, but it is not burdensome.
How little as individual Christians we know how to walk like Christ: “This must be done because it is the will of the Father. That must not be done, because it is not the will of the Father.” What a change it would make with our dear wives, if we husbands could take that ground! If my wife sees that I am will-less before the Father, what harmony would exist in the everyday circumstances of marriage. She would say in all things, “This is but an opportunity of being subject.”
I believe that in every case husbands, parents, children, masters and servants where there is something painful, something wrong, we shall find that it is in the higher, the more responsible member that the failure comes in first. But the wife, for example, cannot say, “Oh, but I have not a shelter in my husband!” What! Have you no Father in heaven? Cannot you bring His power to bear on your husband? Cannot you put your will aside, so as to be able to bring in the power of a higher relationship? If you can get that thought, you will be able to get strength and power to meet it all.
Of course there are difficulties in every relationship, but oh, to know what the setting is in which the two jewels are locked together! Pure gold not of Ophir, but of the antitype, Christ in heaven.
Marriage is like a finger pointing to the union of Christ and the church, and what a poor-hearted thing he must be who, with the arm of a wife pressing on his own, has never thought of it as pointing to the love of the Lord Jesus Christ for that church, for whom He gave Himself and which He is to present to Himself without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.
G. V. Wigram (from a wedding talk)