One of the most difficult precipices in personal change is when the moment comes for personal sacrifice. You have developed an environment of pleasant things around you that you enjoy. You look forward to the small things in life that bring you a degree of pleasure. You may desire to sit down with a cup of coffee and relax in the same moment your wife desires you to help her hang a curtain. You may desire to tile the floor with tiles that you really like, but your wife prefers tiles that you really don’t like. You may like to spend time with your wife in the evenings, while she prefers to enjoy a book at the end of the day. You may desire to spend that bit of extra cash you got this month upgrading your computer while she may want to upgrade a feature in her kitchen.

Regardless of what the issue is, the moment when you are faced with the decision to do something that God says is best for someone else, especially when it is in conflict with your personal desires at the moment, it is a hard thing to do. In Ephesians 5:25ff, God puts a glaring example of this before our eyes. For the Lord Jesus, sacrificing Himself for the good of His church was a precipice of agony, both in Gethsemane and on the cross. Christ also sacrificed Himself by the very act of becoming a man and living as a man for more than 30 years. He subjected Himself to over 3 decades of discomfort and inconvenience in order to do what God said was best for His church.

It is that self-sacrifice, and the kind intentions that drove it, as we have already seen in this series of articles, that constitutes beauty in God. What I would like to point out at this point however, is the beauty that Christ has purchased for His bride through that sacrifice. In the same way that Christ sacrificed Himself for His church to make her beautiful, so husbands are to sacrifice themselves in every area of life where they will have opportunity to make their wives beautiful.