Paul continues his instructions for husbands in Eph 5:19: Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but NOURISHES and CHERISHES it. Here, Paul goes to the world of tender care for infants for an analogy, using two words loaded with meaning. The first is nourish. The Greek word is EKTREPHO, from TREPHO to rear, to feed, primarily used of children + EK from or out of. The heart of a wife needs to be regularly fed with the ingredients required to nourish her heart just as an infant is dependent upon its mother’s breast milk.

Today, we begin a new series, Loving Our Wives Well Because We Understand the Needs of Their Hearts. Here is a quiz. How would you summarize these statements made by women as to why they were divorcing their husbands?

My husband is no longer my friend.
The only time he pays attention to me is when he wants sex.
He is never there for me, emotionally, when I need him most.
I hurt all the time because I feel alone and abandoned.
We’re like ships passing in the night—he goes his way and I go mine.
My husband has become a stranger. I don’t even know who he is anymore.

What these wives were starving for was heart intimacy with their husbands. It is a heart need of wives that wasn’t even on the screens of these husbands. However, this foundational need of wives for heart intimacy with their husbands is spelled out in at least 5 biblical texts, which this episode explores.
It should not surprise husbands who thoughtfully read of the creation of Eve that a wife has a profound heart need that he doesn’t experience nearly as strongly—the need to feel connected to her husband. After all, she is designed FOR relationship. Adam is created for the ground, from the ground, given a name that means ground, tasked to work the ground, and his sin brings a curse upon the ground. No wonder he loves the earthy part of connecting to his wife! But Eve is made for the man, from the man, given a name that means “out of the man,” assigned to assist the man, and her sin brings a curse upon her relationship with the man. No wonder a lack of heart connection to her husband would be so excruciating to a wife!
This feminine longing for heart intimacy is a foundational part of God’s marriage design. In Genesis 2:24-25, we read, A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed Notice that the goal of marriage is loving intimacy (vs 25) to be “naked and unashamed.” Such loving intimacy happens by joining lives, “a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,” and by joining bodies, “they shall become one flesh.” As husband and wife join their lives, they share their ideas (mind), their decisions (will) and feelings (emotions). This union of hearts, minds, and wills is then celebrated by the joining of bodies in sex. The marriage commitment is to regularly join hearts and bodies. Most men love joining bodies but are clueless about the fact that equally important to God, and usually more important to wives is connecting two naked hearts. Peter seems to have understood this reality, for he commands husbands:
1. Meet Her Need to Feel Understood. Live with Your Wives in an Understanding Way (I Pet 3:7)
“Your wife’s first need” says Peter, “is for you to understand her, which means discovering what is going on in her heart.” Literally this text says, dwell-together according to knowledge. Dwelling together refers to sharing everyday life. The Greek word for “know” is not the word for observing objective facts. Rather, this particular word indicates a relationship between the knower and what is known that progresses into deeper understanding. Peter seems to recognize what psychologists have discovered—that one of the deepest of human needs, especially among women is to feel understood. An astonishing number of men, including ME, entered marriage clueless about this fundamental dimension of marriage—connecting two naked hearts, i.e. emotional intimacy. Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoker, in their book, Every Woman’s Desire, observe:

84% of women feel they don’t have heart intimacy (oneness) in their marriages.
83% of women feel that their husbands don’t even know the basic needs of a woman for emotional intimacy (oneness) or how to provide it.
A large majority of female divorcees say that their married years were the loneliest years of their lives.

Let’s sharpen our picture of heart intimacy. Christian counselor Barbara Rosberg in, The Five Love Needs of Men and Women, cowritten with her husband, explains:
“The word, ‘intimacy’ comes from a Latin word that means ‘innermost.’  What this translates into for those of us in the marriage relationship is a vulnerable sharing of our inner thoughts, feelings, spirit, and true self…This support is achieved through listening, empathy, prayer, or reassurance.”
“Heart intimacy” to a wife means feeling so thoroughly loved and accepted that she easily and constantly shares with her lover what is going on in her heart. To a wife, the heart intimacy she craves is having her husband be her best friend—who loves to talk with her about everything—because that is what best friends do. Rosberg describes one wife’s yearning for heart-to-heart connection: “Melody’s idea of intimacy is sitting on the love seat with Dan, a couple of cappuccinos beside them, a roaring fire in front of them, no kids around them, and plenty of time for a good, long, heart to heart talk” (Ibid). While many Christian men look back on their wedding day as the beginning point for having regular sex, their wives look back upon it is the day they married their best friend. Romance is icing on the cake for them. The core of the relationship is being such close best friends that they stroll through life, arm in arm, sharing the secrets of their hearts, knowing that those secrets will always be valued because their husband loves them unconditionally. The next three biblical truths show how to build and maintain that intimacy.
2. Know What’s Happening in Her Heart. Husbands Should Love Their Wives as Their Own Bodies. He Who Loves His Wife Loves Himself. (Eph 5:28)
Paul recognizes two characteristics of men: 1) they take care of what belongs to them and 2) they default to taking care of themselves. In the deepest possible way, our wives are worthy of special care and devotion because their body so thoroughly belongs to us that to love them is to love ourselves. Here is the point:  Men pay constant attention to their bodies. When my body aches, I groan. When my body is hungry, I eat. When my body is tired, I rest. When my body craves sexual release, I pursue my woman. When my body is wounded, I care for the wound. When my body is sleepy, I nod off. We are so united to our bodies that we cannot ignore them for long. They get our continual attention.
Men default to treating our marriages like our cars or lawnmowers: so long as they keep running, we take them for granted; it is only when they breakdown that they get our attention. Paul says, “Men, take the opposite approach. Your nervous system tells you immediately when your body is in pain. You should be so vigilant to know what is happening in your wife’s heart, that you know right away what she is feeling. Your connection with your wife’s heart should be so strong that it is like the nervous system of your own body.”
Intentional attention to her heart requires skillful listening to help her open it to us. Christian Counselor, Paul Tournier writes “In order to really understand, we need to listen, not to reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart, we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible, in order to help him better explain his experience” (To Understand One Another).
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The government does not own us. In this Harris is right. But we don’t own ourselves. Christians who believe the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) know that “You are not your own.” We were bought with a price—the very blood of Jesus. We must not do whatever we want but instead glorify God in our bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). We cannot defy the image of God in fellow human beings, even unborn ones, without defying God Himself.

In last Tuesday’s presidential debate, Kamala Harris said, “One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”
She’s partly right. We don’t belong to the government as if it owned us and can command our every action. This is deeply ingrained in the American psyche and our representative form of government. But neither do we belong to ourselves—not in the radically individualistic, deterministic way Harris meant it.
From a civics perspective, we belong to the communities we join or are born into. We are members of families, volunteer organizations, and churches. Our memberships require things of us, and we are not free to neglect or defy those obligations without consequence. These community bonds make for rich cultural relationships. They knit us together in ways that enrich us even as we enrich others. All of this is free from government intrusion and control—and rightly so.
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Natural law, then, remains as indispensable for Christians today as it was for the many centuries in which it held a central role in Christian ethics. As Protestants, however, we cannot retrieve natural law without allowing Scripture to remain the final authoritative norm of our teaching. 

How should we then live? So Francis Schaeffer famously asked in his 1973 book and subsequent video series. The question has certainly had renewed urgency over the past two years, as Christians around the world have confronted the for-us-unprecedented (although not so much for our ancestors) moral and political challenges of navigating a global pandemic, and accompanying public health measures. How should we love our neighbors? By mask-wearing and vaccinating? By moving worship services and schools online or carrying on as normal? And by what standard should we evaluate the many answers proffered by TV personalities and public authorities?
For many Christians, the answer is quick and easy: “By Scripture, of course.” But a few minutes’ reflection will be enough to leave us scratching our heads in puzzlement. For Scripture, clearly, has very little to say on the subject of public health emergencies, and only the most general principles about how we should conduct ourselves in the face of such complex moral and legal demands. The same, we may soon realize, goes for hundreds of moral and political—and indeed ecclesiastical—decisions that we are called upon to make in the course of carrying out our vocations. If we assume that Scripture has all the answers, we are quickly bound to be disappointed. And if we say, sensibly enough, that we need to “apply Scriptural principles” to particular cases, this simply raises the question of how we identify and apply such principles? How do we engage in moral reasoning?
The answer, for generation after generation of Christian theologians and ethicists, was “natural law.” But the idea of natural law fell on hard times among twentieth-century Protestants, under pressure from Barth, fundamentalism, and modernism. It’s high time we recover it if we’re to navigate the profound moral challenges of our day with integrity.
From one standpoint, the idea that there is such a thing as natural law should be pretty uncontroversial. Everything in nature was created by God, who determined what it was and how it was meant to act. Just as a human inventor can tell you how a tool is meant to work, how to keep it in good working order, and how it’s liable to break if you don’t, so God, being a God of order rather than chaos, impressed upon all of his creatures the way they were meant to work. This is what we still often call “the law of nature” or “the laws of nature.” But man too is a creature, and as such is also subject to the law of his nature, which determines how we are meant to act and how we shouldn’t, what kinds of behaviors will achieve good results and which ones will end in brokenness. At the intersection of human nature and the natures of the rest of the world, we find natural law, the moral principles that distinguish wise and successful living from foolish and disastrous actions: sow and reap in preparation for winter, eat and drink in moderation, marry and remain faithful, honor the aged.
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