Well, each of us needs to change something about ourselves and many of us want to change something about ourselves. So how do we break free from the patterns and ruts of life? What hope is there for personal change in our lives when we seem to be stuck? The answer comes in a marriage sermon on a glorious text in Ephesians 5 verses 22 to 33.

In a 2007 sermon, here's what John Piper said. Marriage in its deepest meaning is a copy of Christ and His church. If you want to understand God's meaning for marriage, you have to grasp that we're dealing with a copy. Marriage isn't an end in itself. This is why marriage doesn't exist in the resurrection.

It's a copy. Copies aren't needed anymore. And the reality is fullest on its display. Here they're needed. The world is filled with a need for this very kind of marriage. It won't be needed in the end. It's a copy. And what it's copying is an original, a reality, a truth.

So it's a copy of a greater original. It's a metaphor of a greater reality. It's a parable of a greater truth. And the original, the reality, and the truth is God's marriage to His people or Christ's marriage to His church. And the copy, the metaphor, and the parable is human marriage.

Jeffrey Bromley, one of my teachers in church history of all things, wrote a book called God and Marriage. And he said this, "As God made man in His own image, so He made earthly marriage in the image of His own eternal marriage with His people." That's exactly right. Pause here.

Men, I said a minute ago, if you really got this text, if it landed on you, you wouldn't need next Sunday's message, the application one, because I really believe that even though application is appropriate and nitty-gritty examples are helpful and good and right for preachers to give, I don't think that's the main way preaching works.

I don't think that's the main way the Bible works. I think the main way the Bible works and preaching that is faithful to the Bible works is that the Bible displays glories that we are designed and made to know and which we don't know because we're in the cesspool of soap operas.

And by the Holy Spirit, in a moment of illumination, all of that can be just driven out and something absolutely glorious enter into a human heart and change everything by virtue of its magnitude before any application ever arrives. You're just changed. Your heart soars with a new sense of what you're on the planet for and what this woman in her magisterial dignity as your bride is about and what you're living for here and everything changes when something lands on you with a biblical force.

That's what I would like to happen. I can't make that happen. Lift my voice, I'd like to lift my voice, but I can't make that happen. God can. So that's a little parenthesis to tell you how I think about preaching. I will give you application. But I have a little misgiving when somebody hears a sermon like this and their first response is "You ever give me an example?" All right, I'll give you an example, but is your heart exploding with the glory of marriage?

Are you soaring? Will you by the end of this service just begin to take off like a little roadrunner? So that from those new heights, she looks different, the kids look different, the job looks different, the planet looks different, life looks different, death looks different, the devil looks different.

Let me out of here, I want to live. Wonder changes people, not examples. Lists and examples, a little bit helpful. But seeing glory changes everything. Glorious, I love that. This sermon clip was from John Piper's sermon on marriage titled Lionhearted and Lamblike, the Christian Husband as Head, part one from back in 2007.

You can find the full message on our site, DesiringGod.org. And this clip was suggested by podcast listener Doug Moore from Goshen, Indiana. Thank you, Doug, for this gem. If you have a favorite selection from a John Piper sermon, send us the name of the sermon and the timestamps of when and where the clip appears in the audio, and we will share it online here in the podcast.

Email me at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org and put the word clip in the subject line. Well change is part of our lives and breakups too are part of our lives, a particularly painful part of life. But there is biblical hope for the breakups we experience as John Piper will explain to us tomorrow as he returns to answer the question from a podcast listener.

I'm your host Tony Reinke. I'll see you tomorrow. �