Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast, where we help to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.

Today's podcast is a talk by TGC Council Member Stephen Whitmer on the biblical distinctives of Christian marriage found in Ephesians 5.

It was recorded at our 2025 National Conference.

Hey, welcome, everyone, to this session on marriage. My name is Stephen Whitmer.

I've been the lead pastor of Pepperell Christian

Fellowship in Pepperel, Massachusetts, about an hour northwest of Boston for almost 17 years.

I have the privilege of serving on the Council of the Gospel Coalition. And more importantly,

I've been married to Emma, my wife, for 19 years, and we have three children, Samuel, Annie, and Henry.

Actually, just about 10 days ago, Emma and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary.

Thank you.

And I'm really glad that TGC did not occur over our wedding anniversary

because that would have been a really awkward choice about whether to stay.

I would have chosen to stay home for the anniversary.

It would have been a hard sell to persuade my wife that I was going to miss my

anniversary to come to do a talk on Christian marriage.

I think she would have detected that irony and pointed it out to me.

I want to thank each one of you for being here.

I've been praying for you.

And in this session, we're going to talk about the biblical distinctives of marriage.

And I'm going to adopt a narrow focus and aim for a broad audience. So let me just explain

what I mean by that. My assigned text is Ephesians 521 through 6.4, which is, as you probably

know, one of the most controversial passages in the entire Bible. Many lengthy books have been written on it.

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