Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Ephesians 5:14-33
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Today’s sermon text is found in Ephesians chapter 5. I’ll begin reading at verse 14 and read through 33. Ephesians 5 beginning at verse 14. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Therefore, he says, “Awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light. See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.

And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife as also Christ is head of the church, and he is the savior of the body.

Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that he might present her to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.

So husbands ought to love their own 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, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.

Nevertheless, let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Let’s pray. Father, it is our desire that in our marriages would reflect the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is clearly at the center of this text. Help us, Father, to be moved by this text, transformed by it, that we might be better husbands and wives, that we might be better men and women, that the young boys and girls here may see before them the model of what it is to be masculine and feminine.

Lead us, Lord God, today into your truth and transform us by the power of the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ name we ask it and for the sake of his kingdom. Amen. Please be seated.

Well, we have this confluence this weekend of Valentine’s Day and President’s Day. I don’t remember that happening before. I always thought President’s Day was a week or so after Valentine’s Day, but somehow this is President’s Day weekend and yesterday was Valentine’s Day.

And it’s interesting, of course, how the Lord God has moved in his providence in our history, in the facts of our nation this last week because we also had this confluence of rulers and marriage. There were civil magistrates in the city of San Francisco this last week that broke the law, decided to go ahead and marry homosexuals in spite of there being no legal provision for that and a ban of it at the state through state law.

And so we had this interesting confluence of rulers and marriage—so-called abomination of marriage with homosexuals being married by rulers in San Francisco. We live in the midst of times that are quite difficult in this regard.

Last night, CNN had a Valentine’s special on infidelity and how, you know, over half of men are adulterous and a third of the women now—the women are quickly becoming as adulterous as the men are, showing us once again that men lead. This is not a difference in sin, what people do. It’s a difference in leadership. And the women are catching on now to the sin of adultery that’s perpetrated by husband after husband in our day and age.

And there are actually books now, scholarly works out, saying that fidelity is no longer possible in our day and age.

Well, praise God for this community. The good news is that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the process of reconciling all things to himself and that part of that reconciliation is this beautiful reconciliation of the warfare between men and women that we saw as a result of the fall. In our sermon last week on deflection, the Lord God is in the process of reconciling men and women, husbands and wives. And I praise God that I worship and live in the context of a community here at Reformation Covenant Church in which faithfulness and monogamy are not unusual things, in which there’s no doubt about what the word of God says in terms of how we’re to go about conducting marriages and what they mean.

I think that we should be very grateful for what we have in the extended community here at RCC. The blessings—this is the blessing of Jesus Christ. The world round about us right now, the United States, Massachusetts, California, other events of this political season should, of course, remind us of the situation that exists when people without the grace of God go about their own way of determining how they’re going to run their lives.

And it’s pretty awful, pretty awful stuff. So praise God for the wondrous way he’s led us.

I want to talk today about husbands and wives. I think I mentioned last week that a man specifically asked me if I would preach a sermon on how husbands might make their wives more submissive. And so I thought that’s probably a good topic, probably a good topic for Valentine’s Day. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about from this text.

It’s very well known to us in Ephesians. It’s a very familiar text. In a minute we’ll look at the chiastic structure of this text that I found in a book I have on New Testament chiasms. I suppose there’s part of me—you know, now that we’re doing these topical sermons I know that some of you have thought we’ve left these structural analysis behind and I think some of you are pleased about that but we’re not leaving it quite far behind. I hope to get you to look at this particular analysis in a couple of minutes and see the usefulness of doing this kind of work, trying to see the way God wrote the text of scripture. It may give us a little bit of a new perspective on what is a very common text to us from Ephesians 5 about the relationship of men and women. That’s my hope today.

I wanted to mention by the way that last week I should have mentioned the Prayer of Confession. We’re now in a period of time using right now one that’s very familiar to us, the Mea Culpa—Prayer of Confession. In the Latin it’s “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” The English translation is “my fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault.” And that, of course, is at the heart of our message from last week on deflection.

One of the problems that we have in Christian marriage today is a failure of leadership of men. And so it’s important for all of us men and boys to drive into our hearts the need, when we pray this prayer every Sunday, to remember that we ask God to grant us the grace not to take a different stone during the week, to blame other people for our errors or sins.

I had a test in my Leviticus class last week and I was shocked to see that two of the young men in my class—and I will not tell anybody who they were, I don’t mean to embarrass them and it shouldn’t embarrass them. This is typical male stuff. I had this test and this one column most of the class got wrong. They didn’t do so. I taught it again today. I always take that as indication that my teaching isn’t good enough. If most of the class doesn’t get it, a few did get A’s, so they didn’t get it. But two boys wrote in this column, “My parents didn’t make me study this part of the table.”

Isn’t that funny? Again, I’m not—I don’t mean to make them feel bad, boys. You know, I don’t mean to do that. It’s just an illustration of what we’re all like. It’s what I’m like. It’s what we’re like in Adam. And it’s what God is transforming us away from.

And every time we hear this, we do this prayer the next few weeks or months—”my fault, my own fault, my most grievous fault”—that should remind us of our tendencies to deflection and reinvigorate us to try to move away from them.

Now, in this confluence of Valentine’s Day and President’s Day, we had Eli oversee the production of a Valentine’s dinner. I wasn’t able to attend, but I hear it was quite nice. I had a little sampling of the food in the afternoon. It was delicious. So I’m sure that part was wonderful and the music was wonderful. What a joy that not only do we have these marriages that are built on the word of God, but that our young people do what they can to encourage them by helping us to celebrate Valentine’s Day. That’s a wonderful thing, part of our Christian community for which we’re very grateful and pleased.

We hope that becomes a regular part of our end of winter festivities, the celebration of marriage, and that may grow and mature the way the other events we’re doing are growing and maturing. It’s a wonderful thing, and so I’m very pleased for that.

Today we want to talk about, you know, how to make a wife submissive. And I think the scriptures do tell us how to do that. It’ll take a little different turn. If you’ve glanced through the outline, you’ll see my take is a little bit different than what you might have expected. There are no clubs or trips to the elders involved in my outline. A little different tact is the normal tact for how we make our wives submissive or assist them in that. And we’ll go over that in just a couple of minutes.

But there are a couple of things that I want to say first leading into this.

We just sang, and Pastor Wilson put together why we were doing those songs today: the deep love of Christ, that Jesus is the fountain of all grace and blessing, that we want to grow in our understanding of Christ’s love and our demonstration of that love. All that’s linked, of course, to today’s sermon because the way ultimately that we assist one another in sanctification is ministering the love of the Lord Jesus Christ to one another.

Sometimes we can sing those songs, the deep love of Jesus, and kind of, you know, remove it from the connection of people that the scriptures I think put all those things into. So when we sing about the deep love of Christ we think about his love for us, but then we think about it as mediated through the people that God puts into our lives. And so the way that God, Jesus loves you, primarily if you’re a married person, is through your spouse.

And when you see your spouse loving you, this is evidence of Christ’s love for you. And so we assist each other in knowing the deep love of Christ. And apart from the love of Christ, we don’t have this kind of relationship one with the other.

So what I say today should not be seen in terms of kind of a legalistic, “oh let’s do this and then things will be better.” No, let’s appropriate the power and love of the Lord Jesus Christ. Recognize this is who we have been made in our new creation in Christ. This is who we are as new men and women. And let us learn that every time, you know, we turn against that in sin to repent quickly because of that and move ahead in blessing.

So Jesus Christ is the source. The gospel, which is proclaimed every Lord’s day, is, as I said earlier, that this love of Christ is flowing out into the world providing reconciliation of relationships. And that’s what’s at the heart of a successful Christian marriage—is just that.

Now I mentioned at the top of the outline, after this joy and community, understanding the will of the Lord, not your wife. I want to just mention briefly something here as we start off. Understanding the will of the Lord is, if you were listening, this is in the text leading up to the discussion about male and female roles. 1 Peter 3:7 is a commandment to husbands that we’re probably most of us are familiar with.

We’re supposed to live with our wives according to understanding and then acknowledging that she’s the joint heir of the gracious gift of life. And if we don’t do that, then our prayers are hindered. The scriptures say—I’ll come back to this in a couple of minutes—but frequently in my case over the years, I’ve thought that what that meant was you’re supposed to understand your wife. And there’s probably a connotation of that. There’s some things we understand. Does she like flowers? Does she like candy? Does she like going to a movie? Does she like going to dinner? I mean, there’s some things like that we can figure out.

But all too often, I think that text is understood in that way—that really the way to live with your wife successfully and to love her is to understand her fully. And I don’t think that’s what the text means. As I read most commentators this last few months ago as I was studying this text, nearly all of them that I found said that what it means is understanding your responsibility to your wife, not who she is, in understanding the deep truths of who your wife is.

Our wives are like us—you know, for the most part not understandable. We are complex creatures made in the image of God and we can’t figure ourselves out and we usually can’t figure our wives out. And if we think that’s what we’re supposed to be doing as husbands, we’re going to have a very frustrated life.

Solomon in Ecclesiastes 7:28 kind of hits the mark, and it’s a text that’s frequently misunderstood. And I want to just mention it in terms of this understanding. The text is usually—most translations say that Solomon says he was searching but not finding. “I found one man, one righteous or upright man among a thousand but not one woman among them all.”

And people normally take that to mean that Solomon, you know, whatever state he was in, only found one really good person out of who was a man and no women were any good. Well, what’s important to understand is that interpreters have done us a great disservice in inserting this word “righteous” or “upright.” It’s not in the text. People have put it in to think to give us a better understanding of how they interpret the verse. But that’s not what the verse said.

What the verse actually says is Solomon says, “I couldn’t find one man among a thousand. I found one man among a thousand and I found no women.” What does it mean? He couldn’t find them. He didn’t know where they were. No. The other thing you need to know about the verse is when it says “found out,” it means to discover, to know well.

And what Solomon seems to be telling us in Ecclesiastes, just before this he talks about how God has set eternity in the heart of man. And what he’s saying is, you know, I’ve known one guy pretty well. I figured out one guy out of the thousand guys I’ve known and tried to know—one of them I could kind of get a pretty good handle on and I couldn’t figure out any women at all in my life, you know.

So what we have to understand is that’s not our job to understand who our wives are, who our husbands are. You’re not normally going to have that knowledge. We’re made in the image of God. We’re complex. Solomon says that men are like vapor. Now, “vanity” is the word again translated. It means vapor or mist. Even the nature of men is mist-like. We can’t figure each other out for the most part. And it shouldn’t be what we’re taking up large parts of our time doing.

What we can understand—in terms of our wives or husbands or friends, boys and girls, same applies to you. You can’t figure your friends out. You don’t have to figure them out. What God wants you to understand is what the will of the Lord is for you relating to your friend, relating to your wife, relating to your husband. That we can figure out—that he’s given us in this text today and other texts as well.

So focal your energies in trying to build and mature your marriage on an attainable goal, which is not figuring out your wife. The attainable goal is figuring out our responsibilities to our wives. And for wives, it’s our responsibilities to our husbands. Children, same thing. Can’t figure out your parents. Believe they love you. Don’t doubt that. Satan wants you to doubt. Don’t doubt it. When the chastisements and difficulties come, don’t try to figure them out. Just understand what your responsibilities are to honor your parents.

Parents, the same with your children. I mean, you got to kind of understand them a little bit, but that’s not primarily what your job is.

I always love that movie Big Trouble in Little China. There’s a line in it where the guy says—he keeps—it’s about this kind of underworld Chinese mysticism kind of thing going on, and Kurt Russell keeps saying “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” And his buddy who helps him do the right thing says, “You’re not put on earth to get it. You’re just do your job. Take care of the evil. Try to snuff it out. Don’t try to understand it all.”

Well, that’s true here too as well as we try to think in terms of how to make our wives submissive. What we don’t want to do is try to figure them out in depth with complete knowledge. What we do want to do is understand what our responsibilities are in relationship to that.

Let me also mention that our concluding hymn of today will be essentially a wedding song. I think we did it at maybe Lana and Mike’s wedding—I think is where I first found the song. It’s going to be weird to sing a song, the last song that’s kind of like a wedding song, but understand we’re doing it today to focus again in on, you know, husband-wife relationships, what they are, and blessing the sentiment. The song has allusions to the wine and the garden and neat stuff in the song, and that’s why we’re singing it. I wanted to explain that.

Now, before we get to my little seven points here, again, I want to look at this text that I’ve given you on the back side of your outlines. So turn your outlines over and there should be a chiastic structure there of the text that is very familiar to us.

And this is not mine. I didn’t come up with this. I found this in a book—Chiasmus in the New Testament. Had it for a number of years by Nils W. Lund. I don’t know anything about him now. He monkeys with the text just a little bit in the last half. Okay. He omits a couple of phrases that are in our text and so I’m not sure that part is necessarily good.

But clearly, if you just look at this with me, you can see that this portion of scripture that he’s got put here begins with a statement to wives, right? About the need for wives to submit to their husbands. By the way, in the section there, you see where it says, “Wives unto your own husbands as unto the Lord.” You know, well, he left out a word. No, he didn’t. The word for “submit” isn’t in this verse. It’s implied. You have to get that verb by knowing the verb that was just used. And in Greek, that’s the way it works sometimes. So it’s not bad that we put it in the English translations, but literally it’s not in the text.

You have to go back to this “submitting to one another” that just preceded this. “Submit yourselves to one another in the fear of God. Wives to your own husbands.” You see, so it picks up the verb of submit. That’s important for something I want to talk about later—that connection. We only know about wives’ submission in relationship to the mutual submission that has just been enjoined to us in the previous verse.

But notice how nicely balanced this is. We have these wives at the beginning and the very last thing in the text in Ephesians 5:33 is “but the wife, that she fears her husband.” The numbers on the right are the verse numbers, okay, from Ephesians 5. So we’ve got wife commanded, wife commanded, and then after the command to the wife we then have an explanation in the B section—the top B section. Why should the wife submit to her husband? Well, there’s reasons given for that. And then in the inclusion, in the complementary B section, there’s an explanation of why the husband should love the wife.

So you’ve got the commands to wives and an explanation as to why the wife should be submitted, and an explanation as to why the husband should love the wife. So we have explanation sections moving in from the end points of this narrative. And then at the very heart of the section are two complementary C-sections, which are the commands of the husbands. You see that under C: “Husbands, love your wives even as Christ loved the church,” et cetera. And then the balancing section: “Even so ought husbands to love their own wives as their own bodies.”

So we clearly have very clear bookends of the command of the husband, command of the husband. And then at the middle of that is a discussion of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in reference to the church. The DEF section—this is a triplet right at the very heart of this text—is a triplet. You see how the word “that” is italicized in D, E, and D prime. “That he might sanctify it, but that he might present, but that it should be holy.” Those that are in the text are Greek words. And what it gives us is a triple action of the Lord Jesus Christ at the center of this text.

In discussing men and women, we come to the center of the text, a discussion of Christ in the church. And it is a triplet repeated for emphasis—that what he is doing with the church is purposive. It’s to a particular purpose that he loves the church. Very important for us.

And then at the very heart of that in the E section is another triplet: “that he might present to himself a glorious church not having spot, wrinkle, or any such thing,” et cetera. And the “any such thing” creates this another tripling up then spot, wrinkle, anything in the middle of this other tripled section. So it seems clear this guy—Lund—has got the center of the text with this great tripling up in a two-fold way describing the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and the church.

Now look at the B section and see how nicely it works out. And if you go home and you’ve got a word processor, cut and paste these few verses from Ephesians into the word processor. Try to break them up and you’ll see that he’s done nothing to get this arrangement. This is the arrangement of the text. And look how clean it is. “For the husband is the head”—at the end of that section—”to their husbands in everything.” You’re submitting to the husband. The husband is the head and he’s the head of the wife, balancing out. So the wives also, you see that. And then as you continue go in, “as Christ also is the head,” and corresponding to that is “subject to Christ.” And then going in from that, “of the church,” at the other side, “as the church”—at the very middle, “himself the savior of the body.”

Now that seems to be remarkably clear that portion, at least, of what he’s done here for us is correct. That after the wife is admonished to be in submission to her husband, the explanation for that draws us into a central point. And that central point is “himself the savior of the body.”

Now that seems to be to be remarkably clear. The biggest reason—see the value of this. Well, that’s interesting Dennis. What’s the value? Well, the value is that in the explanation to the wives, if you’re a woman here today and you’re either in a relationship now with a husband or will probably become one—understand that the command to you that you be submissive to your husband is rooted in something to do with Christ and the church.

And specifically, the center of that reason to you is that Christ is the savior of the body. Why do you submit to your husbands? Because you want to be saved. Because you want to be protected. Because the whole purpose of it is not somehow against your own self-interest. The entire purpose, the center of the explanation given to you to develop a submissive attitude toward your husband, a great desire to follow, the very purpose is centered upon the fact that that’s what’s good for you. He’s the guy that Jesus Christ is using to save you—save you from isolation, save you from economic difficulties, save you from temptations to sin, save you in the sense of sanctifying you.

Later, in the middle section, that’s the whole purpose—he’s sanctifying the church. Your husband, no matter what you might think about him, has been given you by Christ to save you. And salvation, you know, we always think of it in point-action terms: “saved from hell and that’s it.” No, it’s not. Jesus’s salvation is what’s being worked out in this church—having a rejoicing community of solid marriages. That’s salvation, folks. That’s not, you know, kind of related to salvation. That is salvation. We’re not, you know, people that are ultimately a ticket that’s punched to heaven or not. We’re ultimately people who live lives in the reality that God has given to us. And we are saved by being part of this community that rejoices and builds up Christian families and children and child rearing.

Well, that’s if you want to have that kind of pleasant life of salvation from all the effects of sin, women, then what you have to do is submit to your husbands. So you see, these structures help us to focus on particular points.

Notice, for instance, that there are three of these kind of central points given to us, right? The first one in the B section is that Jesus is the savior of the body. And the next one is down in the E section: “that he might present to himself a glorious church.” The end result of all this stuff is the glorious, the mature, the glorious church that Jesus presents to himself. And then at the bottom, in the concluding B section, what’s the center there? The center is cleaving to his wife. “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” The very center of the explanation of the man’s need to love his wife is a command ultimately that this is what men are supposed to do—is to cleave to their wife. Wives—men’s tendency is to not cleave to their wife in their fallen state.

So what do we have? The structure helps us to see that to the wife, the command to submit is premised upon the fact that this will be her salvation. And to the husband, the command to love his wife is specifically—what does it mean to love my wife? It means cleaving to her. It means recognizing the oneness of flesh that God has created between you and her, the oneness of personhood. Now you’re linked to your wife inescapably.

Now, so the center of the explanation to the man is this cleaving action that God has brought about in the marriage covenant. And the center of all of that is that the end result might be a glorious church without spot or wrinkle. What we do in our homes is directly related to how well we move in terms of the community of Christ, how well we are part of the Lord of Sabaoth’s hosts, the army of God—the church matured and brought without spot or wrinkle in relationship to the work that Jesus accomplishes in our homes.

So you see, these structures are not just interesting arcane things that you know, “what’s he talking about that big word again?” Don’t think like that. It’s an assistance. It’s a tool for you. And if I don’t use the tool correctly, okay, I’m sure I mess it up a lot. But see, take this home, husbands and wives. Read it over this week. Look at the structure. Meditate on it. Chew on it. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? Meditate on the word. One way to encourage meditation on the scriptures is to look at the structure in which they’re written, and they tell us some pretty interesting things—like what I just pointed out—these three central emphases as this text tells us what Christian marriage is all about.

So this is a structure that’s helpful, I think, to us. And it’s helpful because it gives us purpose statements. Again, for instance, in the middle sections, the CDEC section—the heart part of the husband’s loving his wife—is not well, is rather directly related to the purpose. The central part of that section on the husband’s love for his wife is that Jesus has died for his bride, his body, with a purpose in view. It’s, you know, the romantic ideal is just to die for your wife, and then whether she accepts or rejects, the big thing is that you’ve died. No, Jesus is dying for the bride with a goal, a purpose, which is at the center of that middle section: “that he might present the church to himself as glorious.”

There’s a purpose to it. Now that means that as husbands, if we’re going to love our wives, it’s to a particular purpose. And the purpose has to include an understanding of her sanctification, right? So these are—these are these are thematic truths in terms of how the Lord God has structured these texts that have great practical application for us, in taking a long string of texts that we kind of get lost in sometimes and we kind of remember “it’s related to Christ and the church and that’s about it.” But these structures help us to focus on particular pivot points as we work our way through it and draw connections that, you know, are obvious from some perspective but not obvious from another.

And so it helps us to kind of meditate on scripture and glean the meaning of what these things are to do. Okay, so that’s enough. But you can work on that this week in your homes. Talk with your wives about it. Think about it. Meditate on it.

Now let’s talk about my observations. I’ve kind of looked at the text a little bit and now we can make some observations on how to make our wives submissive.

**First, you assist your wife’s submission by being thankful for her.** This is right in the text. This is why I read the text leading up to the commandments of the wife and husband to in their relationship, right? That’s why I started in verse 14. You rise—what is resurrection life like in verse 14? It calls us to rise up. Resurrection life: “Awake from the sleep. Understand what the will of the Lord is.” And then it tells us then what the will of the Lord is. The will of the Lord in verse 18 is that we “speak to one another and as a result manifest the spirit to one another.” The centrality of language here.

And then verse 20 specifically: “giving thanks always for all things to God.” So this sounds simple and obvious and it is. But you know, the scriptures preach to our weakness. In Colossians 3:19, it exhorts us to love our wives and then says, “And don’t be embittered toward them.” God has called you to live in incredibly close association with someone that you don’t understand. And in all likelihood, you never will understand them. And the potential for becoming embittered about how they deal with things by just being a different person, number one, and then being a whole different sex, number two, that can lead to a degree of bitterness.

Husbands are tempted. Colossians 3:19 doesn’t connect this command to love our wives to not being embittered against them for no good reason. Adam was kind of bitter against Eve. That’s why he struck out with his tongue at her for what she did. He blamed her. She, the scriptures tell us, acted not, you know, in with moral turpitude. She acted—really she was misled, miguided. And so sometimes that’s what happens to our wives, and men tend to become embittered.

So the first way that this text leads up to our wives becoming submissive is it instructs us—it commands us—we’re to be thankful in all things, and certainly that means we should be thankful for our wives. Now most of the time, you know, that’s not difficult. Most of the time if we have our head screwed on straight, we know that our wives are probably the most important thing the Lord God has done to bless us. You see that over and over again at our anniversary times, men getting up and saying how the Lord God has used their wives in their sanctification.

But keep this with you in times of difficulty. When you’re tempted to start saying, “How can I make her more submissive?”—you know, when you start to take that—give thanks for her first of all. This is a great blessing from God to you. Do not allow yourself to be embittered by what she does. Be thankful for her. Be always thinking in terms of how wonderful she is.

Now, brothers and sisters, I know you’re going to go to the prayer meetings today and you’re going to say, “Help me not to fight with Johnny or Susie, and help me to be kinder in my speech.” Well, the same thing here. Don’t get upset with your brothers and sisters. When you start to get upset, stop. Pray to God. Give God thanks for brother and sister, right? You want brother or sister to be different in this way or that? Okay. Well, begin by giving thanks for them.

And husbands, learn to give thanks for your wives on a regular basis. That’s what the text tells us leading up to these commands.

**Secondly, you assist your wife’s submission by knowing what submission is and isn’t.** I remember when I first got kind of serious about the faith, I went to this conservative Baptist church out in Beaverton and the first guy I got to know was a deacon there and he had this wife who was the quietest person I think I’ve ever met in my life. I thought, “Yeah, that’s submission. Never says a thing. Smiles nicely all the time.” And that really, you know, young, stupid. That was kind of what I thought. “Oh, there’s the good submissive wife—never says anything.”

Well, that’s not what the scriptures say. I mean, some wives are like that, and that’s okay if they’re quiet. But the scriptures give us some models of what godly women are like. The scriptures talk about Sarah in First Peter 3. She’s the model to the wife of what it means to be submissive, right? Sarah—do you remember Sarah in the scriptures? Is she some blushing violet who always just salutes when the husband says something? No. No, she had many things to talk to Abraham about and she had many things she wasn’t happy with about the way things were coming down and she expressed them. She said, “Hey, you know, it’s bad that this Ishmael guy is living with us. This isn’t good.” And Abraham, well, you know, she’s not being very nice. She’s not being loving. You know, she’s not whatever.

And God says, “Hey, she’s right. Listen to Sarah. Listen to what your wife said. She’s right. You know, the truth is that, you know, it’s going to be through Isaac that your children will be bred. And so it’s important to establish the covenant line by getting Ishmael out of the picture of your home.” Sarah seemed to know all that already. See, God instructed Abraham to listen to his wife and to heed and to hearken to what she said. That’s good advice for us most of the time, man.

Sarah was not some kind of quiet person. That’s not what submission means. Clearly not. Sarah was somebody who did indeed obey her husband even though their situations were quite fearful when they went into Egypt, for instance, and that’s really pointed out in 1 Peter 3—that Sarah is obedient and not fearful. She’s not driven by fear but she’s a strong woman.

Proverbs 31, of course, the picture of the Proverbs woman. I’m going to start preaching a six-part series through Proverbs next Sunday and the sixth one will be on Proverbs 31. It’s this beautiful acrostic poem about the godly wife picture, probably of the church more than any one wife, but very clearly there the woman is no blushing violet. She’s a strong woman. And the woman is described in the Hebrew as a “giore hail”—a mighty woman of valor. “A good woman who can find one?” you think. Well, a nice quiet submissive wife who can find one? No, a valiant woman, a warrior woman, a jaw-headcrushing woman, a Deborah-leads-when-she-had-to kind of woman. These are all great women in the scriptures, and they’re all strong women.

So you got to, if you’re going to say, “How am I going to make my wife submissive?”—you got to understand what submission means and what it doesn’t mean in the scriptures.

On this part of your outline, I’ve given you a couple of definitions. This is from a book called Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. It’s a collection of essays. The definitions I’ve given you here are from John Piper. And let me just read them here and comment.

“At the heart of mature masculinity—so at the heart, in other words, this isn’t all that’s entailed in masculinity, but at the heart, this is what begins to work its way out to particular actions—is a sense of benevolent responsibility. It’s benevolent. It’s not like the Gentiles who lorded over people. It’s a benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for, and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships.”

So he’s brought this out. This has pertinence to all men, even if you’re married or not. What masculinity is—there’s a sense in which men lead the culture. And I hear this a lot—that women only have to submit to their own husbands. Well, that’s true in one sense, in the particular sense of that particular command. But there is a general submission of women in a culture to the leadership of men. That is also true. And I think this definition gets at that.

Now again, it’s easy to break this down. He has this responsibility to lead. That’s number one. That’s the whole idea with the arrangement of husbands and wives—is you got a leader and you got a follower. That’s what’s going on. Now the follower doesn’t just, you know, go, isn’t thoughtless or mindless or anything else. She’s counseling husband as he decides leadership, but he is always leading.

And then specifically his leadership in part consists of providing and protecting for her. We’ve talked about this many a time. The text in Ephesians says the same thing: “No man hates his own body but nourishes it and cherishes it.” What do we do? Nourish means to stiffen up by giving food to. So we love ourselves and the evidence of that is we feed ourselves and we cherish. The word means a mother hen or a mother bird protecting her chicks with her wings. We clothe ourselves. You don’t go outside when it’s, you know, 20 below without putting a hat and coat on. I mean, unless you know you—other things are going on in your life, but that’s what we do—we protect ourselves and we nurture ourselves.

And so those are the two jobs that Adam had for Eve: protect her and to nurture her, build her up, right? And so these are the jobs of men—to lead, to protect, and to provide for our wives in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationship. So, you know, when you’re in the workplace, your responsibility to the women is a little bit different—should be in a Christian business—than your responsibility to the male employees. There’s a leadership you provide for women and a nurturing and a guarding that goes along with that.

So, but really what I want to get at is Piper’s definition of submission. If you’re going to teach your wife or assist her in her submission, you got to know what it is. What is it?

“At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition. That, you know, Piper’s article is clearly cast in our modern day and age and he wants to avoid the idea that biblical requirements of submission are somehow restraining to women. They’re not. You’re freest when you accomplish the task that God has called you to do. It’s not freedom to do something you’re not cut out to do.”

That movie that George showed, Bruce Almighty—you know, when you try to take upon yourself the responsibilities of the world, that’s not a freeing disposition. It turned Jim Carrey into a slave. And when we try to do things we’re not cut out to do, that’s not freedom. That’s something else going on. It really produces slavery. So the scriptures say this is freedom: “Where the law of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

And so the liberty for women involved is involved in properly submitting.

“At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strengthen leadership from worthy man in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships. Excellent definition.”

I think I’ve used this before. This book came out probably 8, 9, 10 years ago, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Woman. This article is by John Piper. What is it then? Submission. It is a disposition to affirm leadership. It’s a desire to follow when the husband says we’re going this direction. It is not an overt obedience to everything that he commands you to do. You know, in the world, if you went home tonight and your husband said, “We’re going to watch the Playboy channel and I want you to sit here next to me,” you’re going to say, “No.” Your desire is to follow him, but it is not obedience to everything that husband wants you to do. It just is not that.

Now, some men think it is. And so they want to know, “How do I make my wife obey everything I do?” Well, you can’t, and you shouldn’t. Okay? You shouldn’t because her desire—she has a desire, properly understood—to affirm leadership, but it doesn’t mean she always obeys what you’re going to tell her to do. If it violates God’s law, she would be sinning before God to do it. You’re not somehow—you know—her god. You’re mediating the grace of God to her, but when you mediate curse to her, she’s not going to follow you.

So women have to understand that they’re, but having said that, the great desire on the part of biblical femininity, mature femininity, is you want to follow that husband. You want him to lead in a good direction. You have this disposition to affirm his leadership. Not only do you have a disposition to affirm it, but you have disposition to receive it. “Tell me what to do. Lead me, husband.” You see, that’s the disposition of proper biblical submission.

And then to actually nurture this strength on the part of our husbands. It sounds a little self-contradictory that you’re nurturing his leadership and his strength, but that’s what the scriptures say. Woman is given as a helper for a man. And so you are there to assist your husband in developing his leadership skills. If he doesn’t get it without you, if you need to be part of developing strength and leadership in him, well, according to Piper, that’s part of what the scriptures teach—is you’re supposed to indeed nurture your husband in that. It’s not your fault if he doesn’t lead. It’s his responsibility to stand up and lead. But you have this great role to play in nurturing and strengthening, nurturing rather, the strength and leadership of worthy men and specifically in our context to husbands.

So it’s this disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men and specifically in our context to husbands. Now that’s the goal. If you’re going to say, “How am I going to make my wife submissive?”—that’s the goal to which you’re moving.

**Third, you assist your wife’s submission by submitting to your wife in the fear of God.** Remember what I just said about the text, the outline that I gave you—how it leaves out the word “submit” in the very first commandment, “Wives be in subjection to your husbands,” because in the Greek text, it’s not there. You have to bring in that verb from the sentence that went before.

Now, what that does is it ties this section into that section. You see that? I mean, he could have repeated the verb “submit—Wives, submit to your husbands”—but he didn’t because he wants us to assume the verb and link this whole text back to the verse just before it. And the verse just before it says that understanding the will of the Lord is to “submit to one another in the fear of God.”

Not the Lord, but God. God is the all-powerful. The word God focuses on strength, sovereignty, that whole thing. And you should be properly fearful of God and as a result wanting to submit to one another in the fear of the Lord.

One of the most difficult things for children to learn is that they cannot figure out what they’re doing. They don’t know half the time. You and I don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t know ourselves. We need God speaking to us from somebody else to show us a better way to move ahead, to show us what sins were involved with.

If you want to know what you did in terms of deflection this past week, ask your wife. Ask your husband. Ask your parents. Ask your kids. God has built it to get away from this self-deception problem—that other people are around us. There is a mutual submission across gender, across sexual lines. Gender refers to language. Sexuality refers to human women and men. There is a mutual submission across sexual lines that undergirds the functional relationships we have of men and women.

You have to be able to follow the advice of your wife when she has solid advice from the Lord for you to properly lead her. And if you’re not doing that, then you’re not modeling submission to her. And she is going to pattern her life after your model and she will model that same lack of submission to you.

If you’re not properly submitting to civil authorities and if you’re grumpy and cranky about the officers of the church and you speak that stuff in the context of your home, or if you come home every night and say what a jerk the boss was, what you’re modeling to your wife is insubordination.

Now sometimes, you know, church, business, the state—clearly the people in San Francisco can do quite poor things, and there’s nothing wrong with being critical. But you see, if you have an attitude of failure to submit to the governing authorities in the state, the church, the business, then how do you expect your wife to do anything other than that? You model submission to your wife by properly submitting, even to her, in the context of your life. That undergirds everything else.

1 Peter 3:7, as I said earlier, says to live with your wives according to understanding of your responsibilities, understanding she’s the joint heir of the gift of life, lest your prayers be hindered. The Lord God of heaven will turn the skies brass over you if you do not honor your wife respectfully as a joint heir of the gift of life.

We come to this table. Your wife is part of who receives communion elements directly from the Lord, not through you. You cannot suspend your wife from the table. She’s a joint heir of the gift of life, no more than she could suspend you.

When we get to the table, everything’s leveled out in terms of our relationship to Christ. So if you don’t do that, if you don’t have a proper sense of submission to your sister in the Lord, right? Song of Solomon: “my spouse, my sister.” There’s this relationship that’s really almost more fundamental than your relationship of husband and wife. You’re married to your sister in the Lord. And if you’re not submissive to the sister in the Lord when she’s the voice of Christ speaking to you, then you know, your prayers will be hindered—if you’re not giving her that honor, that weight.

Prayers being hindered. So, “Oh well, okay, he’s not going to answer my prayers.” But, you know, if you look back to the skies becoming brass, it’s in two sections in the Old Testament. It’s the end of the law code in Deuteronomy 28, and it’s the end of the curse section of curses in Leviticus. It’s like the ultimate curse is for the heavens to become brass over you. It is part of the defeat that you’ll suffer at the hand of your enemies. It’s part of not being able to bring produce out of the ground to fulfill your requirements at work. And so when it’s wrapped up that if you don’t honor your wife by being properly submissive to her as a sister in the Lord, that your prayers will be hindered, it means everything you are will be hindered. Your job will go worse. Your civil responsibilities won’t work out. Things won’t work out at church. Everything goes sour.

I think is what that’s alluding back to—all the curses are rolled up in those prayers being hindered. So be properly fearful of God. That’s what the text says: “submitting to one another in the fear of God.” Understand that the Lord God brings temporal chastisements upon you if you don’t do that.

**Fourth, you assist your wife’s submission by recognizing that your wife’s submission is not primarily your responsibility, but hers.** Your role in this is derivative of your primary role to love her, right? How am I going to make my wife submissive? Not your job. God doesn’t say, “Husbands, make your wives submissive.” God says, “Wives submit to your husbands. Have differential attitude.” So now you do have some responsibilities. Your love for her is to be the same as the man that Jesus loved the church. You want to sanctify her and you want to assist her submission. But you see, I think it’s quite different thinking that way about it—that she’s a free moral agent in relationship to her walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.

And you know ultimately it’s her job, her responsibility whether she does that or not. You want to assist that but it’s not primarily your job. What you should be saying is, “Am I fulfilling my primary responsibility, which is loving her?” You see. And if you see lack of submission, that’s where you first want to go, right? “How am I loving her?”

So you understand that it’s not your primary—it’s not primarily your responsibility, but hers. And that’s in verse 22 of the text—she is commanded to do that.

**And then fifth, you assist your wife’s submission by loving her then and serving herself sacrificially.** If the whole group of texts here is creating this new man, you know, Ephesians is all about the sovereignty of God and then the new man—put off the old man, put on the new man, engage in proper speech and attitudes toward one another. And then it immediately starts to apply it at the most basic unit of culture, which is the family.

What we’re talking about here today has tremendous significance for our country. It begins to apply that work out, and in working it out, it gives the wives a command to be submissive and it gives you a command to love your wife. And so your primary responsibility is to love her and to self-sacrificially do so.

And what does that mean to self-sacrificially love her? That’s see—it’s based on what Jesus did for the church. And it means putting aside our agendas. You know, I used to—when I first became pastor, I used to get so ticked off. We’d have these discipline situations and you know, I just thought what a massive distraction from the ministry, which is studying the Bible and preaching. And then I real—wait, wait, whoa, that’s goofed up. That’s Greek thinking. People are the ministry, right? My job is to get together with you all when you want to and help encourage you and sometimes when you don’t want to and to encourage you in your walk. That’s not a distraction. That is the ministry.

Now you come home and you want your wife just to, you know, support you and she can go off to work tomorrow and do a good job and problems at home seem like a distraction from the ministry, right? “I’ve been called to enter into vocation. The wife has given me to help me do vocation. Why can’t she just be better off at it so I can do vocation? This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

No, it isn’t. I mean, it is what you’re doing 8 hours a day, but the other half of your waking hours is spent in the context of your home. And what you have to understand is that what you do in terms of your wife has a direct impact on how well you minister in the context of your job. So it’s not a distraction. It is your job to self-sacrificially love your wife.

And that doesn’t mean the eight hours you’re going off to work. Don’t say, “I gave up my life ’cause I’m going to work.” No, you have to work anyway. Otherwise, the Bible says you shouldn’t eat. If you’re an able-bodied man, you won’t work, you shouldn’t eat. So that’s nothing. That is not self-sacrificial labor for your wife going off for your job. That’s what you’re called to do.

What is it then? Well, it’s being willing to take the time in the evening instead of watching television or listening to music or whatever it is to input into the life of your wife, to talk to her, to date her, to take her on a Valentine’s Day thing every week. It’s to court her. It’s to assure her of your love for her.

You know, I mean, this is what women need—assurance on is that their husbands love them. And I know I’m preaching to the choir here. I know you all, most of you do very good job at this, better than me for the most part. But this is how you make your wife submissive. By loving her.

How did Jesus make us submissive? By coming and saying, “Come on, get it together right now”? No. He came and he died on the cross. He reminds us of that every time we come to the table. We come to the marriage supper of the lamb. And he reminds us that what he did was die for us. He gave his life self-sacrificially for us. And that’s what wins our submission ultimately.

Yeah, he commands us and there are commands we can legitimately give to our wives. And you know, if they’re really rebellious, certainly, you know, talking with the elders or getting counseling is important. All that stuff—I’m not saying any of that’s not true. But I’m saying that the primary way the savior produces submission in his bride is by telling us every Sunday, “I love you. I forgive you your sins. I’m going to sit and have a little talk with you every Sunday and I’m going to have a meal with you and remind you that I loved you and laid down my life for you.”

That’s what we do, right? We go to God’s house on Sunday and we come and we’re feeling guilty. We’re feeling insecure. Our wives are feeling insecure. They’re like the Song of Solomon says, insecure about relationship. And Jesus says, “It’s all right. I forgive you.” He wants us to be assured of that forgiveness that he has granted to us at the beginning of our time together.

And then he converses with us. He tells us about his word. Helps us to think about our lives in relationship to his word. He sanctifies us. And then he has a great time of joy with us. You know, it’s the same old stuff—glory, knowledge, life. Are you ministering those things to your wife? To do it means you got to put your own agendas on the side. You don’t take the boat out for the weekend or on Saturday. You stay home with your wife. You take her along. You see, you build in that oneness as a way of loving your wife self-sacrificially. That’s what Christ does for us. Ministers glory, knowledge, and life. And that’s what we should be doing for our wives.

**Six, you assist your wise submission by ministering God’s word.** At the heart of this whole discussion, as I pointed out in the text, is that Jesus does this for the purpose of cleansing us by the washing of the water of the word, right? So Jesus does what he does with us by means of his word. And so husbands can assist their wives’ submission by ministering the word of God to them.

Are you doing that? Are you sitting down regularly with your wife talking about your scripture, about the scripture? Are you ministering the word to her? I’m giving you something this week. You can do it. Take that outline. “Well, this is interesting. You know, what’s it make us think about? Let’s look at this over. Let’s look at the center points Dennis talked about. Minister the word to your wife and assure that salvation is the goal of her submission to you as Jesus Christ came to save the body.”

**Seventh, you assist your wife’s submission by being respectable.** That chiastic structure reminds us at the beginning of this section, “Wives submit to your husbands.” At the end of the section, “Even so, wives respect, fear, reverence”—different translations, different words—”their husbands.” The chiastic nature of that shows us that those are parallelisms, okay? It’s basically the flip coin of the same thing. It’s the same thing.

So we assist our wives’ submission to us by assisting their respecting of us. The Greek word means to worship, reverence, respect. Fear is like—it’s okay, but only if you think of it as the fearful kind of reverence for God that we have. And so what we want to do to assist our wives’ submission is to assist their respect for us. And the way we assist respect for us is by acting respectable.

We’re to honor our parents. Well, you know what? Some parents receive more honor than other parents. We should all honor our parents to some degree. But the degree of weight—which is what honor is—that you give to your parents will vary depending on how weighty they act or how light and foolish they act. Are they acting like chaff or rather acting like gold and silver? And depending on the answer to that, you’ll give them more honor or weight.

You know, we’re—I’m well, I won’t talk about it, but there are situations where you’ve got to figure out how do I honor this authority whether it’s in the church, state, family—and am I required to give the same amount of honor? You’re not.

Husbands, if you want to be honored and respected by your wives, then act respectably. Act in a weighty fashion. Do what you’re supposed to do. And when you do that, you’re going to increase your wives’ respect for you in all likelihood. And as a result of that, the Bible says that her submission will grow as well.

Now this is really nothing new. These are the same old truths, but they’re so important. They’re so important because our world is battering at the door of Christian marriage. The world is battering at the door of functional relationships where there is a requirement of submission and leadership. All that stuff’s being washed aside.

What can we do about it? What can we do about homosexual marriage? Not much in the big sense. But the small steps that we take in our homes—this is what builds the future. The future is not built primarily by ways of ideas, ideologies, or political action. The future is built by the small steps of obedience that we develop in our homes that then create the culture of the community that we exist in the context.

We can go a long way toward rolling back the demonic attack on marriage if we act in our marriages the way that Jesus Christ says we should in our homes. If we apply these simple steps of seeing this goal of submission and love before husband and wife, doing the simple things that are required from the text here, we understand that they produce tremendous results in the blessing of our community here, in the lives of our children, and in the life of our culture.

May God grant us the grace to indeed have as a goal increasing our wives’ submission and our own love. And may we go about doing it the way his scriptures tell us to do.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you, Father, for him giving us his leadership. We pray that for the men of the church particularly that as they come forward, they would recommit themselves, Lord God, to being good leaders in the home, loving their wives.

And may the wives submit themselves unto their husbands without fear, recognizing that your hand is upon them for good and not evil. Help them to see, Lord God, that at the heart of the command to be submissive is the knowledge that indeed through a proper biblical submission their lives are saved. Help us, Father, to rejoice in this today. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.