Dennis Tuuri

Today’s sermon text is found in the book of Colossians. We’re going through the book of Colossians in our preaching and just a minute. I will locate the text. My notes seem a bit akimbo. Okay, here we go. So, Colossians 3:18 and 19. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

An amazing text as we shall talk about. Colossians 3:18-19. “Wives, submit to your own husbands as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them.”

Let’s pray. We thank you, Lord God, for the gospel truth that is at the heart of this text. And we thank you for the gospel power that changes our cultures and cultures of fallen men. We thank you for this text that gives us such simple, direct commands to us and such profound teaching on the role of men and women in the context of marriage. We pray you would bless us Lord God by your Holy Spirit that you might transform our hearts by your word and that spirit Lord God may write the words of this text upon our hearts that we may be changed by them both convicted of our own sinful shortcomings in terms of these texts and also empowered for new obedience in Jesus name we pray.

Amen. Please be seated.

The gospel really is everything. And the text that we just read is a gospel text. The gospel is the good news of the ascension of the Savior King to the throne to the right hand of the Father. It is certainly personal salvation. But what does that mean? Personal salvation. That just means our sins are forgiven and then we get to go to heaven. No, it means that the world is transformed by the death, the resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ.

You know, we read in Romans that the gospel is the power of God for salvation. And that word power is dynamis. It’s the root word of course of our word dynamite. The gospel is the dynamite or in today’s language the H-bomb. It is the detonating device of tremendous power and ability both to destroy wicked foundations and also having the power to reform and rebuild proper foundations. Now dynamite’s a tricky thing.

If you’re going to use dynamite in terms of demolishing a building so that you can rebuild, you want to place the charges correctly. There may be parts of the structure or building you’re going to bring down you want to keep up. So you have to be careful with dynamite where you place the charges. That is true of this text. This text is dynamite into the context of the kind of egalitarian movement that is going on in our post-Christian country.

There are things that the post-Christian culture has to challenge us with that we need to hear. But there is much of the post-Christian culture in terms of the roles of men and women in marriage particularly that are also things that we must not be influenced by. How do you figure those things out? Well, this text are gospel charges laid to the root of some of the bad foundations in this country that have been laid by those apart from the Lord Jesus Christ.

But I have to be careful with this text to not blow up the wrong things. To just continue to stretch the metaphor, this text was gospel dynamite thrown into the Hellenistic and Jewish cultures in which the first century church found itself. Paul writes to a church and while that church in Colossae is primarily consisting of gentile converts, there are also Jewish elements within it and they’re being affected by Judaism, a kind of a twisting and a perversion of what the Old Testament taught about what Judaism should have been about and instead a rejection of Messiah and a twisting of things.

Now whether it was raw pagan cultures or whether it was the Hellenistic culture that primarily dominated Colossae or whether it was the twisted Judaism practiced at the time, the one thing that all three of those cultures had in common was a completely twisted fallen view of men and women.

There were various household codes produced by Hellenistic culture of this time. And these were codes that said, “Well, this is how the family should work.” The family was the root of Rome. You may not remember that, but the family was originally a big deal in Rome. And so, these household codes were significant. And this piece of text that we’re entering into today, these next, you know, nine or ten verses, they are what some people call the household code of the New Testament.

So, Paul is writing here using a literary device that was common in its time among the Roman culture, but he is blowing it sky high. And we’ll talk in just a couple of minutes about some of the major differences between that and the Hellenistic culture. So, what this text is saying is: you Jews who have twisted the scriptures have got it all wrong in terms of men and women. You Hellenistic cultural people, you’ve got it all wrong. And you pagan people, you’ve got it all wrong. And let me tell you what these roles should look like.

Now, is there anything more fundamental to building a Christian culture or any culture than the family? Probably not. I mean, the church is certainly significant, but the family, that’s what creates culture and changes it, etc. And so, right at the base of pagan, the twisted Judaistic, and Hellenistic culture, Paul places this dynamite charge and lights it and it blows it up.

Now, he doesn’t blow up all order in the house. He gives us a new set of commands about how the houses should be ordered. Now, significantly, all three of the twisted Judaism, the Hellenistic, and the pagan cultures were all reflecting the postfall condition of men and women. Adam blamed his wife and we see what kind of tyranny resulted fairly immediately as the Bible treats us with the story of Lamech with multiple wives.

The first multiple wife guy and he is a brute of a man. He says, “If the Vlad insults me, I’ll kill him.” And he tells his wives this. He is a tyrant of a husband. And that’s the postfall condition. Women don’t want to submit to the rule of the husband. Your desire will be to conquer your husband. The same way that sin crouches at the door of us and desire to overcome us. Fallen women are like that.

And fallen men try to exercise dominion through brute force and power and through tyranny. So all these cultures really had a common theme throughout them and that was the tyranny of men, the subjugation of women and actually treating women as almost a different species. Okay, because of the power of men, their physical strength, domineering tyranny was what resulted long-term in post-Christian cultures as well eventually.

So that’s what Paul was addressing here. Okay. And that’s the given condition. That’s the given condition. Women are subjugated by men. Now women, you know, they get their own thing going too, right? So one of the Caesar’s wife was a source—or a poisoner rather. So you know if people have a drive to power, they’re going to find ways to do it. But primarily what happens in pagan cultures, the Hellenistic culture and in twisted Judaism is the husband gets all the legal rights and the wives have none.

Okay. So, this text is important. We’re going to talk about four particular words in this text: submit. What does it mean? Fitting, love, the responsibility of the husband, and bitter. He’s not supposed to be bitter. And so, let me but before we do that, I want to say four—nay five—huge differences between what the Bible teaches and what these other cultures teach. Okay? Distinguishing elements from the get-go.

Number one, the wife is told to submit, not to obey. This is huge. Now, in the very next verse, next section, he says, “Children, obey your parents.” And then he says, “Servants, obey your masters.” He knows the word obey. He deliberately does not use the word obey. He uses a different word that empowers the woman. So, she’s no longer treated like a child or a servant. It doesn’t say obey. Neither does it say obey in Ephesians.

This is very significant because all the household codes and twisted Judaism and pagan cultures, they said, “Dog gone, the wife better obey her husband. That’s it. That’s what it is in fallen man’s world.” Okay? And he threw this dynamite charge and says, “No, now this has tremendous significance that’s still being worked out in the context of the Christian church. Some of you know that there’s been a bit of a dust up or was a little while back about the vows of wives in wedding ceremonies.

And you know, it seemed to be implied by a prominent figure that if the word obey is not in the vows of the wife, then it’s really not a Christian marriage. And another man, Tim Bailey, in a public blog said that denominations should say that any marriages performed that don’t have the word obey in the wife’s vows, the denomination should say they are not valid Christian marriages. I’m not kidding you.

That’s what this man said. Now, I don’t get it. I don’t understand that because as I say, Paul could have said obey. He didn’t say obey. The word obedience is used once in reference to Sarah to her husband Abraham. Okay? But it’s not a command there. It doesn’t say that she obeyed him in everything. It seems to be pointing to a particular situation when her submissive desire to be led by her husband resulted in her doing what her husband wanted her to do.

That’s a different thing than saying that the wife’s role is always obedience. Okay. So, first of all, major difference: submit is used not obey. You just cannot forget that. Husbands and wives understand this. Okay? It’s significant.

Secondly, there are reciprocal obligations and in two ways. One, in Ephesians 5:21, as he’s about to tell the wives to be submissive. What does he say in the context of the church? “Be submissive to each other. Submit to one another.” Now, the husband and wife are members of the church. And so, as church members in some sense, they are to be mutually submissive. The mutual submission that goes on in the church doesn’t differ man to man, man to woman to man, whatever. It’s a generalized condition that in this church there’s to be a mutual submission to each other. That means that women have just as much value to bring to a conversation about the church as the men do.

And it means that when women bring good ideas, we’re supposed to say that’s great. You know, marriage is given for completion, right? I mean, most men and women are not complete without their wedding partner, and they’re not going to reach the levels of sanctification and growth that they would with the other person. We don’t have someone just to serve our interests. We have someone that’s going to change our interests. It’s going to change who we are and we them. It’s completion. It’s fulfillment. And so, it’s sanctification.

Marriage isn’t primarily for happiness. Marriage is for holiness. And it’s to make both parties more holy. And they only get more holy if they have a working relationship where mutual submission is a significant part of it where they listen to each other. Talk to each other about their sins and their shortcomings as well as their encouragements. Right? So, there’s a mutual submission to the household codes introduced in Ephesians at least member to member that informs this idea of submission wife to husband. Okay, so at one level wives and husbands are brothers and sisters in the Lord, right? They’re best friends.

What do friends do? Friends talk to each other, challenge each other. Iron sharpens iron. That’s what friends do to each other. Husband and wife are best friends usually, hopefully. And that means there should be some iron sharpening iron going on there. Okay. So this idea that women are supposed to be quiet and obedient and not discuss things with their husband is just way out of whack, I think, with the whole teaching of God’s family code, household code. Okay?

So there’s mutual obligation. Thirdly, there’s a reciprocal mutual obligation in terms of what these verses say. In other words, I’m saying this—it doesn’t just say the wife has to do this, this, and this and obey, and then the husband can do whatever he wants. The husband is given mutual obligations. The husband has a requirement not to rule, not to exert headship, not to be the covenantal head. That’s not the command here in Colossians. It doesn’t say rule your home. It doesn’t say rule your wife. What does it say? The command is love your wife. But it’s a mutually—see just the fact that there is a command makes it a mutually reciprocal relationship which is unlike the house codes of the three groups that I mentioned previously of fallen men.

There’s a mutual reciprocal obligation relationship and responsibilities. And not only is there a mutual reciprocal obligation, but the man’s side of this contains a negative. It contains a command about what not to do. The wife is told simply submit to your house. This is fitting in the Lord to your husband. This is fitting in the Lord. A husband say love your wife. And it goes on to say don’t be bitter against her.

So there’s a negative command to him. The onus as it were, the one prohibition in terms of husband wife relationships in this simplified household code is given to the husband. Okay that’s very significant. There’s a restraint on husbands: do not. This is completely unlike these other household codes that I’ve been referring to.

And then five—the most important thing. So I’ve given you four differences and the most important thing is given to us in the instruction to the wife: do this as is fitting in the Lord. As is fitting it—kind of—is past tense fitting in the Lord. Now that makes all the difference in the world. You see, because the Hellenistic code really, this is what’s fitting in Augustus Caesar’s mind or in Caesar’s mind. That’s what Judaism—they really didn’t want Yahweh. “We will not have this man to rule over us, King Jesus. No, some other king is what they wanted. A king like the nations round about them.” And pagan man has no concept of this at all.

So the thing that makes all the difference between the kinds of household codes of fallen man and the household code of the Bible is the household code—not just the wife’s thing but the whole thing—could be said to be fitting in the Lord. In other words, our obligations are hedged about by what is fitting in the Lord. Submitting doesn’t involve doing things the Lord wouldn’t approve of.

And the command to submit and to love and to obey and to treat your kids right, etc. All these things are proper and fitting because we all serve. What did we read about last week at the end of this little section? We all have a lord in heaven, right? Chapter 4 verse 1 of Colossians, masters finally addressed: “You know, treat them right because you too have a master in heaven.” But it’s the same word kyrios that’s used seven times in this section. There’s a completion. There’s a seven—this number of completeness—sevenfold.

God is Lord. And because God is Lord, we have a completely different way of doing marriage relationships in the life of those who are disciples of the Lord than those who do not acknowledge him as Lord. And the change couldn’t be greater, could it? Think of the sort of world, you know, where husbands are domineering, get to have all the sex they want in the Roman culture, and the wife is, you know, not that she should want that, but, you know, he can do whatever he wants.

The wife really in Roman culture at times were almost like the wives in Islamic cultures. They had to be kept out of sight. They had their own place to be. They didn’t want to be around other men. They had to do whatever the husband told them to do. They were really property. And in fact, they were actually referred to as property. So, so look, this is gospel folks. This is gospel.

The result of the fall was twisted marriages and the horrors that come along with that and the psychological breakdown that comes along with that and the twisting of culture that comes along with that—that’s sin. That’s the results of sin. And over here this side of the instruction to seek the things that are above which is to say to seek Jesus, the ascension of Jesus Christ, the good news that Jesus has paid the price for our sins and he’s ascended to the right hand of the Father. He’s not just savior, he’s lord. He’s king. And the good news is that part as well.

And that good news says, you know what? It’s not going to be that horrible thing anymore. I’m putting an end to those kind of relationships. And I’m building these kind of relationships. And is there a more blessed place than when husbands love their wives and wives follow the lead of their husbands and children obey their parents and dads don’t give their children reasons not to obey by frustrating them? Is a more blessed state than that.

I know it’s hard to reach. Our sinful natures don’t want to do that really. But I’m telling you, this is a gospel text. This is good, good news. What God has accomplished through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ as it is applied now in the context of the practical application of the family, the basic building block of a culture. All right. The great reversal has happened. The gospel has changed everything and the gospel has changed the way families work and the ascension life that’s given to us in that gospel is reflected for us here in the kind of relationships we have.

All right, let’s talk about the words. First word, probably the most difficult word: submit. In our teen Sunday school class today, I was sort of asking for other words. You know, here’s the problem. So we talk about submission and in our culture one of the things I you think about if you listen to the news much are the submission holds that police place on supposed lawbreakers. That’s the view of submission. And so submit has this connotation of some kind of servile obedience of a second-class sort of entity.

Now the gospel says there is neither man nor woman in terms of relationship to God. They’re joint heirs of the gracious gift of life, right? Complete equality. I mean, the Hellenistic world didn’t think that. I mean, philosophically, they thought that women were inferior people. They were kind of a different species and they weren’t as good as men. And there’s no hint of that in the Bible. Just the opposite. So, so we don’t want maybe there should be different word than submit, right? Or maybe we should reclaim the word. There’s always that. And sometimes it’s hard to tell what to do. But don’t think I’m messing with the text of scripture.

The Greek word is hypotasso. It means to stay in order. It had military implications, right? And by the way, right from the get-go, how does that make you feel? Military implications, right? So maybe that makes you feel like the wife just has to, you know, salute the husband and that’s that. Or maybe it makes you feel like, oh, that’s encouraging because that guy, if you served in the service that I used to salute, he was the dumbest guy on the block. And so, you know, maybe it affirms the fact that submission really isn’t about innate qualities of the people, right?

Nothing in the Bible says men are smarter than women or that the husband’s going to be smarter than the wife. And I’d say probably 50% of the time the wife’s smarter. What’s wrong with that? That’s a good thing, right? If your helpmate’s smarter, I think it’s a good thing.

So, but see what are the implications? So, we translate a word into English in a way that the culture will understand. And if submit comes to the place where all people think about is something other than what the Bible is teaching, and we probably want to use a different word. I don’t know what it might be. I was watching last night on YouTube a woman doing a YouTube video. She was in her car. She had a little two-year-old in the car seat behind her, and she’s talking about why she thinks it’s a good thing to be submissive to your husband. And she used the synonym of support—to support your husband.

In class today, one of the young women was saying that, you know, it’s to support a husband and also not to tear him down, to be submissive. Okay, so there’s lots of ways we could talk about this. And you know, we could spend weeks talking about submission, but support I thought wasn’t bad. By the way, that mom in the car, it was really endearing. Here she is, a young Christian mom, talking about biblical marriage and this two-year-old’s in the back seat and without even skipping a beat the way moms do. She obviously has looked in the mirror and she says to her two-year-old, “Stop picking your nose” and goes on, “Take your finger out of your nose.” Starts teaching again about it. It was just, you know, I don’t know if you moms realize you know how endearing that kind of thing is.

But so submit. Now God is a God of order. In 1 Corinthians 14:40, we’re told that all things are to be done decently and in order. And so submission seems to have reference to an order that God has created. And that order of course is the order of the original creation account as well. In Romans 13, we read that let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. So that word subject is the same word submit. So we’re all supposed to be submitting to governing authorities. And the reason for this God says is there’s no authority but such has been ordained by God.

Now that we struggle with that when we have a president that we might not agree with everything that he’s doing or even nearly anything that he’s doing, we struggle with that, but that’s what the Bible says. There’s no authority that exists without God’s ordination of it somehow. And so, we’re supposed to be submissive to a president that we completely disagree with. That doesn’t mean obey, right? We’d have trouble if that was it. But the point is there’s these broad cultural sort of statements about submission that help us to understand the kind of thing that’s going on in the submission of wives and husbands and what it means is just like in the civil magistrate it says that these men are appointed by God so be submissive.

Okay. And so when you find yourself in a marriage and you know at least in this country that’s because you chose to do that. Some countries have arranged marriages. That’s not the case here. So you chose this person and there you are. And what you have to do when troubles happen in marriage to maintain a properly biblical relationship to your husband, or for the husband to be properly loving of his wife, what you have to do is to rely on this truth that there are no authorities that exist but such as are appointed by God.

God has appointed this as your wife. God has appointed this as your husband. And until biblical grounds for divorce have been met or happened, that’s where you’re at. And so 1 Peter 3 talking about the submission of servants to masters and to civil authorities and then husbands or wives to husbands. You know ultimately the example is given of Jesus who submitted like a lamb to the slaughter. And it doesn’t say he did that you know fatalistically. It doesn’t say he really was submitting to the people that put him on the cross.

It says he was submitting and trusting himself to the Father who judges righteously. So the basis for trusting in a relationship, supporting a husband, not undermining a husband in whatever way you can, the basis for that is not the husband’s actions, not the circumstances you find yourself in. He can do things that make it easier or harder for you, of course, but ultimately your relationship to your husband of submitting, if we want to use that word, support, whatever it is, that’s got to be rooted in this verse from Romans 13 that there no authorities exist except that have been ordained by God.

So there you go. That’s the order in the family. And those are some of the implications of submission. Now by the way it goes on in Romans to say therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. So there’s a warning about not doing these things. Okay? And there’s a warning in each of these obligations: wives, husbands, children, parents, servants, masters. We should understand the warning.

Jesus was a submissive guy. Now, we all know, yeah, Jesus the son was submissive to the Father. Don’t blow by that. That’s truth. That’s a great truth. That is a gospel truth. That is an empowering truth for anyone who’s called to exist in a submissive relationship. And we all are. Not just wives, congregants to pastors, people to their governments, a servant or a guy at work to his master. We’re all in submission to various ways. We’re all submissive to each other here, right? Mutually submissive.

And what the Bible tells us here is that Jesus submits to the Father. The Father sent the Son. The Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit. The Spirit or the Son doesn’t send the Father. Okay? Because the Son is eternally submissive to the Father. Okay. He does the Father’s will. Does it make him less of a person? No. He is co-equal with Father and Holy Spirit. He has all the glory, all the power. Right? But the function is different. The function means that I shouldn’t feel like I’m disempowered because I got to submit to the local sheriff. No. Okay.

So, we can’t blow by Jesus’s submission as a model for every one of us, including wives. You inhabit the ascended Christ’s role of submission to the Father when you obey this command to submit to your husband. Okay? You inhabit Christ’s role. You’re being Christlike. You’re not being enslaved to the Lord who represents Christ and you don’t. You’re both representing Christ. Okay? But not only this, Jesus was actually submissive to people. In Luke 2:51, we read when Jesus was a child, he went down with him, came to Nazareth and was subject—same word, submissive—to them. But his mother kept all these things in her heart. There’s a pondering of this great mystery.

But Jesus was submissive to his parents. The Lord God, the second person of the Trinity, was submissive not just to his heavenly Father, he was submissive to his mommy. Okay? To his mother. Jesus. Okay? So, so don’t get the idea here that submission is somehow denigrating. It’s filling a role and it’s filling a role in the order of God that God says leads to flourishing goodness. You’ll be most content when you’re doing what God wants you to do. When you’re coloring outside the lines, it’s not much fun out there. Might be till you start, you know, trying to figure out what it is. So, when we play by the rule book, right, that’s not a restriction on us. That is a liberation of us, my friends.

The law of God is liberating. It tells us here’s the way. Walk in it. There’s going to be joy and fulfillment in this path. And when we reject the law of God and his precepts for how houses are to be organized, we move over into an area of sin. And sin is always enslaving. Sin always enslaves us because that’s not what God wants us to do. So submission is certainly a liberating concept that our Savior is the ultimate picture of.

Now I wanted to quote from Barth here. Boy, pastor’s quoting from Karl Barth. Well you know he had some good commentaries that he wrote actually and he said this. He said that submission is the free act of acknowledging the order which is established through the word of God in Jesus Christ. That’s a good definition. Okay? And it’s a free act. He says it’s a willful act. It’s not some kind of slavish thing. Paul by telling wives to do this is acknowledging that they might not. He’s appealing to their volition, to their free will, we could say, in the proper sense of the term, not the Arminian sense of the term.

He’s appealing to them to engage in a free act of acknowledging the order that God has created by his word. And as I said, this exhortation to submission is balanced with the instructions to the husbands to love their wives.

So let’s see another way to put this submission. It is a willingness to yield though fully equal and often times as I said earlier more intelligent, more spiritual than the husband. Okay. But in spite of those differences, it is a willingness to yield to the direction of the husband. Okay. Now, now there’s lots of things that go into that. But what’s the context for this is the mutual submission that’s already going on in the relationship of brother and sister, friends, best friends, husbands, and wives. So what’s being envisioned here is not a deal where the husband makes all the decisions, doesn’t get any input from the wife and she just submits by. No, that’s not biblical submission.

Biblical submission begins with a mutuality, discussion, contests or not contests, arguing, considerations of truths, my view, your view. And at the end of the day, somebody’s got to break the tie. Now, now look, if you’re a husband and you hear that your wife is supposed to be submitting to you, what that does not mean is that you break the tie by deciding in your favor. Wife says A, husband says B. Right? Now, how are they going to break the tie? Well, they can come up with C. That’s the normal way. 99 times out of a 100, right? You married men and women, that’s the way it works. A, B, and you come up with C, an alternative. And the alternative is better. Why? Because that’s the purpose of marriage. It’s mutuality. It’s completion. You’re going to do better stuff together as a couple than you would do individually.

So, usually it’s a C. But if it’s not a C and you have to go either A or B, the husband, I think, is the decider as George Bush would have called it. But that doesn’t mean the husband decides on B all the time. Sometimes the husband decides on A, what the wife says, right? Why would he always decide on what he said? That’d be goofy, wouldn’t it? I think that’s a strange view of submission and leadership.

I mean, I don’t think my ideas are consistently righter than my wife’s when we disagree. And there’s no giving up of headship. There’s no failure of submission if the husband decides that the wife’s way will prevail and not his. All he’s got to do is break the tie. He doesn’t have to cast the vote for his idea all the time. Okay? You know, there’s a beautiful example of this submission. Do I even raise this topic?

The Super Bowl. If you happen to watch it, DVRed it, whatever you did, or maybe you just read about it. It’s a beautiful example. Now, okay, so I’m going to talk about men here, and I’m not telling you I know anybody involved in this, and this may just be—it’s like watching a movie, right? When you watch something like this, because you don’t know these people. You don’t know why they’re saying what they’re saying.

But we had a team, the Broncos, with a player, right, Peyton Manning, who several games before the Super Bowl understood that his part on the team, the role he was supposed to play was to not mess up, to not be the guy he had been for most of his career, to take on a different role, the kind of passes and things he would engage in and do. He had to do that because he really needed his defense to win the game.

So, Manning is a picture of submission. He’s not a weak guy. He’s a powerful guy, but he’s submits to the coach and he submits to the vision of the guy that’s laying out the mission that he is on. Submission to. Submission means you got two people in one mission. Okay? You don’t have two different missions going on. So Peyton Manning is submissive to the coach. Okay? And he plays a game just like he had to. Not flourishing, not going to be the MVP, right? But he’s doing it for the team. He’s doing it.

And what happens? The team wins. And Peyton Manning because of his humility. That’s what submission requires. Because of his humility and because of the sound leadership of the coach, they win the Super Bowl and everything’s great. And maybe Manning retires, maybe he doesn’t, I don’t know. But if he retires, he goes out as a Super Bowl winner. But you can talk about the other quarterback maybe not being so humble, but I don’t want to get into that. I don’t know the guy. But it just from watching what happened afterwards, I’m like, boy, it was a nice morality play given to us, and the humble guy seemed to be the one that God rewarded.

So submission is kind of like that. It’s playing a role in the team. You know, it’s not what both these things say. Submission on the part of the wife, love on the part of the husband, is they’re both living for each other. And beyond that, they’re both living for Jesus, right? I know it’s simple, but the old acronym: Jesus, right? Jesus, others, yourself. That’s the way it works. The husband and wife are not trying to please each other. They’re trying to please Jesus. They’re on a mission. They’re on a mission together to serve Jesus.

And then within the context of that mission, Jesus says, “Think of your wife, husbands, love her.” And he tells the wife, “Think of your husband, wife, not yourself. Think of him, submit to him, support him, try to, you know, not tear him down and try to build him up because that’ll be good for you and it’ll be good for the mission. It’s not just a matter of the two of you.” That’s what these roles are all about: putting Jesus his mission first. Both parties being in submission to the mission that they both are on together, working through things, each of them looking for the well-being of the other rather than serving their own interests.

All right. We’re going to stop there for today and either next Sunday if Gordon needs to stay for his mom’s funeral or the following Sunday I’ll be bringing a message on the rest of this. This is all fitting in the Lord. I’ve talked about that. But husbands, what does it mean to love your wives and what does it mean particularly, I want to spend a lot of time on this. What does it mean to not be bitter against them? Very important.

All right. So, let’s praise God. Bless his holy name for the good gift he’s given to us of renewed, restored new creation, ascended marital relationships. Okay, let’s pray.

Father, we do thank you for marriage. We thank you for the wonderful aspect it has in building the culture. How necessary it is to create, to complete rather, the dominion mandate to beautify the world to bring it to its development. Thank you Father for revealing this tremendous negative effects of sin in these Hellenistic twisted Judaistic and pagan cultures of domination of one sex by another to show us the depth of our depravity that we enter into. And then the great blessing, the great truth of the salvation you’ve brought to us in Christ.

And thank you, Father, that you’ve created with this hand grenade, this dynamite, you’ve blown up old foundations to lay new ones. Bless us, Lord God, in our homes. Help us this week as husbands and wives particularly that are here to inhabit these roles in the ascended Christ to do all things in the name in relationship to the revelation of the Lord Jesus in his name. In Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen.