Divinely Ordered, Spirit Empowered Marriage | Ephesians 5:21-24
Divinely Ordered, Spirit Empowered Marriage
Please look with me in Scripture at Ephesians chapter 5 verses 21 to 24.
In chapter 3, Paul prayed that the Ephesians would be strengthened with power through his Spirit in their inner being. Then in chapter 4 he exhorted them to live in unity, and to put off the old self and put on the new self. Being kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving. Then in chapter 5 he charged them, and us, to be imitators of God, walking in love, walking in the light and not in darkness, making the best use of the time. And today we will begin over the next 4 weeks to see how God’s loving care is given to us in divinely ordered spirit-empowered relationships.
Please stand to show our respect to God’s word as I read these words of instruction from Ephesians 5, and to provide the context I’m going to begin with verse 18.
“And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.”
Marital conflict. Household chores. The thermostat. Communication. (Why is it that introverts always marry extroverts?) Why do you always leave the lights on? Do you even know where the clothes hamper is? The baby is crying, are you getting up? And then there are the big four. Parenting. Finances. Sex. In-laws.
There is no lack for potential conflict in the relationship between husband and wife. Perhaps as I made that very brief list of possibilities, some of your personal favorites that you and your spouse like to “discuss” came to mind. Every day we are faced with navigating the inevitable conflicts with the one that we are closest to, our husband or our wife. How do we reconcile our wants, needs, and desires with the wants, needs, and desires of someone else who may not see things exactly as we do, or even want the same things that we do.
How do we walk our way through the minefield that marriage could be, but by God’s mercy, grace, and empowering spirit doesn’t have to be? And how do we live at peace in our other relationships as well?
In Ephesians 5:21-6:9, God, in his kindness, gives us the answer. He gives us a roadmap to guide us and to help us navigate our way with peace, and joy, and love. He provides us with what we need for our good and for his glory in the important relationships of husband to wife, parents to children, and masters to bondservants.
But before Paul gets to the specifics of each of these relationships, in verse 21 he provides us with a summary statement that acts as an umbrella over all of them. There we read, “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
Beginning with verse 18, Paul commands us to be filled with the Spirit, and he gives four ways in which that is expressed. First, by addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Second, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart. Third, giving thanks always and for everything. And fourth, submitting to one another. All four of these are a result of being filled with the Spirit, and all four are empowered by the Spirit.
ALL CHRISTIANS ARE CALLED TO SUBMIT
So in verse 21 we see that all Christians are called to submit. This verse is a general heading urging Spirit-filled believers to be submissive or subordinate. We should not mistakenly believe that submission in the Christian life is only for wives. We should not think that submission is something uniquely feminine. In fact, every Christian is called to submit, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to the authorities in their lives.
The word submission in verse 21 literally means to ‘arrange under.’ It means to make oneself subordinate to the authority of a higher power…to yield to rulership. There is a significant idea of order to the word. It describes the submission of someone in an ordered manner to another person who was above the first in some way. For example, it was used of the submission of soldiers in an army to those of superior rank. So this is not the idea of mutual submission, me submitting to you and you submitting to me, but it is the idea of submitting in those relationships where submission is appropriately called for. For example, as citizens we are called to submit to our governmental leaders. As church members we are called to submit to our elders. As employees we are called to submit to our employer. And in all things we are to submit to Christ. So the call to submit is not a unique call to women, or to wives. Rather, it is a call to living a Spirit filled life characterized by submission to one another, where the nature of that relationship makes submission appropriate.
And oh, don’t we often bristle at the idea of submission. Of someone else telling us what to do. You tell me to drive 65 MPH? I’m driving 72. I have to wear a mask? Oh no I’m not. Most of you are too young to remember this, but there was a time when wearing your seatbelt was not a law. It was your own choice. And I can recall that when Illinois passed the law to require wearing a seatbelt, I hated that. Is wearing a seatbelt a good idea? Yes. Did I agree that it was a good idea? Yes. But I didn’t think it was a good idea that the State of Illinois told me that I had to do it. Even when we know it’s right and good, submission to authority is hard. Often rather than focusing on the good and order and safety that submission brings, all we see is restriction.
If you are struggling to see the beauty of submission, I want to encourage you to consider that the ability to see the good and rightness of it comes from the Holy Spirit. It is a work of the Holy Spirit. I’m encouraged by what Jonathan Edwards said about how the Holy Spirit works in us.
In describing how believers are led by the Holy Spirit, he (Edwards) argues that, just as a good eye recognizes natural beauty, and a good ear knows harmony, and a good tongue tastes sweetness - all that without a train of reasoning - so there is a spiritual sense in the regenerate soul that perceives immediately the fitness and beauty of a holy action or a relationship.
If you are struggling to see the fitness and rightness and order that submission provides, ask that the Holy Spirit would fill you and grant you the spiritual sense to see and appreciate it.
So that is the umbrella of submission that the next 21 verses of Ephesians stand under. Now Paul gets to the specifics of various relationships that we all have. It is as if Paul is saying, “Submit to one another, and this is what I mean: wives submit to your husbands, children submit to your parents, and bondservants submit to your masters.”
WIVES ARE CALLED TO SUBMIT TO THEIR OWN HUSBANDS
So we begin with wives, because the Scriptures begin with wives. There is a lot of misunderstanding today about what the Bible means when it says that wives are to be submissive to their husbands. So to gain a clear understanding of the meaning of submission is vital.
Sometimes in getting definitions clear in our minds it is helpful to think through what something doesn’t mean in addition to what it does mean. So as we begin to consider biblical submission in the husband / wife relationship, here are a few things that submission does not mean. Then we will look at it from the positive side of what submission does mean.
First, submission does not mean putting a husband in the place of Christ. Yes, the husband is the wife’s immediate authority, but Christ is the wife’s ultimate authority. And when this passage says that Christ is the Savior of his body, the church, it is not in any way implying that the husband is the Savior of the wife. Ladies, you have only one Savior and you have only one ultimate authority, and that is Jesus Christ.
Second, submission does not mean a wife should give up efforts to influence and guide her husband. After all, God designed you to be your husband’s helper. Betsy Riccuci wrote a helpful summary of this principle in Love That Lasts, “My role toward [my husband] is not that of a critic, passing judgment on whether he is leading effectively, properly, or correctly. Nor am I to be merely a passive recipient of his leadership. I am to be an active participant in making his leadership both effective and successful. I have a stake in this! My help is crucial to the success of my husband’s leadership. How kind of God to design marriage this way!”
Third, submission does not mean that every woman is submissive to every man in the same way. Wives you are to submit to your husband, your own husband. The term "your own" in verse 22 shows that the relationship of leadership and submission between a woman and her husband should be different from the relationship of leadership and submission that she may have with men in general. All men are not in authority over all women. Men only have that position with their own wife, not with other women.
Fourth, submission does not mean a wife should give in to every demand of her husband. A wife’s submission to her husband is to submit except when it would be sin to submit. John Piper's helpful here. She should never follow her husband into sin. Nevertheless, even when she may have to stand with Christ against the sinful will of her husband, she can still have a spirit of submission - a disposition to yield. She can show by her attitude and behavior that she does not like resisting his will and that she longs for him to forsake sin and lead in righteousness so that her disposition to honor as head can again produce harmony.
Fifth, submission does not mean submitting to physical harm. Wives, you are not called to submit where it would injure you physically. That would be sin if your husband were to strike you or abuse you physically. No woman is called to submit to physical abuse.
Sixth, submission is not inconsistent with equality in Christ. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Both male and female were created in the image of God. Men and women are equal under God in every way. Equal in importance, equal in standing, equal in significance, equal in privilege, equal in worth. Men and women are equal under God in every way. But here's the mistake. Equality does not require sameness. That's the error of the world, thinking that equality eliminates any possibility of difference in roles. It does not.
How do we know that? Well, there is equality in the Trinity, but at the same time, there are different roles. The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, equal in every way, all equally God, but not identical roles. The Son submits himself to the Father and the Spirit submits himself to both the Father and the Son. So too, with men and women, equality does not require sameness. That distinction between equality and sameness is a critical one for us to keep in mind.
So now moving on to what submission does mean.
In the book “Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John Piper and Wayne Grudem define biblical submission for the wife like this. “Biblical submission for the wife is the divine calling to honor and affirm her husband’s leadership and help carry it through according to her gifts. It is not an absolute surrender of her will. Rather, we speak of her disposition to yield to her husband's guidance and her inclination to follow his leadership. Christ is her absolute authority, not the husband.” She submits out of reverence for Christ.”
Let’s unpack that definition a little bit.
First, biblical submission is a divine calling. Ladies, your role of submission is not a calling of your husband on your life. It is much more significant than that. It is a command from God to submit to your husband as you submit to Christ. And if you reject and defy that command, you are not only rebelling against your husband, you are rebelling against God.
And men, this is an important truth for us to remember as well. As I mentioned earlier, biblical submission is a voluntary placing oneself under authority. When your wife submits, she is submitting first to the command of God, and only secondarily to you. No one makes a wife submit to her husband. It is her voluntary choosing, because of her divine calling by God to this role. Carolyn Mahaney writes correctly in Feminine Appeal: “Submission was not our husbands’ idea, and neither are they responsible to enforce it. This command is not divine permission for husbands to assert authoritarian leadership. Nowhere in Scripture does it say, “Husbands, see to it that your wives submit.”
Second, biblical submission is honoring and affirming. Affirming means that wives advocate and embrace complementary male and female roles. They affirm and celebrate the strength and leadership of men. And they rest in and find joy in their uniquely feminine strengths. Honoring means that they respect their husband’s role as leader of the home. Even when they may not have full respect for the decisions being made, they respect his leadership and his role.
Third, biblical submission is helping. God created woman to be a helpmate. As a woman submits to her husband she is working with him, not against him. Ladies, a good question to ask yourselves is, “Am I helping my husband, or am I a road block he needs to work around?”
Fourth, when a woman is exercising biblical submission she is using her gifts for the good of her husband and her family. God has given her gifts to use according to his own will, and she should use them in a complementary way to help her husband. Ladies, the gifts you have are no accident. God has given them to you to specifically help in ways where your husband may be weak.
Fifth, biblical submission is characterized by an attitude and disposition of yielding. A submissive wife’s first inclination is listen to and follow her husband’s guidance and leadership, not to question it and critique it and dispute it.
So how does this play out in every day life? And why is submission good for everyone involved?
A few years back before our subdivision was more fully developed we were the last house to the south on our street and there were no houses behind us to the east. So the intersection closest to us, which is 33rd and Canyon, had very little traffic. And there was no need for any traffic signs. But over time as our subdivision has grown, the traffic at 33rd and Canyon grew, and yet there was no traffic sign. And I can remember saying to Tammy, that intersection is an accident waiting to happen. Now eventually, the city put in a yield sign for traffic headed north and south, so now it is a safe intersection again.
That intersection is a picture of how many marriages operate. No system to control traffic. So collisions and pile ups and damage and injury are a normal occurrence. But what God has done in his gracious wisdom and love for us, is to provide the wife with a yield sign to control the flow, avoid collisions and damage and heartache and injury.
So ladies, when a collision is about to occur in your marriage, your responsibility under God is to yield. If you and your husband are about to collide in the intersection, your responsibility under God is to yield at that point of conflict so that the conflict doesn't damage and ultimately destroy your marriage. Now yielding is not so much what you do as it is what you don't do. You were going along, and you could see a collision coming, and so you made the choice to yield. You made the choice, because God commanded you to yield, and if you didn't yield, there was going to be a crash, and air bags were going to be deployed, and windshields were going to be shattered and fenders were going to be smashed. A biblical wife yields to her husband’s authority.
But what we will see next week as we turn to husbands, is that the biblical husband places the wife's needs above his own. Now, sometimes as they come to an intersection and imminent collision, the wife is willing to stop, willing to yield. As she should be, each and every time. But what actually happens is that the husband recognizes that it's best in loving and serving her to give her the preferential treatment and allow her to go. This is an important point. And this is a point that is lost on a lot of people. Hers is most often only an attitude, a willingness to yield. I'm going to say that again. Hers most often ends up being just an attitude or a willingness to yield, which is often declined by her husband and his desire to put her first. He loves her. He wants more than anything to bless her and to nourish her and to fuel her and to protect her. And so, while she has an attitude of yielding and is willing to yield, the husband in his desire to put her first yields instead.
So here come 100 decisions for your marriage. On 50 of them you agree immediately what should happen. That's not a problem. In another 50, 40 of those don't matter that much and he's fine to just say I love you, and let's go in the direction that you believe is best. Only in maybe 10 times out of 100 is the decision a significant one where the husband and wife are not seeing eye to eye. What happens then?
In a healthy marriage, the husband and wife should try to come to a decision that seems right to both of them. They should discuss the matter together completely. They should pray together and seek God. And they should determine if there are specific principles or commands or wisdom they can gather from God’s Word. And the wife’s attitude in all of this discussion should be one of submission and a willingness to follow her husband’s lead. And all this should happen under the leadership and guidance of the husband. He is the one who should initiate the whole discussion.
Why is this process important? First, because in a marriage where husband and wife are both affected by sin, neither one will always have all the right answers or see things in the right perspective. Sometimes the husband has a blind spot and at other times the wife won’t be seeing things fully or clearly. That’s why God in his kindness and wisdom created us to be complementary. Each with different giftings and perspectives and various insights that we bring to the table. In addition, this process communicates value and care to the wife. Her ideas and perspectives do matter, even if in the final analysis the husband deems best to go in a different direction. It also helps the wife to understand all that went into the decision. At the end of the day, while it may not make her submission easy, it does make it easier.
And this process doesn’t only benefit the wife, it benefits the husband as well. First of all, it gives his wife an opportunity to show him honor and respect as the leader. And it also puts him in a position to benefit from the helper that God has given him to his best advantage. Rather than ignoring the help God has given him, he makes use of it. And men, that’s not a sign of weakness, that’s a sign of wisdom. I can tell you from personal experience that the biggest mistakes I have made in my life have not come from considering Tammy’s views too much, but from considering them too little.
But, even with all that in place, in a world of sin in which both husband and wife are beset by the limitations that we all have, there will be times when a consensus may not be reached. In this situation, it is the husband's responsibility to exercise his leadership role and make the decision. The wife needs to submit to that decision. In those instances, he leads, and she follows in humble submission. Willingly, lovingly, and quickly. Every time. No matter what. He makes the decision, and this is key, not for his own sake or benefit, not selfishly, but out of a desire for her higher good, and his family’s higher good. Stiving to lead his family well in following the Lord. Men, when your wife knows that your decision making is driven by her good, your family’s good, and the Lord’s leading, she will most often willingly submit to that kind of leadership.
Now given how easy and rational, and non-emotional all of that sounds, why is submission so difficult?
Remember from Genesis that marriage was part of God's original plan. God has established and sanctified marriage. It's God's idea, it is God’s divinely ordered relationship for men and women. The perfect plan of God before the fall was the husband lovingly leading his wife, and the wife willingly submitting to her husband. But in chapter 3, the roles are distorted with the fall of man. And in Genesis 3:16 God pronounces what the effect of that fall will be for the man and for the woman. There God says to Eve: “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”
The word translated as desire in that verse comes from a Hebrew word that means to compel or to urge or to seek control over. What Eve and every woman after Eve experience as part of the fall is a sinful urge to usurp her husband's authority. To push him, to direct, to mettle, to nag, to manipulate, to control, to pressure. Her inclination is not to submit, it is to lead. And his inclination indicated by the phrase but he shall rule over you is to lead in an authoritarian, dictatorial way.
We all know that little babies don't need to be taught to lie, or hit, or say mine. They don't have to take a selfishness seminar. But just as that inclination is true in children, it is just as true that as boys become men and girls become women, their sinful bent emerges and becomes all the more obvious. The wife's tendency is to urge to seek to rule, to take the lead over her husband, and the man’s tendency is to rule with an iron fist. That’s why here in Ephesians 5 women need to be told to submit and husbands need to be told to love. The submission of the wife and the loving care of the husband restores the relationship to the way God designed it before the fall. And that makes for a happy and peaceful home for mom, for dad, and for all the kids too.
Now a wife might say, well I’d be more submissive if he were more loving. Or I would submit if he actually deserved it. Or a husband might say, I’ll be more loving when she stops nagging and trying to control me and make all the decisions. But those are the times when Matthew 7 screams loudly. Don’t worry about the speck in your spouse’s eye until you’ve taken the log out of your own eye. Wives, your command to submit to your husband is not contingent on his love or his performance. Ultimately, you aren’t submitting to him anyway, you are submitting as to the Lord. And husbands, your command to love is not contingent on your wife’s submission. Is that the way Christ loves the church? So each spouse should remove the log from their own eye and concentrate on filling their own role and the whole household will benefit.
What happens in a home where submission and love aren’t the norm? Well, when a wife seeks to rule, to press up over her husband, normally a man responds to that in one of two ways. Neither one of which is right or biblical or justified. Please understand me. I’m not saying these common responses by men are right or acceptable. They are not. But at the same time, they are very common. One of the ways that a man responds is that he becomes authoritarian. He just powers up over her. It doesn't matter how high she takes it, he takes it higher. That's a terrible home to live in. The more she pushes the more domineering he becomes. The tension gets hotter and hotter and more intense. She pushes and he shoves back even harder. And that's no way to live.
Another way that is just as common among men is as the wife gets stronger and stronger, the husband becomes very passive. He’s like, yeah, I stopped caring a long time ago. And as she presses harder, he pulls back. It’s as if he says, fine, you want to lead, go for it. And often the result of this is that the husband and wife end up living separate lives in the same household. And that’s no way to live either.
And that’s why although submission is not easy, it’s God’s best. It is God’s loving, and kind, and tender care for wives.
Proverbs 14:1 says “The wisest of women builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down.” Wise women build their houses through humble and gracious submission, while foolish women tear it down with their controlling attitudes. Ladies, are you building your house, or are you tearing it down?
GOD’S DESIGN AND PICTURE OF SUBMISSION
In verses 23 and 24 Paul gives two reasons for the wife’s submission to her husband.
The first we find in verse 23, For the husband is the head of the wife. This headship is explained more clearly in 1 Corinthians 11 verses 3, 8 and 9. There we see, “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God…For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”
So the argument that Paul uses for the headship of the husband over the wife goes all the way back to creation. God instituted this order in relationship for the good of Adam and Eve and for us. And it is important to note that this was God’s design before the sin of man. The husband’s headship is not a part of culture. It is a part of the creation that God declared very good.
The second reason given for the wife’s submission to her husband is drawn from redemption and concerns Christ’s headship of the church. Christ’s relationship to the church is the picture God gives us for the beauty of marriage. The church’s submission to Christ is presented as the model of the wife’s submission to her husband. And the love Christ has for the church is the husband’s model for the way he is to love his wife.
So as we consider the wife side of that picture, how does the church submit to Christ. First of all, the church gladly submits to his loving and gracious rule. The church receives everything it needs from Christ, striving to live in complete obedience to him. The church’s submission to Christ means looking to him as its head for his beneficial rule, living by his norms, experiencing his presence and love, receiving from him gifts that will enable growth and maturity, and responding to him in gratitude and awe. It is these attitudes that the wife is urged to develop as she submits to her husband.
So wives, are you looking to your husband as your leader? Are you willing living under his leadership? Are you appreciating and resting in his love? Are you happily receiving all that your husband gives you? Are you thankful to him, and are you respecting him? These are the attitudes of submission.
CONCLUSION
The world tells us that submission is a demeaning, oppressive, ugly thing. But in fact, biblical submission by the wife, is God’s gracious and kind road sign for the good of our marriages and our families. When our homes are governed according to his guidance, we experience all the peace, joy, harmony, love, and goodness that he has designed for us. And then our marriages will bring glory to our savior and he will be lifted high.
When we willingly and humbly submit our lives to God in obedience to him, we are blessed. We can only do that when we are filled with his Spirit to live a life worthy of the glory of Jesus. He submitted himself to the Father, so that we might be adopted to God’s family. To him be all glory and honor and praise.