One of the most offensive ideas the church has introduced to the world (at least as far as our culture reckons things) is that wives should submit to their husbands in the marriage relationship. Submission is just a dirty word. It’s so demeaning. It’s depressing. It’s dehumanizing even. And yet we are called to just such a thing in the Scriptures again and again. Paul is explicit about it being a part of the marriage journey. In this third part of our series, The Journey of a Lifetime, we are going to dive into Paul’s command to see if we can better understand why he gave it, what he meant, and why it is perhaps not nearly as bad of a thing as we have been led to believe. Let’s get started.

Dirty Words

Have you ever said a dirty word? Maybe don’t raise your hand on that one. How about this: Have you ever wondered what exactly makes a word a “bad word”? Culture certainly plays a big role, but I don’t think that’s the only factor involved. There is a common theme running through all of these words we aren’t supposed to say in polite company. Generally speaking, a word that gets classified as a “bad word” is a coarse or vulgar way to refer to marital relations, bodily functions, or religious condemnation. There are, of course, more polite or sophisticated ways to refer to all of these things, but in a moment of anger or irritation or even simply because we don’t know a better word, we go with the more common versions…and get our mouths washed out with soap. 

But while all of these different words that might be classified by someone as “bad words” can be offensive to people, there’s a difference between a “bad word” and an offensive word. An offensive word is a word that does just that: it offends another person. Just because a word happens to offend someone, though, doesn’t necessarily make it crass or vulgar. It may simply be that the person has come to associate a host of negative things with that particular idea such that its being used around them calls to mind those ideas and rubs them the wrong way. It offends them. 

Well, while we can avoid the use of words that are broadly considered crude or vulgar with a bit of verbal discipline, keeping ourselves from saying words that are merely offensive can be a much more challenging affair. We don’t always know what word or idea is going to be offensive to the people around us. It may be that in one context, this or that word won’t be bothersome at all. In fact, no one will even notice that we’ve used it. But in a different context, the same word or expression could get us in pretty hot water. 

There are some words, though, whose offensive nature is recognized so broadly that avoiding their usage isn’t so hard. We just treat them like one of those “bad words,” and we don’t have to worry about much else. But sometimes we come across an idea that has to be discussed even if it does happen to offend some people. The subject is sufficiently important that we can’t avoid it forever. In these times, we have to take courage, and press forward in spite of the potential consequences. 

This morning is going to be one of those times. This morning we are going to use a word that is deeply offensive to some people. Perhaps some of you. And, in fact, we are probably going to use the word a lot. So, if this is a tough word for you, you may want to prepare yourself. This could get rough. This word definitely doesn’t fall on anybody’s list of “bad words,” but the idea it conveys makes some people absolutely bristle. It is sufficiently offensive that it has driven people away from the church entirely. And here we are talking about it directly. 

So then, what is this terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad word as far as so much of the culture around us goes? Are you ready for this? Everybody sitting down? The word is: Submission. And as if that weren’t bad enough by itself, we’re going to be talking about submission in the context of marriage. Talk about piling bad on top of bad! Why on earth would we do this? Why not focus on the more positive things the guys who contributed to the Scriptures have to say about marriage rather than wallowing around in this kind of muck? Because when it comes to the marriage relationship (and, frankly, in our personal relationships with Jesus as well), getting submission right will do more to help us get and stay on a God-honoring path than just about anything else save making sure Jesus is at the center of things. And, if He’s really at the center of things, we’re probably going to be getting submission right anyway, so the two go hand-in-hand. 

This morning we are in the third part of our teaching series, The Journey of a Lifetime. Over the course of these few weeks, we are taking a look at some of the wisdom in the Scriptures that will help make sure this most significant of relationships is functioning like God intended. We started out by identifying the primary problem any marriage faces. With Genesis 3 as our guide, we discovered that the biggest issue in any marriage is sin in some form or another. But because knowing what the problem with something happens to be doesn’t actually tell us how to get it right, we took a step back to Genesis 2 last time to discover God’s purpose for marriage in the beginning. The relationship was always about helping us to be more like Him. 

Those two big ideas were important as starting points for our conversation, but they were also fairly abstract. Starting this morning, we are going to get more practical. Today and over the next couple of weeks, we are going to look at some very specific things we can do to move our marriages in the direction God wants for them to be going, starting with the idea of submission. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me in Ephesians 5. There are a handful of passages that address the idea of submission in marriage, but this one is the most significant. 

Now, the famous…or perhaps infamous…thing Paul says about submission in marriage here falls in v. 22. There the great apostle says this: “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” That one verse, clipped out of context, has been the source of no small amount of controversy and tension in the church and in the culture more broadly. It has been used to justify all sorts of abuse and mistreatment of wives by husbands who incorrectly take Paul’s words here to mean that women should be considered as little more than domestic servants who exist only to serve the whims and will of their husbands. A whole book and accompanying streaming series was written to bemoan the potential excesses of this verse. I still remember a seminary lecture when a woman in the class went on at length about how much she hated Paul for writing this in the first place. The thing is, though, for all the controversy and chaos surrounding this little verse, what I read to you, and what is printed in your Bible, is almost certainly not what Paul actually wrote when he was first composing this letter. 

Do I have your attention now? Although there are a few ancient manuscripts that are worded in Greek pretty much like what I just read to you, the oldest and most reliable of them read simply like this: “Wives, to your husbands as to the Lord.” Now, if you are a grammar person at all, what you may notice about that sentence fragment (it isn’t a complete sentence at all) is that it doesn’t have a verb. What are wives to do to their husbands as to the Lord? Paul doesn’t actually tell us in the Greek. Instead, translators have long helped Paul out by filling in the verb blank with the word “submit,” which makes good grammatical and contextual sense as we will see in just a minute. But in doing so, and in putting a section break between vv. 21 and 22, the result is that most readers miss out on the bigger picture of what Paul is really saying about marriage here, as well as the context of what he says, in a way that open the door to all the problems you can imagine might enter through that passageway. So then, what are wives to do to their husbands as to the Lord, and why do translators fill in the word “submit” here? Let’s dig into the passage a bit and see if we can’t make some positive sense out of all of this. 

The most important textual clue that the word “submit” is in fact the right verb to fill in the blank in v. 22 comes from v. 21. Okay, so what does Paul say there? Look at this with me: “…submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.” There is our word. That’s where translators and interpreters take their cue for making a change necessary to make sure we have an English translation that uses good English grammar. In borrowing the verb from v. 21, though, the whole tone and connotation of what Paul says in v. 22 and which causes so many problems for so many people changes. 

If we take v. 22 all by itself, Paul sounds like he is really downing on wives. Wives, you are just to do whatever your husbands tell you to do. Just like the church is supposed to obey every word Jesus ever spoke, you are to be obeying every word that comes out of your husband’s mouth. That’s only right. It is right here in the Scriptures, after all. I could probably write a whole sermon running on that theme. It would be well sourced from across the Scriptures thanks to a number of other verses—all equally clipped from any relevant context—that seem to make the same argument. I could title the whole thing something like: Proper Helpmates: How to be a More Godly Wife by Becoming More Submissive to Your Husband. I’m kidding, of course, but the real problem here is that some preacher somewhere probably has written that sermon. But again, that is not what Paul is saying here. 

Because translators borrow the verb “submit” from v. 21, we have to answer an important question before we can do anything with v. 22. What was Paul talking about in v. 21? In the same vein: Who was he talking to? Well, he wasn’t talking to husbands and wives just yet. That doesn’t start until v. 22. In v. 21 Paul is talking to the church, to believers more generally. As for what he was talking about, there is definitely an idea of submission to it, but “submitting to one another in the fear of Christ,” like, “Wives, to your husbands as to the Lord,” is a sentence fragment. And that word “submitting,” isn’t really a verb either. It’s participle. A participle is a word that’s formed from a verb, but it’s dressed up like an adjective. In other words, it’s a verb that’s being used to describe something. It’s an active description, if you will. If you are going to be able to do this other thing, here’s how you do it. 

And, by the way, if you are starting to feel like you are back in your high school English class, stick with me. We really are going somewhere with all of this. But grammar matters. A lot in this case. 

So, in v. 21, the word “submitting” is describing how we are to be doing something else. Okay…then, what is the else here? To answer that question, we have to go back to v. 18. There, after cautioning the Ephesian believers against being filled with wine, he urges them to be filled with the Spirit. To put that another way, Paul says, “Listen, you can fill yourself with all kinds of things. If you fill yourself with some things—like too much alcohol—that’s going to lead you nowhere good. You need to aim to be filled with the Holy Spirit.” He then goes on to define what that looks like. The person who is filled with the Holy Spirit is first and foremost a follower of Jesus, which is an important prerequisite for everything else Paul says here. More directly than that, though, he speaks words that are encouraging and uplifting and otherwise appropriate for the occasion; she has a heart filled with worship; he has a heart filled with gratitude; and they practice a godly submission to one another that is rooted in their commitment to honor Christ as Lord. 

If we really want to understand where Paul is coming from for this whole section, though, we have to go back further than that. We have to go back to the beginning of chapter 5. There we see that Paul is calling believers to “be imitators of God, as dearly loved children, and walk in love, as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.” Now, let’s think about this for a second. What was Jesus doing when He gave Himself for us? He was submitting to us. He was first submitting to the Father, of course, but in so doing, He was coming underneath us to lift us up in the direction of being who God made us to be. That’s the substance of all godly submission. It is coming underneath another person and putting their needs and desires ahead of our own so that we can move them in the direction of Jesus. And in doing this we are just doing what Jesus already did for us. That is, we are imitating God. 

There’s more. In doing all of this, we are striving to live in light of what Paul urges us to do all the way back at the beginning of chapter 4. Flip back there with me and look at this: “Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to live worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” So then, what’s this? Can’t you see how this fits right in with where we started? Or rather, can’t you see how where we started flows smoothly from what Paul says here? 

Living worthy of the calling we have received involves imitating Christ which means lovingly submitting to one another out of reverence for Him, which takes a great deal of humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love to do, all of which helps to maintain the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. When we are constantly looking for ways to put the people around us first, lovingly lifting them toward Jesus, we are going to be far more united as a people than we will otherwise be. We will have great peace as a body. 

If you have sharp eyes and ears, though, did you catch the first word Paul used there at the beginning of chapter 4? What was it? Therefore! And what are we supposed to do whenever we see a “therefore” in the Scriptures? We look back to see what it is there for. So, what is this one there for? It’s there because Paul is telling us how to do something. Starting in chapter 4 and running right through where we started toward the end of chapter 5, Paul is telling us how to do something. He is telling us how to live as those who were chosen by God in Christ “before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in love before him.” If you are in Christ, God chose you before the world was created to be one of His people. Now, just because someone is not a follower of Jesus doesn’t simply mean they weren’t so chosen. It just means they haven’t yet embraced God’s choosing of them like you already have. It is incumbent on we who have received His choosing to help those who haven’t yet see and understand why it is such a good thing to do. That’s for another time. 

Connecting all the dots here, then, one of the primary ways you can live as one who has been chosen by God in Christ to be holy and blameless in love before Him is to lovingly submit to one another out of reverence for your Lord. Having said all of that by the time we get to verse 21 of chapter 5, Paul goes on to give us an intensely practical example of one particular context where Christian husbands and wives can put all of this into practice on a daily basis. “Wives, to your husbands, as to the Lord.” And although the word doesn’t actually appear there, it’s obvious that submission is what Paul is talking about. 

But now we understand the context of that submission. As we said a minute ago, Paul is not just making some kind of a blanket statement that wives should do whatever their husbands say. Instead, He is calling wives who are themselves followers of Jesus to practice the love of Jesus toward their husbands who are also followers of Jesus (that’s important here; Peter addresses the situation of couples in which only one spouse is a believer in his first letter) by coming underneath them in order to prioritize his needs and desires ahead of her own so that she can play the instrumental role God designed her for of lifting Him up toward Jesus. That doesn’t sound quite the same as “wives, submit to your husbands” did when you first heard it a few minutes ago, does it? 

And, as if to double down on the context of this godly submission, Paul immediately connects her work back to her relationship with Jesus which is itself being faithfully lived out through the context of the local church. “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything.” 

Let’s unpack this right quick. The role of husbands and wives in the marriage relationship are not the same. God made men and women differently. He gifted them with different gifts. They are co-equal heirs of the grace of Christ, as Peter notes, but they were designed differently and for different purposes. Sin distorts all of this in terribly damaging ways as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, resulting in wives trying to step into their husbands’ roles, and husbands trying to take their wives’ roles in ways that always make a mess of things. But what Paul makes clear here and in other contexts as well, is that husbands are called to take on a role of authority and leadership in their marriages. But if that sounds unfair, think again. Being in a position of authority after the pattern of Christ—which is the only acceptable pattern husbands can use to live into their God-given role; anything less is sinful and will unavoidably do great harm to the relationship—means that at the end of the day, if things aren’t like they should be, God is going to be looking at them for an explanation for why His little girl doesn’t look as much like Him as she should have come out looking when He entrusted her to his care. Ladies, you don’t want that burden. 

I know this will come as a bit of a shock, but husbands don’t always get our role right. One day, we’re going to have to answer for that. Your role, wives, is in part to help make sure we do get it right. More than that, though, just because we screw it up, doesn’t mean you have to as well. Because ultimately, you will answer to God for whether or not you got your role right. Wives are called to submit to their husbands not because their husbands are somehow deserving of such a thing—they almost assuredly aren’t—but as a function of their larger and prior submission to Christ as Lord. This is not blind obedience to some jerk who has an entitlement complex. This is a loving sacrifice of your own needs and desires for the sake of helping to lift Him up in the direction of becoming more fully who God made Him to be. 

And, lest you think he is somehow being left out of the fun here, in v. 25 Paul shifts his attention to us. We’ll talk about this a whole lot more next time, but for now listen to this: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.” What is this? While the wife is being called to lovingly place herself under her husband for the sake of moving him toward Jesus, all husbands have to do is love their wives. How is that fair? You’re not reading it right. Husbands are to love their wives how? The same way Jesus loved the church. And how did Jesus love the church? Paul answers that. He “gave himself for her.” He died for her. That is, He submitted Himself to our needs and desires in order to move us toward who God made us to be. We aren’t getting left out of the fun here at all. Our role just looks a little different is all. One coin; two sides. 

If we want to get marriage right, submission has got to be part of the equation. Not just any submission, but a godly submission. Now, if one partner or the other is not doing this to the glory of God, is that going to make things harder on the one who is committed to it? Absolutely it will. No doubt about it. But do you know who understands perfectly what that challenge is like? Jesus, the one to whom we are ultimately submitting. So, yes, this can all be made very difficult if one or the other decides not to be a part of the effort. But our call is not first to submit to or love our partner. It is to submit to and love Jesus and to act toward our partner accordingly regardless of whether or not we think they’re worthy of our efforts in this direction. We’re not doing it for them first. We’re doing it to the glory of God. And when our goal is to glorify God, things are going to go better for us in the long run even if they get hard in the short term. We know that because on the third day after Jesus died, God raised Him from the dead and gave Him the name that is above every name. And one day He is going to return and reward all those who have committed themselves to the glory of God with the same eternal life He now enjoys. In other words and to put a point on all of this: Submission in marriage brings glory to God. 

Because of this, why would you not both want to get this right together? Submission in marriage brings glory to God, which if you are a follower of Jesus is the whole point of your existence. Neither of you is going to be formed in the image of Christ entirely on your own. Fortunately, God gave you each other to help one another in that direction. Wives, the more you work to see your husband become more fully who God made him to be, the more worthy of your submission he is going to become. Husbands, the more you work to see your wife become more fully who God made her to be, the more worthy of your love she is going to become. Instead of chasing after one another in that Tom and Jerry like cycle of insanity that sin causes, you will be constantly lifting each other up more and more toward Jesus which will just make everything about your relationship better. Submission in marriage brings glory to God. And it can enrich and increase your joy in the relationship. What have you got to lose? Commit yourselves to living sacrificially toward one another from out of the love of Christ and to the glory of God and see together just how good things can really become. Submission in marriage brings glory to God. Let’s glorify Him together.