Video Transcript: Submissive Wives, Sacrificial Husbands

And from Titus two, verses three through five. Older women, likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self controlled, pure, working at home, kind and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. And the last passage is from First Peter three, one through seven. Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands. So even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word, by the conduct of their wives, when they see a respectful and pure conduct. Do not let your adorning be external – the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry or the clothing you wear. But let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious. For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord. And you are her children if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening. Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the women as the weaker vessel since they are heirs with you of the grace of life so that your prayers may not be hindered.

Well, these aren't the most popular passages in the Bible these days and a lot of people feel that there are much better ways to proceed and to think about marriage, to think about relationships among married people. And it sometimes gets so fundamental that marriage isn't even something between a man and a woman anymore, but it might be between a same sex partners. Even if you are male and female, the ideal is to act like you're totally identical and interchangeable. If you do have a faithless spouse, you certainly wouldn't want to do what Peter suggests and have it as one of your goals to win them over to the Lord because we know that all religions are equally good, and it's no big deal anyway as long as you love each other. You ought to spend a ton on clothes and cosmetics. And wives be pushy, husbands be wimpy. Treat your wife as a stronger partner. Now that would probably be the wisdom that a lot of folks would like to press on us today. And when you read the passages that we have just read, you'd say, well, there's quite a sharp contrast between what God teaches us in those passages and what seems to be kind of a common mindset these days. 

But there's also still another way to think about and ask about these questions. We know that there are some fairly radical views that are lately in conflict with the Bible. But what about some of these? What if a woman manages a bank and earns her family's main income while her husband teaches their children at home? Is that okay? Is that something just atrocious and unthinkable for a Christian couple? What if a husband loves to cook and he likes to shop and his wife is good at managing the finances? She handles the checkbook. She pays the bills, she does all the figures and makes a lot of the investment decisions and maybe asked his opinion, but she's the one who's good at it. Is there something really amiss if that's the way they divvy up their jobs? Or what if a wife goes on a week long business trip and does that with quite a bit of frequency and leaves her husband to care for the kids and leaves her children behind for days and maybe even weeks at a time are what we sometimes call traditional roles based on the Bible and revealed by God. That's something to give a bit of thought to. 

Of the cases that I've mentioned, you might say, well, it said in Titus, that a woman should be busy at home. And so that's very clear evidence that the woman's place is in the home and the man's place is out there doing his job. Well last time I read Ephesians six verse four, it said fathers bring up your children in the training and instruction of the Lord. The father's place is in the home. What can be more obvious. So you know it may be that how we think about the division of labor and the kinds of roles that people ought to pursue might not be quite as tightly defined as, as those of us who maybe a more conservative view of the Bible might think. 

Of the Bible, when we think of work being a man's thing and home being the woman's thing that assumes that work and home are very very sharply divided and separated from one another. That actually is a fairly new situation. Some of you have heard just a little bit about this. If you've read Nancy Pierce's book Total Truth or heard me talk about just a little bit, um, she talks about some of the things that happened with the industrial revolution, how work and family got separated. Now you understand what I'm saying here? The only way that you can say work is totally the man's thing and family is totally the woman's thing is if work and family are totally separated in the first place. That wasn't always the case. In America's colonial times, a lot of work and economic activity was done at home or on the farm or in the family craft or in the family store. And it was done by family members working together. The wife and the kids would be very involved in what the business was up to. 

Now the industrial revolution of the early and mid 1800s, separated work and family and you had a factory to go to and later on an office to go to, a place of business and some private realm of family and family became more and more privatized. You weren't in business together, so to speak. And that whole private realm of family and faith got separated from the more public realm of business and industry and husbands were the ones who tended to go out into the public realm of business industry and so on. And women were the ones who stayed home and husband at the workplace wife at home became what are called traditional roles. What I'm pointing out here is what we call traditional roles or something less than 200 years old. And it's largely a social and economic construct. 

Now in inventing these traditional roles as it unfolded, fathers spent way less time with their children in teaching and training and discipline than they used to. You know that a couple 100 years ago, there were books written for child training, and the authors of these books, wrote their books with men in mind, with men as the main readers of those books and directed as men who are going to be involved in the rearing of their children. Nowadays, any author who wrote a book on child rearing directed mainly at men would be committing business suicide, because we know that the ladies are the ones who pick up those books and read them. And if you were to target mainly men with books on child rearing, you would sell about three volumes. 

Men became more aggressively competitive and self interested. These are generalizations, it's not true in every case. But it's the development, the way society unfolded. Raising kids became almost entirely the mother's responsibility. She spent the vast majority of the time with the kids and he very little. Women, on the other hand, became a lot less involved economically than they used to be or they were very involved in those businesses where they were working together as a family. Much less involved and so very, very dependent on what the husband brought home as income. And another thing that happened which is hard for a lot of women with young children, women had less adult contact and became more socially isolated with their young kids, where the hearing of an adult voice was kind of a rare experience. And for a lot of women that can be very challenging nowadays and it didn't always used to be quite like that. 

Home became viewed as a place for personal feelings and, and a private place. And it was to be different from that public realm of commerce and competition. Women, here's a shift that a lot of authors have commented on, women were viewed as the guardians of virtue. They were the champions of what is pure and right and one of their jobs was to rein in those men and civilize them a bit and make those caveman a little more, make them shave once in a while, maybe put down the club and act a little more civilized. Now, eventually feminists reacted against that. They called for modern women's roles to be less home oriented, more career oriented. In other words, they wanted women to become more like what the men had become. I'm not sure that was gonna be a big improvement either. But the aim was okay, we're sick of this new role that women have been put into. Let's put them into the new role that men have been put into. And when you do that, of course, one of the things that happens is at home and kids gets hit  coming and going. If the fathers have been neglecting them already, and now the mothers are called to do so as well, it's not exactly an enormous blessing for the children. 

Further developments: mothers increasingly became the ones who were to lead in religion at home. They were to really lead in Bible reading and family prayers instead of the dads. It became pretty socially acceptable for men to be absolute dunces and incompetence when it came to anything related to the kids or the child rearing or just to starting a load of wash or to cooking a meal just helpless. And that was fine because hey, they're just men. Some traditionalist women kind of thought you know, the whole world would be more like home. Home is a lot better place than that big bad world out there. And some feminist women wanted to get women out of the home and get them more into that workplace. So this is how things have been unfolding over the last couple of 100 years. 

One of the impacts on churches was the churches got into that realm of feeling and of the private and women kind of still liked  the church a bit and men became more and more fed up with it. Church was more of a feminine kind of place. Preachers didn't proclaim public truths, they emphasized feeling. And more and more congregations got to be 70 to 75% female. Churches made religion soft and comforting. You didn't hear stuff about put on the whole armor of God or be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. You know my boys like that men's memory verse that we did. But those aren’t verses we think about or we say gentle sweet Jesus will give you a lift throughout a difficult day. And, of course, there may be a place for some of those emphasis in the Bible too. But my point is that more and more churches became very tender and sensitive to the feminine. Some evangelicals kind of get the other thing promoted. A manly religion of muscular Christianity with sports stars on the stage and preaching from the pulpits. And one of the outcomes of women being the guardians of virtue was that the men rebel. Men really didn't want the women to run their lives and to make them pure and holy. And it's possible that that really wasn't women's main job in the first place, to help the men clean up their act. But that was the result, was that their attempts to moralize men often made the men run from church and maybe even a run away from home. 

So when you when you see all of that going on, you have to ask, well, what's going on? Several decades ago, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a very conservative British pastor had this to say. He said the husband is deliberately vacating the position in which God has put him.. and he's leaving it in laziness to his wife. And he was talking about activity and leadership in the home. He was not saying, you know, the man is not working hard enough and providing for his family financially well enough. He was saying, he's vacating the position, leaving it in laziness to his wife and he was was looking across the ocean to the US. And he said in the United States, you have what may more or less be called a matriarchal society. Now you can decide for yourself whether the old British pastor knew what he was talking about or not. He was writing this back in the 60s. And the man is increasingly regarded merely as the one to provide the dollars, the wage-earner, the man who brings in the necessary money. The woman, the mother, is the cultured person and the head of the home and the children look to her. This false unscriptural view of man and woman, and father and mother leads to a matriarchal society, which it seems to me, is most dangerous. The result of course, is the growth of crime and all the terrible social problems with which they are grappling in that country, the United States. A matriarchal society with a woman as the head and center of the home is a denial of the biblical teaching. 

Now, you see, again, what he's saying here, he's not condemning the, he's not arguing that we've got to keep the roles in their traditional place. He was looking at a society which mainly had what we call traditional roles at that time. And he was saying this is a disaster because it results in the home being handed over entirely to the wife and mother and the man taking a pass on that and doing his stuff elsewhere. So when we think about this passage in Colossians, and in our study of Colossians, wives submit to your husbands as it's fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives. Do not be harsh with them. As soon as we hear husbands addressed in one way and wives in another, our heads fill up with whatever our default settings are for what we think are the differences between men and women. And we may hear stuff that the Bible isn't even saying. We may hear stuff saying, now men, be men and work hard. Women, be women and take care of the kiddos. You know that when we hear of different roles being brought up that may be just how we fill in the blanks when it's not said that way in the Bible. 

Now, as we think about that, then, let's face the fact that the reshaping of roles was mainly driven by economic and social and cultural changes that came as work was separated from home. When we listen to God's Word, you may, man, I wish that he may speak from the Bible. Because I've been talking about a whole spiel of cultural analysis here. If you wanna hear the Bible, rightly, you need to know how your culture has shaped you, and what kind of ears you've got, and how you tend to fill in the blanks. So that's why I'm taking the trouble to talk about this a little more length. The traditional roles weren't always traditional. They weren't divinely revealed or required by God necessarily in the way that we interpret them. The biblically required roles are the ones that we just read in these passages. They're found in the drama of portraying Christ and his Church, of submissive wives and sacrificial husbands and that may or may not in some cases, it may still result in certain decisions about the roles that you fill and so on. But the central role differences between husbands and wives are defined by this drama of portraying Christ and the church, and of the wife submitting as to the Lord and the husband loving as Christ loved the church.

Marriage pictures Christ and His Church, the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior. Therefore a man shall leave his father mother hold fast to his wife, the two shall be one flesh, and this mystery is profound, and it refers to Christ and His Church. So if you want to talk about what roles there are or what we call traditional roles, we have think in terms of biblical roles, and what those involve, first of all. And separate that somewhat from what might happen to be a cultural development or what we might find in some cases to be convenient division of labor in our own case. It's not always wrong to have those traditional roles. I'm the one who earns the primary income in our family. My wife is primarily involved at home. I don't think that's a terrible thing. And I don't think that the way we have divided is necessarily the biblically required thing. The biblically required thing is to understand these roles of sacrificial love on the part of the husband and submissive love on the part of the wife. 

Sacrificial husbands. We talked about this some already last week picture Christ's love for the church. Husbands love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her husband. A husband is always preaching about Christ, and he's always picturing Christ and it's either a good picture, if he is resembling Christ to at least some degree or it's a bad picture if he's being harsh, or if he's being uninvolved or if he's being totally passive, then it's a false picture. But either way, he is painting a picture of Christ's love for the church. And so we who are husbands need to take that as our main role. Submissive wives, picture, the church's response to Christ. Wives submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands and we saw Peter saying similar things. We saw the book of Titus saying something similar as well about submission and Ephesians five shows us that that submission is not just a commandment to submit, but a command to dramatize something about the relationship between the church and Jesus Christ. 

Now let's think about what godly submission is not and what it is, and we'll think about what godly headship of a husband is not and what it is. That's basically all I'm going to do in the rest of this message. First of all, godly submission is not regarding the husband has smarter, better or worth more than the wife. He might be smarter, she might be smarter, you know, it's probably gonna be 50 50 or what and I don’t know what percentage it is, but in terms of sheer IQ, or intellectual power, it's certainly not the case that all men are smarter than all women, or that they are more virtuous or that they're worth more. Now, there have been many ideologies, some religions throughout history that have taught that men are worth more than women. That's taught in the Quran to take one instance, but it's not taught in the Bible. Godly mission is not going along with your husband's cruelty, or pretending that sin is okay. It's, you know, a patriot makes a true patriotism to say, my country right or wrong. And the wife may say, my husband right or wrong. Well, you may love him right or wrong, but you don't go along with him right or wrong. If he's sitting wickedly, you don't just pretend that it's fine. If he's treating you awfully you don't say Oh, honey, hit me again. That is not what submission is, just as in relation to the government. It would not just be say, oh, yeah, I don't care what my government does, it's my government. If it's wrong, then as a citizen, you may still love your country, but you're going to try to change how things are done. 

Godly submission is not disobeying God in order to obey your husband. Let's say your husband says, You know what, I don't like church, and I like going to church, and I don't want you going to church. Your proper response is I must obey God rather than men. God says don't forsake the gathering together and so I'm gonna go worship with the people of God and I can't make you come along, but I got to obey the Lord. If he's involved in some kind of crooked scheme and they have a home business together, it's your obligation not to go along with it. It is not submission, if you disobey the highest authority of all to obey a lesser authority. What happened with the apostles? They were commanded by the authorities not to preach anymore the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And they said, We can't help speaking about him, and we must obey God rather than men. So there are some cases where a woman knows she has to do something in order to obey God. Her husband wants her to do otherwise it is not submission for her to disobey God in order to obey her husband, at least it's not godly submission. And so that has to be understood. 

It's also not being passive and stifling your creativity and feeling my calling in life is to be a complete extension of my husband's mind and personality and to make my own being disappear. This is not what godly submission is. You may have talents and creativity and God calls you to use those.  You’re a wife, but you're still a person, too, and you're still a daughter of God. It also does not mean always keeping quiet and never questioning or criticizing or advising your husband. It does mean I think not always being a nag, and just being a crank and always contradicting everything he wants and everything he says and certainly that would not be submissive. But true submission does not mean that you never make a peep to the contrary, that you never asked him well, why? Why do you want to do it that way? Or that you never critique something that he does. 

Now you might say, well, that first Peter seven, or that First Peter, three verses once or seven passage seems to make it very clear that she's supposed to win her husband over without words, by just the beauty of her inner spirit. Remember who’s  it talking to there. It is talking to the wife of an unbelieving husband. Now, if your husband is a pagan, and you've already made clear your Christian faith and invited him to become a Christian, then don't beat him over the head of that every day. You seek to win him over by your life and by your manner and the beauty of your spirit. If you're married to a Christian man, you have to tiptoe around it like you're walking on eggshells or something and never say anything to him because you're gonna treat him like a pagan and never say a word because you've always got to win him over? Quiet him down, he’s a Christian. You ought to be able to listen to one or two words of somebody else and so it doesn't necessarily mean you never question or criticize or advise. That scenario, keep in mind, and it also doesn't mean that you do nothing without first getting your husband's permission and that you never do anything outside the home. I think that's an over-controlling setting that is not in line with the biblical spirit of submission where you know, she won't put on the blue socks instead of the red ones in the morning without hubby’s permission. You know, this is not what the Bible means by having that spirit of submission and of working together as husband or wife. 

Well, if that's not what godly submission is, what is it? First of all, it is submitting to Jesus. And then as an expression of your submitting Jesus, you're picturing the church's submission to the Savior. And so that does influence and control everything you do. If you did criticize your husband, it would not be for the joy of jabbing and shoving in the knife and turning the blade a bit. It would be because you think something is out of line with Jesus, not for the joy of being a critic, wanting to honor your husband's authority and embracing his leadership. There is a role of leadership involved and godly submission is looking for that leadership, appreciating it, affirming it, wanting to embrace it. And so you're submitting as is fitting in the Lord, it says in Colossians. That's an important phrase. It's fitting in the Lord because you're dramatizing something about the relationship to the Lord. And it's fitting in the Lord because the Lord is the one who created marriage to work that way. I should say that this is the submission of a wife to her own husband, not the submission of all women to all men. That's one good thing about submission. You get that one guy to submit, you forget about the other 3 billion. I mean, you should treat that with some respect too but you're not stuck with all of them trying to run your life. 

But the fact of the matter is that nearly all women are going to have somebody who is calling the shots for them and who is providing in some way for them. And if it's not their husband, it's likely to be their boss, who is calling the shots and where she better do what he says or she's fired, or it will be the federal government, that beloved provider. That by the way explains a lot about politics. You'll find that in our country, the vast majority of unmarried or divorced women vote for one party. The vast majority of married… you hear about gender gap, but it's actually women without  husband's gap versus women with husbands gap when you see how parties vote, because those who do have a a man already providing for them prefer smaller government because the government takes too much of their husband's income. Those who don't have a husband and need the government to provide for them prefer the party of a bigger government because they need them because there's no man around doing it.

I am not going to weigh in on the plusses and minuses, but that’s a fact about our politics that somebody you're gonna be looking to somebody for direction and for provision to a considerable degree and godly submissions has that if you have a good guy be thankful for him and embrace his leadership. It does mean supporting your husband, helping him to reach his full potential as a man of God. You've got your potential to reach he's also got his. Adam couldn't reach his full potential without Eve. And ever since then, married men have depended very much on their wives. It's kind of almost comical way some presidential candidates who you know are itching to run. I don't know if they quite dare to do it because their wife isn't too eager to have to go through that meat grinder or to have their family go through it. You've heard the story, I'm sure of the woman who was married to the senator. And they went back to a class reunion and they met some other guy who was you know, had kind of a low pay unimpressive job and who had used to be the boyfriend of the Senator's wife and the Senator said to the senator’s wife, well, you have got to be mighty glad to have married me instead of him. And she said, Well, if I had married him he would have been the senator. So, you know, there is that aspect where you are able to help somebody reach their full potential. 

It's also compatible with thinking for yourself. You're not helping your husband by thinking all his thoughts after. One of the great values you bring is to bring stereo sound into it or two angles of vision into the decision making process. You're doing him a lot more good if you're thinking for yourself and helping him with your thoughts than if you're just repeating his words after him. And godly submission according to First Peter three, it is effective and it's more effective than nagging. If you do have a husband who needs to be won over from unbelief in Christ, or if you need him to be won over from some ungodly ways, or once you have voiced your concern and their desire for change in that regard after that, you're not gonna win him over by beating the issue to death. But if you love him, and you use that gentle and quiet spirit that he's talking about in first Peter, then you're actually going to have a greater likelihood of having a result. You know the passages from Proverbs. Better to live on a corner of the roof than than with a quarrelsome nagging woman. Better live in the desert than with a quarrelsome nagging woman. Like the constant dripping of water drip drip drip drip drip is the nagging woman so on. Solomon didn't like nagging woman very much. If that's what happens when you marry a 1000 wives, I don't advise it. Anyway, that's another subject. 

The fact is that you're going to have more of an impact and because you're gonna be a person wants to hear from. When you do speak, he's gonna take you a lot more seriously. And so yeah, the fact is, you can express areas of disagreement at the same time not be a nag and we'll get to the husbands in a little bit. I talked about the constant dripping of water. But every husband of course when he's getting nagged too much gets asked as well, I might be in the real drip. If it takes that much from her to get my attention, maybe I've got a problem. So questions always have to be asked on both sides of the equation. And godly submission according to the first Peter again, is powered by this peaceful spirit, this calm spirit, this is being contented in Christ. Most of us when we have to have our own way and can't survive unless we get our own way. The main reason for that is our own insecurity. The main reason for that is we just gotta have what we want to have and we gotta have now. Or if somebody disagrees with us we take it as a personal slam, and it is undermining our dignity. And our very sense of self is in danger of falling apart if we can't get our way. When you know who you are in Christ, as a daughter of God, when you know that you're not stupid, when you know you're not nobody, when you know that you're not less than your husband is in any respect, then it's a lot easier to give somebody their way instead of being harder because it doesn't devastate who you are. And so the ability to give someone else their wishes is actually powered by being content in Jesus Christ 

Well enough about submission, but what about headship. There's a few things that it's not and we'll see how they correspond in some ways to what submission isn't. It's not being superior, and it's not having more work or more wisdom in your life. And one of the dangers of course, when you understand that your role is portraying Christ in relation to your wife might be to get this kind of Messiah Complex and thinking that you are some big thing. Now Christ is the Messiah and you're not. Your job is in a very small way to play a drama of His love. It's not harsh bullying, or forcing your wife to submit. Again, notice very much what Paul is saying. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. In Colossians, he's speaking very briefly. He expands a little bit in some of these other passages, but in Colossians, the only thing he says is husbands love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Because that could be one of the big dangers, is harshness. It's one of the greatest evils of our society, abuse of women and of spouses and either where it doesn't come down to physical beating, there is often a kind of bullying and harshness and a lack of consideration that's very deadly. And back in Paul’s time, there was the whole idea of patria potestas that the father or the husband is the head of the whole home, that the father is the dictator who calls all the shots. He had the literal power of life and death over his wife and children. He could kill them if he wanted and there wouldn't be a penalty under the law. 

So when the Apostle says you don't be harsh with your wife, he was saying something quite at odds with the way an awful lot of men were tending to be and were tending to be with the blessing of their society. And whether society blesses it or not, there's no room for just harsh bullying or forcing your wife to submit. You'll notice it never says husbands make your wives submit to you. It's one thing to tell wives submit to your husband voluntarily. It's quite another thing to say, husband, you're the head and you make her submit. Now in the Bible there are some cases where fathers make their children obey and if they don't, they get disciplined. But never in the Bible is there any instruction of how you're supposed to discipline your wife, if she's not submissive. Or how you're supposed to deal with her. Her role is to be voluntarily submissive. Your role is to be voluntarily loving and not harsh. And if she's not submissive, you are not called to make her submissive or to preach to her sermons on submission. Leave those to me or somebody else. 

But when you listen to a sermon, really when you listen to this sermon, or if you ever went back to listen to, tune out the half the dozen that doesn’t talk to you. And only listen only to the half that talk to you. When I talk to married couples. Sometimes I want to talk to them and I choose to talk with them separately, because there are things I want to say to one that I don't want to say in front of the other one because I'm gonna say, well, the pastor told you to do such and such. I don't want them to know too much of what I told their spouse. I want them to know what they need to do. And whenever you read the Bible listen to what it’s saying to you, not what it’s saying to the next person. 

Godly headship of a husband is not independent of God's authority or the authority of the Church and the government. And so as I said in relation to the wife, you as the husband do not have the right to command her to do stuff that is out of line of God's will, that's contrary to law of the land, that's contrary to the authority of the Church of Jesus Christ. There have been some patriarchal men who, you know, are kind of chest beating and real macho and very much in favor of husbandly authority. They got nothing bad to say about the government. They never found a church elder they listened to in their life and their time in God's word is fairly limited. But they sure believe in husband authority, and that seems to be about the only kind of authority they believe in. That's just not godly headship at all. If a husband is beating his wife, I believe that it is absolutely right for that wife to report it to the elders of the church and ask that he be excommunicated from the church unless he stop it. That she report it to the government and have him locked up in prison unless he cuts it out, because he's violating the law. Now and she's being submissive wife because that guy needs to change. And the best thing for him is if he's held accountable by the legitimate authorities, who say you don't do that kind of stuff and get away with it. Wives who covering for her husbands are not truly submitting in a godly manner. Those husbands should be held to account. 

Godly headship is not ignoring your wife's wishes and wisdom and saying you know, I am the head of the relationship and so I've got all the necessary knowledge and I'll make all the decisions. Thank you. That's not godly headship. Peter says husbands be considered as you live with your wives. It's not getting what you want or insisting on your own way or exalting yourself. You're appointed to be a leader for the good of your wife and for the good of your family. And that is not the equivalent of always getting what you want and what's convenient for you and what you'd like to do. And then godly headship is not making every decision or being a control freak. You’re never delegating. There may be a lot of stuff in your home that your wife makes most of the decisions on. And that's just fine. If you say hey honey you are good at that you cover that. And you know if there's any areas where it's a tough call, let's talk about it. But other than that, I have that. That's just fine. That's not inconsistent with godly headship at all. You do not have to make every decision. 

Now what is godly headship? Well, first of all, it's self sacrificing. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. It's the self sacrificing head of the church, Jesus Christ that we are representing. It's gently providing and caring for your wife. We talked about, last week, how husband is caring for a wife the way the head cares for its own body. And a head is not gonna say, Well, I'd like to take a big chunk out of that arm, or I'm kind of kicked off the stomach. So this week, I'm going to starve that stomach and teach him a lesson. You know, that'll be very hard. The head will feel a lot of pain if the arm and the stomach are in trouble. And so you want to gently provide care for your wife the way you provide for and care for them and  protect your own body. It involves protecting and honoring and empowering your wife to flourish in beauty, in joy, in holiness. Christ's sacrificed himself for the church and why? To make her a radiant bride, to make her splendid, to make her pure. 

Jesus said, I have come that you might have joy that your joy may be complete. And so husbands who wants to represent Jesus in relation to, husband who wants to bring her maximum joy and bring her to her highest potential in beauty and in holiness. It means being considerate and aware of your wife's wishes, of her weaknesses, of her strengths and just everything that you want to know what she wants. So that where possible you can grant it. You want to know where she's weak. You want to know, you want to know her cycles of the month, and how that affects her. You want to know if she’s somebody in their late 40s or entering her 50s. And there are hormonal things where she's not just this evil hag who is out to make your life miserable. There may be other factors that work and it is best for husbands and wives to be aware of what's going on, what affects each other's moods. That's part of being considerate of considering or thinking about what's affecting the person whom you love.

Godly headship is leadership. It's taking the lead by your example. It’s taking the lead by your actions, and doing things that need doing when something needs talking about bring it up. This doesn't mean that the wife can never bring stuff up for discussion. It does mean that if the wife is always the one who has to start a discussion, or the discussions will never happen, then there's something amiss. If the only time any discussion takes place, what are we gonna do with this child and their education? Or what are we going to do about that? How are we gonna handle this financial issue? And if the only one ever bringing these questions up and putting them on the agenda is the wife then there's something a little bit of miss because he's just letting all the initiative go to her and getting her a burden that she's not meant to bear? Now in a healthy relationship, there may be lots of occasions where she brings it up first but he takes the overall initiative.

And then it also means making hard decisions and taking responsibility for the consequences. There may be times when a tough call needs to be made, and he might make that call and then he's got to take responsibility for it. Sometimes the call you make as a husband will be honey, we've discussed all this and I kind of think this way would be better when you think that way would be better and it's not all that clear. So we're going to do it your way. And when he says that, then he's still saying I've made the decision that we're going to do it your way. And so if we get some blowback from this, or if it doesn't turn out the way we want it, it was my call. And I'm not gonna say, but you wanted to do it that way. And you remember what I said. I wanted to do it that way and boy, we could have avoided that and it would have turned out a lot better if I hadn't listened to you. Oh, shut up.

When you take responsibility as head and you say, Honey, I kind of here’s how I am thinking, but I sure see your case, so we'll go for it because I like to make you happy. But once you've made that decision, then you take responsibility for the consequences of that decision. In a sense of being the head of relationship means you take responsibility for things that are also aren't even your fault. Jesus took responsibility for his church with a lot of glitches and he took it all on himself. When your wife has issues, they may be her fault, but now that she's your wife, there's still your responsibility to do all you can to love her and help her along that path. 

Maybe to conclude, just give an example of what a good healthy argument might look like in the case of godly submission and godly sacrifice. The wife and the husband are going to have a vicious argument and I'm gonna sacrifice and do it your way, he says you know, because he's called by God and now that he knows what she wants, he's bound and determined to make sure that it goes her way. No she says, I'm going to submit and do it your way. No, he says I'm gonna sacrifice and do it your way. No, no, no, no, no. The Bible says I have to submit and do it your way and so you know, they get into this long long argument though. He's got to please his wife. No, I am got to  please you and finally he invokes his authority and headship. I'm called to sacrifice as Christ gave himself up for the church. I decree that we’re gonna go your way because it will bring you joy and good for you and that's that. I don't hear another word about it. Now, you know, kind of snicker a little bit because that doesn't tend to be the way our arguments unfold is it. Where we're so eager to do what's good for her and she's so eager to do what's good for husband but this is where godly sacrifice of godly submission would get you into arguments. And that's how you would settle them. The husband would say, Well, I can see that we've got to do this your way. And that's that. 

There may be times of course, where God's will is involved very clearly, then you have to weigh in on what God's command is. But otherwise, the call to submit and the sacrifice to each other is basically a contest to see who can please each other the most, to see who can bless each other the most. And if you get into conflict, then I don't care who wins that conflict you've both already lost. If the conflict was not a contest to see who can bring the most blessings to the other then you already lost in that conflict and even when you win your side of the argument that it's time to go to Lord in repentance and go to your spouse in repentance. And as we think about all of this, there is undoubtedly a lot of repenting to do. And that is why we so desperately need God's grace. 

We can fool ourselves a lot of the time. When you live with one other person and your calling is to love that person in a sacrificial way or in a submissive way, then you really find out the depths of your sin. And what a selfish pig you are a good deal of the time. And that is God's grace. God's grace puts us in these situations so that we can’t fool ourselves. So that we say You know, God gave me the spouse and I find my spouse sometimes bringing out the worst in me and maybe it's a good thing. Now I know the worst in me. God knows the worst in me deal with it. God forgave it washed with your blood, change it by your Spirit. And so even the sins and the conflicts that exist in our marriages can be an act of God's grace to unmask us to ourselves and to show us again how desperately we need the Lord Jesus Christ and then to pour out that mercy and that blessing upon us. 

Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the ways that it so often runs contrary to who we are and how we think and act and we thank You that You reveal yourself and also reveal ourselves to us both as we are in sin, but also as we can more and more be as redeemed people. Father help us as husbands to live by faith in Jesus Christ and more and more to exemplify and model, the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ in the way we relate to our wives. And Lord those of us who are wives here, we pray that you will grant grace to gladly welcome and accept the husbands you have given and to model the submissive love of the church to Jesus Christ. Help us Lord, when we have difficulties in our marriages to seize those as opportunities for grace and forgiveness from you and the grace and forgiveness shown to one another. And help us learn to seek to outdo one another in bringing joy and blessing to each other for Jesus sake and for His glory. Amen.