High rises and spaghetti

Today I want to start with a confession. You are going to see me struggle with sin right here before your eyes. This sermon was easy to write and the passage is one that is well known but it causes some big fights so I want to ask you to do me a favor.

I want to read to you from the word of God and I want you to give it a chance. I want you to try to forget what you have heard and what you may have thought for a few moments and give the word of God a chance. Listen to it like you had never heard it before and give me a chance to explain what this means and how it should be applied before you react. Give God a chance, he is never wrong and his word is never wrong. So lets figure it out together.

Ephesians 5:22–33 NASB95

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.

I know that this passage, and in particular the word submit calls up a lot of emotion and a lot of past arguments and feelings. Most of these are because of our own misunderstanding and misconceptions. Our problems starts because God made us different and we struggle with being different, with understanding why we are different and with understanding each other. Since we don’t understand each other or what God is doing we are afraid that we will miss out on something or that someone else will get something we didn’t get, bear with me for a few moments and trust that God is fair and just.

The problem begins because men and women are different. We are built different and we think differently, our brains work differently and God has done this on purpose. Not all women are the same and not all men are the same but it should be apparent to everyone that women are infinitely better than men.....................at being women and men are infinitely better than women..........at being men. Our brains don’t work the same, it seems that when a baby boy is still in his mother’s tummy he is flooded with testosterone and this causes some of the paths between the analytical side of the brain and the creative side of the brain to disconnect and others not to form at all. This means that women have a much easier time going back and forth between creativity and analytical thinking than men.

Think of it like this, if you had several things to do in Little Rock and several others in North little rock and Little rock was built like a mans brain there would just be one bridge across the river and traffic would always be backed up so you would probably arrange to do everything on one side of the river first and then everything on the other side so that you only had to cross the bridge once. But if Little Rock was built like a woman's brain there would be hundreds or thousands of bridges and crossing the river would be as easy as pie so you could plan your day differently.

Let me try to help you ladies understand how a man’s brain works, and yes ladies........it does work. imagine if you walked into a high rise apartment building, you would immediately be confronted with one of three choices, you could go up the stairs, get in the elevator or go down the hallway and pick a door to enter. A man’s brain works like this building. if you want to think about football, you go into the building and go to the football room, it happens to be in room 319 so you go into the elevator, up to the third floor, walk down the hall to room 319, go in and shut the door behind you and you are now ready to concentrate on football. Later on if you want to think about cars you have to leave the football room, go down the hall to the elevator and go to room 611 to the car room where you can concentrate on cars. This allows a man to focus and to concentrate on a problem with few distractions.

Now a woman’s brain is different. I don’t pretend to fully understand it but I think I can help you guys out. Think of a plate of spaghetti. When you look down at a plate of spaghetti you see all of these noodles wrapped around each other and weaving in and out of each other, they are covered with sauce and spices and it is all mixed together to make a delicious dish. When you eat spaghetti you don’t attempt to pick out one noodle and separate it from everything else, eat that noodle then push the plate away and say man that was a good meal, you eat it all together and all wrapped up with each other. When a woman thinks her thoughts are liked to other thoughts and she easily sees connections that we struggle with.

Typically a man’s brain works best when we focus and concentrate on one thing and that is where he is most comfortable, a woman’s brain works best when she can see how everything is connected together and she can easily make connections that are hard for us to see or understand, that is where she is most comfortable.

Because of the way her brain works a woman is most comfortable when she sees connections and feels connected to the world around her. Think of it as if a woman goes around with a ball of string and she likes to make connections to the things she cares about. Much of the time and effort that she puts into a relationship is about making these connections. The more things you share and the more things you have in common the more connections you make, the more strings there are between the two of you. The more connections there are the safer she feels and the more comfortable the relationship is. The more connections she has with you the more she feels appreciated and understood and the happier she can be. Ladies, this may shock you but guys don’t think like this.

In fact a man feels most at home, most relaxed and most successful when he is in an area he knows a lot about and where he feels like he has the answers and he can feel confident that he knows what he is doing and that others respect his knowledge and ability. A man doesn’t feel comfortable because he feels connected but because he feels competent. He wants to feel useful and needed and that his knowledge and abilities are respected.

God made us differently and we have different areas we are naturally better at and different things that we need to feel good about ourselves and about our relationships. God knows this, he made us that way, and he even tells us how to make it work.

We all know what it looks like when it doesn’t work, the man comes home and goes into the football room to watch the game, he locks the door and settles in. Later his wife comes home and she immediately starts to include him in her day. He on the other hand has vaguely heard someone out in the hall but he hasn’t yet come to the door. She says I was out shopping today at that new store on the highway and I ran into Betty from church, you know that her daughter is graduating this year, they were there picking out a dress for the graduation party, it reminded me of when our daughter graduated, it was so beautiful, remember how perfect everything was, everything except the potholes in the street in front of the school, the ones that are still there, I don’t know why someone doesn’t do something about it. At this point the man has realized his wife is home, come out of the football room and looked down the hall to hear her talking about potholes, so he closes the door, thinks for a second and remembers that the pothole room is room 521 so he goes down the hall, gets in the elevator goes to the fifth floor and ambles down the hall to the pothole room, opens the door and holds it for his wife, who is not there. Meanwhile she has continued on, I don’t know why they never fixed that road but anyway when I ran into Betty at the store her daughter was trying on dresses and I stopped to talk to Betty about the new carpet that was installed in the hall at church, it was such a horrible color choice and Betty completely agrees, someone should have been on that committee that has knows something about decorating instead of letting the building committee handle it but its done now. Anyway when she came out with that blue dress on I could not help but notice that she was showing, can you believe it, Betty’s daughter is pregnant. This is the exact moment when the man reached a the pothole room in his mind and turned to look for his wife, she was nowhere to be seen but looking down the hall where her voice was coming from he heard the her last statement and screamed down the hall....... PREGNANT, WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU ARE PREGNANT. His wife looks at him, shakes his head and says “see what I mean, you never listen to a word I say”.

So the bible says wives be subject to your husbands, now when we think of subjection we think of one being lower than another, one in charge and one obeying, we think of status and no one wants to have less status than someone else. But God never meant it so be about status. It is about meeting the needs of someone else, it is about sacrificial service. You see ladies your husband needs to feel useful and knowledgeable, he has a need to feel like he matters, like someone needs him. The way he meets this need most often is by proving that there are subjects that he is an expert on and there are things that he can do better than most.

If you think about that high rise building there are doors that are shiny and polished, the rooms are well used and well decorated, these are the areas he excels in. There are other doors that are dusty and old and neglected and we don’t talk about those. The more time he can spend in the rooms where he is an expert and where he feels comfortable the easier it is for him to open up to you and be comfortable around you, to give you what you need. So find a room you husband likes to hand out in and spend some time there, ask some questions and let him be the authority, let him show you his abilities and his knowledge and appreciate them. By acknowledging what he does well and that he is a valuable human being you will make him feel loved and appreciated and give him the freedom and confidence to love you back.

Guys, I know that your wife likes to be right, and I know that you probably let her win the argument sometimes because you think it will solve the problem, have you ever noticed that it doesn’t. That is because being a subject matter expert isn’t what makes her feel comfortable, safe and loved. She want to connect with you. Have you ever felt like she interrogates you, or that she rambles all over the place without getting to the point. This is her way of connecting with your life and trying to get you to connect with her life. She is offering you strings of connection, what you did today or what she did, how she felt or what you felt, what is important to her and what might be important to you. She is building all of those connections because the more connections she has to your life the closer she feels to you and the easier it is for her to love you and appreciate you. See we are each trying to give the other person what we want and need instead of what they need.

Ladies it will be uncomfortable for you to go into a room and shut the door and only focus on one thing, especially one thing that may be much more important to your husband than it is to you, besides it is only one connection and there are so many more things you could connect about. But your husband needs that, submit to it, go into the room, shut the door behind you and prove to him that you respect him, that you admire him, you must or you would not have chosen him, let him know it in a way he can understand.

Guys, I know your wife goes from one subject to another and you have a hard time keeping up, I know that you feel confused because you don’t know what she wants you to do, the thing is she doesn’t want you do anything. She just wants you to connect with her, if you feel like you have to do something concentrate on helping her connect her life to yours in any many ways as you can . I know you will have to struggle not to find something you can fix, or some expert advice you can give, I know you want to solve the problem, but give yourself up for your wife, allow the problem to go unsolved, allow your advice to remain unspoken, concentrate on understanding what she is saying, not so you can fix it, or solve it, or resolve it but so you can make her feel safe and loved and important to you. Give up your comfortable room and stand out in the hall, Listen to your wife just because she is important to you and let her know it. Let her know you care and you are interested in what she is saying just because it is her that is saying it, you will be glad that you did.

Both men and women are designed to work together, to complement each other, we think differently, we have different wants and needs, we need to take turns, ladies, spend some time in your husbands favorite room, you may even enjoy it, men quit trying to figure it all out and just enjoy the journey, eat the spaghetti and quit trying to untangle the noodles. Give your partner what they need and not what you want, that’s the way God designed it to work, and it does.