Sermon Tone Analysis

Last week we started this series on marriage entitled “Meant to Be.”

I wanted to take a look at God’s teaching on marriage because God has a grand design for marriage to give him glory and give us joy.

A lot of married people are not living in joy.

I heard Rodney Dangerfield say one time, “My wife and I were happy for twenty years.

Then we met.”

I thought to myself, “That’s funny because a lot of people can relate to that.”

So we need to ask, “Why is marriage in such poor shape in America?”

And part of the answer we discovered last week is that we have gotten away from the purposes in which God created marriage in the first place.

So last week we began to take a look at what God’s purposes for marriage are.

In looking at the beginning of marriage in Gen. 2:18-25 we saw that marriage is to provide intimate fellowship, to produce oneness or unity between the partners, and to produce godly children, to influence the earth for his glory.

Then in Eph.

5:32, we found out that there was a more important purpose for marriage.

One that had remained a mystery for thousands of years until Christ came and created a bride for himself, the church.

Then the mystery could be revealed.

The mystery is that the most important purpose of marriage is to glorify God by being a running illustration to reveal to our world what the relationship between Christ and his church looks like.

Marriage provides hundreds of thousands of illustrations of Christ love for his church and his church’s trust and submission to his will based on who He is and the sacrificial love that He has shown them.

Husbands, if you have a wife is devoted to you like the church is devoted to Christ.

You have a gift from God!

Here’s how I interpret that.

You can get a inheritance that includes a house and money from your daddy.

But, only God can give you a godly wife.

Today and next week we are going to talk about “The Beauty and Glory of a Submissive wife.”

I always hesitate a little to talk about this subject because of the big “S” word submission.”

Many wives shrink away from this teaching because they think that this means they are suppose to be a slave to their husband and do whatever he says.

That is not at all what is being taught here.

Actually, what is being taught is that submission between a husband and his wife is mutual.

v.21 say that we are to be about the task of “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Both partners submit to each other in different ways.

What that teaches us is that submission has nothing to do with personhood.

Eph. 5 is not a teaching that men are superior to women in any way.

However, “Equality does not mean sameness.”

We are equal in personhood, but different in our roles.

Men and women complement each other in marriage.

It’s what scholars call complementarianism.

We all know that men and women are different.

*A woman walked into the kitchen to find her husband stalking around with a fly swatter.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Hunting Flies” he responded.

“Oh!, Killing any?” she asked.

“yep, 3 males and 2 females”, he replied.

Intrigued, she asked.

“How can you tell?”

He responded, “3 were on the TV remote and 2 were on the phone.”

We are different because God made us different in order to fulfill the roles God gave us.

The different roles involve mutual submission.

The husband submits to his wife by providing Christ-like headship.

The wife submits through voluntary followship.

The word “submission” actually comes from the military meaning to line yourself up under the leadership of the one in command.

But the one in command takes responsibility for the care of those he leads.

What both husbands and wives need to remember is that in marriage, being the right person is more important than finding the right person.

Today and next week, let’s look at what submission from a wife’s perspective looks like.

After we finish with the wife’s role, we will move on and study the role of the husband.

Today let’s talk about why a godly wife submits to her husband.

I.

A godly wife submits because it’s her responsibility (v.22)

Or we might say out of obedience to God.

She does it because God told her to in the Scripture.

He simply addresses in v. 22, “Wives, submit to your own husbands.”

That’s important to note because some of you wives are thinking right now, “I’m more qualified to lead this family than my husband is.

He’s an idiot and I’m way more godly than he is.”

Maybe so, but he is the ungodly idiot that you married.

Education, intelligence, spiritual maturity, age, experience, or anything else does not change the wives responsibility.

If your husband is a godly man who has a biblical vision for his family and leads out in the things of God, a godly woman will rejoice in that leadership and support him in it.

The problem is, “What if he is not kind of leader in the home?”

You would never follow him in sinfulness.

However, submission and respect for him as the leader is still God’s desire.

So the way you act before your husband can be God’s way of bringing him to salvation.

So instead of nagging, criticizing, and preaching to your husband because he is not the kind of Christian leader that he ought to be, a wife should set a godly example before him.

Show him the power and beauty of the gospel through its effect on your own life.

How do you do you become a wife that gives the proper support to your godly husband and, if your husband is not a believer, have a godly influence on him that he might be saved while at the same time submitting to him?

II.

A godly wife submits because it’s her glory.

This is not an indictment against women that get their hair done, wear jewelry, or wear nice clothes.

This is more of an indictment against the kind of thinking that says doing all those things is what makes you beautiful.

In America, women are groomed to think that nice hair, nice clothes, nice jewelry, added to this a nice body and wrinkle free skin is the definition of beauty.

None of that makes you attractive to God.

This kind of beauty is external and it is temporal.

He says, you should pursue the “imperishable beauty that comes from having a gentle and quiet spirit.”

That is what is precious to God.

What does that mean?

It means it’s beautiful to God to treat your husband like you believe in him.

It’s not your job to upstage him or make him feel inferior about who he is or how he provides for your family.

It means your recognize that he is the one that God brought into your family to lead it.

It means you relate to your husband with humility, love, moral purity, kindness, and respect.

If Abraham is the father of believers, the Sarah is the mother.

Sarah respected Abraham’s God given authority as leader in their family by calling him Lord.

I’m not saying that you should call your husband ‘Lord.”

That was the custom of that day.

What I am saying that you should show him respect due to the fact that God placed him in a position to lead your family.

Some wives are so outspokenly disrespectful to their husbands, there is no way they can be lead.

*I once saw a cartoon that had a young boy asking, “My dad wants to know if a man speaks in a forest, and there’s no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?”

Some women make their husbands feel like nothing they can do is good enough for them.

The Bible is clear that this is not only disrespectful to the husband, but it is also dishonoring to God.

III.

A godly wife submits because it’s her joy.

In 5:22, the command “submit” is in the middle voice.

This means the action is back onto the subject.

The idea is that we are “to submit ourselves.”

This is carried over from v. 21.

In v. 21, the idea is that each partner should willingly submit to the role that God has place them in to the family.