Wives & Husbands

Bible Reading

Ephesians 5:21–33 NLT

21 And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. 22 For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. 24 As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. 25 For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her 26 to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. 27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. 28 In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. 29 No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. 30 And we are members of his body. 31 As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” 32 This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. 33 So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Introduction

Let’s pray: Lord, this passage challenges so many of our culture’s fondest ideas, that it is always going to be a challenge to apply it to ourselves. Please help us to be open to your powerful Word. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Because of the challenge of this passage, I just want to make a few things clear before we get started.

This beard does not make me Jesus. Don’t take my word as Gospel, rather use those three great gifts God has given you: your mind, his Word (the Bible), and the illumination of the Holy Spirit, and work through the passage yourself. There are many resources to help us understand God’s word, and I am just a small and rather insignificant one of those.

Don’t expect God’s ways to align with yours. We are fallen people, and the purpose of God’s Word is to conform us to God’s image, not to allow us to form our own image.

If you find yourself in conflict with your understanding of the Bible, don’t be too hasty about dismissing that understanding. Examine your cultural or historic biases, interpret scripture with scripture, get a good book or course on hermeneutics (how to interpret the Bible), find some reliable commentaries that take Scripture seriously, talk to someone who wrestles seriously with Scripture. Above all, take God’s Word seriously.

This passage applies today. It may be tempting to dismiss these instructions as coming from Paul’s cultural context. That would be a mistake! I will explain how both the instructions for wives are counter-cultural (not only in our culture, but in Paul’s), and the instructions for husbands are astoundingly counter-cultural.

This passage does not directly apply to everyone. Paul is speaking to wives and husbands. Single men and women, who are a key part of the church, do not fall directly within the application. However, this passage does reveal something about singleness, stay tuned.

The key to understanding this entire section is understanding Christian “submission.”

Christian Submission

The Greek word for submission, hypotasso, is used throughout the New Testament, as you can see here.

It is a particularly New Testament word, and always has the same meaning: a personal and active acceptance of our dependent role in a particular relationship, paying due reverence to the one we depend on in that relationship. It should not be confused with obedience—Jesus calls us to obey him, but to submit to one another.

Now, this idea of accepting a particular role, such as our role as creature in relation to God as creator, or our role as disciple in relation to Jesus as rabbi, seems to be fine with us so long as it involves God. We struggle, though, don’t we, when it involves submission to another, imperfect human being. Children struggle with submission to parents, Christian citizens struggle with submission to worldly authorities, Christians also struggle with submission to one another. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, wives struggle with submission to their husbands and vice-versa.

Where does this struggle come from? Paul pleads with the Christians at Philippi:

Philippians 2:3–4 NLT

3 Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. 4 Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.

We struggle with our own self-focus. We confuse our narrrow perspective, the view from our eyes, with the vastness of reality in which we are a tiny part. Paul goes on to explain how a Christian is supposed to live by pointing to Christ’s example:

Philippians 2:5–8 NLT

5 You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. 6 Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. 7 Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, 8 he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.

Jesus, God himself, modelled submission! How can we reject his call?

A more down-to-earth example of submission is when a parent listens to their child and learns. For example, when I was fourteen or fifteen, my parents listened to my interests and bought our family a home computer. That might not sound like a big deal nowadays, but it was back then, and that instance of humble listening to their teenage son set that same son on a fruitful pathway for life.

Now, let’s turn to the passage.

Wives

Ephesians 5:22–24 NLT

22 For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. 24 As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything.

Paul’s advice to wives would be easy to confuse with traditional cultural views on women, except for three things.

Paul is careful to set the context of his discussion only to a marriad couple, whereas traditional cultures would extend this submission to all women submitting to a wide variety of men, such as to your father, etc.

Paul grounds his instructions in the relationship of Christ with his people, the church.

Paul makes it clear that submission is a personal choice, not something to be forced on someone. Paul is exhorting wives to choose the path of Christian submission. Husbands, this is an important point to remember: it is up to your wife to choose whether she obeys Christ or not, it is not your responsibility to force that. This Christian idea that people must choose their own response to others, and to Christ, is also found in the other household code relationships of parents and children and masters and bondservants.

Why mere submission?

So why are wives called merely to do something that all Christians are supposed to do to one another? That doesn’t seem very fair, does it?

But I think Paul is thinking of the unique intimacy of marriage; of the way we become a part of one another and come to know one another. I’m sure each of you wives is more aware of how imperfect your husbands are than anyone else is, and also you’re more aware of his imperfections than of anyone else’s imperfections, even your own! Paul is calling you to submit yourself to someone whose imperfections and weaknesses you are painfully and intimately aware of.

That’s hard. That’s scary. That’s massively counter-cultural. It requires great trust in God as your protector.

But we are called to trust God in hard things.

Husbands

Ephesians 5:25–30 NLT

25 For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her 26 to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. 27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. 28 In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. 29 No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. 30 And we are members of his body.

Indeed, husbands are called to their own hard thing. Husbands are called to sacrificially love their wives, giving their own lives up for them as Christ gave himself up for the church. This is a powerful form of submission: recognising that you are dependent on your wife for purpose in your life. Husbands get this wrong all the time: they think their purpose comes from work or family. However, in accepting marriage, a man accepts that his wife is essentially in control of his love (under God, of course). Children come and go. Careers come and go. But your wife is with you for your life.

You see, a husbands sacrificial love is intended as an image, obviously an imperfect one, of Christ’s love for the church. Just as husbands give up other loves for the one love of their wife, so Christ became human for ever more on our behalf.

By the way, the fact that the church now exists, that God’s love for his people has been expressed before the whole world in Christ, frees people from the need to marry. How? The image, marriage, has been replaced by the reality: Christ and the church. Single people have a powerful position in the Church precisely because the Church is already the bride of Christ. While before Christ, marriage was an important expression of family, we now have an even more intimate and enduring family to belong to: the Church.

Personal Responsibility

It is important to rememver that both husbands and wives are responsible for their own choices. In other words, a wife should not wait for her husband to love her sacrificially before she chooses to submit to him. And a husband should not wait for his wife to submit to him before he lovingly sacrifices himself for her. These choices reflect our own relationship with Christ more than the health of our marriage.

Think about it: a marriage between two imperfect people where both were expecting the other to make the first move towards one another is destined for dissolution, for divorce. But a marriage between two imperfect people where both are prepared to give the other a chance, even before the other deserves it, is never going to fall to pieces.

How can husbands and wives submit themselves to one another like this? We can do it because we know with absolute certainty that God loves us. That he’s got us. We can abandon ourselves to another fallible human being because God will never fail us. We can place others’ needs before our own because God will care for our needs.

Matthew 10:30–31 NLT

30 And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows.

Conclusion

Marriage is tough. It’s hard for two inherently selfish beings to join together in a lifelong relationship. It’s hard to consistently place another above yourself, especially when each day they remind you of how selfish they are. It is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that we can hope to live this way. But living this way is a powerful example of the kingdom of heaven here on earth. Who wouldn’t want a part of that?

Let us share Paul’s prayer for the church in chapter 3. Let’s pray:

Ephesians 3:14–19 NLT

14 When I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, 15 the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. 16 I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. 17 Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. 18 And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. 19 May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

Amen.