Ephesians 5:22-24-The Beauty of Marriage for Wives

 Okay, friends, if you have a Bible, would you please see in the moments we have together as we look at God's word, we are in Ephesians chapter five. If you have a Bible, please open with me to Ephesians chapter five. There are Bibles underneath, uh, your seats if you wanna use one of those. Let encourage you to have a copy of God's Word open.

They're also in the book Nook. Out in the nx there are these, uh, scripture journals of the book of Ephesians. And so every other page, just like Jonathan Edwards, uh, loose leafed Bible is blank so that you can take, uh, notes in them. And so avail yourself to those. They are ours. As a gift to you, please just take one, and if you don't have a Bible at home, then the Bible under your seat is yours.

Please take it. We take for granted the fact that we have access to God's word so quickly and so easily, and we are grateful as God's people to be able to come around it freely and with joy. You'll remember last week that Paul encouraged us in these evil days to live wisely by shaping our communities, not with distraction or complaint or pride, but with spirit-filled song and gratitude.

Humility. And he has this verse in verse 21 where he says, submit to one another at a reverence for Christ. And then in talking about mutual submission, his mind naturally goes to the household codes of the Greco Roman world, where these household codes came from, whether they were a stoic import into the Greco-Roman times, the household orderly codes of.

How marriage ought to function, how the relationship between child and parent ought to function, how in that day the relationship, uh, from slave to master ought to function. Paul just naturally goes there when he thinks about this word submission. And so today we're gonna look at this passage in verses 22 through 24.

So if you're willing to enable, let's stand together for the reading of God's word. Ephesians chapter 5 22 through 24.

Wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church, his body, and is himself, its Savior now as the church submits to Christ. So also wives should submit in everything. To their husbands.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Father, even as we read those passages, uh, together from your word, there are women in this room who are already uncomfortable. And so would you grant grace and peace and joy and insight into the truthfulness of your word? Even when texts are in our culture, apparently for some hard to preach, may you guard my lips to preach your truth boldly and clearly, and we thank you, father for this passage and your care for us.

In Jesus name, amen. I sat years ago with a couple in premarital counseling. Their names are Holly and Steve, and when we began to talk about a biblical view of marriage, I could tell Holly was getting a little uncomfortable and she said, okay,

I love him, but I have to be honest with you, and you can imagine the scene. I mean, they're young and they're bright, and they are just. Gazing at each other. Madly in love. Whenever I hear the word submission, she said, I get really nervous because I don't wanna lose myself.

I don't wanna like lose my voice. I don't wanna lose my autonomy or let him call all the shots. And it was amazingly refreshing to hear her say that because she felt it deeply. Some of you in similar situations have also felt it very deeply. It was for Holly, it was a cry for help. It was a cry for clarity, and I'm so glad that she shared it.

And when many of us in this room hear the word submission, we have to ask the same questions. Is Paul saying that wives lose their voice or become doormats in a marriage? No. Is this command for men to control. Does this give cover for selfishness or worse to harm? May it never be. This is why this passage matters so much for us, because if we're gonna be able to send the gospel across the nations, if we're gonna be able to send the gospel across our living rooms, we have to first understand how the gospel manifests itself in the way that a husband loves his wife, and the way that a li a wife respects and loves and honors her husband.

Does exactly what Paul asks of the wives to do, even as he asks of the husbands to do. And next week, guys, this is all you. So please make sure that you bring your husbands back. Wives, guys, make sure you're here next week. He gives 40 words to wives. He gives 115 gulp to the men. This passage is so important for us because Paul is not giving ammunition for oppression.

He is painting a picture of Christ at the very center of the home. And when Christ is the center, every role is redefined, turned upside down and light of his redeeming love. And so Paul shows us the call of wives in marriage, verse 22. He shows us the ground of that call in verse 23, and he shows us the pattern of that call in verse 24.

The call, the ground and the pattern. First, the call wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord. Paul begins his instructions for Christian households by addressing wives. Now that may come off to you like he's prioritizing the. The wives as having a bigger situation or a bigger issue to deal with, but that is not the case in the Greco Roman world.

Paul would never even have addressed the wives in the Greco Roman world. He would've skipped right over them, ignored them completely, because it was the man of the house. The men were the ones that they were addressed. They were the Potter Mamis, they were the head of the household. They were the ones that had all the authority over the wives, even over the children in that house and over the slave.

And so please. Oh ladies, please hear Paul with incredible countercultural care giving agency to wives in a way that would've been totally shocking in the first century. Do you hear that the call of wives in marriage. Notice closely what Paul actually writes in, in English, it's, you don't pick it up, but in Greek, the word submit is actually not in verse 22, it's a carryover from verse 21.

Literally in Greek it says, wives to your own husbands in the Lord. In verse 21, the word submit is written in the middle voice. Now this is a little English. I know some of you teach English, so go easy on me as I explain the middle voice here, but middle voice in English is when you say, for example, I dressed myself.

That's the middle voice. I had agency and clothing myself. If, if you dress your child, you dress the child. That's active voice. If you were dressed, that's passive voice. Are you with me? But if you dress yourself, that's the middle voice. It is. Assuming that it is a voluntary role. It is not coercion. The wife has agency, she's participating in submitting.

To one another at a reverence for Christ, even here as she submits to her husband. And the force of the grammar here underscores that the wife has agency. That submission in marriage is never something done to a wife. It is something she offers freely as she entrusts herself to the Lord.

And so with that agency and with that dignity. Paul, what does he call a Christian wife to do? He says that she should honor her own husband as the covenantal head as unto the Lord. When Holly heard that word submit in pre counseling and it carried baggage for her because she grew up in a house where her father was incredibly patriarchal and abusive.

The fact that she was even entering marriage took years of preparation for her emotionally to be able to know that she could trust another man with the preciousness of her life together.

And as she began to understand that submission is a voluntary spirit enabled posture of honoring her husband, her grip on that issue began to relax. And submission does not mean inferiority, Haws of the world. It does not mean silence. Remember, Jesus himself submitted to the will of the Father, even to the point of death on a cross.

Philippians five, uh two, five through eight says that Christ Jesus emptied himself by taking the very form of a servant and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Friends. That is not weakness. That is holy strength. So we should also notice the phrase that's important, your own husbands. Paul is not commanding every woman to submit to every man.

She's not sanctioning some kind of, he's not sanctioning some kind of broad male dominance that is not the biblical picture. He's speaking about a husband and a wife and the bond of marriage where submission is a part of God's design for marriage to mirror Christ. And the church. And as Paul puts it in Colossians three 18, wives submit to your husbands as it is fitting to the Lord.

Now here, let me just take a pastoral moment to speak as frankly in as candidly as I can. There are women in this room who are in abusive relationships, I'm sure, and submission never means submitting to sin. Enduring harm and abuse and coercion and mistreatment. They are not headship. They are sin, and they are a violation of God's design.

They are an assault on his image in the other person. And if anybody here is an abusive situation, please hear me. The Bible does not tell you to stay silent or to suffer in isolation.

We want to be a place, Trinity must be a place where there is safety and there is justice, and there is care in our denomination. The PCA over the past several years has become more and more heightenedly aware of the situation. And they wrote a study report called The Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault Report, and they said it well.

It said, abuse must never be excused or minimized or hidden. It must be named. It must be resisted, and it must be dealt with, and it must be dealt with in the light. So if this is your reality, ladies, please hear who we want this place to be. An incredibly safe place for you and the courage you have to come.

I just want to say yes. I don't know who you are. I'm not talking to any person in particular here, but I just want you to hear us saying We are so proud of you. Please lean in. Please ask us for help. Obedience to Christ always comes first. There are elders. There are leaders in his church who would love to hear your story, love to walk alongside you.

If you wanna talk about it more, and if you're just curious about this topic or you wanna walk alongside others, then I'm gonna be in the nursing moms room after service and nursing moms. If you need to nurse during a discipleship, if you would please nurse in room one of Trinity kids and Jill Pop, the director, one of the directors of, uh, Trinity Ladies.

And I will be in there. And I'd love to just have a q and a if you have more questions about this passage.

The Bible never asks you to stay in an abusive relationship. At the same time, sin makes this command very hard, and wives may resist their husband's leadership and not without reasons, because husbands have often failed to lead their wives with Christlike love, fear, and mistrust and pride. They all passed wounds.

It all rises up here, doesn't it? But this is precisely why Paul adds the phrase as to the Lord. Christian submission is not grounded in whether a husband always earns it. It is rooted in the believer's relationship to Jesus because the wife's ultimate loyalty is to Jesus, not her husband. And whenever she honors her husband's leadership and faith, she's ultimately honoring the Lord who gave her a new identity in him.

And Peter said it this way, he said, likewise, wives, in chapter three of one Peter, be subject to your own husbands so that even if some of you do not obey, if some do not obey the word, that is some husbands, that they may be one without a word by the conduct of their wives. And when they see your respectful and pure conduct, they'll be drawn to the Lord.

That's the gospel. In a healthy, in a healthy marriage, a testimony that points to Christ. That's the call of wives in marriage. What's the ground of that call? Point two. Look at verse 23. For the husband is the head of a wife. Even as Christ is head of the church, his body, and is himself, its Savior de Paul explains why wives are called to submit.

It's not because the men are smarter or stronger or more capable. It's not because the culture demands that in Paul's day, the ground of the call is theological, not cultural. The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church. It goes all the way back to creation, which you heard Amanda and Kevin Brown read earlier.

For us, the word head, kale in Greek has carried a great deal of conversation in the history of the church. Some argue that that word means source. Some argue it means authority, but in Paul's word, it's a rich, covenantal term. It points to the one who is bound to the body, inseparably, united, and therefore entrusted with the responsibility for its final life and wellbeing.

Think of Adam and Romans chapter five. God calls him the head of humanity, not just the head of his marriage, and through his disobedience, death spread to all. Then Paul sets Christ beside him and says, Christ is the last Adam. That Christ is the covenant head whose obedience brings righteousness and life to all who placed their faith in him.

So headship here is not about privilege. It is about covenantal responsibility, what the head does, cascades down through the body. And Paul gives the same idea in one Corinthians chapter 11, but I want you to understand that the head, same Greek word, kale, of every man is Christ, and the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

God the Father. Even within the Trinity, the Son, the Father, the Holy Spirit, mutual affection and love, care for each other in a profound way. Never a sense of inequality or a loss of dignity. And that's why Paul adds and is himself. Its savior. Christ's headship is not harsh. His rule is sacrificial. It is redemptive.

And the church is not crushed or diminished under Jesus's headship. And in the same way a wife is not crushed or diminished under her husband's leadership, if it is healthy and rich and good. Why? Because there's mutual trust and forbearance that's developed there. And it is a picture to their children and to the watching world of the church to church's glad submission to Christ.

As the sermon in the sentence says, as the church gladly submits to Christ her faithful head and loving bridegroom, so also wives are called to honor Christ by submitting to their husbands as unto the Lord. Again, it is easy to hijack this text to make it mean things that it does not mean. But if we are to have healthy marriages, we are to be able to say, we don't pick and choose what aspects of God's word we obey.

We lean into it with all of the intentionality that it's required for our marriages to thrive.

So husbands are called to live. As we'll see next week with a deep sense of covenantal accountability and one day men. Let me talk to you just for a second, pastor Mark, saying he get you to himself next week, but let me just talk to you briefly for a second. You will stand before your savior one day for the way you treated your wives and dad co.

I hope I'm close to hear how well you treated him,

but there's some of you in this room that don't treat him so well. Again, I don't know any particular person or I've already talked to you about it, but I hear the stories of women in this church and outside of this church who are confused by the way their husband demands things of them. There's no trust in the relationship.

It's like driving a car with no oil. Things only get hotter and hotter, and then things begin to explode. So brothers, you will be held accountable for how you treat your wife. And that is a wonderful responsibility not to be ashamed of it, to embrace it. And I want this church, I long for this church to be a place where marriages can thrive because so many of us have such deep wounds because of our marriages or the children of people who had marriages and their parents that were just so hard to endure.

And may we be that kind of group, and you cannot do this by yourself. That's why our community groups are so important. We want you to be in community because quite frankly, no matter how many elders we had in this church, or how many people were in this church, in ratio to the elders and deacons, we still need the community groups to be the community around people, to walk alongside them for their health, spiritual health, and sometimes even physical protection.

And by the way, there are some wives who have come to us and say, Hey, I think that I am, um, you know, I'm not being treated in a way that's wise. And it's not always the wife who sees things clearly. Sometimes the husband is actually the one who's treating her well. She just needs to trust them, and she's kicking against the gods.

So it is a two-way street, brothers and sisters. May we be a church that talks about it often and leans into all that Paul calls us to do and say the calls to the wives. The ground of that call is rooted in a theological statement, not a cultural one, that Christ is head of the church and the pattern is found in verse 24.

Third. The church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Paul lifts our eyes from the home to the heavens, and he says the pattern of a wife's submission is nothing less than the church's submission to Christ. It is not rooted in a national pastime. It is not rooted in a social construct.

It is rooted in the church's submission and love of Christ as her head. In Ephesians chapter one, we read that he, Jesus put all things under earth. The Father put all things under Jesus's feet and gave him as head kale over all things. The church, which is his body, the fullness of him who dwells, who feels all in all.

Notice the phrase in everything you're to submit to your husband's in everything. Now, that can sound overwhelming. It can even sound dangerous, but a wife must follow her husband never blindly into sin. She follows her husband as he leads her in the way of truth. That qualifier comes from verse 22. She submits to her husband as to the Lord.

The wife's submission is always bounded by her whole higher loyalty to Jesus. Do you hear me? Are you with me?

Christ is her refuge. Christ is her boundary. Christ is her safety. And so when Paul says in everything that is not selective, that submission to her husband is not. Pick and choose. It is purposeful because it is a posture. It is a disposition of trust, and that trust pervades the marriage her toward her husband and her husband toward her.

Jesus said in John 15, nine and 10, as the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Would you abide in my love at Janice and James Winos daughter? Uh uh, her wedding yesterday, Lindsay's, this was the passage for their wedding. Abide in my love. If you keep my commitments, you abide in my love. Obedience always flows from the security of our being loved by Christ, and it echoes even to Hebrews chapter 13 verse 17.

Obey your leaders and submit to them for they are keeping Watch over your souls as those who will have to give an account. Submission is an act of trust in God's ordering of the home. The universe and every Christian marriage is meant to be a preview, meant to be a preview of the great wedding day, the banquet supper of the lamb, where John says, in revelation, let us rejoice and exalt and give him the glory for the marriage of the lamb has come and the bride has made herself ready.

The call, the ground, and the pattern. Now let's put some. Let's talk brass tacks for a second, and what does this practically mean? How do we encourage the holies and Steve in their marriages? Think about your home right now. Think about it as a little church, the churches that live under Christ's authority, and there must be complete trust and joy and independence upon his word.

And while Jesus never disappoints husbands do. So the trusted marriage must be continually cultivated in both directions for that trust to be built. And submission does not look the same in every marriage, and that is good news. For one, it may be a season where a husband travels or is a way for a long time, and he asks his wife to shoulder nearly everything in the home while he's gone.

When he returns, he listens to her. He debriefs with her. He honors her work rather than resenting decisions that she made in his absence. He says thank you to her. He appreciates her. For another couple. It might mean that she prayerfully supports her husband's leadership and choices about schools or jobs or finances or the family calendar or some other perspective in their relationship.

For a retired couple, it might be that she comes alongside her husband to think about financial generosity or how they should spend their time and how they should invest into their extended family. It's a partnership, do you hear me? Not a domineering presence, but a humble responsibility that husbands have.

To love their wives. It is not a crushing burden. According to Paul. It is a spirit filled invitation. Ladies submission is an act of trust in Christ freely offered just as the church freely offers itself to be able to be shaped by nothing but the gospel under Christ's of authority. Or think about it this way, just briefly, every couple in this room, there is not an even distribution of talents.

You just have to look at my marriage to Lauren, and it's obvious that I married up. And so in everybody's family, there's different ways. Sometimes she handles the finances of the home because she's just better at math. Sometimes he handles other decisions, but you've come to agree about it. You've come to a place where she trusts you men, and you come to a place where you trust her.

There's a different give and take in that relationship because rarely are gifts evenly distributed. The gospel logic is because Christ has claimed his bride with saving love. Husbands are called to embody that love in their leadership of the wives and to let them use their gifts for the sake of the family and to encourage her to do so.

Wives have incredible agency. Paul gives them agency that was radical in the ancient new world. Does your wife feel the same in your marriage?

This. It begins to transform how we think of marriage. It is not merely a social arrangement. It is not merely a cultural custom. It is meant to be a living picture of Christ in his church in the covenant. When a husband embraces his calling to lead not for himself, but for the salvation and the flourishing and the good of his family, he mirrors Jesus.

When a wife responds with willing trust, she points the world to the safety and to the joy that belongs to the church under the headship of her savior. And that's why Christian marriages that are healthy are beautiful, and they're full of evangelistic power, which is why some of you, as teenagers, you will love to go into the homes of really healthy marriages.

You just love to hang out with them because there was something captivating about that room. You loved it. You, some of you, the youth see it in the marriages of those who work in the youth ministry. They see the marriages. They're like, there's something attractive about that. Beautiful. Others of you see it in community groups, would you ask questions of each other?

If you're a husband and wife and you're struggling, and if I asked who in this room is struggling in their marriage, I dare say all of our hands would go up because we all need the grace of the gospel to know how to better live it out, lean into each other as friends. Come around this text and look, 40 words given to wives in Greek and 115, as you'll see next week, given to the husbands, so to the holies and the Steves in the world out there.

And Holly and Steve, by the way, now live on the West coast, close to their parents actually, and they're thriving. They have two kids, and they're doing great. They've got an incredibly fantastic marriage. They just had their anniversary earlier this month, and for the Hollys and Steves in this room. Would you see the call?

Would you see the grounds? Would you see the pattern that Christ has given to us? It is a calling to mirror the church's joyful trust in Jesus, and so take heart in Christ. You are not diminished, but you are dignified and so may we be a place where marriages are cultivated and like pattern for his glory and for our good.

If any of you wanna talk more about that today or in the future, pastor Mark and I are open books. We would love to talk to you more about that, as with our elders, and we'll even have a time of q and A in the nursing mom's room after the service today. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you that you have called us into mutual submission.

Unto the Lord and particularly the way that expresses itself as wives submit to their husbands and everything, let them submit to loving husbands who reflect the beauty of your son. Father, would you help us, father, to see that this is not the cultural baggage, the tension that we feel, father, help us to be able to clear that away and fix our eyes on Jesus.

Help our wives never to feel called to erase their gifts or silence their C or endure harm and help them to submit to you and everything, even as they entrust themselves to their husbands who lead them beautifully and foremost to Jesus, who is the faithful ahead, who never misuses his authority. He's a loving bridegroom who lays down his life for his bride.

As we come to the table this morning, father, would you remind us of that, that you open wide your arms to welcome us in our wounds, in our joys, however we are in faith and repentance. May that mark us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Sermon transcript is computer generated.