“As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word.” (Ephesians 5:24-26 NLT)
How does the church submit to Christ? A related question may also be: Who is the church? When you think of the “Church” as the Body of Jesus Christ, the sum of every person who has or will ever place their trust in the living Christ, the first question fades into incomprehension. However, one day the Church, comprised of every blood-washed soul, will be entirely united and in full unity and devotion, as one Body submitted to our only Savior and Lord, the Christ, the Son of the living God.
But until that day, how do we, as the Church, submit to Christ? One person at a time! Every day we, individually, renew our love and devotion to our Savior, offering our lives as living sacrifices to be offered in our grateful submission and service to Him alone. That’s essentially how each wife and each husband devote themselves to each other.
Submission isn’t a negative term or concept. I willingly and joyfully submit to Christ’s lordship over my life. Why? Because I know He knows me better than I know myself, He desires only good for me, and He will protect me in ways I can’t protect myself. The only way any of us move forward in our faith is by trusting Him to do in, through, and on our behalf what only He can do, as He enables us to do and be what only we can do and be as His strength is being lived out through us.
Submission isn’t a burden, it’s a safety net. It’s our eternal guarantee that we’ll never walk alone or in our own strength. And in marriage, submission isn’t becoming a limp rag, it’s being more together as husband and wife than either of us dreamed we could become on our own.
A wife’s submission to her husband isn’t yielding to him her personality and leaving with him the right and obligation to make every decision for her, it’s to enter into a partnership of mutual love and devotion that together relies upon and seeks the will of God to be the best they can be together, and individually to maximize their effectiveness to the glory of Christ.
John MacArthur wisely wrote: “The Christian husband displays what he thinks of Christ by the way he treats his wife.” To bully her or abuse her in any way is to disrespect and violate our devotion to Christ. Christ loves us with His whole being, illustrated by His willingness to die in our place. He didn’t die to set us free to be anything we desired, He died to enable us to become what only He knows we can become.
Reflecting Christ in marriage is demonstrated by our undivided loyalty to Jesus and to each other; our devotion to one another’s well-being in every avenue of our lives, individually and corporately; and our willingness to submit to one another in mutual desire to see Christ become famous as we exalt and honor Him individually and together.
It’s interesting to me that Paul writes in Ephesians 5:33: “So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife mut respect her husband.” The word “love” used here is “agapao” (ag-ap-ah’-o). This is a love that’s not dependent upon emotion to fuel it, but it’s an act of the will, driven by what we know is God’s will. And the word “respect” is “phobeo” (fob-eh’-o), from which comes our word “fear.” But this isn’t a word that denotes being afraid of someone, but in a similar way as we reverence and esteem God, a wife is to hold her husband in high regard, respecting and honoring him.
Which of course begs the question: What if our spouse isn’t deserving of our love and respect? We’ll look at this more closely in tomorrow’s post.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 