I preached on Col 3.18 yesterday. This is an excerpt from the sermon. May it bless you, challenging you wives to submit to your husbands, and challenging you husbands to pray for your wives and to do everything in your power to make it easy for them to submit to you and treat you as a king.
Wives, the Bible outlines four parts of your submission. I’ll mention just two here (you’ll need to listen to the sermon online for the other two).
The first is respect (Eph 5.33). The greatest and deepest longing of a husband is to be respected. He doesn’t need a 5-star meal every night, or intimacy every day, or an immaculate home; he needs a wife who respects him; nothing will make him happier and more satisfied in the marriage than to be respected and trusted, because that’s his greatest and deepest need.
The man was created by God to be respected as the head, to be followed as the leader, to be honored as the protector, to be trusted as the responsible party, and to be treated with tender lovingkindness as a king. And the woman who does this will win both his heart and his lifelong loyalty.
This is what makes the infamous quarrelsome woman of Proverbs (25.24; 27.15; 19.13) so impossible to live with. The complaining, quarrelsome wife is so hurtful to the husband and so contrary to what God calls a wife to be that the husband who has one would literally rather live in the yard with his dog than in the house with her–which translates into: he’d rather work late than come home on time; he’d rather take an extra shift than be home on a day off; and he’d rather spend money he can’t afford on a hobby he’s no good at, than be at home with her–because it’s so hard to be home.
When a wife refuses to respect her husband, she’s tearing down the house that Prov 14.1 says she’s supposed to be building up. And she’s doing everything in her power to make her home, her side, and her bed, the last place on earth her husband wants to be. She’s making it extremely difficult for her husband to love her, to want to be with her, to want to spend time with her.
Your husband may be less clean than you are, less knowledgeable about certain things, a less mature Christian even, but you’re to respect him as your husband and honor him as your head. He may even be unkind and unloving–to his shame; but while you pray for God to change him you’re to honor God by respecting him. And the testimony of God in 1Pet 3 is that your respect of him will do more to draw out his love than anything else.
A second part of a wife’s submission is assistance. In Gen 2.18 God says He made you to be a helper fit for your husband. This means you’re to be a help to him in everything and a hindrance to him in nothing. If his work is mostly outside the home, then do everything you can to take care of the inside of the home. If he works all day, then help him by making sure dinner’s ready when he gets home. If his work is distracting, then help him remember the dates and times of family events and be understanding if he tends to forget. If his burdens are heavy, help him by easing either the burden or him. And if he needs to feel close to you, help him by freely and gladly giving yourself to him in love.
You need to realize that God has placed a tremendous amount of responsibility on your husband’s shoulders. The responsibility to care for you and the children, to provide a home for all of you, to clothe and feed all of you, to lay down his life for all of you, to deny himself in order to serve all of you, and to do everything in his power to bring you all up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And your husband will give an account for all of this on the Day of Judgment.
And, as his wife, you have the privilege to come alongside and not only help bear the load, but comfort, encourage, support, and cheer him on in his work. It’s the wife’s calling to be her husband’s greatest fan, his cheerleader, his friend. She’s to do everything she can to help him fulfill the calling God’s given him. And the home in which the wife owns this role of helpmate and serves her husband in any way she can, is a home with a very happy and grateful husband, a very happy and loved wife, and upon which the blessings of God will come in abundance.
Since it is God’s express will that wives submit to their husbands (Eph 5.22; Tit 2.4; 1Pet 3.1, 5; 1Cor 11.3, 8), what inevitably happens is that the submissive wife becomes the happy wife; not only because she’s honoring God, but because she’s learned how to draw out her husband’s love for her and make it so easy for him to want to be with her and serve her as her head. Therefore may the Lord bless your marriage and fill you both with His Spirit in order that you might honor Him and enjoy the blessed estate of marriage.
If you would like to learn more about living in a godly marriage, check out my book here.
