Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless. In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own flesh but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, since we are members of his body. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church. To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband. Ephesians 5:22-33
Over the years, Susan and I have enjoyed speaking to groups about marriage and parenting. When I speak to men, I emphasize a man’s responsibility in marriage. When Susan speaks to women, she emphasizes the last phrase from this section of Paul’s letter addressed to wives. While the husband is commanded to love his wife, the wife is commanded to respect her husband. One of the greatest needs a man feels is for respect. But many women find it hard to give respect. This is true, in part, because our wives know our faults better than anyone and are often more affected by our faults than anyone. Many wives wonder how their husbands would have survived without them. “Behind every successful man is an exhausted woman.” And when women feel unappreciated by their husbands, it compounds the difficulty in offering the respect so desperately needed.
Occasionally, the news media carries the story of some wealthy couple battling in the courts over how much of the husband’s financial success he owes to his ex-wife. While our human tendency is to argue over who needs the other more, God commands the husband to treat his wife with sacrificial love and the wife to treat her husband with respect.
A mother will often discover the extent to which she is showing respect for her husband, when she sees the extent to which her children are showing respect for her. As unpopular as this truth may be in our culture, God’s word has not changed and authority in the home comes from God. When a husband operates in submission to God, he has authority. When a wife submits to God by submitting to her husband, she has authority. Certainly, husbands should show respect for their wives and children. But, wives are especially commanded to remember to show respect for their husbands.
Notice that Paul does not simply give us instructions about how husbands and wives should treat one another; he also gives us the reason. When he states, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife and the two shall become one,” he takes us all the way back to the book of Genesis where God creates man and woman and reminds us that the Creator has a plan.
God wasn’t just haphazardly throwing things together. The more we study science, the more clearly we see the evidence of design everywhere. Regardless of what you may have been taught in school, your life is not the result of matter, time and random chance. You are not just a piece of highly evolved slime. You are a unique creation, and the God who formed you has an eternal plan for your life. Despite the pain you may have experienced, God’s plan for your future is good.
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