Wives...Be Subject

1 Peter 3, verse 1-6, Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct. Do not let your adorning be external, the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry or the clothing you wear, but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious. For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord.

And you are her children if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening. You may be seated. This is one of those passages that men are afraid to preach. And the reason is because we have emasculated the men of the Church of God and we have made women basically run the Church of God in the United States. And there is some sensitivity sometimes to some of these topics for good reason. there are men in the history of time who have abused what God has given them as authorities in a home and there are women who have been victimized by some wicked men who have perverted scriptures to do things that they are not authorized to do.

And so in response to that some people have gone completely in the wrong direction or the other direction from what scripture says and they've created situations where men have no authority all of a sudden or somebody will try to say there's some kind of 50-50 authority in the home and things like that. Also, a lot of people are just afraid of what the people in the crowd will think of them. And I'll say this, I know this is a fact, I haven't experienced it quite as much as other men, but people will leave your church for just one little petty reason.

It's something that I've heard from several pastors that I know. the things that eventually cause people to just run out of what they at one point thought was a good church sometimes shocks people at how minor it seems to them. And so there is a sense of fear and trepidation when you stand before people and preach God's word and you're going to say something that you know is more counter-cultural than a lot of things we say at this point. But fortunately for you, the only person I care about pleasing is Jesus Christ.

And if you're not interested in me pleasing Jesus Christ, then really I don't need you. So I don't mean that to be rude and I don't mean it to be snarky. But that's why we're here is to praise Jesus Christ, to worship Jesus Christ and to do everything that honors him. And so that's my goal every week. But in particular this week, when I'm going to say some things that may be hard for people to hear.

I want you to understand that the goal is to be faithful to the text of Scripture. faithful to what God has commanded in the hopes that it will actually help all of us to grow. We're going to do two weeks talking about women, basically. And so if you don't like this week, come back next week. And then if you don't like next week, come back the next week.

And then we'll start talking more about husband's obligations. And so it's the way it's laid out in Scripture almost every single time is that God addresses the women first, and then He addresses the men when we look at passages about husband and wife relations. And so, if you're afraid I'm not going to be hard on the men or tell the men what they need to do, just keep coming back is what I hope you do.

So this week I want to get through verses 1 and 2, and then actually 5 and 6. So we're going to talk about what it means to be subject to your own husband, what it means for a wife to submit to her husband. And then next week, we're going to get more into some of the details of how that is in particular. So I'll really, really get excited here. We'll talk more about modesty, and that's what verses 3 and 4 really affect more in some ways.

And so there will be some excitement there. And I promise you, I will not give you a legalistic list of things, but I will give you some food for thought, I hope, regarding that. so in the context of 1st Peter Peter says be holy for God is holy he says that you're going to suffer and you're living in basically this land of people that is not your home your citizenship is in heaven you've been reconciled to God by the blood of the cross and now in order to go to heaven basically you're going to suffer because Jesus suffered so you have this gigantic thing that Jesus did for you that he suffered on your behalf He was punished basically by the world for being God, for proclaiming himself to be God, for being so righteous that they couldn't even stand to be in his presence. And now you're going to try to live a righteous life and follow him.

And as the result of you just trying to live the righteous life, if you never opened your mouth and only just tried to follow God's commands, you would offend nearly everyone around you on a constant basis. The fact that we're not as offensive as Jesus on a regular basis This might be a testimony that we're not quite living as much like him as we think we are. But here you are, you're suffering in this world, and God's giving us some practical tips on how to be holy, though.

You're going to spend time in this world, and your life is going to impact the people around you. It's going to have an impact on the people around you. You're supposed to keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they see your good works, they'll glorify God in heaven. and when they speak against you as evildoers, they'll be ashamed.

And so God gives women some practical tips not only as to how to live in this world with their husbands not only just how to be Christian women but he actually giving them instructions in that same context of 1 Peter 2.12 about keeping your conduct among the Gentiles honorable so that you might not bring reviling against the word of God by your behavior. So that when people look at your behavior, they will be able to see that you're actually a worshiper of the one true God. There's an objective truth to how women are supposed to behave, how women's attitudes are supposed to be toward their husbands.

So let's dig in a little bit. Peter says, likewise, so we have this transition word that's telling us that everything's still connected, though. There's really no chapter breaks. Peter didn't stop at the end of chapter 2 and say, well, that felt good, I'm starting a new chapter. This is a continuation of all the thoughts. And Peter's thoughts, excuse me, since verse 13, have been about submitting to a human institution.

He was talking about submitting to your government first, and we talked about what that means already. And now he talked about servants being subject to their masters. We talked about what that meant. We talked about how Jesus was that example. And now we're getting into how we function in the home, basically. How do wives and husbands interact?

And Peter says, Wives, be subject to your own husbands. Now there's an important word in there. It says, To your own husbands. and there's a false teaching in the church today that would tell you that biblical submission of women to men requires all women be subject to all men somehow. And that is not what Peter is saying and it's not what the Bible teaches.

What Peter is saying is be subject to your own husband. So you have a husband and he's the one you're supposed to be subject to at the exclusion of others. So in some cases that might mean you need to watch whether or not you're working at home or not. You shouldn't have other men that you're submitted to. You see that in Titus 2. We're told that older women teach the younger to be workers at home, submissive to their own husbands.

But one of the points here is that you don't have this situation that the world sometimes paints about us where we all come to church and all the women are sort of, you know, what's that? There's that one show where they're all wearing their red robes with the white hats and I don't even know what it's supposed to be. I don't remember now. But where all the women are just like subjugated.

They're lesser people. And that's not what the Bible teaches whatsoever. What the Bible teaches is that within the context of your man-woman relationship, in the context of marriage, there is a hierarchy that God has built in so that you can flourish, so that you can make decisions, so that you can reflect the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ so that the onlooking world can actually see a picture of the gospel.

So let's go look at what this means. And then we'll talk about, even if they don't obey the word, what that means that they could win their husband. Turn to Ephesians 5. There's a few texts that I'll call classic texts that we'll look at. In Ephesians 5, Paul's telling everybody to look carefully how they walk in verse 15 of chapter 5. In verse 10, he tells them, try to discern what's pleasing to the Lord.

In verse 17, he says, therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And then verse 21, he says, Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. And if I took a fortune cookie and I wrote submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ on it and I put Ephesians 5.21 and I stuck a piece of paper with that verse on it into a fortune cookie and gave it to you and you opened it up and that's all you could read, you would think it just meant everyone somehow submits to one another. and it sounds kind of kind of novel and nice actually like oh we all just outdo one another in showing honor and we're always esteeming one another higher than ourselves and so this is just telling us submit to one another out of reverence for Christ and if there was no continuation of the book of Ephesians at this point I'd say you're right but I think what Paul's telling us is submit to one another out of reverence for Christ and then the next sentence starts to tell us the examples of how we submit to one another.

And he starts to define for us all the relationships that exist where there is going to be authority and submission in this world so that you might function. You cannot function on a team without a coach. There's always a team captain. There's always a leader. Every one of you that has a job, I guarantee none of you have some job where everyone just sort of shows up and just kind of does whatever.

There's somebody who has to make the decisions, somebody who's in charge, somebody who leads things. It's the natural way that God has created and ordered things. In fact, you don't have to be a Christian to understand this concept. All over the world, there's leadership seminars, there's TED Talks. I don't recommend a lot of them, but some of them aren't bad.

But this is a very common thing to people. Leaders lead, and that most people aren't leaders. Most people, not to their detriment, but most people aren't the leader. There's a few people that God designs as leaders, in fact, and then other people seem to be what are called good soldiers sometimes. People that are happy to follow a good leader, and they like following a good leader even.

But God's given us some relationships now that he's going to define at the end of Ephesians, the first one being husband and wife. He says, wives, in verse 22, submit to your own husbands. It's the same language that Peter uses, basically. Peter said, be subject to. I'll say it's the same concept, though. Submit to your husband.

We already talked about submission to government. It an intentional putting yourself underneath somebody else authority Submit to your own husbands as to the Lord though he says For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church his body and is himself its Savior So now Paul takes this relationship of husbands and wives, a relationship that all the people in Ephesus already understood. Ephesus did not know what marriage was until Paul showed up. since the beginning of time people have been getting married and having children and civilizations have built themselves on the beauty of the fact that when a man and a woman actually get together and love each other that it results in more people in your civilization and you can build more things and you can pass things on you don't have to be a Christian to understand by natural revelation that there are certain relationships that produce more people for you And when those relationships are more stable, it seems to produce more stable people.

Non-Christian countries have laws about marriage and divorce simply because there are certain things that work and don't work. It's not necessarily because of morality. But Paul's telling them that the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. And so when you have a situation where feminism starts to take over in a situation, where a culture is given over to the idea that men are not supposed to be heads of their households, this becomes totally counter-cultural.

This is something that would have probably shocked some of the people in Ephesus, and it really should shock us today. If you walked into the average household in the United States, this verse would shock them. and I would argue if you walked into the average Christian household in the United States the verse would probably shock most of them but if it didn't shock them at the very least it would shock you to observe them because I would guess that most people don't function the way that this verse is telling us to and I think the problem exists in the Christian church as well so Paul trying to exhort the women says now as the church submits to Christ so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. There's no greater comparison that Paul could have made for women to submit to their husbands than to compare the church submitting to Christ.

Christ is absolutely the head of the church. He's in charge. And in Christ's case, he's perfect. there's no church on earth that has any excuse to disobey Jesus Christ whatsoever nobody can say well Jesus did me wrong this one time so we don't quite have to submit to him it can't happen he's perfect but women can say that kind of thing they can be right about the first part you wives in here can you think of a time your husband let you down I'll give you time I know some of you are struggling your husband is going to let you down your husband is not Jesus Christ so you have this man who God gave you and he sins against you and he sins against God and sometimes he acts like a buffoon if you turn on the TV you sometimes wish your husband was even as good as the guys they portray on TV, maybe.

Maybe not in this room, but there's women who struggle. They have difficult husbands. And even though he's trying to grow in grace, he fails. And he doesn't understand you the way that you wish he would. And he doesn't love you the way that you wish he would. And that maybe you ought to be loved.

But there's no exception clause in Ephesians 5. so we'll talk about the men in a couple weeks I promise you the men will run out of here hurting more than I'll hurt the ladies I can dig deeper because I know the problems men have but ladies there's no excuse there's no but he's a bad husband but he blew our money on something but he did this but there's none of that in here it is submit to your husband even as church submits to Christ. That's your calling. And there's a reason why God made it completely independent to how your husband behaves or who your husband is when you read Ephesians 5.

And it's because your temptation will be to always focus on the sin of the other person. Your temptation will be to say, well, because my husband isn't good at X, Y, Z, I shouldn't have to listen to him in that area or submit to him in that area. it could even be that your husband's an evil man. Peter addresses that. Go back to 1 Peter. Chapter 3 says, Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands.

And then he says, So that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives Peter actually addresses the possibility that you're a Christian woman living in exile in this strange land where you're a pilgrim and you're a sojourner and instead of some kind of weird glorious suffering where everybody knows you're a martyr and everybody celebrates you and maybe you get to heroically go do something that people will be reading about. I mean, we read Fox's Book of Martyrs, and we read about these guys that went singing hymns to their death, and they burned to death, shouting, May God open the King of England's eyes. And we hear these great stories of all these heroes, and we've got pictures of Martin Luther, and all these different people on our walls who did all these great things, and a lot of them suffered greatly.

And you know, we don't have a list of all of the women in the history of Christianity who suffered at home alone faithfully loving and respecting a man that didn earn any love or respect from them but doing it because Jesus Christ commanded them to And He when they enter His glory He welcomes them. And He sees their labor, and nobody else does. I guarantee you there's been thousands of them.

You don't know any of their names. You know the names of the ones that were wives of great preachers or something. You know some of them. So for some of you, this is a call to, blatant obscurity. It's a call to go and suffer alone. And the only person in existence who will comfort you is Jesus Christ.

Is he enough for you? Because that's Peter's point here. He needs to be enough. If the one person on earth who's supposed to be the person that loves you and leads you and cares for you and the person who's supposed to love you as Jesus Christ loved the church, if he fails you whether it's a little bit or whether it's a lot of it your service to Jesus Christ from the heart is supposed to be what encourages you to continue an argument from the greater to the lesser if you know what that means I think the Latin term is like an a fortiori argument it's when we say if you're married to a non-Christian man or even a Christian man who's in some kind of disobedience, Peter says you need to be subject to them.

So the argument from the greater to the lesser says, well, praise God if you're one of the ladies out there that actually got a decent man or maybe even a good man. And quit complaining about the things he does and quit whining about it and quit nagging him and start obeying the scripture that says to submit to him. Because you're not one of the ladies who's actually dealing with the more difficult situation that Peter described you still would have to submit to a man.

What a pleasure it ought to be for a Christian woman to have a guy who she even thinks is just an average Christian guy. That's not who Peter was talking about. Peter's talking about people that were in some kind of abuse at times, I think. People who faced real difficulty. And so check your heart about that and recognize that God may have blessed you abundantly where this scripture should actually be easier to obey because of your circumstances.

And what it reveals to you is that it's your heart that's the problem. If God put you in the Garden of Eden, you still would ascend. Perfect husband, fellowship with God. You may eat of all the fruits of all the trees of the garden except for one. Can you imagine the abundance of food that was there and how good it all tasted at the time? I had to throw three pears away today because when we cut them open, they were like rotted from the inside.

I'm glad I didn't just bite in. Adam and Eve could have anything they wanted they had no divorce to deal with yet they didn't have any baby mama they had to worry about there was no other things in their life that could have made things difficult the work was pleasurable, no thorns or thistles and they still sinned and now here we are don't blame your circumstances for your sin you blame yourself for your sin but there's a promise in here so that even if some do not obey the word they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives it says when they see your respectful and pure conduct Peter wants to encourage women not only to obey God for the sake of obeying God which is enough motivation for us to obey God if God never told us what the the results of some of the obedience would be, we'd be obligated to obey him, and we should do it cheerfully. That's what submission is.

Submission isn't grumbling when you walk away from your authority and just doing what the person said, but in your heart, like not doing it with a cheerful heart, not with goodwill toward that person. But God actually promises women, hey, your behavior is actually going to have an effect on your husband. your behavior is going to have an effect on your husband. That can be a good effect or a bad effect.

You can be affecting your husband by being manipulative. So you could actually have a good effect. You may affect good things in him the wrong way. or you may actually drive him to do things that he shouldn't do, which are his fault when he makes a bad choice, but you can sure create an environment where your respectful and pure conduct encourages good conduct on his part.

So men and women affect each other in marriage. And in the most extreme case, God actually I think is promising here that in some cases an unbelieving husband when he sees the respectful and pure conduct of his wife is going to actually become so interested in the power that caused her to be that way that he will get saved himself this is not telling you that a man will get saved apart from God's word because it says even if some do not obey the word they may be one without a word by the conduct of their wives I don't think this is saying that magically some people get saved because they look at their wife, act kind. I think too often we read scripture and it's almost like a moment in time.

Like, oh, well, if I have a good day, my husband will get saved. I have heard stories, though, of women who have endured some things with some pagan men, and it was decades. And they got saved, though. when we were reading Genesis 20 all I could think is when I read Genesis 20 it feels like it's like an overnight thing like they showed up dream and the next day he sends them off.

And I'm listening to Jason read it and I'm thinking this is like a period of time. How do you get to the end where it says he shut the womb of all these people? There must have been some period of time where Bimelech was starting to realize like, wait, stuff isn't happening here. You know what I'm saying? So I think we have to think about the way scripture, often times we read it in a moment but it's describing a longer lifetime.

Listen to this. Does anybody know who Augustine is? You know, St. Augustine, they named the city after him down in Florida, I think. So Augustine's one of those really neat guys who, if you're Protestant, we consider him a forefather of the faith. And if you're Catholic, they consider him a forefather of the faith.

And he's a fun guy to fight over. He said a lot of good things. But listen to Augustine's description of his mother. All right, this is what he says about her. She arrived at a marriageable age. and she was given to a husband whom she served as her Lord. And she busied herself to gain him to thee.

So Augustine's writing to God. Preaching thee to him by her behavior in which thou madest her fair and reverently amiable and admirable to her husband. for she endured with patience his infidelity and never had any dissension with her husband on this account for she waited for thy mercy upon him until by believing in thee he might become chaste moreover even though he was earnest in friendship he was also violent in anger but she had learned that an angry husband should not be resisted either in deed or in word but as soon as he had grown calm and tranquil and she saw a fitting moment she would give him a reason for her conduct if he had been excited unreasonably this is a description of Augustine's father it sounds like he was an adulterer and he was violent with her And if you read the rest of chapter 9 of his confessions, you can see more details of what appears to have most likely been abuse that she endured. But listen to the end.

Finally, her own husband. Now toward the end of his earthly existence, she won over to thee. Henceforth, she had no cause to complain of unfaithfulness in him, which she had endured before he became one of the faithful. this isn't the first story of a woman who faithfully loved and served a wicked man as her husband for the glory of God it's not the first story I've heard that ended with the man getting saved with the man coming to her in repentance and the wife realizing it was all worth it because she obeyed God and God came through on the promise that He made that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives.

How much more should a Christian wife who has a Christian husband who actually maybe seems like he's trying to grow in grace sometimes and maybe he's fumbling along and maybe he's not so smart. Maybe he's got some baggage. but how much more should a woman in that situation try to win her husband in the same way how much more does her behavior hopefully have an effect on her husband there's nothing that shames me more in my personal life than when I act wrongly toward my wife and she responds in this godly way I am almost instantly brought to shame but when she resists me as Augustine noticed, the resistance shouldn't occur, in word or in deed. That actually stirs up more strife.

So this is how a woman submits to authority. The extent of a man's authority is limited. I should clarify that. You cannot ask your wife to sin. You cannot command your wife to sin. There will be times when that could become a gray area. you probably should not ever ask your wife to violate her conscience.

Wives, you should learn how to communicate as well. You should be able to explain to your husband why you don't want to do something, or why it may be sin to you even. Communication is extremely important here. And for some people, it takes a long time. Some people never learned communication Like Lord willing my kids are going to know how to communicate when they grow up because they watched me do it and they watched me do it with my wife But I didn know how I learned, but basically I learned yell growing up.

When you get mad, yell. That's what I learned. Took me a while to figure out that wasn't the right way. And at first I attracted people that actually that was kind of what they wanted to do, or at least that's what they wanted me to do. So learn to communicate so that people can work with you. In Colossians chapter 3, parallel passage to Ephesians chapter 5, I just want to reiterate what we see.

God caring about women, loving women, wanting women to be equipped tells wives in Colossians 3.18 Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. And he follows it up the same way as the other chapters. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. If you're a wife and you're afraid that submitting to your husband could result in difficulty for you, maybe pain.

Maybe you don't want to be like Augustine's mom and endure infidelity. You certainly don't want to. Peter says, do not fear anything that is frightening. So God gives you a promise, first of all, that he's going to be with you no matter what you suffer. Second of all, God commands husbands to be kind and gentle to their wives and to love them and not be harsh with them.

And so there should be some alleviation of fear, especially if you have a Christian husband. You should have some hope that my Christian husband is actually caring for me and so I can willingly submit because he's good, just like the picture he gives me of Jesus Christ. I can willingly submit to this. but even if even if he's not Peter wants you to not fear anything that's frightening it can be frightening to submit yourself outside of the marriage relationship we have to submit ourselves to the government we've talked about that there's times that you're not going to like what submission to the government means there's times that submission to the government is going to mean things that absolutely you do not want.

And I'm not talking about having to wear a mask or something. I'm talking about the penalties for not doing things sometimes. That's part of your submission. Jesus submitted not by obeying an unjust government, but he submitted by taking the penalties that they gave him. But in verse 5, we'll skip 3 and 4 for now. this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands.

So what these women did that made them beautiful, and we'll talk about that next week, is they were submissive to their husbands. They loved God. They understood God's order of things. Even before Ephesians was written, even before Colossians was written, even before 1 Timothy 2 was written, even before 1 Peter was written, the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands.

As Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord. So let's turn to Genesis 18. This is an exciting one. We just read it recently here. Genesis 18, verse 12. Sarah trying to figure out how she's going to have a child.

She's an old woman. She's old. It says in verse 12, Sarah laughed at herself, saying, After I am worn out, and my Lord is old, shall I have pleasure? That's the word in the Bible for master. Sarah had an attitude of submission toward her husband, where calling him master, or we'll say maybe in modern terminology, calling him sir, was not offensive. to her.

She didn't think of it as something that she was above or that she would never do. In fact, in her heart, she considered herself his servant. And that is the attitude of the Christian woman. So just like we're supposed to submit to authorities because we believe they've been given to us by God, because God ordained them, we can actually be excited to submit to them because we know it's what's good for us because Because he works all things for the good of those who love him To those who are called according to his purpose Because God ordains everything Every authority in your life that is a just authority that is the correct authority over you, is actually given to you by God.

And if you're called to suffer because of that, that's actually a gift from God. But Sarah had a hard attitude of submission too. and so if I explain to you briefly what submission is for wives and husbands I'm not going to give you a list like well if he says do the dishes do the dishes honestly like if a wife asks a husband to do the dishes once in a while he probably ought to too I can't walk into your house and tell you how you should divide up things and how things are going to work and I understand that people have different situations and some women they aren't homemakers full time and they have different things that they have to do and there's kids and all this stuff, I get it. And that's why I can't make a list and I don't want to make a list.

I don't want to be your lawgiver. I don't want to be your conscience. I want to be somebody that tells you how to take every thought captive to obey Christ so that you can destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. That is what we're gifted with. We're gifted with the Spirit of Christ in us to help us understand the words of the Spirit of Christ that were revealed to us and then passed down by the blood of lots of people that made sure the Bible's in English right now.

The only language... I mean, we have, like, so many Bibles, we need to throw some translations away. There's whole countries that wish they had a bad version of the message in their language, frankly. There's whole people groups dying right now. And then they're dying without ever having heard the Word of God. And it's His election that stands.

We trust His sovereignty, but don't you want to reach those people? Don't you want to get your act together and start submitting to your husband in your house? And husbands, don't you want to start loving your wives and quit quibbling over all the little stuff and all the weird things and like, did you buy this? Or why did you do this? Or, you know, whatever it is that happens in houses.

I don't want to bring up too many examples because then you'll know that the only ones I have are me and my wife. But don't you want to get over that stuff and start reaching people? Don't you want your kids to see how to do marriage so that when they get 18, 19, 20 years old, they know how to do it right off the bat. They don't screw it up and then they're going somewhere and they're translating Bibles for people that need it?

Or they're going and they're running for office at 19 and 20 and actually making good changes in legislatures and things like that? Trying to build for the future here. But in your heart you need to sanctify Jesus Christ as holy. You need to, in your heart, think to yourself, I am going to be submissive. to this man that God has ordained is my authority.

And if he is an idiot, if he's a buffoon, if he sins against me, if he sins against God, I'm going to submit to him because I'm submitting to Jesus Christ, actually. And that's way more important than winning that argument with my husband or being right about this thing or that thing. There's techniques to help you, too. If you're a nagger, there's ways to figure out how to write things down so that you don't have to nag.

There's ways. There's ways to help you with things. What did I see one time? A nagging woman, what was it? When a woman nags, it's like beating herself with an ugly stick. Kind of a clever little quote.

You want to look beautiful to your husband? have the gentle and meek spirit that is precious in God's sight. He'll think you're beautiful. You don't even need makeup. You act that way at home. Some of you get dressed up to go out. You don't even try to look beautiful for your husband from within, in the house.

That's what your submission is. But so Sarah obeyed Abraham calling him Lord. And you're her children. If you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening. The word if should not be here is my understanding. It's not there when I look at original and people that comment on this verse say it shouldn't be there.

It should just say do good and do not fear anything that is frightening. This is your command basically. You are a child of Sarah in the sense that we're all children of Abraham of the promise. And if you don't want to fear things that are frightening you need to do good. So what's frightening? What's frightening is submitting to an earthly man. is actually relinquishing your need for self-preservation and self-protection and putting yourself in a situation where you're vulnerable.

Where this guy who maybe is not as good at some things as you are has to make some decisions. Where he has to go talk to people and you wish you could be there to do the talking for him because you know you either a better talker or maybe you like it more whatever it happens to be Or you know that sometimes he says things that offends people and boy you know that if you were there you do it better And you sometimes have to trust that he going to go do it. Just like, you know, we have to trust what, like senators?

You know, you trust your boss to go to a meeting at work. You know, we do this, we submit all the time to different people. Everybody in this room that, you know, you trust me when I answer a phone and say I'm the pastor of Covenant Bible Church, I'm representing the church. like you're trusting something and there's probably some of you that can answer some of the questions better than I have to faith but that's part of being in a situation where you have an authority where you have somebody that you're listening to so you don't have to fear anything according to Spurgeon because he says when we know it is the Lord we readily cry let him do what seemeth him good okay so let's break that down for a second there's more to this quote but when if you knew the lord had given you some specific thing to do and it resulted in difficulty you you're comfortable with it you say let him do what seems good to him okay that's what people have the most peace when they find out they have cancer and they're able to say well i know that god is in charge of that those people have amazing peace when people suddenly lose a spouse and they get to that point when they say that was what God ordained for us I thank him for the time I got they have a peace so once we get to the point when we understand that it's actually God behind everything the thing we're dealing with we can usually handle it, faithful people at least but so continuing with Spurgeon he says as long as I trace my pain to accident my bereavement to mistake my loss to another's wrong my discomfort to an enemy and so on I am of the earth earthy and shall break my teeth with gravel stones but when I rise to my God and see his hand at work I grow calm he says I have not a word of repining he says I open not my mouth because thou didst it so that's Psalm 39.9 he opens not his mouth because he knows it's God who ordained it so there's no complaining when you trust in the sovereignty of God and God has given women a command he's given a command to submit to their husbands so that by their good conduct he might bless them not only with the peace that surpasses understanding because of the joy of their faithfulness in Christ and the contentment that they'll find running to him when their earthly husband fails maybe repeatedly, but a promise that he's going to save some of those men or he's going to grow them in the likeness and conform them to the image of Christ through the women actually doing things the way that they're told to do.

It's counter-cultural. It's not the way we think of doing things. It's not how we... It's just not how we feel like we're wired. But it's how God says He's going to do things. And one of the reasons, most certainly, is because He'll get all the glory then. and so that your exhortation is submit to your own husbands as to the Lord do it cheerfully do it with a good will knowing that God shows no partiality and he sees your heart in the matter so next week we will look at verses 3 and 4 we will get an idea of how you are to adorn yourself and how that relates to how you submit to your husband and how you have that good effect on him.

Let me pray. Father, thank you for your word. We thank you that you are so kind and loving at all times and that even when things are hard for us to hear, even when things are hard to preach, that you are always right and we can trust you. I pray that you would bless us in the hearing of your word help the women of this room to live out the commands of Scripture that we heard tonight.

And you would cause the men in the room to be helpful to their wives and lead them in the right way of how to do these things. That this is not a tool to be wielded or some weapon, but it's your word. So we pray that we would all work together to understand it and help brothers and sisters to live according to it. In Christ's name I pray. Amen.