1. Courageous & Sober-minded Headship: 2024 Marriage Conference Session One

It is a joy to be with you and I am looking forward to this weekend and trying to pull some threads together that will hopefully help and encourage all of us.

My aim in this conference is to provide both a framework as well as practical help for a courageous marriage.

And that title, courageous marriage, is simply a recognition of the fact that in the 21st century, to have a biblically faithful marriage requires fortitude.

You're cutting against the grain of everything around us. There's been times in history in which marriage was held up in a wider cultural sense in which the general expectation of both sincere

Christians as well as nominal Christians and even non -Christians regarded this fundamental institution with reverence and respect.

We don't live in those times. And therefore, to cut against the grain requires certain kinds of biblical fortitude and so I want to lay some foundations.

So tonight I'm going to do some biblical foundations for thinking about husbands and wives and in particular what we mean when we speak about a husband's headship and a wife's bodyship, to quote a term.

And then tomorrow, we're going to look at failures and sins in relation to marriage as well as challenges and opportunities for recovering fruitful households and then conclude with parenting together as fathers and mothers.

So with that, let me pray and then we'll begin. Father, I ask for your help now, help me to be faithful to your word and helpful in this place.

Lord, you know the challenges and the difficulties here and so I pray you'd bring the word to bear in whatever ways you see fit and trusting it to you,

Lord, as the sovereign Lord of all of us. So we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So different truths are under assault in different eras of church history.

So if you think about the first century, the controversies the church faced was over the inclusion of the

Gentiles in God's people, right? That was the big fight. You fast forward a few centuries and there's controversies over the doctrine of the

Trinity and the doctrine of Christ, who is Jesus, is He God, is He not

God, those sort of things. Fast forward a few more centuries and we're into the Reformation where controversies over the authority of Scripture versus the

Pope or over the doctrine of salvation and justification by faith alone, those are the controversies.

One hundred years ago, the controversies that the church faced were over the literal and historical realities of biblical events and figures.

So for example, like conservative Bible -believing Christians were culturally weird because they believed in the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and a coming judgment.

Conservative Bible -believing Christians a hundred years ago were outsiders and weird for believing those things.

But today, conservative Bible -believing Christians are not just culturally weird but culturally despised because we believe that a boy is a boy and not a girl, and that a girl grows up to be a woman and not a man, and that no surgeries or hormones can change that whatsoever.

In other words, the debates of the 21st century are debates over what it means to be human, not necessarily over who

God is, though of course that factors in, and not even over what Scripture is, though that clearly factors in, but the debate, the place where the battle is pitched is over what it means to be human, over what it means to be a man and a woman.

And this is where marriage is fundamental, where we learn as human beings what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.

The first place that we learn that is in our homes. That's where the teaching happens.

And it's not just the teaching, the formal teaching, the sitting down and let me tell you about the birds and the bees, or let me tell you about what the

Bible teaches, but what's caught, the air that you breathe about what it means to be a man and not a woman, and what it means to be a woman and not a man.

Where do we learn that first? We learn it in our homes and we learn it from our parents, which is why marriage is so crucial not only for the sort of flourishing of society, which it is, but also for the shaping and formation of Christian kids.

What kind of expectations will they have as they grow up? So tonight I want to offer a framework for thinking about manhood and womanhood more broadly, but we're going to really zero in on husbands and wives, that tries to weave together both

God's design in creation as well as Scripture. In doing that,

I'm going to jump around a little bit, but I'm largely going to be in Genesis 1 to 3 at the beginning, and then we'll be in Ephesians 5 towards the middle and end.

So if you've got a Bible and you want to have those open, that's where you should be. And so I'm not going to unpack every passage in detail, but I want to lay down some markers and highlight some biblical truths to help us think through this question of, what does it mean to be a man?

What does it mean to be a woman? What's the framework that we should use to think about these things?

And so here's the three basic statements. I'm only going to really unpack the first two. I'm going to leave the third one, we'll kind of show up maybe tomorrow, but this is the framework that I'm operating from.

Okay, so here's the first statement. God's acts establish basic facts.

God's acts establish basic facts. So we can look and say, what has God done? What has he done that establishes basic facts?

Second statement, God's commands fit those facts. God's acts establish basic facts, and then

God's commands fit those facts. And then the third statement, our applications ought to fit those commands and those facts.

Our applications ought to fit those commands and those facts. So there's kind of a three.

So first we have to say, what has God done? That's acts, that's his acts establishing facts. And then what has

God said in light of what he's done? That's the commands fitting the facts. And then how should we live?

How do we apply it in our context and our day and age? That's where we get into questions of culture, and maybe there's some variations, but how do we apply what

God has done and what God has said today? And again, we'll talk more about that last question tomorrow.

Today, we're really going to camp in those first two statements. So another way to think about those three would be indicatives, imperatives, and applications.

Indicatives, imperatives. You remember back to your grammar, indicatives are statements of fact, just what is. Imperatives are statements of oughts, what we ought to do.

And then applications are when we try to take those and push them into the corners of our lives. So statement one,

God's acts establish basic facts. So this is the indicatives. And this is the soil from which

God's commands grow. So before we ever talk about what we should do, we need to talk about what we are.

Indicatives are statements of fact, and I have three kinds of facts in mind, and I'm going to really focus on one in particular.

The others, I'll just mention, and you can go chase those down perhaps on your own. But three kinds of facts, three things that God has done to establish facts.

The first is facts of creation, the second is facts of nature, and the third is facts of redemption.

These are three different kinds of things that God has done. Facts of creation, facts of nature, and facts of redemption.

So beginning with that first one, facts of creation, what are these? Facts of creation are things about our humanity that were established by God when he created

Adam and Eve, and that are revealed to us in Genesis 1 to 3, and then echoed throughout the

Bible, okay? So facts of creation are sort of the primal, original facts about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.

This is the early chapters of Genesis, and they're specially revealed. These are things that you could only know if you have a Bible, and that's going to distinguish them from what

I called facts of nature. Facts of nature would be the things that anybody with eyes in their heads can see.

Okay? That's general revelation. It's things that even non -Christians can't deny, though they may try, but even if you don't have a

Bible, you can know facts of nature. But facts of creation are things that we learn from the Scriptures, about what

God did in originally creating us. So here, what are those kind of facts?

Here are some examples of those kind of facts. Fact number one, man, that is the human race, which includes both men and women, is created for God and his mission.

That's a fact. Established by God in creation. And so God created men and women in his image.

And so one of the deepest and fundamental facts about every human being is that we are God's creatures made by him and for him.

We're told this in Genesis 1, be fruitful. I will make man in my image after my own likeness, male and female, he created them.

We are human. We find out later in Genesis 2 that we are embodied souls and ensouled bodies, okay?

So God forms Adam from the dust of the ground and then breathes into him the breath of life, and Adam became a living being.

So that's a fact. You can see, you have eyes in your head, you can see, yeah? Human beings have bodies.

And most people throughout history, Christian and non -Christian, have believed that human beings have souls, but where did they come from?

How did it get to be that way? Well, God did it. He formed man from the dust and then breathed into him the breath of life.

And then this human being that God made reflects God, images God, and is made for God in his mission.

What are some other facts of creation? Well, we're told in Genesis 1 that as one of God's human creatures, each of us is either male or female, a man or a woman.

So being made in his image, it's male and female both are made in his image.

But it's significant that this duality, this separation of man and woman is necessary to fulfill the mission that God originally gave us.

So God said, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So these are the tasks, that's the mission, fruitfulness, multiplication, filling, subduing, ruling over God's worlds.

That's given to the human race. And this is important, those cannot be completed if we're only single -sexed.

Fruitfulness, multiplication, for example, is not happening unless you have both men and women.

We're both necessary to fulfill that task in order to glorify God.

So this is a fundamental fact about human beings. You were made for God and his mission, and this sexual binary, male and female, is necessary to fulfill it.

That's fact one. Second fact of creation is male headship, male headship.

This is a debated item among Christians, at least modern Christians. It's not a debated item in the history of the church, but it's a debated item today because many egalitarian or feminist scholars regard the fact of male headship seen throughout history as the result of the fall, right?

Men became the head because of the fall. They sinned, and the rule of men, the patriarchy, was a result of the fall.

However, the early chapters of Genesis before the fall teaches us that God originally designed men to be the head of their home, to be the head of their households.

And then these facts, what God did in Genesis 1 and 2, are then picked up and formed the foundation of things that God says later in the

New Testament, later in the Old Testament. So what's some of the evidence that God originally created men to be the head?

I've got six reasons, all from the early chapters of Genesis. So number one,

Adam, or Adam, if we're going to use the Hebrew pronunciation, Adam is the name of both the entire human race and the first human male.

So this idea of the name, the name Adam in Genesis can refer either to that individual, the first man, but also to humanity as a whole, okay?

Adam, this signifies that Adam is the head and representative of the human race.

It points, it establishes as the original foundation this fact that his male descendants will be the heads of their homes, just as he is the head of his.

So his name, standing for the fact that man can be both a term to refer to males, but also could refer to mankind, right?

That's what we do in English. The same was true in Hebrew, is evidence that we can point to, one piece of evidence for male headship.

Second fact that supports this, Adam was created first and then the woman.

Adam was created first and then the woman. And so this, creating in this sequence, God gives

Adam headship as the head of his wife. And later biblical authors are going to explicitly point to this.

Paul, for example, in the book of 1 Timothy, is going to tie the fact that he does not permit a woman to be a pastor, to teach in the church, because Adam was created first, not

Eve. So this fact, just God did it, leads later to this command, right?

This expectation in the church about how God has structured his church. But it's based on this fact, God did it this way.

Adam was made first, then Eve, okay? So that's the second.

Adam was created first, then the woman. Third, God gives Adam the moral design for the garden before he creates

Eve. This is something maybe we don't always notice when we read the story. But we're told in Genesis 2, 15 to 17, that when

God comes and says, you may surely eat from every tree, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you may not eat.

The day you eat of it, you shall die. When Adam commands that, Eve has not yet been created. She's not present for the first Sunday school lesson, okay?

She's not. Why would that be significant? Because the expectation is that having given Adam the moral design for the garden, when

God, a few verses later, does create Eve, who's supposed to teach her? Who's supposed to pass on the word of God to his wife?

Answer, Adam is. This, again, I think is part of what's underneath that later biblical restriction of the pastoral office to qualified men.

Because God created Adam to teach his wife the word. This is going to be picked up in a minute when we look at marriage as well.

So the exhortation to eat from every tree except the tree of knowledge of good and evil is given to Adam alone.

Adam, as the head of his wife, is responsible to instruct her in God's ways.

Fourth element from Genesis. Woman is explicitly created from Adam as a helper for him.

She's from him, right? She's created out of his...a rib from his side, and she's created for him, a helper corresponding to him.

So Adam cannot complete this calling, as I said, to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, all by himself.

He will need help. And part of what's going on there in that Genesis 2 bit where God's not good for man to be alone, and then you have this bit with the animals, this is

God's way of demonstrating that animal assistance is insufficient, okay?

Right? Dogs are great, not going to get it done, okay?

Adam will need more than loyalty and slobber. Like that's...he's going to have to level up from there.

Elephants, impressive, not going to be a great helper, okay? Adam will need help.

Animal help is insufficient. God reveals this through the naming of the animals. And then at the end of that says, now,

I'm going to knock you out, pull out a rib from your side, fashion it, build it, construct a woman, bring her to you so that you go, whoa, man, that'll be a good name for her, right?

That's my, like, youth pastor joke right there. You guys got it. God created

Eve from Adam's side in order that she would be like Adam, they would share a common human nature, and as a helper fit for him, assisting him in the task that God has assigned him.

She will come alongside him literally as his helper in order to fulfill this task.

Fifth piece of evidence for male headship in Genesis 1 to 3, Adam names the woman.

Not only does he name the animal, so when God brings the animals, what do you want to call it? In Adam's...this

is like the reverse board book. Remember when your kids were little and you had those board book and you would show it and you'd say, you know, there's the red fruit on there, and you'd point at it, you'd say, apple.

That's how the kid learned the apple. And then you'd say, ball. And then you'd see that little creature with the whiskers next, and then you'd say, devil.

No, I mean, cat. You'd say, cat. Always forget that. God did that but in reverse.

He came to Adam and said, what do you want to call this? And Adam says, squirrel. Okay. Adam says, dolphin.

Adam names it. This naming is a part of Adam's act of authority as God's steward, as the steward of God's creation, created to rule over.

The act of naming is an expression of that authority. So he names the animals, but then when

God brings Eve to him, Adam composes the first words that we hear from Adam.

The first human words written down for us in the Bible is a poem that Adam composes in honor of his wife as he names her, right?

This at last is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

We'll talk maybe more about that a little bit tomorrow, the significance of how Adam is doing this naming task.

So he gives…actually, Adam gives her two names. In Hebrew, it's ishah, that's the word for woman, and Adam is an ish.

So he names the two of them together. She shall be called ishah because she was taken out of ish.

Hear it? And English brings this over a little bit. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

There's a linguistic connection between the two of them that English and Hebrew both have.

And then later, after the fall, Adam gives his wife a personal name, one that distinguishes her from all other women,

Eve, Chava, okay? So that personal name. But in both cases, Adam is naming his wife.

The one who names is evidence of his leadership as the head. Final piece of evidence.

After the fall, and again, we'll explore this more tomorrow. After the fall, God holds

Adam fundamentally responsible for the rebellion of both of them, okay?

Eve had been…we'll explore this section tomorrow, but Eve had been the first to eat from the tree, and she is the one who had given it to Adam.

But when God comes down in judgment, he says, where are you singular?

He does not say, where are y 'all? Okay? That's what we say.

I'm from Texas. That's how we'd say it. Where are y 'all? Okay? God does not say that. He comes and says, where are you masculine singular?

It's Adam, where are you? Now, he's eventually going to talk to her. He has words for her, but where does he go first?

Not to the one who sinned first, but the person who was responsible for both, and that's

Adam. God calls Adam to account because Adam is the head of his household.

And now, this idea of headship does not mean that every man is the head of every woman.

That's not true. That's not a biblical teaching. For example, later we'll see in Ephesians 5 that wives are told to be subject to your own husbands, okay?

Not to every man. It's not that every man is the head of every single woman. That's not the way it works. But man is the particular sex that occupies the headship role in marriage and in the church, and then applied outwardly in various spheres of society.

Okay? This idea of male headship is rooted in creation. It's not rooted in the fall.

It's not a cultural artifact, and therefore, it has implications everywhere. Those are the facts of creation that God establishes that form the foundation of everything else we're going to talk about.

Now, briefly, let me mention these other facts just so you can have a general sense of them in your head.

Facts of nature, I said, these are facts that anybody with eyes in their head can see.

It's general revelation or natural revelation. Sometimes we'll say natural law or divine design.

You pick the words that you like the best. And whereas facts of creation are things we learn from the Bible, facts of nature are things we learn by observation.

So one example of this would be things like men, in general, are taller than women. Okay? That's a fact of nature.

Now, it doesn't mean every man is taller than every woman. That's not true. But as a generality, it is true.

This would also be things like women, in general, tend to be more relationally -oriented, people -oriented.

Men tend to be more task -oriented and thing -oriented. It's a general truth. It's the kind of truth that would get you fired from many jobs.

But it's true. It is still true. Men are typically more aggressive and competitive than women.

Women typically tend to excel in verbal and linguistic skills. Men tend to excel in mathematical and spatial skills.

These are the sort of things that you typically would graph on a bell curve, right, where you would have two overlapping bells.

And in the middle is a lot of people who kind of overlap. But the men tend to cluster over here.

Women tend to cluster over here. And there might be some outliers who bleed one way or the other, some atypical men, some atypical women.

But that's facts of nature, okay? And these are the places where our culture is hell -bent on just denying that these exist at all.

But they do exist, and they just come back with a vengeance, right? When you deny, when you suppress it, eventually, they just blow up.

You can't actually... Nature is stubborn. Nature is stubborn because God made it that way.

And these tendencies, what we call these traits and tendencies that we have, are built into us by God because he designed us as men and women for different things.

So every man, every man is a son. Every man you've ever met is a son.

He's the child of human... He's a male child of human parents. That's a son. And every son is designed by God, by nature, to become a father.

That's true even when somebody maybe doesn't get married or there's biological irregularities. You can be fulfilled in spiritual fatherhood, however you want to think about it, but every man is born a son and directed toward fatherhood.

Likewise, every woman is born a daughter and is directed towards motherhood, whether or not she ever bears biological children or not.

And these different tendencies, these things that we begin to notice, men are a little more this way, women are a little more that way, are designed to serve those callings.

Those different traits and tendencies are to enable and equip us so that men can be faithful fathers and women can be faithful mothers.

And for most people, the pathway to those vocations is husbanding and wifing, right?

Most...you become a father, the pathway that God intends for most men to become a father is to get married and become a husband first.

So these are facts of nature. I'm trying to think if there's a few others, maybe I'll highlight here.

Here's just some others. Part of the reason I do this is because some people don't like it, and I like to make people uncomfortable.

No, it is helpful because in the culture we live in, it can be uncomfortable to admit this.

And sometimes it's just important to go like, yeah, we all see that. We can all admit that we see that. So, for example, men tend to really like group hierarchies.

This is kind of a funny one. Women do not like hierarchies. If you put a bunch of...like, just imagine a group of teenage boys, if I have a group of teenage boys in one classroom and a group of teenage girls in another classroom, and I walk into the boys and I say, okay, so I'm about to rank all of you in terms of...and

it doesn't matter what it is, okay? Could be height, could be athletic ability, could be intellect, whatever it is, the guys are going to be like, all right,

I want to see where I'm at. Like, where am I? Am I at two? How do I move up? How do you move up the thing?

They want to know where they stand in the hierarchy, okay? If you walk in and you pose the same question to the girls and you said, hey,

I'm just going to...we're all going to rank you and it doesn't matter what the feature is, okay? We're going to rank you and we're going to put it up on the board.

The girls are like, oh, no, please don't. I do not want this. I do not like this.

This makes me uncomfortable. Male groups tend to slot into a hierarchy like this. Women tend to be more inclusive, right?

They don't want people to feel bad about being higher or lower. They want that group camaraderie.

These are just natural tendencies and it's flowing from the way God made men and women and what he intends us to do.

And we'll talk more about some of that tomorrow, see if there's any others that I wanted to flag.

There's a great article a number of...a couple of years ago, I think it was called... I don't have that right now.

The Gender Gap is Taking Us to Unexpected Places. It was an opinion article in the New York Times and it was basically talking about the different values that men and women tended to have.

Women tended to value care, fairness, protecting the welfare of others. Men tended to value truthfulness, plainness of speech.

And this was...the article was trying to explain sort of like the gender gap in politics, right? And cancel culture on campuses and how those sort of things work.

And it was flowing from just the fact that men and women are different. They value different things. And they can complement each other when they work well or it can be disastrous when they don't.

Okay, so that's facts of nature. We could talk more, you can ask questions about that if you'd like. Final set of facts, which

I'll briefly mention here and come back to at the end, is facts of redemption, okay? So like facts of creation, these are revealed to us in the

Scriptures. But instead of having to do with God's original design, they have to do with God's redemptive design, how

He's remaking us in Christ. So one fact of nature is Christ died for sinners. That's a fact of redemption, okay?

And it shapes how we...that's a fact that should lead us to live a certain way in light of it.

We're going to see that in Ephesians 5 in a moment. But for now, let's conclude this section by saying God's acts establish basic facts.

There's indicatives. The world just is a certain way. Now, the second part of this framework is this,

God's commands fit those facts. So when God comes along and He's going to tell you what to do,

His commands will correspond to the way He made you. Divine imperatives fit divine indicatives, okay?

And I like that language of fitness, okay? In fact, it's a biblical phrase. So in Colossians 3, 18 and 19,

Paul says, wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the

Lord. He appeals to fitness. He says, this fits, okay? The kind of thing you are as a wife and the kind of thing your husband is as a husband, this fits.

Submission is a fitting response. So we're not just dealing with bare facts that have no significant, but facts that establish a pattern and our behavior should conform to it.

So here's the way to say this. What we do ought to fit what we are. What we do ought to fit what we are.

And so this is a moral fitness that God supplies. So when we do that, let's consider

Ephesians 5. And I want you to listen. As you hear Ephesians 5, I want you to have these two categories, indicatives, imperatives, facts versus commands.

I want you to have it in mind and I want you to see if you hear them, okay? So here's Ephesians 5. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the

Lord. 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.

Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

That he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.

That she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

And therefore, man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

This mystery is profound. I'm saying that it refers to Christ and the church. Let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

So you hear them there, right? There's both facts and commands, indicatives and imperatives.

The husband is the head of his wife. The wife is the body of her husband.

Christ is the head of the church, which is his body, and that's a pattern that we look to to shape our behavior.

These are facts. And then, that's facts, then wives are called to submit.

That's an action. That's a command to their husbands. Husbands are called to love their wives.

The commands fit the facts. The imperatives fit the indicatives. And I just want to stress one thing here again.

Paul regards a husband, maybe I'll do it this way. I always love to do this, okay? Does the Bible teach, in that passage, that husbands should be the head of their homes?

You can nod or shake your head. Does that passage teach that husbands should be the head of their homes?

Okay, you're all wrong. I love it. I love it. I love it every time I do this. It does not teach that. Listen again. It doesn't teach that the husband should be the head of his home.

It teaches that he is. This is really, really crucial, okay?

This is really crucial. It doesn't say, husband, be the head. It says, husband, you are.

Whether you want to be or not, okay? The question is not whether a husband will be the head.

It's will he be a faithful one or an unfaithful one? His headship is a given.

It's a fact, okay? And that's true. He could do what the text says, imperatives.

He could obey them, and it could be a loving and a sacrificial headship. Or he could disobey, and it could be an abusive and domineering headship.

Or it could be a passive and abdicating headship. Or he could bail altogether, and that family will be defined by the absence at the head of the table.

But one way or another, he is the head. The same thing is true of a wife.

It's not a question of whether she will be a body. It's what kind, right?

That's the how they know. It's a head and a body. It's a head and a body. It's not a question of whether, but what kind, faithful or unfaithful.

I'll come back to that in a moment. And this is why sometimes you'll hear pastors, theologians, summarize the biblical teaching on the complementarity of the sexes, right?

Complementarianism. They'll summarize that as the doctrine of headship and submission. And I think it's a mistake because if you listen, headship and submission is highlighting the man's indicative and the woman's imperative.

It's a category confusion. If you were going to summarize it, this is how I summarize it, it's we're talking about headship and bodyship.

Headship and membership, if you want to use that word, okay? Because Christ is the head of the church, the church has members, the husband is the head of the household, the household has members.

That's the parallel. Headship, bodyship. Headship, membership. That's the parallel. And then from that, that flows those imperatives.

Love her like Christ. Submit like the church. Cherish like Christ. Honor and respect like the church.

The imperatives flow from the indicatives, but they're not indicatives, and the indicatives are not imperatives.

So that's the basic categories, and we'll explore more of these tomorrow because the third step would be then our applications, how we live, should fit both of those.

We should live in light of the way God made us and in light of what God has told us, both.

Our applications should fit the commands and the facts. We'll come back to that. Let me give you maybe a passage here, just point and direction, you'll find these.

There's this puzzling passage in 1 Corinthians 11 that has to do with head coverings, okay? So we're not going to get into the head coverings question in particular, but that's the application side.

That's a, like, cultural expression of something. But in the passage, what's highlighted is,

I'll read it. I want you to know that the head of every man is

Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Notice that it's indicatives, it just is, okay?

It could be the head of a wife is her husband, that's a possible translation there. And then every man who prays or prophesies with his head uncovered dishonors his head, dishonors

Christ. Every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, that is, husband.

If a woman is not covered, let her be shaved. A man indeed ought not to cover his head, he is the image and glory of God.

Woman is the glory of man. Those are indicative statements. Man is the image and glory of God. Woman is also the image of God, that's why it doesn't say she's the image of man, she's not.

She's the image of God, but she's the glory of man. She's the glory of the glory. And sometimes we think that, oh, that means she's lesser, okay?

No, just like the holy of holies isn't, like, the second best. Like, that's, like, it's like, this is the holy of the holies, okay?

If man is the glory of God and she's the glory of the glory, it's compounding glory, augmented glory, greater glory.

Come back to that in a minute. He goes on to say, man is not from woman, but woman is from man.

That's going back to Genesis, you hear it? Right? Man wasn't taken out of Eve, Adam wasn't taken out of Eve's side, he was taken from the dust.

Eve was taken out of man, she was from man. But you think, okay, but nor was man created for the woman, but woman was created for the man.

There's an asymmetry there, there's an asymmetry. She's made for him in a way that he's not made for her.

He was made for the mission and she was made to help with the mission. For this reason, the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head.

Again, that's the cultural application, we can talk about that. Then there's this weird bit, because of the angels, and you're like, all right, you lost me,

Paul. But nevertheless, here's the conclusion, neither is man independent of the woman, nor woman is independent of the man in the

Lord. For just as woman came from man, even so man also comes through woman, but everything comes from God.

So just as in the beginning, the first woman was taken out of the first man, ever since then, every man has come from a woman.

And this is meant to stress that interdependence. We need each other. It complements. They're different. There's different tasks, different callings, but they're both necessary, again, to fulfill that mission.

Okay. In light of all of this, in light of all this, the first element as we do the courageous marriage is to get a better picture of what headship and bodyship means.

Okay. So what does it mean to say that the husband is...I've established, I hope, that he is that. Genesis 1 to 3 teaches it,

Paul echoes it in Ephesians and 1 Corinthians, but what does headship actually entail? So I've got a two -sentence summary for husband's headship and a two -sentence summary for a wife, and I'm going to unpack it a little bit and we'll be done for tonight.

Okay. So two things to remember.

One is that interdependence, I already mentioned that. You can't have one without the other. No one wants a bodiless head or a headless body.

Okay. A pastor friend of mine the other day, I saw him in a sermon say this, he said, a body without a head is a corpse and a body with two heads is a freak.

Okay. Neither work. Does not work that way. Headless bodies and bodiless heads, no.

We want head and body together. And second, that the whole body together has a mission, a purpose.

We're talking here about that fruitfulness and dominion purpose. Okay. So what is headship? Here's the head's role, two headings.

The first sentence has to do with inside the body and the other one has to do with outside. The head, in this case, the husband, what does the head do?

The head orders or structures the body for its purpose. It orders and structures the body for its purpose.

It's a long sentence, so I'm going to break it down. Through his presence, words, and actions, and he empowers the members of the body to fulfill their calling.

So he puts the house in order for the purpose that God has defined it, and he does so through his presence, words, and actions.

And then he also empowers. He's a source of power for the other members of the body. That's first his wife, and then subsequently his children.

When we talk about provision, that's what we're talking about. He's providing so that they can do what

God has called them to do. He's a source of power and provision for them. That's the internal purpose.

The second, outside, is the head maintains the body's boundaries. This is protection, guardianship.

The head represents the body to other bodies. He's the representative. We talked about that a minute ago.

And he's responsible for the body as a whole. Everything that happens in that body comes back in the end on him.

So let's unpack that a little bit. The head organizes the body for its purpose.

It orients the body, directs the body. And so the head, therefore, has to have mission clarity.

It's really important for the head to know. And this is true. You can hear in this, I hope. We're talking about marriages, we're talking about households, but you could apply this to other kinds of social bodies, business, a church, a government.

Like all of it, the same principles would be at work. For a household, the husband needs to have mission clarity.

What are we for? What are we doing? What's the mission and what isn't the mission? And he has to keep that purpose in mind.

And I want to stress this notion of presence, okay? Because sometimes you can think that a household should be ordered the way that a platoon should be ordered.

Barking orders. No, no, not that kind of order, okay? There may be times where that's necessary, where just direct commands are required.

But those commands need to emerge from his presence. The head should lead the body, should orient and govern the body the way that the earth orients the moon, by gravity.

The head must have gravity. A husband guides his home through his gravity.

And if he does so faithfully, then the moon orbits properly. If he's unfaithful, that moon starts colliding with stuff.

Or you could use a musical image here, just another image, okay? The head sets the tone, right?

Lays down a beat, okay? He establishes a rhythm. And it could be a steady beat, that would be faithful, and that allows for beautiful music.

Or it could be an erratic beat, right? Which just leads to noise.

Or think in terms of a melody line. He lays down a melody line, a bass line. And then that enables the other members of his household, first and foremost his wife, to bring the harmony and make glorious music.

Not just melodies, but harmony. Or another way, another image. The head is like the body's immune system.

It regulates the body and how it functions, but also fights off, defends from sickness, recognizes infection, and marshals resources to fend it off.

That's that, again, that provision and protection aspect. That's what a head does for a body.

Orders the body for its purpose through presence, empowers the body, the members of the body, for their purpose, and then protects it, guards it, maintains the boundaries, and is responsible for all of it.

That's headship. Bodyship, what is that? Okay, this is the flip side, so listen, the flip side.

First, the body receives that initiating presence and words and actions of the head and refines them.

Refines them, how? By providing feedback, input, and counsel to the head. So the head takes the initiative, here's some initiating presence, initiating words, and then the body says, let's refine that.

Let's make it better, let's sharpen that point a little bit. Let's make it better, okay? Providing feedback, input, and counsel.

And then second, this is the more important one, I think. Both of them are important, but this one's where the glory comes.

The body glorifies the head's efforts and makes them fruitful, okay?

How? By keeping in step with the head, by carrying out the head's will, and then extending and amplifying the body's influence in the world, okay?

So again, let's go through those again, both of them. Feedback and counsel, okay?

This is an inescapable biblical truth. Once you start to recognize it, you'll see it everywhere, okay?

The body will influence the head for good or for ill, period. Just like the head can't help but lead, the body can't help but give input, influence, feedback, okay?

Adam listened to the voice of his wife and the human race fell into ruin.

You remember the story of Nabal in the book of Samuel? Okay, Nabal had a wife named

Abigail, and Nabal, his name literally means fool. So you're wondering what his parents were thinking when they named him.

Like, that's like, his name is the Hebrew word for fool. And they're like, yeah, we're gonna name that guy fool. It's like, I don't think this is gonna go the way you think, but, or maybe it is gonna go the way you think, okay?

Nabal did not listen to the voice of his wife and God killed him, and their household almost came to ruin.

But one way or the other, right? That influence will be there. That input will be there.

Husband is the head and he can lead like Adam or like Christ. A wife is the body and she can influence for misery like Eve or for good, like that woman in Proverbs 31.

In fact, that passage is really an interesting one. When you think about the book of Proverbs, you get 30 chapters in which a father is saying to his son, get wisdom, get wisdom, here's wisdom.

Wear this around your neck. Put it on like a coat. Soak yourself in wisdom. Listen to the voice of Lady Wisdom, not to the voice of Lady Folly.

Listen, listen for her voice. She's called, they're both calling in loud in the streets. Which woman are you gonna listen to?

The adulterous woman or the wise woman, okay? So 30 chapters of that. And then at the end, it's here she comes walking down the aisle.

Excellent wife who can find. And a description of this woman that he's been trained his whole life to recognize and listen to.

The prince in the book of Proverbs is ahead in training. He will lead this kingdom. He will order and structure and guide it, but he will not do so on his own.

He will be influenced one way or another. So it's either Lady Wisdom, Lady Folly, excellent wife or the adulterous woman.

But one way or the other, she will influence. But not just clarifying counsel and feedback. The body is also the place of fruitfulness.

Fruitfulness, okay? This is a fundamental truth. Ladies, if you're gonna write one thing down for you to reflect upon about how

God has made you, it's this. The body receives in order to give more. The body receives.

So the woman's the body, the wife is the body. She receives in order to give more. It's not just receive it and then give it back.

It's receive it and glorify. Receive it and beautify. Receive it and amplify.

Of course, we have the classic image of this in the one flesh union, the marital act, right?

In the biblical picture, procreation is described in the Bible this way. A husband is the gardener.

He plants his seed in the wife who is his garden. And then she bears fruit in the form of children.

Like that's the biblical metaphor that is like Song of Songs, all the way Genesis, right?

That language of seed that comes up again and again. The seed of the woman, the seed of the woman. Okay, that's agricultural image. And we're meant to see them in light.

Women are gardens. They bear fruit. And not just the physical kind of fruit.

This is shaping everything that you do. Women are great at receiving and glorifying, making things beautiful.

This is the calling of a wife, of the body, to take what is good and make it better.

Okay, and so then the musical metaphor, she's the harmony. She makes the song glorious.

The head empowers, she takes that power and enlarges the household. Okay, this is the biblical vision of headship and bodyship.

Final thing for tonight is then to circle back and to see those imperatives again in a fresh light, okay?

So men and women are different. God made us that way. Facts of creation, facts of nature. And so when

God comes to husband and wives, he doesn't give us the same commands because we run on different fuel, okay?

Men run on respect. Women run on love. And so God knows that when

I'm addressing what does faithful headship mean, you're the head, husband, so what should you do?

You should love her like Jesus did. You should die. You should lay down your life. You should sacrifice in order to glorify, beautify, cleanse, nourish, cherish.

Those are the verbs that get used for the men. This is the faithfulness. She needs love, that's the fuel she runs on.

Women, wives run on love, so give her love. But wives, husbands don't run on love, they run on respect.

And so God says to them, submit in everything. Honor, respect, that's what you do.

Now, you might say, well, isn't that an expression of love? Absolutely, but the form is different, which is why, and this is anticipated a little bit tomorrow, this is why marriage is gonna get wonky because men tend to give, well, sometimes wanna give the fuel that they run on to their wives, and their wives are like,

I don't need that. That's not, right? I'm not just a friend that you respect. I need to be cherished.

I want to be loved, I want to be delighted in. I want you to regard me as beautiful and I want to be beautiful for you.

That's the fuel, and I'm not your buddy. You can respect your buddy, and your buddy will be like, yeah,

I'm a man among men, my brothers respect me, this is great, great. That's not how your wife works.

Likewise, wives, I'm just trying to, I just wanna love him, delight in him, cherish him, and he's like,

I want respect. That's the fuel, and so God knows this. God's wise, he knows the way he made the world, and so he says to husbands, lover like Jesus, and he says to wives, honor him like the church does

Christ. We'll get more of what that looks like, ways they can go wrong in the coming days.

For now, let me pray, and we'll wrap up this evening. Father, I am grateful for your word.

I'm grateful for the clarity it brings. I pray that we would have soft hearts to receive it, and that you would work in us what is pleasing in your sight.

We wanna work out these truths to see where we're failing and to run to Christ as our head and our high priest, and then out of that faith in him to live faithfully as men and women, as husbands and wives in our homes.