Submission is a Dirty Word

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the
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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her
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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is
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Mike Abendroth, and as it sounds, I have a little cold, some sniffles.
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I took a COVID test yesterday, negative. So I'm thankful for that, and I don't think
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I've talked much today. This is in real time, Saturday, March 26th.
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Fred Butler would always say that I'd have shows done like eight months in advance, but they're only a week in advance.
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This probably will be two weeks in advance, because I need to start getting some shows for the summer. If I'm gone in the summer, we want to have—I usually do reruns in the summer, except after the sickness and my
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COVID sickness and acute respiratory failure and all that, I had so many reruns, I don't want to do that anymore.
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You can always write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com. Very encouraged by your emails and comments, and I'm not really doing too much social media these days.
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Twitter, I look at it and I post maybe once or twice a week. I might do a like or something like that, a heart.
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What's the difference between a retweet and a heart? Isn't it the same thing? Heart. Well, on No Compromise Radio, we like to talk about the
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Lord Jesus and His Word, and I think the last couple shows I did, one was the
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Beza briefing, and the other one, we were talking about what's a spirit -filled life look like.
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I'm going to record some American Gospel 3 clips, and I don't know if Brandon will use any of those or not.
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I made it into American Gospel 2. I was too sick for American Gospel 1. I was asked, but too sick, and my agent said it was a small project, so I should decline.
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Just kidding. Remember, we are famous here for laughing at our own jokes, and people say it sounds like you're sitting in a room by yourself, talking to yourself, and laughing at your own jokes.
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See? Isn't that No Compromise Radio ministry? I talked a little bit about spirit -filled last time, and I'm in the book of Ephesians on Sunday morning, and right after the spirit -filled section in chapter 5, it talks about wives and husbands.
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And if you think big picture of unity, remember Ephesians chapter 4 talks about unity, as I'm pulling up my
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Bible right now. "...urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the
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Spirit in the bond of peace. There's one body..." I don't know why I'm short of breath today.
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I rode the life cycle for 90 minutes yesterday. That should do something. "...just as you were called into one hope that belongs to your call, one
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Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."
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Well, dear radio listeners, we understand that church unity is important. Christ is the head and we're the body, and we want to make sure, although we have diversity, we have unity, broken and wounded.
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Why don't people say broken and wounded much anymore? I think the word theological journey or journey is so out of date these days, it's almost okay to use it again.
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Don't you think? I didn't really want to use that, but if somebody asked me my theological journey from Darby to...
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what's a theologian's last name that starts with a D? Vitsios? Who?
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Come on, give me somebody that starts with a D. From Darby to duplicity.
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No, we would not want that. I'm looking at my... I keep most of my theological, systematic theology books at home, and I hear
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I'm at the church building today. Who would start with D? Dombrowski?
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Do you see an Armenian? Oh, it'll come to me.
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D .D. Hodge? D .D. Warfield? See, we sit here and laugh at our own jokes.
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I want to talk a little bit about family the next couple shows, specifically wives and husbands.
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I say it wives and husbands because that's the order here in Ephesians, and if there's anything that will cause disunity in the church, could it be there's already disunity at home?
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Or put it more positively, if there's unity at home, will that not help the church's unity?
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And so in big picture, Ephesians, we just don't come to chapter five and say, oh, it's time to obey.
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I mean, even the section there, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church, that tells us that this is not simply moralism.
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When it says, now as the church submits to Christ, that's eternal subordination.
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Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. What we have here with Paul, it's not nude law, simple moralism.
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Here's another list. I had lunch with somebody the other day and they said many churches just have these 10 steps and seven ways and six methods and five who knows what.
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That's not what Paul is doing. He's been slowly and rightly encouraging the saints about the triune
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God and how God loves sinners and from election to redemption, to sealing, to bringing
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Gentiles and Jews together in one new man, to glory in the church, everything is leading up to, well, in light of what
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God has done and who he is, how do you respond? And then that's really the crux of it at 4 .1,
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walk in a manner worthy of your calling. And he comes to the section now for wives and husbands.
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He soon will get to the section for children and workers, but this whole section here, it's kind of interesting because don't we want weddings, don't we want marriages that are healthy?
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Of course we do. It's dumb to even ask. And I think a healthy marriage will not only help society, but it'll help the church.
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That's what I'm driving at today, is if you'd like to help the church in terms of its unity and its effectiveness, humanly speaking, well, we'd like to have good marriages.
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I've been married now for almost 33 years, 32 years, and I'd like to honor the
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Lord in the church even through my marriage. There was a seven -year -old girl who had just seen the movie
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Cinderella and was testing her neighbor's knowledge of the story.
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The neighbor said, I know what happens at the end. What? Asked the little girl. Cinderella and the prince live happily ever after.
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To which the little girl answered, oh, no, they didn't. They got married. Ouch. He who finds a wife finds a what?
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A good thing and obtains favor from the Lord. Proverbs 18 .22. I mean, even the whole book of Ephesians, sometimes we forget.
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Chapter 6, verse 22. I've sent Tychicus to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we are and that he may encourage your hearts.
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And I think he's going to encourage your hearts by saying, well, this is how Paul is, of course, but this is the encouragement we have in the triune
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God that this letter unfolds and portrays. If I were to ask you good marriage advice, what would you say?
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Where would you find good marriage advice? I looked up online and here's some marriage advice on Google.
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Assume the best of one another. Don't ever stop trying. Communicate respectfully. Always be flexible.
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Well, here's another list. Make your spouse your number one priority. Celebrate the process.
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Learn to speak at least one new language. Don't sweat the small stuff. Well, I found our third list.
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Have positive conversations. Show affection. Date frequently. Enrich your intimacy.
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I found a fourth list. Be courteous to your wife. Don't despise her. Provide her clothes, jewelry, ornaments regarding wives to husband.
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Be hospitable. Protect his earnings. Be skilled. Those are the list.
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Those four lists. Well, here's the funny part. The first list is a secular list.
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The second part is an evangelical list. The third list is a
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Mormon list and the fourth list is a Buddhist list. What's the common denominator in all that?
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Or I could ask it this way. What's missing in all of them? I mean, it's not enough to say husbands love your wives.
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It's not enough to say wives cement your husband. You can say that, obviously, and most of these people do, right?
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Even common grace lets people know about that. Society knows. Does anybody ever say to themselves, you know what?
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I don't think it's right to love my wife. I mean, they don't love their wives sometimes and actions and deeds and thoughts, but they know it's built into the system that they're supposed to do that.
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What's missing in all these lists, sadly, and it makes them simple moralism, is the
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Lord Jesus and his church. It doesn't talk about union with Christ, ability, growth, maturation, conformity to the son, power to say no to sin and yes to righteousness, all these things.
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We want to have good marriages. It's God's design. It's a good gift. It's a gracious gift of God.
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We want, even in our marriages, if I could use Matthew 5, to let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your
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Father in heaven. But the commands in marriage to both wife and husband, and then later in the family for children, it's just not raw law, soaked with grace, saturated with grace.
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One man said that without the context of grace, Paul's marriage instructions could sound metallic.
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Some of you, like me, have had COVID and then you get that kind of weird taste in your mouth. Even now,
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I've got this weird taste in my mouth, kind of this, I don't know. It's not metallic, but it's something, and I don't want to have these commands sound metallic nor taste metallic.
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We with William Cooper, the poet, when you think of the home, he called it the only bliss of paradise that has survived the fall.
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But too many people have marriages that are just stressed and cracked and barely, you know, it's on life support.
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And it's not going to have, it's not going to give us any help if we just simply use these kind of, like Ogden Nash ditties, if you want your marriage to sizzle with love in the loving cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it, whenever you're right, shut up.
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And even if I appeal to you by saying, you know what, you don't really have romantic feelings for your spouse anymore, but you do want your kids to turn out well.
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The best thing for your kids is to see, I think Elizabeth Elliot said it, to see a mom, their mom loving their dad and their dad loving their mom.
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I mean, that's the greatest thing you could ever do for your children, right? And Paul says to ladies, submit to your own husbands, he says, ladies, now he says, wives submit to your own husbands as to the
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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.
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Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
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Now, when I read that, it's kind of chalkboard for people, fingernails on chalkboard, just that sound, what,
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I don't know what sound bugs you. One of the sounds that bugged me was when the kids would play with their cheap water bottles, right?
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You'll go buy 36 bottles of water at the grocery store and it's two bucks and the plastic just makes that sound, you know, that crinkling sound,
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I never really liked that. And to many, when I say wives should submit to their husbands, their own husbands, it sounds like I'm a caveman.
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It sounds like, you know, me, Tarzan, you, Jane, the culture is allergic to and hateful toward this kind of talk.
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I listened to Annie Get Your Gun sometimes, a soundtrack with my family, and I think she said,
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Annie, when she was about ready to get married, I promise to love and honor but not obey. Now he doesn't say in this section, obey your husbands.
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That's given to the children, and Paul makes sure that he doesn't say the wives are like children.
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We'll talk in a moment about how Paul liberates ladies, but here Paul is saying, in a voluntary way, your own will, spurred by the
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Spirit of God, remember spirit -filled people talk about the
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Lord, they sing, they're thankful, and they submit, and so it leads right into this section. You voluntarily subordinate yourself, even though you're equal in Christ, Galatians 3 .28,
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even though you might be smarter than your husband, more godly than your husband, a better business person than your husband, this is
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God's plan. He's the one that made male and female. He's the one that ordained marriage, and I'm pretty much with Sinclair Ferguson.
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You want to know why marriages are awful? Because wives don't submit and husbands don't love.
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I mean, how many commands really are there? You'd think there'd be all kinds of things about marriages and weddings and roles and commands.
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There are not that many. I mean, we're going to see later wives are to respect their husbands, and Colossians, husbands are not to be embittered toward their wives.
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Obviously there are certain commands, but not as much as you'd think. If I hand you this book, thousands of pages, this
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ESV study Bible I have, now it's not all Bible. There's notes and thesauruses and concordances and all that stuff.
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I'm looking at over 2 ,700 pages, and if I distilled it all down into marriage how -tos, what would you find?
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Marriage commands, what would you find? And it doesn't really have that much, but what it has is important.
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And it says, submit to your own husbands. Now in the original language, that word submit's not there. It's filled in from the previous section, so therefore some ladies say, you know what,
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I don't have to submit because that's not a command in there. It just says, literally, wives, doesn't say submit to your own husband, it says wives, to your own husbands.
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And therefore, I don't have to do it. Well, you can read the parallel passage in Colossians 3 .18,
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it's there for you, wives submit to your husbands. So if you say it's not in Ephesians, that doesn't bother me because it's not technically a verb there, but you can find it in Colossians chapter 3.
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In addition, as you look at this entire section, you see Christ loving and the church submitting.
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And of course, in this particular case, as Christ loves, so too must the husbands.
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And as the church submits, so too must the wife. I mean, this whole section here is about submission, right?
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Submitting to one another, then submitting here, then essentially children submitting, right, obeying, and when you go to work, then you're submitting to your boss.
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And it just means you submit your control, you line up under. It's military language.
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And of course, the general is not a better image bearer, you know, he's not a better person just by the sake of his title or her title than a colonel or a sergeant or a corporal or anyone else.
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You place yourself under and here, it's amazing to me that it doesn't say wives, submit to your own husbands as to the
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Lord, it doesn't say, I guess I could rephrase this, this is why sometimes you need an editor.
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Let me just stop and back up. This is pretty amazing language because in the Jewish culture, you as a man would own a dog and you'd own a sheep and you'd own a goat and you'd own a wife kind of thing.
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That's kind of the way the Jewish culture ended up being, sadly. In the Greek culture, you know what, basically stay indoors and obey your husband.
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Don't talk. Right? And a husband, if he wanted somebody to raise his family, it'd be his wife.
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And if he wanted pleasures, he'd go elsewhere. And in the Roman culture, you know, you don't have any rights if you're a woman, you can drink wine, all kinds of things.
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And here, Paul addresses wives and he says, line up under, that's not subservient.
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That's not, I'm lesser as a person. This is just his here function.
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And so you're a lesser person, therefore you are to submit. Paul doesn't know that. Paul doesn't know that at all.
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I mean, if you think about submission, big picture, the Hebrew word for helper is ezer.
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Here I raise my Ebenezer and it just means completer or helper. And you think that's to demean a woman if you say she's man's helper?
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Well, God uses a word like that for himself when he helps his people, Exodus 18.
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It has nothing to do with that. Martin Lloyd -Jones' wife,
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Bethann Lloyd -Jones, was asked the question, what if my husband wakes me up at 3 a .m.
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demanding I fetch him ice cream? Am I to go and get it? Answer, yes, and then phone the doctor because he's clearly not a well man.
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And of course, the well -known statement by Matthew Henry, the woman who was made out of a rib, out of the side of Adam, not made out of his head to rule over him, nor his feet to be trampled upon him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved.
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That's the issue. And we see what Paul is doing here. And I know it must be hard, right?
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If I have a boss, it's hard to submit to the boss because they're not perfect, right? That's why we're told as husbands not to be embittered because we have people who are lining up under us who don't always do what we want them to do and are not always godly and so it's easy to be bitter with people like that.
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Ian Hamilton said, wives, do you submit to your husband? Do you submit to your husband's
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God -appointed leadership? Do you submit gladly out of love? Do you help him to live up to his calling?
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Do you pray for your husband to have the courage, grace, wisdom, and humility to be your leader? And then, of course, he says, husbands, do you make it as easy as possible for your wives to submit to your headship?
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Do you treat your wife as a spiritual equal? Do you tell her as often, as the
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Lord so often tells his bride, that you love her and cherish her? Do you treat her with gentleness and thoughtfulness?
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Do you listen to her and have the humility to lead her when necessary? It's amazing.
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That's the way it should be. There's nothing troglodytish about that. Old women teach young women,
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Titus chapter 2, and what do they teach them? To be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, subject to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be dishonored.
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Because if God says something and you don't do it, or you think it doesn't apply to you, or it only happened at Ephesus and Corinth, and we're way beyond that when the trajectory of theology finally comes to fruition like now, no, no, we don't want to dishonor
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God. We don't want to demean God's word. This is a command. And just because submission is misused or abused, it's not wrong.
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It's R. Kent Hughes who talks about men who are domestic job of the huts, who throw verses around.
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Submit. By the way, this is not to say husbands, tell your wives to submit. He's addressing wives.
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It's like I'm preaching a sermon. Okay, now it comes to wives, you submit to your husband. Husbands, children, that's what's going on here.
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Paul is not saying women are inferior, they're no good for ministry. You can see Romans chapter 16 to cancel that out.
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He's not saying they aren't divine image bearers. He's not saying that they aren't to have vows like men did in the
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Old Testament. They can't have access to God. They don't have responsibilities to hear
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God's word and to obey it and to trust the triune God. I mean, yes, some husbands are awful, but here we still have the command.
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I think it's important for us to realize that this command is given, especially in light of what happened at the fall.
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Remember Genesis 3 .16, to the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain, you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.
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You can look at different ways to interpret that verse, but the common way to look at it is you're going to want to take over headship and you're not supposed to be taking over headship.
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Here in this book, you can look at submission. You can go to 1 Peter 3, in the same way you wives be submissive to your own husbands, so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, that they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior.
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I mean, what are we going to do? We can say we don't want that in the Bible. We can say, let's start a new religion and just ignore that.
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But it's right there. And ladies, as you submit to your husband, it's as to the
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Lord. You see it in verse 22, as to the Lord. How do I show my submission to my
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Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who forgave me all my sins and rescued me from wrath and Satan and sin and death and hell?
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I'll submit to my husband. That's what he's trying to say.
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Brian Chappell said the idea is that a woman submits to her husband as she looks over his shoulder to see the
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Lord who is saying, you are ultimately doing this not for him, but for me. Isn't that wonderful?
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That's wonderful. And so that helps ladies to say, well, you know what? If I ignore my husband, it's like ignoring the
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Savior. I'm going to undermine my husband and his authority. That's like undermining Jesus and trying to undermine his authority.
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I'm going to counter my husband's authority. I'm going to nag my husband to do things. It's like nagging Jesus. We don't want to do that.
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So anyway, the fruit of a Spirit -filled life is submission, and he starts off with the wives, and then he's going to go to husbands, and we're going to do that in just moments, or for you, dear listener, we'll do that tomorrow.
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Same bat time, same bat channel, same submission channel, same loving channel, No Compromise Radio.
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You can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.
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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.
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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.