Lord, How Am I Supposed To Love This Woman?

Lord, How am I supposed to love this woman?

3/23/03

Minister Cedric Portis

Ephesians 5:21 Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

Ephesians 5:22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

Ephesians 5:23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Ephesians 5:24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

Ephesians 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

Ephesians 5:26 That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,

Ephesians 5:27 That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.

Ephesians 5:28 So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.

Ephesians 5:29 For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:

Ephesians 5:30 For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

Ephesians 5:31 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.

Before I get started I want to say something about the “Sunday Sermon.”

Every sermon you hear may not apply directly to a situation that may be going on in your life, this moment but one day it might, better yet I will tell you exactly what will happen. God is going to send someone into your life that needs the knowledge that you have gained from the Sunday Sermon. Remember, you never really understand what you have learned until you can teach someone what you know. With that I want to look at 2 verses from the passage of scripture I read earlier. Verses 22 and 25.

Lets look at what Paul is saying here, now most women don’t have a problem with the second phrase of verse 22, they have no problem with submitting to the Lordship of Jesus.

But looking closer at this passage, Paul is saying that the woman is to submit herself to her husband in the same manner as she would submit herself to Jesus. Now that is a powerful level of submission. That is giving to the Husband a significant level of authority. Read verse 23/24. So that in a manner similar to the way that Christ is the head of the church, the man is to be the head of the wife. The obvious meaning of headship in the New Testament and the Greek language is to be in a position of preeminence and a position of leadership.

And what I understand this passage of scripture to mean is that the husband is to be the head of the home. This is not a license for tyranny; this is not a license to demean the woman or to treat the woman as a slave but the responsibility for final authority and for leadership in the home is vested in the husband. And if the woman resist that, she is resisting God, it is God who gives that directive.

Now there has been teaching that I have heard that men have bought into the idea that the only way that God could tell women to submit to men is if men are naturally superior to women.

This is so very not true. Subordination in terms of the division of labor in the Bible never carries with it the idea of inferiority. Even our doctrine of the Godhead says that the Son is subordinate to the Father and the Holy Spirit is subordinate to the Son, and no otherwise do we infer from that, the idea of inferiority or there is any less dignity to the Holy Spirit that there is to Jesus Christ. So there is no less dignity, no less value to the woman than to the men.

Submit is not a dirty word, God is tell you that you are to submit to one another in reverence of Him. Anything you do for God is not shameful or degrading and should not be looked upon or thought of in that manner.

You hear constantly in our society the myth of the 50/50 marriage and I can’t think of anything worse because in a situation of a 50/50 marriage where there is no final authority, what fallen human beings tend to do is to be locked in perpetual power struggle to gain 51%.

Well, God settles that, God says final say; leadership is vested in the man. And before the grin gets to big on your face men, I’m not so sure that is as much a privilege as it is a weighty weighty responsibility.