Sermon Transcript
Ephesians chapter 5, verse 21 to chapter 6, verse 9. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as in 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 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. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the 2 shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to the— to Christ and the church.
However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise, that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ. Not by the way of eye-service as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whether good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, Knowing that He who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with Him.
When Christianity first came on the scene, it revolutionized relationships.
It revolutionized many of the established ideas of what a community could look like. So, for instance, nationalities who had never experienced any unity with each other before came into Christianity and started calling one another brothers, sisters, family. Different classes of people did the same thing, from ruling officials on one end of the spectrum to the poor and slaves on the other. They sat under one roof, they took communion with one another, walls between them broke down. Women flocked to Christianity partially because of the status it gave them.
Sociologist Rodney Stark, who was a professor at University of Washington for decades, wrote from a secular point of view before he probably later became a Christian, but at least at the time he was researching, he wasn’t. He said the first-century church was at least two-thirds women.
And this was at a time when there was no societal advantage to being a Christian. In fact, there were pressures not to be a Christian. Kind of like today, it cost them something to follow Christ, and yet women came to Christianity in droves. So, the early church was a mix of ethnicities, genders, economic statuses, those with power, those without, and the world had never really seen a group like that before. One place in Scripture where you see the diversity of the early church is— it’s the last chapter of Romans, which you probably usually just skip over because it’s a long list of names.
No harm in that, but the list of names shows us the early church included men, women, Jews, Greeks, rich, poor, living in community as one body. It was utterly unique in the history of the world to that point. No one else was even really trying to create such a community. Diversity like that was not a virtue at the time. It’s not as if you find some first-century author admiring how diverse Christian communities were.
If anything, they scoffed at it, which means if you today value diversity in a group, whether you are a Christian or not, if you value diversity, you are benefiting from something that Christianity brought to the world. World. Now the question is, why did the first-century church have such diversity, or what caused it to happen? And the answer to that is texts like the one we are studying today, because Christianity had some radical ideas in regard to how people should treat one another. Passages just like this gave tremendous status and dignity to groups that had not had those those before.
So when a first-century person read a text like this, that person might have been every bit as shocked as you were when we read it a minute ago. Some of them might have found it offensive even, like some of you might have found it offensive, but they would have been shocked and maybe offended for very different reasons than you just were. They would have heard the commands to husbands, the commands to fathers, the commands to slave owners as totally countercultural. That husbands must love and cherish their wives in ways that we will outline today but were unheard of at the time. That fathers must be involved with their children in ways that were at least atypical compared to the culture at large.
And that slave owners must treat their slaves as if the slave were the master. No one thought slaves should be treated that way. No one gave slaves elevated status. So the instructions for husbands, fathers, and slave owners, especially if you take those collectively, were brand new in the world. They were shocking, not at all what people in power were accustomed to hearing.
Perhaps offensive to those in power. Whereas, you know, us today in our culture, we are not particularly shocked by what Paul says to husbands and fathers at least, but we are probably really shocked by what he says about wives and slaves, right? In fact, it could trigger us, right? We might accuse passages like this as being outdated, patriarchal, offensive, to marginalized groups like women and slaves. We might say, this is the kind of instruction that keeps the oppressed oppressed.
This is the kind of thing of why we shouldn’t read the Bible.
But actually, these kind of passages provided liberation for traditionally oppressed groups. I mean, think about it. Why would women and the poor, slaves, flock to Christianity? And they did, why would they flock to Christianity if Christianity oppressed them just like everybody else did?
Why would they be so anxious to be part of something if it kept them down? Answer, it didn’t. Christianity didn’t keep them down. Instead, it liberated them. So if you today from a 21st century vantage point are triggered to say like, how oppressive, why should we listen to this?
One reason we should listen is because the original marginalized audience who heard it was liberated by it. They thought it was fantastic news.
So let’s jump into this. I’m just going to go in the order of the passage. These are relational imperatives for Christians in 3 different types of relationships. Husbands and wives, fathers and children, masters and slaves. Husbands and wives, fathers and children, masters and slaves.
How must these groups interact with one another? First, husbands and wives, submit to one another.
The picture is mutual submission. It is not only the wife who submits. It is also the husband. We know that Paul was intending to say the husband submits as well because of how he wrote it. In the Greek, there is actually no verb whatsoever in verse 22 where it says in all our texts, wives, submit to your husbands, in verse 22.
It doesn’t actually say that, although it means that, which is clear through the rest of the passage. But the Greek starting in verse 21 says this, it’s going to happen. Verse 21, submit to one another out of reverence to Christ. Verse 22, wives to your husbands as to the Lord. See, there is no verb in verse 22.
If you read it, it’s just wives to your husbands as to the Lord. If that’s all you had, you’d say wives what to their husbands? There’s no verb, right? The verb must be borrowed from verse 21 in order for verse 22 to make any sense, which is what Paul intended, and you see that throughout the rest of the passage. So the translations that start off verse 22 of saying, wives, submit to your husbands, so it’s not wrong, he is saying that, but it’s not the only thing he was saying.
Paul says first, verse 21, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. And now he’s like, I’ll give you some examples of what I mean, starting with wives. But not only wives. Paul actually carries the principle of mutual submission all the way through each of the 3 relationships he describes. So husbands and wives, fathers and children, masters and slaves, the people in each of those groups must mutually submit to one another.
So yes, the wife submits, but it’s not just the wife, it’s all of them. Them. But in each group, submitting looks a little different. So Paul gives some specifics, like if husbands and wives are to submit to each other, what does that actually mean practically? Paul talks about the wife first.
We’ll talk about the husband first, just so you can see how incredibly wonderful the wives would have found this new teaching, especially then, but probably even so today. So what does it look like for a husband to submit to his wife? It looks like husbands love their wives like Christ loves the church, verse 25. As Christ gave himself up totally and completely for the church, husbands give themselves up totally and completely for their wives with every action, with every thought, with every decision, with every breath, death, the husband prioritizes his wife over himself. The question is always, what is best for her instead of what is best for him?
Because that’s what Christ did for the church. Now some of us may contend, that’s not really submission, that’s just sacrifice. You may argue Christ sacrificed for the church, but He didn’t submit to the church because Jesus remained in charge, right? He still had the authority, so the church submits to Him, not the other way around. Fair point, we’ll get to that, hold that thought.
Remember, submission looks different in each relationship. Christ’s submission to the church was to position Himself in a lower status compared to the church. Lower in importance even. He put himself in the role of a servant, most vividly with the crucifixion. But think also, for instance, when he washed his disciples’ feet.
You may remember John 13. Jesus takes the role of a servant before his disciples, and not just any servant, but the lowest servant on the pecking order of servants, one who washes feet. Feet that wore sandals everywhere, through dust and mud and animal business and bits of glass and sharp rocks, pottery that, you know, left the feet bloody, scabby, dirty. Only the lowliest servant would wash those feet, but Jesus does it for His disciples. And Peter protests, remember?
Peter says, surely not, right? And when he says that, he means something like, Jesus, you can’t do this. You’re the master. You can’t lower yourself like this. It’s beneath you.
And Jesus says basically, I am beneath you. I am putting myself beneath you, which is a type of submission. It’s saying, I’m treating you with more importance than myself. Value even. Later on, Christians reflecting on the leadership model of Jesus would write— this is Philippians 2— in humility, value others above yourselves, having the same mindset as Christ Jesus, right?
Which means Christ valued others more than himself. That is a type of submission. So Paul says, husbands, that’s how you treat your wives. You put yourself beneath her. It’s a little like she’s the queen and you’re the farmhand.
She’s the royalty, you’re the servant. See how that’s submission? Now, in the first century especially, but even so today, right, wives? If you’re a woman, where do you find a husband like that?
A man who insists that his needs are met behind yours, if at all. A man who insists that your needs are the priority, commands it even. We’ll get there in a second. Where are you going to find a husband like that?
First-century women found those men in the church, and so they flocked to the church. Of course, they would probably flock to the church today if a bunch of those men were Husbands, love your wives like Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Now, touchy subject, if we weren’t there already, about authority, about being in charge, about the church submitting to Christ. The metaphor of royalty and servant, queen and farmhand, it can only go so far, right? Like all metaphors.
Force can because when we think of queen and farmhand we expect the queen to boss around the farmhand. The queen gives orders, the servant obeys, the servant must comply and that is not the situation with the church and Christ. The church does not boss around Jesus. Jesus is always the one in charge, not vice versa. He has the final say.
But husbands, husbands, Before you start thinking something like, that’s right, I’m in charge, I have the authority, my wife needs to listen to me, before you get too puffed up, what did Jesus use his authority to do?
He used it to put himself in the role of a servant.
Again, back to John 13, Jesus begins to wash disciples’ feet. Peter protests, Lord, you can’t do this, we should be washing your feet. Feet. Jesus responds to Peter with authority. Jesus corrects Peter.
There’s no question about who’s in charge, it’s Jesus, period. You know, you could say Jesus put Peter in his place, but the place where Jesus put Peter is up.
Jesus uses his authority to elevate others. Not make life easier for himself. He uses his authority to command his disciples to receive him as a servant.
Jesus says, I will wash your feet. I will be the farmhand, right? I command it. He says, Peter, you will have more status and value than me, and Peter obeys. The rest of the disciples do too.
They submit to Jesus’ authority. They take the higher status.
And that’s a picture of husband and wife. It looks something like the husband saying, and sorry for the stereotypes, fill in your own scenario if this one doesn’t fit for you, but it sounds something like the husband saying, wife, I know my game is on right now. I know it’s the final quarter. And I know you think I should be over there watching the TV, but we’re not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to listen to you talk about your feelings.
I want to hear all about your crazy mother.
I’m in charge.
I’m putting my foot down.
Right? This is what we’re doing.
I’m your servant.
And the wife says, right, well, if you insist, dear. You know, yes, sir. You see why the women flocked to the church?
You see how it elevated them?
I know it’s controversial to say, husbands, love your wives like Christ loved the church, and wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. I know those are controversial phrases, but I’ve never actually seen it be a problem in practice if husbands and wives actually practice them. Because to the extent you show me a husband who loves his wife like Christ loves the church, I will show you a wife who loves to submit to her husband. The problem is not Paul’s instruction. The problem is obeying his instruction.
Because I’m sure there are some husbands in here who have not prioritized their wives in everything. And if that’s you, cut it out!
And I’m sure there are some wives in here who fight their husbands even when he is doing all he can to prioritize her. He’s killing himself to do what’s best for her and she’s fighting him. Cut it out!
Most of us are probably in between. We get it right some, we get it wrong some.
But the picture is complete and total submission to one another in different ways. That’s husband and wife. All right, second, fathers and children, submit to one another. Just like today, it would not have been unusual to hear that children must obey their parents. That’s one of the 10 Commandments.
Paul makes reference to 10 Commandments here in verses 2 and 3. Nothing strange about that. But what would have sounded unusual, depending on the family— so not in every family, but in Rome at large— children were not treated as if they had apparent worth or dignity. Romans, for example, did not believe children had a developed soul. They were not considered fully human when they were first born.
Children only became human when they reached certain milestones, like getting a name, which happened when they were about a week old, or they got teeth, that could be months down the road, or maybe when they first ate solid foods, maybe that’s a year down the road. Not fully human until then. And maybe the most telling indicator of the status of children in the society was the acceptable practice of infanticide, leaving unwanted babies to die of exposure in the trash heap. Infanticide was not illegal. It was one way to handle an unwanted pregnancy or babies born with some kind of defect.
Just let them die in the street. And actually, fathers held the power of life and death over a newborn, not the mother, the father. After birth, the baby was placed at the father’s feet, and if the father picked the baby up, the child became part of the family. But if the father turned his face away, the baby was abandoned, common practice in Rome. But Christians rejected all of that.
They said, that’s not the way we’re going to do it. Babies have just as much value as everyone else, and if a baby is abandoned, we will adopt the baby, raise the child as our own. Christians gave status to the most vulnerable in society that had no legal status. And of course, Christians today continue that same impulse. It’s why we care about life in the womb.
We say we’ve got to take care of the baby. Yes, of course, we also have to take care of the mother as well. The two don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Both baby and mother matter. They both have value.
So we place ourselves in the role of a servant before them both. We treat both mom and baby as having a higher status and importance than ourselves. In the first century, those groups didn’t have an advocate like that. Someone saying, I am radically for you. My role is to elevate you.
Make sure you are okay. Women and children didn’t have it. Maybe children most especially. So Paul calls Christians to do it, and particularly he calls dads to do it. Fathers, bring up your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord without provoking them to anger.
Be involved. It doesn’t mean moms are free from responsibility, of course, but he specifically mentions dads. Make of that what you will. Is it because dads had the power of life and death over newborns in that culture? Maybe.
Were dads less prone to be involved? Were they more likely to bail if it got hard? You know, escape to some hobby or job or new wife because escaping is far easier than guiding a family? Don’t know. He just mentions dads.
But I will say even today, well, at least in the most recent census, so not today today, Okay, but in the data we have, there were 2 million homes led by a single dad. There were 10 million homes led by a single mom.
Single-parent homes were 5 times more likely to be without a dad than without a mom. Of the homes that are mom-only, those families are 4 times more likely to be at poverty level than families with 2 parents. Conversely, when dad is involved in the kid’s life, the kid is more likely to do well in school, less behavior issues, etc. Most of that’s from the National Fatherhood Initiative. Paul says, dads, be involved, which apparently is still a needed admonition today.
Dads, serve your kids. Moms too. Kids, listen to your parents. That’s the instruction. Thirdly, masters and slaves, submit to one another.
Now, if the phrase wives submit to husbands wasn’t shocking enough to our modern ears, anything involving slaves and masters could certainly send us way over the edge, right? And for good reason, because when we hear the word slave, we immediately think of plantations in the pre-Civil War southeastern United States. That’s what slavery is to us. But the slavery Paul addressed, quite a bit different from that. Not to say it was okay, not saying slavery was okay in that day, okay?
Paul wasn’t either, we’ll get there. But it’s helpful to understand what Paul was addressing so you can have some context for how he was overturning earning it. In the 1st century, unlike plantation slavery in the U.S., slavery in Rome was not race-based. People from any race could be a slave. It was not lifelong, it was temporary.
It could never be done through kidnapping. Both Old and New Testaments of the Bible specifically forbid kidnapping someone and then selling that person as a slave, which is exactly what the world slavery was that we think of— kidnapping, selling. Additionally, slaves in first-century Rome could be paid. They were often educated. They could be married to someone else who was not a slave.
Very different from what we have in our minds. So what was it? Slavery then, not all the time, but most often, was how to get out of debt. You owed someone, you couldn’t pay them, so you worked as their slave. That is, if the lender allowed you to work off the debt, because the lender actually had a choice.
Instead of letting you be a slave, they could just throw you in prison until you could pay. But of course, I mean, if you’re stuck in prison, very unlikely you’ll ever be able to pay back your debt, right? Because if you couldn’t pay before you were in prison, prison. How are you supposed to acquire enough wealth within prison to now pay off your debt? You wouldn’t.
So you would just rot in prison, meaning the lender would never get paid. So unless the lender had some kind of vendetta against you, would rather see you rot than get their money back, right, you’d be given the option slave or prison. And most people, of course, chose slave. But the rest of your family, if you had one, didn’t need to become a slave depending on the size of your debt. So even if you were a slave, you could still go home at night and live with your family.
You just still had to show back up the next day and work and work and work, and the day after that and the day after that until you paid off your debt. Slaves could even have slaves of their own because in some cases someone may owe them while they they owe someone else. I hope you’re getting the picture that first-century slavery is not at all like New World slavery. It’s night and day, right? And it’s into that setting that Paul says, masters and slaves submit to one another.
The part about slaves submitting to masters was not at all surprising to first-century readers. You can imagine someone in Ephesus had slaves. He’s listening to Paul’s letter for the first time. Paul tells slaves Obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, rendering service as goodwill to the Lord. And masters were probably thinking, now that’s what I’m talking about, right?
You tell these slaves they can’t be lazy. But Paul’s setting them up because he’s setting up the masters because his next instruction is, quote, masters, do the same to them. Ephesians 6:9, masters, treat your slaves exactly the same way as I just said slaves must treat treat you. Now that’s new.
Masters submitting to slaves?
Masters must submit to slaves with fear and trembling as they would to Christ, rendering service to slaves. No one had ever said anything like that to masters before, ever. Do you see how liberating that would be for slaves? Do you see how the slaves and the poor would flock to Christianity? It’s the only place in the world where lender and debtor were on equal footing, where the lender owed the debtor every bit as much as the debtor owed the lender.
Yes, the debt still needs to be worked out. Paul commands debts be paid in Romans, but masters must respect the slave as if the slave were Christ himself. Masters serve the slave as if the slave were Christ himself. That was a new paradigm, to say the least. And as one New Testament theologian words it, it is true, you know, we admit Paul did not explicitly condemn the form of slavery that existed in the first century, though he did explicitly condemn New World slavery.
But instead of explicitly condemning first-century slavery, Paul reframed the master-slave relationship such that the institution would no not be able to survive. And it didn’t. It ended. And it’s Paul’s words that helped end it. Because what would slavery even mean as an institution if the master elevated the slave above himself?
That institution can’t continue. It would crumble. And it did. So for those of us today who would rightly say any type of slavery even if it’s just to pay off a debt, any type of slavery is wrong and it shouldn’t exist. If that’s how you feel, and you should, you can thank Paul who put into place the framework that ended slavery.
Because Christians were the only ones saying something like, masters, submit to your slaves. No one else said that. One, and it eventually crumbled the institution. Mutual submission was a brand new concept in the world, whether you’re talking about masters and slaves, parents and children, husbands and wives, mutual submission, brand new then.
And if we’re honest, it’s still pretty unique today because when do you see someone with power elevating the powerless above themselves? Really, really above themselves, not just with words, with actions, with more importance, with more perks. Really, you before and more than me. When does that happen? Then if that happens, which is rare enough, when do you see the formerly powerless group like respond with gratitude and reciprocal service rather than entitlement.
Like the group that never had perks before, when they get perks, do they turn around and try to use those perks in love and service to others?
Not usually, right? They want more perks. It’s rare, it’s so rare to see groups with power dynamics or even groups of equal power try to out- outdo one another in service to each other. It’s rare. But isn’t that exactly what we all want to be part of?
You may not have thought about it much, but think about it now. Don’t we all want a relationship where we can give ourselves totally to another? Where we can prioritize the other person to the sky always? But at the same time have no fear that this other person will exploit us, have no fear that we will get taken advantage of, of knowing for certain no matter how much I give this person, I’m confident this person will prioritize me just as much as I am prioritizing him or her. Don’t we all want that?
Isn’t that what we kind of hope for when we fall in love? We hope for that level of intimacy and trust. I give you all of me, but I know without any amount of fear that you will give me all of you. Both of us totally vulnerable and exposed to one another, both of us defenseless against exploitation, but yet both of us totally secure, no fear. Isn’t that the relationship we want?
That’s the type of relationship available to all of us because it is the relationship Jesus invites us into with himself. He already gave up everything for us. He gave up all of his status for us in order to elevate us. He already paid our debt. In the debtor-lender relationship, you know, we owed what we couldn’t pay.
Our sin before God was so great, we’d never be able to work it off. So he paid our debt for us on the cross to set us free. And he is the ultimate royalty, yet he became the ultimate service servant for us. And now he says, since I have already given you everything of me, since I have already given myself fully to you, vulnerable, defenseless, now you give me everything of In our human relationships, we hesitate, of course, to give ourselves fully to another, to prioritize someone over ourselves, above ourselves. We hesitate because we don’t want to get burned, right?
It is a huge risk. We can’t be certain what the other person will do. We might get taken advantage of, so we always hold a little, little bit of ourselves back. But in the case of Christ, there is no risk. There is no reason to hold yourself back.
We know he will always prioritize us because it already happened. He already gave himself fully to us, which means you can give yourself fully to him. You can prioritize him in every moment. You can defer to him at every moment. You can think about how best to serve him at every moment without any risk.
With total security because you know that’s what he’s always doing for you. You can be in a relationship of complete trust, complete surrender, complete prioritizing of another without one drop of fear that he will ever exploit or take advantage of you. If you’ve never given yourself to him, if you’ve never pledged your life in service to him, do it today. Tell him, I’m yours, all of me I give to you because I know you have already given all of yourself to me.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for mutual submission. Thank you for showing us how incredible and life-giving relationships can be Forgive us, Lord, for where we get it wrong, because we do.
We’re afraid to give ourselves fully to another.
I pray, Lord, that You would help us grow in trust. Help us first grow in trust of You that we can give ourselves fully to You, and then when we have done that, Lord, having been totally filled by what You have done for us, let us turn in service to one another and submit to one another as to the Lord. We pray those things in His name. Amen.
