God's Beautiful Design for Women: Living Out Titus 2:1-5 - part 2Love, Cherish, and Obey?

Leslie Basham: What comes to mind when you hear the word submission? Nancy Leigh DeMoss approaches it this way.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I think we have to have this starting place that submission is a good thing. It’s a beautiful thing.

It may not be easy to understand. It may not be easy to live out or to embrace because we are fallen and we don’t naturally want to submit to anything or anyone except ourselves. So as fallen sinners, it’s hard.

But if we could just step back and get the perspective that it’s beautiful; it’s good; it’s for our blessing; it’s for our benefit; it’s for our protection. Even more importantly, it’s for God’s glory.

Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. It’s Thursday, November 20.

We’ve been in a rich series called God’s Beautiful Design for Women: Living out Titus 2:1-5. It’s been spiritually deep and very practical, covering a variety of topics that affect women today.

As we near the end of the series, we get to one of the most interesting topics yet. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy: I recently came across a website that is a wedding planner helping brides, young brides-to-be, plan their weddings. Here’s a paragraph on that website. It says,

The traditional wedding vows include asking the groom if he will love and cherish. But the bride is asked in the traditional vows if she will love, cherish, and obey her husband. The word obey [so says this website] seems to be problematic for most brides. Today, couples see themselves as equal partners when married, so the word obey is eliminated from the vows.

So whatever was traditional does not apply today, so says this wedding planner.

I came across a Christian website where there was a discussion going on on one of their blogs about whether to include “obey” in the wedding vows. A woman who identified herself as “Anne” had this to say:

I’ve never been married, hope to someday, though. But I do not want "obey" in my vows. Love, honor, and respect? Yes, absolutely. But I’m not about to say "obey" to any man. I obey God and Him alone will I serve. "Obey" to me signifies subjugation, servitude, loss of rights, lack of ability to make decisions. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but now, uh-uh.

I think that Anne represents where many, many, perhaps most women are today in their understanding and their perspective on obeying, that word obey or the “s” word, submit. We’re going to run head on into that today and try to get some biblical light on what submission looks like, what it means, why it matters.

I’ll tell you from the outset, I want you to believe by the time we’re done with this little mini-series within the Titus 2 series, I want you to really believe that submission is a blessing and a gift from the Lord and something to be embraced. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We’re in Titus chapter 2, and we’re learning the things that older women are to teach younger women. Older women are to teach what is good and so train the young women to love their husbands and children. Notice where this whole curriculum starts. With love. Love.

If you have love in your heart, then everything else on this list will be a lot easier to fulfill. "To love their husbands, love their children, to be self-controlled, have sound thinking, to be pure, to be working at home, to be kind, and to be submissive to their own husbands, that the Word of God may not be reviled" (Titus 2:4-5).

Now I know a lot of women who think, “If God could just have left that last characteristic off this list, it would be a lot easier list to swallow.” Am I right? Submissive to their own husbands.

What does that word mean? Why is it in the Scripture?

The word—and many of you have heard this before—in the original language is the word hupotaso. It’s a compound of two Greek words, the word hupo that means “under” and taso that means “order.”

Anybody in the day in which this was written would have known that this is a common military term in the Greek language, hupotaso. It meant to arrange the troops in a military fashion under the command of a leader. So you have a commanding officer and you would have troops and they would be arranged in order and in orderly fashion under the command of this leader.

So it is now not just a military term. It’s come to mean “to place in an orderly fashion under something; to subject oneself; to place oneself in submission.”

I want to point out that this submission in the way that the word is used in the New Testament is a voluntary act. It’s to submit yourself. Nobody can make you submit to anybody or anything. If you have teenagers, you know that’s true.

Submission is the acceptance of God’s order for our lives. And so as it relates to marriage, which is what we’re talking about here—wives to be submissive to their own husbands—submission, for a woman, means to accept God’s order for her life as a wife.

By the way, submission, for her husband, means to accept God’s order for his life, and we’ll talk about that in just a moment. The way that the word is, the form of the word in the original language, says that women are to be continually submitting themselves to their own husbands.

This is an ongoing way of life, not just a one-time choice. It’s not just every once in a while when there’s a decision your husband makes that you don’t agree with. That may be a challenge to submission. But submission is to be a way of life, continually submitting ourselves to what God-ordained authority.

If you have the book of Titus open, I want to show you that this concept of submission is a theme that runs all the way through the book of Titus, starting with the concept of disobedience or insubordination, the opposite of submission. We see in chapter one that disobedience or insubordination is characteristic of those who don’t know Christ. It’s a quality that is descriptive of unbelievers.

Look at chapter 1, verse 6. It’s talking here about qualifications for spiritual leaders in the church. “If anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.” Having a child that is insubordinate disqualifies a man from being a spiritual leader in the church.

That word insubordination in the original language is essentially not hupotaso. It’s the opposite. It’s the negative. It’s a child who is not under authority.

Then look at chapter 1, verse 10. “For there are many who are insubordinate.” A description again of unbelievers. Then chapter 1, verse 16 again describing the unbelievers—“They are detestable, disobedient.” That word there is a different word than insubordinate. It has to do with not letting oneself be persuaded, not willing to listen, hard, hard-headed, stubborn.

In chapter 3, verse 3, the apostle Paul says, “For we ourselves were once foolish”—and what?—“disobedient.” We were that way.

We didn’t all live it out. I got saved at the age of four, so I didn’t have a whole lot of years to show a whole lot of wild disobedience in terms of acting out. But my heart was not under authority.

By contrast, as Paul talks to believers he emphasizes that submission is a characteristic of those who have truly been born again. He talks about submission in the context of a variety of relationships. We’ve just looked at chapter 2, verse 5 where young women are to be submissive, hupotaso, ordered, under their own husbands.

But it’s not just wives. Look at verse 9 of chapter 2. “Slaves are to be submissive,” hupotasto, “to their own masters in everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative.”

So again there’s this authority structure; there’s this arrangement. You could liken this to the whole employment world. There are bosses and there are subordinates. Those who are under bosses are to be under bosses, hupotaso, submissive, to be well-pleasing, not argumentative.

They’re not to be talking back. They’re not to be disputing or saying, “I’ll do it my way.” They’re to come under in an orderly arrangement under their boss. Look at chapter 3, verse 1, and again you see this recurring theme in Titus.

Now he’s speaking about everyone in the Body of Christ. He says, “Remind them to be submissive,” hupotaso. “Submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient.”

God has configured the entire universe with relationships of authority and submission. There’s an order to this universe. And God is the designer of the universe. He is the one who best knows how it should function because He made it. The call for believers is to come under God-ordained authority, to arrange ourselves, hupotaso, to come under God-ordained authority.

Now as it relates to submission in marriage, that’s a hot button. That’s a hot potato subject and you have to have pretty thick skin to talk about that in public today, especially if you’re a man, a pastor. We need pastors who will preach the Word of God on this.

But I think one of the reasons it’s hard to talk about today is that there are a lot of misconceptions about submission. There’s a lot of confusion. The whole concept is inconceivable to many people today, including, sad to say, many believers.

There are many people who consider this concept culturally irrelevant, and just totally dismiss the whole idea. The southern Baptist denomination in the year 2000 amended their core theological document called “The Baptist Faith and Message.” Among other changes they added a declaration on family life. I want to read to you how that paragraph read.

The husband and wife are of equal worth before God since both are created in God’s image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, protect, and to lead his family.

A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband, even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.

Now that paragraph sounds to me a lot like a lot of things I’ve heard and read in Scripture, things we’ve been talking about in this series. But when that amendment was passed in the Southern Baptist Convention, a firestorm erupted. It was huge in the secular world and sadly in the Christian world as well.

Of course the sentence that raised all the ire was this sentence: “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” People were infuriated with this—Christians, non-Christians, Baptists, non-Baptists.

A former president of the United States—I won’t say who—moved his lifelong membership from the Southern Baptist denomination, calling them “rigid” and saying, “This statement was a distortion of the meaning of Scripture.”

It’s a controversial issue. It’s an explosive issue. But we have to start by saying that this issue of wives being submissive to their husbands is clearly, unmistakably stated in Scripture multiple times, not just once, but multiple times.

Theologians today, many of whom call themselves evangelical Christians, are doing all kinds of gymnastics to explain these texts away, to make them say something other than their plain meaning. They’ll say, “Oh, that was just for that culture. That was just for that context, but it doesn’t apply to our culture.”

As you study the Scripture, you see that this concept is consistent with the whole of Scripture and that it is trans-cultural. It transcends cultures and eras. I’m not going to go into all the technical or theological debate about all of this. There are some good books you can read on this subject, and at our website (www.ReviveOurHearts.com) we’ll have some resources that we can point you to if you want to study more on that.

But I’d like to say as a starting place for this whole concept of submission in general and submission within marriage in particular, that this is God’s idea. This is not something Paul made up. This is not something your husband thought up. This is not something that men got together and said, “How can we make women’s lives miserable? Oh, I know what we’ll do. We’ll make them submit.”

This was not a men’s club that came up with this idea. This is the sovereign, Creator God and Lord of the universe who not only is sovereign, but is wise and is good and is loving and made us and cherishes us as His children and wants what is best for us. He’s the designer. He knows what is best for us.

He has established relationships of authority and submission in all of the universe. I think we have to have this starting place that submission is a good thing. It’s a beautiful thing.

It may not be easy to understand. It may not be easy to live out or to embrace because we are fallen and we don’t naturally want to submit to anything or anyone except ourselves. So as fallen sinners, it’s hard.

But if we could just step back and get the perspective that it’s beautiful; it’s good; it’s for our blessing; it’s for our benefit; it’s for our protection. Even more importantly, it’s for God’s glory.

That’s the perspective I want us to start with. If God commands it, then it’s good, it’s precious. For us to abandon it or reject it or fail to embrace it is to do ourselves and the gospel harm.

As I was preparing for this series I was struggling a little bit because I was under the assumption that all Christian women already understand this concept of submission. Whether they like it or not, they get it. And I’m thinking, “What could I possibly say that would be fresh or insightful that they haven’t heard before?” I was struggling a little with that.

Then I had dinner a week or so ago with some of my women friends. We were talking and I asked these women, “When you got married and when you were a young wife, what was your concept of submission? Did you get it?”

It was interesting as we went around the table, in different ways each of these women said, “Either I was clueless about submission, what it really is, or I had some real misconceptions about what it really is.”

They said things they wished they had understood better as young wives, which is why we have Titus 2 that older women are to teach the younger women these concepts. One of the women at the table said, “My idea of submission was doing what my husband wanted me to do if I agreed with it and liked it.”

I said, “Are you serious?”

She said, “Yes. That’s really what my concept of submission was. If I liked it or agreed with it, then I would do it.”

I got an email this week from another woman. I emailed several of my friends after that dinner conversation and I said, “I’d like to know what your concept of submission was when you got married, and what you brought with you into marriage, and where you’ve struggled with this issue.”

One woman said,

I not only did not know about submission, but my mother was a strong-willed German mother who often ran over my dad with her demands and sarcasm. If I would have understood biblical submission earlier in my marriage, we could have avoided many hurtful arguments.

I want to say to younger women who are listening and younger women in this room, if you can come to understand God’s concept of biblical Christ-like submission, you will avoid many hurtful issues in your marriage.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be hard issues, because submission and hard often go together. So this is not an easy thing. But if you will learn it God’s way and do it God’s way, you will find huge protection and blessing in your marriage.

Over these next couple of days, I want to lay out the “ABCs” of submission, the basics. You may have heard these things many times before, but I’ve found, even as a single woman thinking through these matters, that it was good for me to review and rehearse the basics.

I’m not going to cover every base on this subject; I’m not going to answer every question that could be raised about this issue—how do you apply it in this situation or that?—but I’m going to give a foundational understanding, what submission is, what it isn’t, and what it looks like in marriage.

Let me start by saying that submission is not based on how wise or spiritual or godly or capable your husband is. It’s also not based on whether you like his style, his manner, or his personality. It doesn’t mean that he is more spiritual than you are. It doesn’t mean that he is smarter than you are. It’s not based on any of those things.

You know what it is based on? It’s based on the position that God has given him and you coming under, arranging yourself under his position. What is that position?

First Corinthians chapter 11, verse 3, says it so clearly. “I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ.” Men have to be submissive. “The head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.”

So you see the hierarchy there? God is the head over all. He’s the head of Christ. Christ is the head of the man, and the head of a wife is her husband.

So all submission is under God. The husband is submissive to Christ. That puts an awesome responsibility on men, by the way, to be submissive to Christ. But it’s the wife looking to her husband in the position of her head that is what she is responsive to in submission.

You see that same thought in Ephesians chapter 5, verses 22 and following. “Wives, submit to your own husbands.” By the way, both Titus and Ephesians make it clear that your submission is not to everybody else’s husband, but to your own.

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 (verses 22-25).

You can see that the context for submission is a covenant relationship. It’s a faithful, exclusive, intimate, loving relationship. That’s the context. Paul sets a wife’s submission in the context of her husband’s sacrificial love and a wife’s love for her husband.

In Titus 2:4, “Love your husband and children.” In that context, it will not be so difficult to submit.

As we look at that passage in Ephesians 5, we realize that there is much more at stake here than just how you feel about this. There’s a bigger picture. It’s the redemptive plan. Christian marriage is intended to be a picture of the relationship between Christ and His church.

That is the ultimate reason to submit to your husband—what you cause the world to think about the relationship between Christ and His church. Marriage is a picture of the gospel. When husbands and wives fail to fulfill their God-given role in the marriage, they tarnish the picture. They bring reproach on the Word of God.

So let me ask you, what does your marriage say about the relationship between Christ and His bride? God doesn’t hold you responsible for how well your husband fulfills his part of the picture, and there are women in this room who have husbands who are not believers or are not acting like believers. You are not responsible for that.

God will hold him responsible for how well he fulfilled that object lesson of loving his wife the way Christ loves His church. But what you will be held responsible for—and I know some of you are younger women not married yet. You need to understand this before you get married, that your calling will be to picture the way that the church is to respond to Christ her bridegroom.

We don’t want to mar that picture. So it’s not just about the dynamic and the chemistry and the dance and your own marriage. Keep in mind as you live out this matter of love and reverence and submission in your marriage, that you are part of a grander, bigger, greater picture and plan.

Your marriage impacts the whole picture. So if not for your husband’s sake or your sake or your children’s sake, then for Christ’s sake say, “Yes, Lord, I am willing to live out my part of that picture and to hupotaso, to come under, to arrange myself under the leadership, the headship of my husband.”

We want to talk in the next session about what that headship means and what the submission means and doesn’t mean. But the starting place is saying, “Lord, yes. I want my life, I want our marriage to be a picture of Your great redemptive plan.”

Leslie: That’s Nancy Leigh DeMoss. You know submitting to your husband is just one aspect of reflecting God’s beauty as a woman of God. We’ve been studying God’s beautiful design for women for several weeks. I hope you’ll listen to the entire series. Get the background to the issue of submission and learn other marks of a godly woman as well.

We’ll send the CD series, God’s Beautiful Design for Women, when you make a donation of at least $40 to the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. You’ll hear all 47 radio broadcasts from this series with a little something extra. Many of the versions you hear on the CDs are extended so you get more material.

Again, ask for the CD series, God’s Beautiful Design for Women, when you make a donation of at least $40. Call 1-800-569-5959 or donate online at ReviveOurHeartsRadio.com and we’ll get you the CDs.

Submitting to your husband is impossible unless you first submit to God. Find out why when Nancy picks this topic up tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

All Scripture is taken from the English Standard Version.