Again, Not Very PC



Ephesians 5:21-32
21Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
23For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.
24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
25Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,
26that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word,
27so 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.
28In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
29For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church,
30because we are members of his body.
31“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
32This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
33However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

We are all, to some extent, a product of the cultural morays in place during our “growing up” years. I am a product of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. That means I grew up during at the height of the feminist movement. As a result, for years this particular passage kind of made me itch. After years of wrestling with God over this passage (and you can ask Jacob what happens when you choose to wrestle with God – he walked away with a blessing AND A LIMP!) I have finally come to peace about it all. This passage isn’t nearly as much about marriage as it is about sin and obedience.

Let’s face it – we’re messed up. Sin has ravaged our lives, our sense of self, and our relationship with God. In the perfection of His plan, God created men and women to be together in harmony and peace, with each receiving what they needed emotionally, physically, and even in spiritually. Then sin entered the world and we have been fighting each other and even ourselves ever since. The feminist movement grew largely out of the fact that both men and women lost sight of how God created them. Men seek to abdicate their God given responsibility (notice that it is responsibility not power) for the women in their lives and women seek to take from men that which was never theirs to have – the man’s place in the family as leader. Emerson Eggerichs lends amazing insight and even research to this whole concept in his book Love and Respect. He nails the truth that God created women with an instinctive capacity to love and men with that same capacity for respect. When women are loved, they share deep respect with their husbands and when husbands are respected, they care deep love with their wives. But, as we mentioned earlier, sin has destroyed that desire within us to give others what they need.

The feminist movement responded to the fact that we messed up the system with worldly solution and those solutions are deeply dissatisfying. But Jesus Christ forgives all of those failings and enables new thinking within us. Women, because we are naturally wired to love, we have to work as expressing that respect to our men. Men, because you are naturally wired for respect, you have to work as expressing love to your women. The Holy Spirit enables both to happen and we can then fall naturally into the roles that God has created us to fulfill; roles that bring satisfaction and joy.

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