I think as Christians, we all have at least one person that we pray would come to know Jesus. A few years ago, when my dad and I were running a youth group, there was one kid that came week in and week out, but he was adamantly rebellious against anything to do with God. He only came because his parents made him and it was one of the only times he got out of the house. For years, I watched my dad and other men in the church try to reach and witness to this kid. There was a lot of prayer, energy, and attention that went into him, and one night the Holy Spirit finally intervened and he admitted to believing in God. He prayed a prayer, and that night there was a lot of rejoicing among the youth leaders. It felt like God finally gave an answer to something long prayed for.

If you haven’t noticed by now, when Jesus teaches the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, He unveils them in such a way that they build upon one another. Blessed are the poor in spirit. That applies to any believer in God, where at the point of salvation, they realize they are so spiritually bankrupt that they could never save themselves. Thus, they are in need of Jesus to save them and pay that debt. Blessed are those who mourn. In other words, blessed are those who see their sin and realize how that sin has grieved God, and grieve over it themselves. They deeply understand just how badly their sin has separated them from the presence of God and find themselves in sorrow over how they’ve wronged God, and yet they find comfort from the Lord in that those sins are forgiven. And blessed are the meek?

The Proverbs 31 woman is the church’s best example of an exemplary wife, mother, and friend. Maybe we roll our eyes sometimes at how cliche it might be, but the fact of the matter is this: there is a reason she stands out from the rest. And if she is the model for all women to strive for in their Christian walk, then logically, she must fall in line with what we’ve been talking about. That’s why I wanted to end our series about submission here: at the pinnacle, the best among us. So that, hopefully, after all this unpacking of, “Wives, submit to your husbands,” we could have something to aspire towards and remind us of the fact that when Paul tells women to honor their husbands, it isn’t to hide them away, but to help them flourish in the space God has given them to occupy as women.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing what Paul really means when he tells wives to be submissive to their husbands in Ephesians. It is my deep desire that, if you’ve been reading along, you have found peace surrounding the subject and that the Lord’s character has shone through. This week, I want to further delve into the subject by taking the key verse through which the other side of the argument stakes its claim to validity. And I’m not talking about those that just flat out renounce God and the Bible. I’m talking about Christians; those that believe that wives being submissive to husbands is an “antiquated cultural ideal” that died off with tunics and the Roman Empire. The thought process on that end of the spectrum is that there should be no submission between genders when God has declared us all as one.

Husbands and wives are addressed many times throughout the New Testament, and it seems that one doesn’t receive a command without the other. I find it interesting that when people bring up “Wives submit to your husbands,” there is not conversation in the same breath about a husband’s obligation to love his wife as if she were his own body. And that’s not some prosaic prattle from Paul to the Ephesians. He’s not giving the women a literal command to submit and then giving the men some flowery metaphor to live by. Sit and consider this with me for a moment: Paul commands husbands to love their wives as if they were a part of his own body. Not a thought, nor a suggestion. They are morally obligated to do so by scripture.

Submission. In 2021, that’s an uncomfortable word when it comes to relationships. In a “woke” culture that champions girl-bossing, equality, and feminism, submission feels like a dirty word. A social taboo that culture twists to say, “See? The Bible is an antiquated book. Why would you live by that? It devalues women as the lesser sex! Only a bigoted jerk would still follow it!” And the only reason people can get away with saying that is because the church has done a poor job at explaining the subject of, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”

How do we follow Jesus? Recently, I’ve come to learn that the answers are so simple: to follow Jesus, we must look at him and remain behind Him. These lessons are thanks to the endlessly cool Eric Gilmore, who I had the unique opportunity to spend a Saturday with at a School of His Presence conference. It seems elementary, but I’m starting to learn that we tend to try and complicate the simple truths of God’s beautiful gospel. At the end of the day, our heady qualifications and lofty, theological thoughts are not the prerequisites to living a life submitted to Christ.