The Unequal Yoke - Part B

It's all about mutual respect. First of all, be considerate. Notice the word understanding. Dwell with them, your wives, with understanding.

Simply this, men learn to be sensitive to what your wife needs. The biblical teachings on submission can be challenging for some to accept, but as Pastor Skip shares in today's message, the unequal yoke, Peter's words to husbands were radical for the time and were at their core about how men were to love wives as Christ loves us. But before we begin today, we want you to know that a brand new way to connect with Pastor Skip and his ministry is coming right to your backpack, purse, or pocket. It's text messaging. And if you've connected with us through prayer or a financial gift, you'll be the first to get a text welcoming you to the group.

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Request the Dads Make a Difference package online at connectwithskip.com or by calling 1-800-922-1888. Okay, we're in 1 Peter 3 today as we join Pastor Skip for today's message. When a man marries his wife, he never wants anything to come between the two of them. When a man's wife becomes a Christian, it's a whole different kind of threat. Suddenly she has a love relationship with someone he can't even see. He can't understand anything that she tries to tell him about this new God she has come to know.

All he knows is that she's in love with somebody else and he's jealous. Instead of remaining first priority in her life as when they first got married, he has suddenly been demoted to number two. So the equilibrium in the relationship is destabilized because one is saved, one is not.

Here's the second scenario. One falls away while one remains faithful. This is the marriage of two believers. Both loved the Lord when they got married. They both were committed believers, but after a while he just sort of loses interest and he goes, I'm not into this spiritual thing. I don't want to like carry a Bible and read it and go to church. You go, see you later.

I'm playing golf. Another note that I received from a woman in our fellowship, different one. How do I as a woman deal with a spouse who's not interested in God, Christianity or church anymore? Inferring that at one time he was interested, but he's not anymore. He's lost interest. He's fallen away. He's backslidden, but she remains faithful.

So you have an unequal yoke. Third scenario, deception. What do I mean by deception? When they got married, she thought he was a Christian because he acted it to the hilt. He spoke Christian ease fluently. Hallelujah, sister, praise God, baby. And he learned all the lingo.

Why? Because he was after the check. He wanted to marry her, so he stalked her. I mean, he went with her to church and he got a Bible and he started singing the songs and it was one colossal con job to get her to marry him. And after they get married, the mask comes off.

Here's a fourth possibility, disobedience. This is where you have a believer willfully dating and subsequently marrying an unbeliever, even though she was told, don't do it, not a good choice. And I've seen this too many times. For whatever reason, she was attracted to him, attracted to his personality, maybe attracted to his looks, attracted to his financial status. And so she decides she's going to be a missionary in the dating relationship. It's called missionary dating. I'm going to win him to Christ.

I see him as my great assignment from God. And her great assignment, eventually she marries her schoolwork and she's married to him now. And what happened is she hasn't converted him to Christ. She hasn't brought him up to that level.

What often happens is he drags her down to his level and she starts compromising like she'd never compromised before, just to keep the thing going, to keep it intact. Seeds of disobedience always yield a harvest of consequence. Last year, off the coast of Japan, there was a pretty hefty earthquake, 8.9 on the scale. And waves 60 to 80 feet tall devastated a portion of the coastline of Japan.

I was there to tell you I was there to see it in the aftermath. What's interesting is how it happened. You had two plates, the Pacific tectonic plate and the North American plate that were sitting next to each other suddenly lurched, suddenly moved and moved in different directions one under the other. Just a sudden movement in a different direction caused devastation.

So when two people fall in love, but they are moving in different directions, there's going to be some sort of tremor that occurs or earthquake or tsunami that occurs. And when the tremors start showing up in the relationship, then what is typical is blaming occurs. Maybe the believer blames herself.

I haven't been a good wife. If I was more loving, then of course by now he'd be a believer. Or she starts blaming God. God, I've been praying about this for 10 years. You don't want me to have a Christian marriage?

You don't want to answer my prayers? But none of that is helpful, because ultimately people are responsible for the own choices that they make. And your husband or wife who's an unbeliever has made the choice, I don't want to budge.

That's their responsibility. At judgment day, your unbelieving spouse won't be able to say, well, you know, I'd have been a believer if my wife would have been a perfect life. That didn't work for Adam.

It's not going to work for anybody else. No excuses, everybody. No excuses, everybody stands for their own choices before the Lord.

Also, I want to give you a word of encouragement. If you're a believer married to an unbeliever, as much as you want your spouse saved, you got to know that God wants them saved even more than you do. The principle in the Bible is that God is not willing or does not want anyone to perish, but everyone to come to eternal life. He respects their choice, but his heart is for your spouse to have their eyes open and come to Christ. For God so loved the world, and part of that world includes, of course, your unbelieving mate. But you are in a spiritually vulnerable situation, caught, as it were, between two worlds, the worldly world of your husband or wife, if she or he is not a believer, and the kingdom of God. So you're married legitimately, but you're single spiritually.

So what do you do? Now we turn to 1 Peter 3, if you will, in your Bible. We go from marrying an unequal partner to managing an unequal relationship.

And I'll say as you're turning to that, if you already have it there, just listen to this. Your marriage may not be ideal, it might not be what you wanted, but even with an unequal yoke, you can have a good marriage. You can have a solid relationship, a loving relationship. It's the case of treating the wrong person like the right person, having discovered you married the right person all along. And by the way, if you are married to an unbeliever, and you're looking at some couples who are married, both believers, and you're thinking, that's what I want more than anything else, and we understand that, it could be that you've idealized a Christian marriage. If you think, boy, if I was married to a Christian, there'd never be an argument, there'd never be a disagreement, there'd never be wet towels on the bathroom, my dog would be a Christian dog, would never bark at the neighbors, the sun would always shine at my house where there's a white picket fence.

Not a reality. Problems even in that kind of a scenario. So what do you do as a believer, married to an unbeliever?

Well, first, let's just deal with this and move on. You don't divorce them because they're an unbeliever. 1 Corinthians 7, if the unbelieving mate wants to remain, you stay in the relationship because it tells us that the unbelieving spouse and children are sanctified by the believer, simply meaning they have a better avenue, a better chance of coming into the kingdom by your presence being there.

But beyond that, we have 1 Peter 3, and look at verse 1. Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they without a word may be won by the conduct of their wives. And if you're thinking, well, this is great if you have the right kind of husband, look carefully at the text. It's written to women who have the wrong kind of husband. Their husbands don't obey the word. They don't care about the truth of the gospel. So Peter writes to women who are saved women married to unsaved husbands.

Something else I just want you to notice. He writes to them in verse 1 down to verse 6. He writes to husbands in verse 7 only.

You find that a little bit odd that he spends six times more scriptural real estate dealing with wives than with husbands. You want to know why? Because wives had it six times harder than husbands.

And you want to know why that is? Because 2,000 years ago in the Roman culture, the men held all the chips. The women had no rights. There was a law in Rome called patria potestas, which meant the father's power. He had ultimate authority over his wife, over his children, even life and death. So he was managing his daughter's well-being and had absolute ultimate control over them until they got married and then the power transferred to her husband.

So this is what it would mean. If a man 2,000 years ago in the Roman culture becomes a Christian, he simply brings his wife with him. She will submit to that and she will come to the church fellowship wherever he's at. That's just how it worked.

If a wife, however, converted while the husband clung to ancestral worship of his gods, he could kill her according to law or certainly cause a lot of ruckus and a lot of problems. So he spends more time, Peter does, dealing with women who are in that delicate situation and one verse toward the husbands who might be married to an unequal spouse. So how do you manage an unequal partnership? Four principles. First of all, with wise submission. I didn't say with blank submission, but with wise submission. Because just like when we discussed submission a few weeks ago, several weeks ago, we mentioned that being submitted to your husband does not mean being submitted to the sinful desires of your husband. You don't submit to sin.

So if he says, let's cheat, let's go get drunk because he's worldly, you don't submit to that. That's where you pull an Acts chapter five, where Peter said, we must obey God rather than men. But there must be wise submission. Verse one, likewise, wives, be submissive to your own husbands.

It sounds a little counterintuitive, does it not? You're telling a wife who is supposed to be submitted to Christ to submit to her husband who is not under the authority of Christ? That's where you need wise submission. That's where you learn to differentiate is he crossing the line between what the Lord tells me to do and his own wishes. Wise submission doesn't mean you're a doormat.

Honey, just a minute, let me lie down so you can walk all over me. It's not wise submission. You still maintain your beliefs, you still maintain your values, but you show that submissiveness to your husband at the same time. The word submit means that you relinquish your rights in order to meet somebody else's needs.

It's a voluntary selflessness, not because you feel like it necessarily, but you want to honor and please Christ. I read about a woman who was married to a husband. She couldn't stand him. He was a tyrant.

I mean, he was like the macho tyrant of all tyrants. He bossed her around and he demanded that she wait on him hand and foot. She was miserable. Eventually he died and she remarried a man that she truly loved. And one day she's cleaning out her desk. She came across a written list that her former husband had given her of the things he demanded she fulfill. And she started reading through the list.

She realized that she was fulfilling most of those for her new husband already. The difference was it was not out of fear any longer, nor out of duty any longer, but out of pure love. It's wise submission.

Lord, this pleases you and I want to win this person. So a wise submissive heart. Secondly, you manage the unequal partnership with silent preaching.

Let me explain. Verse one says that even if some do not obey the word, they the unbelieving husband without a word may be won by the conduct of their wives when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear. Now don't misunderstand what the verse is saying when it says that they without a word. It doesn't mean that you never share a word about the gospel. You never say anything about the truth of how a person gets saved, because that is fundamental.

That is essential. People have to hear the truth before anybody can get saved. Peter even says that back in chapter one here, verse 23, having been born again, not of corruptible seed, but incorruptible seed, but incorruptible through the word of God, which lives and abides forever.

So when Peter says that they without a word, maybe one infers, they've already heard it. Now live it. Don't continually nag them into the kingdom. Nobody can be nagged into the kingdom. Don't badger them. Don't argue with them.

You shared the word. Now the silent preaching of a lovely life, as William Barkley calls it, will win them. So gals, don't set your husband's alarm clock to Christian radio to that loud preacher at six in the morning, if he's on, at volume setting number 10, thinking that'll get him.

No, it won't. He'll just throw the radio across the room. You don't need to pin notes on his fellow repent center.

Love Natalie. Or stuff tracks in his sandwich right between the tuna fish and the cheese. There's a little gospel track. The silent preaching of a lovely life. And notice verse two, when they observe, when they watch, when they carefully check out your chaste conduct, that means your faithfulness to God, your faithfulness to your husband.

That's the best evangelistic tool, accompanied by fear. So why submission, silent preaching. The third way you manage an unequal relationship is by balanced beauty. Verse three, Peter says to wives, don't let your adornment be merely outward, arranging the hair, wearing gold, putting on fine clothes or apparel. Rather, let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God. For in this manner, in former times, the holy women who trusted in God also adorn themselves being submissive to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord, whose daughters you are, you do good and are not afraid with any terror. Everybody appreciates beauty.

It's a $17 billion a year industry in this country. So we all buy into it at some level. We all appreciate it. Preachers have gone crazy on this verse. Some preachers denouncing wearing jewelry, doing your hair up, wearing makeup.

It's crazy. And I'll admit it, you know, some people paste on makeup like it's peanut butter on toast. But as they say, any any house looks better painted. So paint the house.

See, that's the disadvantage men have. The outside of the house looks pretty gnarly all the time. But don't stop with just painting the house.

Decorate the inside of the house. Make sure that you have a stunningly beautiful personality to go along with the outward beauty and here's the reason why. What's outward is only temporary. Proverbs chapter 31. Beauty is deceitful. Charm is, charm is deceitful. Beauty is vain. But a woman that fears the Lord, she shall be praised.

So make sure that you work on the inward, the ageless beauty of an inward heart. The fourth and final way to manage an unequal partnership is in verse seven. He's now addressing husbands. Both apply to husbands and wives. Verse seven. Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife as to the weaker vessel and being heirs together of the grace of life that your prayers may not be hindered. Peter is probably addressing the husband who's saved while the wife is not saved.

It would not be the typical situation 2,000 years ago, but it could have happened and so he addresses them. What does he tell them to do? It's all about mutual respect. First of all, be considerate.

Notice the word understanding. Dwell with them, your wives, with understanding. Simply this, men learn to be sensitive to what your wife needs. Her physical needs, her emotional needs, and her spiritual needs, because you want to win her to the Lord.

Second, be caring. Notice in verse seven, giving honor to the wife. She's to be the special object of a husband's care.

When she feels like she's considered and doted over and she's the special one in his life, there's a security that develops as she realizes that my husband loves me. Above all else. The third thing in verse seven is be chivalrous.

Now, I'm going to be careful with this one. It says giving honor to the wife is to the weaker vessel. Before you get all up in arms about that, what do you mean weaker vessel? It doesn't mean weaker intellectually.

I know this. I'm married to a woman who's much smarter than I am. It doesn't mean weaker spiritually. My wife, I think, has a deeper spirituality than I have.

I can get weird at times. But as speaking of the physical constitution, generally that is the case. Of the man and the woman, physically, the man is stronger.

The woman would be the weaker vessel. So there are things the man needs to do in considering the needs of his wife. Be chivalrous. So the whole idea is a mutual respect, a mutual honor. Respect and honor your wives.

In that culture, unheard of, a man didn't have to honor his wife. Paul says, honor your wife. Think about her needs. Be considerate. Be caring. Be chivalrous. A 10-year-old class of boys was asked, how would you make a marriage work? You expect interesting answers from 10-year-olds. 10-year-old Ricky said, tell your wife she looks pretty, even if she looks like a truck.

I don't know what's going on in his house, but I don't know what's going on in his house, but not bad advice. Women always love to hear, you look beautiful. I love that outfit. Love your hair.

Love the lipstick. You go, I don't notice those things. Notice them. And I want to draw your attention as we close to the closing comment in verse seven. Just in case you think Peter is giving some casual advice, like he's sitting back with his pen at Starbucks going, huh, what good advice could I give to women who are married to unbelieving men or men to unbelieving women? Notice it says that your prayers may not be hindered. The way you treat your husband and your wife seems to have a bearing on how God answers or doesn't answer your prayers.

That's interesting, isn't it? That your prayers may not be hindered. And since those prayers would naturally include your spouse's prayers, your husband's prayers, your wife's prayers, your spouse's conversion, petitions for salvation, make sure that you respect your wife and that you respect your husband or they will turn around and resent your Christianity and not be attracted to it.

So it goes back to what we began with. If you treat the wrong person like the right person, you could well end up having the right person after all. Treat them like a gem.

Win them to the Lord. That's Skip Heitzig with a message from the series Keep Calm and Marry On. Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskip.com. Now, here's Skip to share how you can keep these messages coming your way.

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