Okay, I'm going to ask you a question that I'm afraid to hear the answer. Good.
I like these kinds of questions. Do you think I'm submissive? Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app.
This is Family Life Today. Do you think I'm submissive? Do you think it's easy for me to be submissive?
My pause tells you everything. Oh, no. I mean, in many ways, we have to define submissive, which we can maybe do today, but you're a strong, strong leading woman.
So you're saying no. I mean, you have obviously submitted in many ways. And I hopefully can say I've submitted, you know, to you in many ways.
But yeah, it's not your first default. The first time we went to a Weekend to Remember, and we've been to several, and now we've been speaking at the Weekend to Remember for several decades, over 30 years. And by the way, if you don't know what a Weekend to Remember is, it's a Family Life marriage weekend, which is powerful from Friday to Sunday. And you can go.
Just go to familylifetoday.com. It really has changed marriages, thousands of marriages for the better. But the first time I sat in this, the women have a breakout session. And so I looked at the notes, I thought, we're going to talk about submission. And I was a brand new Christian.
And I sat in the back and I crossed my arms thinking, oh, here we go. This is that Jesus stuff. Every wife is supposed to submit.
And I remember thinking, and I am not going to do that because my mom was a doormat and I will not be a doormat. What I didn't realize is that I had a very poor definition of submission. I had no idea what biblical submission was. And so that was the first time I had heard what biblical submission was. And I uncrossed my arms and I thought, oh, I had no idea that's what it is. And so you guys, this is a big day.
We're going to talk about what is submission in the Bible? What should it look like? How do we do it? We've got Dr. Julie Slattery with us. I'm not thinking this is your number one topic you like talking about. No, no. There's a lot of things I talk about in ministry work.
Some of them are very controversial, but none more so than this one. Really? And Julie, you're known. I remember talking to you on the Love Like You Mean It cruise and you were saying, how would you like to be me? And everywhere you go, you're known as the sex doctor. But now we're talking about submission. Please don't make me the submission lady.
No. Well, Julie has written a lot. Julie's written Rethinking Sexuality. You've got Authentic Intimacy.
You've got Java with Julie podcast. You're married with three sons. I mean, you do it all. You're sort of a Wonder Woman.
Finding the hero in your husband. You're the president and co-founder of Authentic Intimacy. But Julie, what I love about you is you're authentic. You're wise.
You're really smart. You've done a lot of research and you're theologically so sound. You love Jesus and you want women to understand what our role is and the power we have in who God has called us to be. But you do a really good job in your book, Finding the Hero in Your Husband, of addressing this, talking about what it is and what it isn't.
So maybe we should start out with, has that been easy for you? No. I think all of us come to this topic with a misunderstanding of what it means.
And baggage. Yes. And I know so many Christian speakers and writers and authors who are just ditching this whole concept now because it's so unpopular and we can point to so many ways that has been misused and abused within the larger church culture and in marriages. And so they're like, this is just not a good teaching. So let's ignore it or let's find a way to talk ourselves out of it.
Maybe that was a cultural thing. But as I studied the scriptures, I have become convinced that this is not something we should just chuck. It's something we need to grapple with because a Christian marriage is first and foremost, a form of revelation.
What's that mean? It means that God created marriage to reveal something about his nature. It reveals the nature of how God loves us, his covenant love. And the scripture really clearly says this pointing to it in the Old Testament, but then very specifically in the New Testament, Paul saying, as you're working out your marriage, the roles in marriage, intimacy in marriage, remember that this is a mystery that is pointing to Christ in the church. And so when we take that seriously, we can't just say, you know what, this is culturally not cool to talk about.
It doesn't seem to fit anymore. We have to say if God created marriage to be this form of revelation, we have to be very careful about muting that revelation in any way. And so my heart has been not to pitch it, not just to take the tradition of what people say it is, but to dig deeper into the scripture and the character of God to say, what is God really calling us to? So how is marriage a mystery that reveals?
Because I've taught this, I've heard many different perspectives on this. At the Weekend to Remember, we talk about our marriage is a mirror. Your marriage can mirror God's image. Is that what the mystery is, is somehow people can look at our marriages and get an idea of what God is like? Paul says it's a mystery, which in some sense he was saying it was a mystery in the Old Testament that's been revealed in Christ, but is continuing to unfold for us here on earth because we don't see it clearly. So there's going to be a mystical part of it that we can't quite grasp. But really what it means as we work out our marriage and if we take seriously who God calls us to be in our marriage, there's a sense to which we're ministering to one another, teaching each other about the nature of God's love, not just to us, but to a watching world. So like that word covenant, most people don't even know what that means anymore.
They hear it and it's like, what is that? Because in our modern day, we think of marriage as any other relationship, as a contract. As long as you're making me happy, I'm in.
But as soon as it gets too frustrating or disappointing, I'm out. But God's love for us is a covenant love. It's based on character. It's based on a promise.
It's based on his faithfulness. It's a journey of intimate knowing. And so God created marriage to reflect all these beautiful aspects of our relationship with him. And when we do marriage, well, we're getting an echo of that, that we enjoy ourselves. But again, it's also a testimony to the world to say, that's different. That's a different kind of love. So Julie, that's beautiful. It's a beautiful picture. And then you hear wives submit to your husbands. It's in the same passage.
It is. In Ephesians. It's in Ephesians 5, 22.
Can we just take our marker and cross that out, some people are saying? No, most men are like, that's the only Bible verse I know. That's really sad. It is sad, but there are men that know that, but they don't know what does that mean? What does it mean wives submit? But it has something to do with this mystery and this revelation. So help us out. Yeah. First of all, we have got to understand that God has given women within marriage a lot of power.
And I would say they actually have more power than men have. Ooh, what's that mean? I totally agree.
Okay. So you can be with me in explaining this, but. All the men are saying, what do you mean by more power? We see relationship much more nuanced than the average guy does. And because of that, we have this power to speak in a way that creates an atmosphere in the relationship that can be positive or negative. And every wife intuitively kind of knows when we're punishing our husbands, we're manipulating them, we're controlling them because we're not happy. We don't feel safe. We're not getting our way. And so women have much more power than men in marriage to define the emotional climate.
I'll give you an example. Each of our sons is married. They're married to amazing women. And I think it's been one of the joys of my heart to see how much they love their wives. And I'm like, oh man, these guys, they are so in love with these amazing women. And I've also watched these amazing women with a look. A look. That's all it takes.
Kill. I can just see their spirit crushed or a word, just a couple words. And I can see like, oh man, that just devastated them. And I realized like, oh, I used to hear that women have power and now I'm seeing it right in front of me. And I remember thinking I need to pray more for them because they don't understand the power they carry. They can make a hero out of him or they can make him feel like he's nothing.
There's a power there. And what we have to understand is in this form of revelation of marriage, God is asking both the husband and wife to walk into their greatest fear. So for a man, his greatest fear is failing. And so when he charges a man, hey, I want you to initiate, I want you to lead, I want you to step into doing something that doesn't feel comfortable or you might not immediately succeed at to being a father, being a husband, being a leader, he's asking the man to take a great risk. And he's asking the woman to step back a little bit and not control, not to manipulate, but to trust. And so within this form of revelation called marriage, we both are in this insecure place. And the natural tendency is either for the man to lead without sensitivity and he becomes out of control. Domineering.
Yeah. And a woman doesn't use her power at all. She just kind of buries it. And we get into abusive type situations where the man becomes passive and the woman in one way or another takes over.
And then we've kind of twisted the revelation of what it was supposed to be. What about the woman that says, but I want to be the one that's leading out there. What would you say to them? Like, I'm better at it. I'm sitting beside that woman. Yeah. So I'll ask you a question.
Did you really want to lead or did you lead because you were afraid? Look how wise she is. She knows the answer. That's a good counseling question. What would I be afraid of? Honey, I know your answer. I know.
I just want to work this out. You'd be afraid that he'll lead you wrong, that he's going to make a mistake. You see his weaknesses. And so you trust yourself more than you trust him. Yes.
And I think, you know, what's even more is not trusting the kids with him. I maybe could suffer under it. This isn't you, honey, but I'm thinking of women. Of course not.
A friend. But when you're kids, now that's when the mama bear rises up and women that think, no, I will not let that happen. I will take charge. And you know, there are times to do that, but we do that so often when it's not necessary.
So let me give an example. When our kids were little, Mike worked the nine to five job and I was working as a counselor a few nights a week. So he would come home from work, we'd high five, he'd be with the boys and I'd go work and I will have throughout the day really limited screen time for the boys. I made like a healthy dinner for them to warm up. I know where this is going. Where's it going?
What happened? He's gonna have screen time and not healthy food. Right. So he would order pizza and put the kids in their high chairs and it was watch a Disney movie.
Yes. Every wife can relate to this illustration. So I would come home at 10 o'clock at night and give him a hug and then look around and recognize that he didn't eat the food I made. And then I'd ask him, what did you guys do? And he'd tell me and I would be so angry. And instead of saying to him, man, you just worked a nine to five job.
You're exhausted. You're home with babies and toddlers. Thanks for staying home with them. Yeah. And you're the fun dad.
I get that. This is your bonding time. I was like, I am so mad at him. I work so hard to do this all day and then he just blows it.
And so those are the examples of how we as women have that mama bear rise up when it's completely unnecessary. And what I had to learn is that I had to be more invested in what we were building as a couple and as a family than in the decision about whether they ate the chicken or the pizza. That's good. And it took a long time to learn that.
Me too. And I'm still learning. Yeah. And they would watch TV and sometimes he forgot to feed them. Yep. But man, did they have fun. Yeah. I didn't forget to feed them. Oh, I'm sure you did.
For a couple of hours maybe, not for a week. But let's get into, let's talk about what submission is not. Yes. So first of all, submission is not obedience.
And I think sometimes people interchange these two words, but they're actually two different Greek words that mean two different things. So obedience is this concept of you have authority over me. I'm going to do what you say because you know better. Whereas submission is I'm yielding my power. I could take over, but I'm choosing to yield it in a way that is for a higher goal because I got a bigger vision of what we're headed towards.
The difference, I think it's an illustration. So let's say a father tells his eight year old kid, we're going to go rob a bank. Here's what I need you to do. Point the gun, demand the money.
If they go to court, the kid's going to get leniency, probably nothing because the father was abusing the authority and the kid was being obedient. Now, if a husband does that to his wife, we're going to rob a bank. Here's your gun.
You demand the money. Then the woman's completely accountable for her actions. There's no such thing as obeying your husband. It's choosing how I'm going to use my power and am I going to use it to take over or I'm going to use it to yield for a higher good, which means sometimes I'm going to put my foot down and say, no, I'm not doing that. And so that's one thing that submission is not. The second thing, we've already kind of fleshed this out a little bit, but it's not the absence of power.
It's not being a doormat. It's not being weak. When we see Jesus being submissive when he was here on earth, he was not weak at all. He actually had great self restraint and great power and great wisdom, but he could see that higher thing that meant I'm not going to do what I want in the moment.
There's a vision of something greater here. So I think those are some of the things that we need to say. This is not what we're talking about when we look at the concept of submission. And so it's not following our husbands into anything that would be not biblical or wise. It's not abuse of any kind.
No. You know, the question is, what is it? Because there's part of me that thinks, okay, if you're a woman trying to be submissive to a man who's not good, it's easy to think of a man with good will. But if your husband is not being a good man or good husband, how do you use this submission?
What's that look like? Yeah, well, first we need to understand that submission is under the authority of God. And so it's not so much that I'm submitting to my husband, but I'm submitting to the authority of God.
He's the higher authority in all of this. And so it's recognizing that if my husband is doing things or asking me to participate in things that are against the heart of God, then I'm going to obey God rather than submit to my husband. And actually it is the loving thing to do, to draw a boundary, to put your foot down, to create a crisis. Submission actually requires far more strength than taking over does.
If we look at 1 Peter chapter three, and we can unpack this a little bit, but one of the things that Peter says when he's talking about why he's being submissive and he talks about having a quiet spirit, notice he doesn't talk about having a quiet mouth, but a quiet spirit. He says, be like Sarah who submitted to her husband and did not give way to fear. Now, I mentioned earlier that marriage calls both man and a woman to step into their greatest fear. Anytime we don't submit, it's because we give way to fear. So when the weak woman doesn't submit and she just becomes a doormat, it's not submission. She's giving way to her fear of if I speak up, he'll get mad. I don't know how to speak up. I don't know where to draw the boundary. The dominant woman also gives way to fear because she's saying, I can't trust God here.
I can't trust him to work. That's super wise. You know, I've never thought of that before, how it gives into fear.
Yeah. And when we look at Sarah, even though she's an example, she was not a quiet woman. She's a very vocal woman in the Old Testament saying to Abraham, don't do this, do this.
And at one point God even says to Abraham, listen to your wife. And so when Peter is using that example, sometimes we get in our mind that the submissive woman is the one who never says anything. Submission is not about whether or not your mouth is moving.
It's about the posture of your heart. An amazing thing, you know, as you go back to 1 Peter 3 is that when a wife responds that way, I mean, one of the results is that you will win your husbands. So that you win husbands that do not believe you'll win them over without words by the behavior of their wives. That behavior is powerful in your man's life. So it's a way that submission actually is a powerful tool of the Lord to win the soul of your man, right? It is so much more powerful than taking control. And again, I'm not saying that there's not a time for a godly submissive woman to draw very clear boundaries and to say, absolutely not.
I'm not doing this. There's times when separation are necessary and calling in third parties and not participating in something that's wrong. That's all part of this. But I think we've lost that concept because it's been portrayed as the husband's the strong one, the woman's the weak one, where in essence is saying, no, the wife is the really powerful one. And if you're not careful, you'll misuse your power. And in your book, Finding the Hero in Your Husband, you give some examples of what this looks like.
Talk about those. So I use some examples of women that are genuinely saying, how does this play out in my marriage? So let's say, for example, you've got a husband who changes jobs every year, and he's never happy with his job. And he keeps wanting to move to try something new.
And the wife is like, I'm tired of this. It's not good for you. It's not good for us.
It's not good for our kids. What does she do in that situation? I think the traditional way of seeing this would be she says nothing.
She just encourages him and goes along with it. And the bossy way of doing it would be, I'm not moving again. We're done. Yeah, you can move. We're staying here. That's right. The submissive way, the strong way of handling this is really to say, God, there's something in the heart of my husband that is not satisfied.
What is it? It's not the job that's the problem. It's not our moving that's the problem. It's that something in my husband is not content. Is it a fear of failure?
Is it an inability to respect authority at work? And so the loving wife in that situation would say, we've had nine jobs in 10 years. And this will be the fifth time you've moved our family. And that's not okay. Something's wrong here. Something's deeper. Yeah. And before we take a new job that takes us out of state or causes disruption in our life, we need to go through some counseling and really figure out what's underneath all of this.
And if that's where God is going to lead us to move again, then I'll be on board with that. But not until we go deeper into what's really happening here. That doesn't sound very submissive, Julie. It absolutely is. And you're saying that is being submissive.
It is. It's being wise to you. You notice the tone of my voice. You notice the words I spoke. It wasn't out of anger.
And there's a time to deal with your anger before the Lord poured out before him. Maybe you yourself talking to a mentor, a counselor, working through things like this first so that I can go with a spirit of wisdom and strength that says, I love you too much. I care about our family too much to continue down a road that really isn't helpful for any of us. So what's that wife going to do if her husband responds with, you know what, I don't have a problem.
There's no deep rooted thing here. I've got a better job opportunity. We're moving again. Yeah, I would say, honey, I disagree. We've been through this.
And let's look at the history of where we were a year ago and before that. And I don't think this job is going to meet the needs that you think it is. And even if you're not willing to go to counseling, I need to go because I feel like I'm just long for the ride on this.
And I'm a partner in this too. Dave, how would you respond to that? Like if I came to you with that tone, with that heart?
Yeah. I mean, if you said it the way Julie said it, and you probably would, you know, because After years of being married, now I would. I mean, in a sense, I'm sitting here thinking I'm listening to two wise women who have learned probably through mistakes over decades. And so, yeah, you're saying it in a way that a younger wife should listen and go, oh, that's how I say it. Because you really are training wives to do it. As a husband, I would be like, hmm. I mean, there's part of me that wants to say, I'm good.
I don't even want to sit down with a counselor or, you know, get a third party help. But if I heard it that way, and it's so interesting, it doesn't sound submissive. It sounds powerful, but it's submission. It's beautiful how you phrase that. I would be like, that's a wise thing.
You know, before I make a decision, let's do that. That would be a great way to move that marriage. And one of the words you used, Julie, that a man loves is I'm your partner. We're partners in this. That's equality.
And yet partners have submission. There has to be in a team, in a company, in a church, in a marriage. And so it's a beautiful way to do it. I would say to a wife, you are just given wisdom that applies to not just a job change, but anything that you're feeling in your marriage. Julie just led you to do it. I'd say, wouldn't it be interesting if there were some conversations tonight in bedrooms or in kitchens that were phrased a little bit like that. That could change a marriage. The Bible is so clear that men and women share equal value and worth and dignity and nothing about the biblical call to submission should negate that sense of value and worth and dignity. Women are daughters of the King and husbands would be wise to remember that as we interact with our wives. But as we've heard from Julie Slattery today, there are wise ways for a wife to submit.
And then there are unhelpful ways for a wife to be submissive to her husband. Julie's written a book called Finding the Hero in Your Husband, Embracing Your Power in Marriage. It's a great book for wives to help you understand the significant role you play in helping your husband be the man God's calling him to be. It's a book we've got in our Family Life Today Resource Center. I would encourage you as a wife, read this book, maybe read it with other wives, go through it together in a group study. I think you'll find it very helpful and I think it can have a significant impact in your marriage.
Again, the book is called Finding the Hero in Your Husband. You can request your copy from us online at familylifetoday.com or order by calling 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the website here is familylifetoday.com. The number to call 1-800-358-6329.
That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. By the way, Julie Slattery recently sat down with Ron Deal who leads Family Life Blended and the two of them have put together a five part video series that's all about marital oneness, about intimacy in marriage. It's called The Nearly Complete Guide to Better Married Sex. Again, this is an online course.
There are five sessions. There are instructional videos, audio components, articles, projects for you to do together. The goal is to help you as husband and wife experience all God has for you in this area of marital oneness and intimacy. You can find out more about The Nearly Complete Guide to Better Married Sex when you go to our website familylifetoday.com. There's a link there.
All the information you need is available. I'd encourage you to check this out. Keep in mind Valentine's Day is coming up. Maybe this is something you guys can do together to help prepare for Valentine's Day. And we hope you have a great weekend. Hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church this weekend. And I hope you can join us on Monday when we're going to hear about God's design for moms to experience joy and fulfillment and life in being a mom.
But first you got to learn what rules to get rid of. Maggie Combs will be here to help with that. Hope you can be here as well. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back Monday for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
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