God's Mandate For Christian Husbands and Wives, Part 3

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Do it today. Thank you in advance and God bless. Dr. Michael Youssef with biblical words about marriage. Happiness does not come when you get all your rights.

Happiness comes when you obey the word of God and when you obey the will of God in your life. And the word of God says to wives must submit to their husbands. And that means wives, that you don't try to compete with your husband, but rather that you would encourage him and that you would help him along to occupy his proper place as the head of the wife. Welcome to Leading the Way, the Bible teaching of pastor and international Bible teacher, Dr. Michael Youssef. An often debated and discussed topic today is equity. And up next, Dr. Youssef tackles equity in the areas of marriage and relationships. Now, the word submission often casts a shadow of inequity, but the opposite is true in the Bible.

Submission invites intimacy and equity into relationships. Thank you for joining Dr. Youssef for his series called God's Mandate for Christian Husbands and Wives. Make sure you listen to this entire life-changing series. And you can do that in a number of ways at ltw.org or with the Leading the Way app or when you subscribe to the podcast. We've made it easy for you to keep up.

Check those out later though. Right now, you don't want to miss a word of Dr. Youssef's teaching that begins right now. Let's listen. This sermon today must be understood in the context of the previous two. While the truth in it stands alone anytime, it must be taken in the context of this series of sermons. And that is not surprising because confusion always happens whenever you throw away the blueprint and you try to go on depending on your feelings.

Imagine a group of engineers throw away the architectural plan and all of a sudden decide to build a building according to their whims. And that is what is happening in our society today. William F. Buckley said, The most important intellectual enterprise is the distinction between right and wrong. And today we live at a time when right and wrong have been progressively blurred. We no longer want the designer's plan. We want to follow our feelings on what we think is right and wrong. But the problem is, my friends, is that feelings are notoriously unreliable, undependable.

And if we rely on our feelings, we will float like the miserable men in a space capsule without the local vertical. In the midst of this confusion and upheaval, the blueprint, the Word of God was given to us in order that we might not be left at the mercy of feelings. He has given us directions, specific directions as to the husband's role and as to the wife's role in the home. And just in case some of you think that I am relying on one passage in the scripture and building a whole doctrine out of it, I want you to listen very carefully at the list of things that the New Testament alone speak about the duties of the husband.

Here is the list. A man is the head of the woman. He represents the very person and the glory of God. The husband is the head of the wife in the same way that Christ is the head of the church and the savior of the body. The husband must give his wife the same sort of love that Christ gave to the church when he sacrificed himself for her. Men ought to give their wives the love that they naturally have for their own bodies. A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. Let every one of you who is a husband love his wife as he loves himself. You husbands should try to understand the wives you live with, loving them as the physically weaker yet equally heirs with you in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Eight references in the New Testament alone. Now I want you to compare this with the list that is given to the wives. The wife has no longer full right over her own person but shares them with her husband.

The woman reflects the person and the glory of man. You wives must be ready to adopt yourselves to your husbands as you submit yourselves to the Lord. The willing subjection of the church to Christ should be reproduced in the submission of the wives to their husbands. Let the wife reverence her own husband. The role of the wife is to be respective of her husband. Holy women of ancient times trusted in God and were submissive to their husbands and here you have it. Husbands and wives have two distinctive roles and that is the way God created everything. He separated things. He separated light from darkness and he called them day and night.

He separated permanent from waters and he certainly made men and women to be different in every way. Different in their needs, different in their position, different in their roles. Yet now it is trendy in the average university campus for women to scorn. Anyone who would call them women or ladies. I got into that trouble myself once or twice and they're quick to remind you that they are persons.

How sad. Part of the misleading is this, that when women or any group for that matter seek their rights and put their rights ahead of the will of God. Whenever we put our feelings ahead of the blueprints that were given to us by the designer of the universe, we will find that our peace is shattered as it is today. You see when Eve saw the fruit and she disobeyed God and she disobeyed what she knew was the command of God, she was claiming her rights and some of you think that women liberation movement is modern. It started back in the Garden of Eden and what Eve saw as her right had nothing to do with the will of God, had nothing to do with the command of God, had nothing to do with the word of God. And you see, let me tell you something, happiness does not come when you get all your rights.

I know people who have all the rights and the most miserable people there are. Happiness comes when you obey the word of God and when you obey the will of God in your life. And the word of God says to wives must submit to their husbands and that means, wives, that you don't try to compete with your husband but rather that you would encourage him and that you would help him along to occupy his proper place as the head of the wife. And that means that you don't try to put him down all the time but to lift him up, it means that you don't be anxious to rub his wounds but rather tend to them and help in the healing process.

It means that you don't belittle him either publicly or privately but rather lift him up and encourage him as the head of the home. Do you realize that in the New Testament, as I look at this again and again, only one time does it say for the wife to love her husband. One time.

Every time is submission, submission, submission. One time it says love your husband. It's in the book of Titus and you know why? I believe God knew that for women it's harder to submit than to love.

It's opposite for men, I'm going to tell you in a minute. God knew that love which wives naturally have for their husbands is not sufficient in the wear and tear of lively day life and therefore action is required, the action of submission. But when it comes to the men, they are left in the scripture without a doubt that their role, their number one duty is to love their wives as Christ loved the church. God knew that a man's love for his wife as himself is the hardest thing for a man. That his virile drive, that his drive for domination, that his God-given masculinity will make it difficult for him to lay down his life easily. Men by nature are self-centered and aggressive and that's why I believe the revival is going to come into our nation.

It will not come to our nation until men will humble themselves before God because God knows he made us, he knows us, he knows our self-centeredness, he knows our desire to conquer and be self-centered and the scripture imposes the heaviest burden when he commands the men to love their wives as Christ loved the church. He's asking him to give up the most precious thing that he would have. I've often said that it's a lot easier to obey without loving than to love without obeying. For submission and obedience can be carried out without love, be a chore, a duty, but you can't truly love someone and don't look out for their best interest.

You can't truly love someone without submerging, subjecting your desire to theirs. Far from being a male chauvinist, the apostle Paul has put the incredible burden on the man. Some people still think that to submit is to be a doormat. To submit is to be without any self-worth. To submit means that you be barefooted and pregnant in the kitchen all the time. Far from it, far from it.

This is an all political tactic and on the surface it seems to strengthen the case for one side against the other, but ultimately it is self-destructive. Nothing can be more liberating and more freeing and more fulfilling for a woman than to submit to her loving husband. When I gave my life to the Lord Jesus Christ, you know what my worldly friend said? My worldly friend said that Christianity will stifle me. My worldly friend said that Christianity is not fun. Following Jesus will make you miserable.

The misguided advice turned out to be far from the truth. I found my true fulfillment in the Lord Jesus Christ. I found my true liberation in the Lord Jesus Christ. I found my true joy in submitting my will to his will.

And I get into trouble when I don't. A good marriage by the way is dynamic. It gets better and better all the time because marriage can't stand still. Either gets worse or gets better.

It either grows or deteriorates. You either grow together or you grow apart. And that's why it can never be a strength pitted against weakness.

That's not what Peter is saying. It is two kinds of strength. Each meant to fortify the other.

Each meant to strengthen the other in a special way. You know it's not weakness for the boat to submit itself to the laws of sailing. The submission of the boat to the laws of sailing it's very strength. In it the rule of sailing that enables the boat to utilize her full strength to harness the wind and thus it takes on the strength of the wind. It's not a weakness for the Son of God that made him obey the will of the Father.

It was power. The power of his own will to will the will of the Father. Wives I hope you don't get misled by those who tell you that submission is weakness, strength. Don't let those who want to tear the scripture apart use those scare tactics to deprive you of the freedom and of the joy of submission. Christian marriage is not fifty-fifth.

Reject that proposition. As soon as it is thought of being fifty-fifty it becomes a power struggle. And the reason it becomes power struggle is because of our fallen nature. We cannot handle it. Somebody has to be the ultimate authority. Somebody has to be the final decision maker. And our problems begin when we start telling each other if I do this, you do this.

If you do this, I do this. That is not scriptural. I read of a marriage contract that came out of California. It was actually designed to take care of all the details in life and actually in the civil marriage that the husband and wife have to go and sign this contract.

I'll give you an example. The wife makes breakfast, sees that the children are dressed, fed and given books, lunch money, bus passes, gym clothes and so on. And she does this on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the husband does all of this on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The wife cooks dinner on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And the husband on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Weekends are worked out according to how much outside work that needs to be done. And who would have done extra during the week.

Can you imagine sitting there on a Sunday morning just keeping up the score? Call that marriage? Can you imagine such an existence be called a marriage? Yet some people call this freedom.

They call this maturity, believe it or not. And you may ask, okay, if it's not fifty-fifty then what is the percentage? Well, you see, the question is the wrong question. There is no percentage.

If you're going to inherit your great uncle's estate, then you can talk about percentages. But it is the grace of God that Peter is talking about in 1 Peter 3. Your equality is hereby delineated. You are equal sinners. You are equally responsible before God. You are equally in need of grace. You are equally recipients of grace. And thus far the 50-50 ends. A husband and wife must be willing to lay their lives for each other.

Not if. That's exactly what the Lord wants us to do. I want to tell you four things as I conclude about wives' submission. The first thing is that the bottom line is that when the husband loves his wife as himself, when he loves his wife as Christ loved the church, he sacrifices more. Secondly, submission means that wives can express themselves, can express their feelings, can express their opinions freely, openly. And wives, if you have a godly husband he will not make a decision until you both agree. Thirdly, submission should never involve sin.

Fourthly, it should never, never, never, never involve physical or psychological abuse. Dawson Trotman, founder of a great discipleship ministry, discipleship program all over the world, I never knew him but the people who knew him tell me that he is a man, was after God's own heart, who loved the Lord so dearly. He modeled his life, tried to model his life on the Lord Jesus Christ. Trotman died at Scone Lake, New York, and he died of all things in the midst of the area of which he was an expert in. He drowned. He was an excellent swimmer, so I'm told. And the very last few moments of his life he was in the water and he lifted one girl out of the water and then he went back and he brought another one and he lifted her up and brought her back ashore or on a boat and then he submerged and wasn't to be found until the dragon found him a few hours later. The following week Time magazine ran an article on Trotman's life and they put a caption under his name and the caption read, always holding someone up, always holding someone up.

And in one sentence that was Trotman's life, holding someone up. Wives, are you doing this to your husband? Are you always holding him up? For that's exactly what the scripture is saying to wives today. I feel a sense of helplessness and disqualification to speak on this subject.

I know there are many godly women who can teach me on this subject far more than I can teach you. But as I expound the word of God, as I open that word for us to feed upon it, the Holy Spirit also doing his work in the lives of wives, husbands. If I'm addressing the wives today, let me ask you, are you resentful of your husband?

Are you competing with him? You have some bitterness in your life toward him. I believe the Holy Spirit wants you to deal with that, wants you to confess that. In order that you may have peace, that you may have joy, there's something that you need to forgive.

Then do it now, do it today. Say, Lord Jesus, help me to forgive my husband, help me to love my husband, help me to submit to my husband. For only the Lord will know and only the Lord will reward you for this because that is obedience to his word. Father God, I lift up to you every person who's bowing before you at this time. I hold up to you every family represented, my own family and every other family. Father, I pray for the wives. I thank you for their faithfulness. I thank you for their dedication and I thank you for their love. Father, I pray that you will strengthen the marriage in our society. Father, I pray that you will strengthen the marriages in our homes and Father, I ask you to heal the wounds, bind the broken hearts. Father, teach us to obey your word even if we don't feel like it and bless our wives today Lord Jesus. Thank you for joining Dr. Michael Youssef for Leading the Way and his practical teaching series, God's Mandate for Christian Husbands and Wives. Listen to this and other messages of biblical truth at ltw.org. And while you're there, check out this special page, ltw.org slash digital resources. There you'll find free content from Dr. Youssef that's sure to help you grow in life and faith. Allow me to highlight just one resource.

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