in turn plays in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 5. This is a passage we have gone through several Lord's Days in a row. We are focusing upon the distinctive roles that God has given to wives and husbands. We are focusing upon what a Christian marriage looks like and this is certainly the key passage. The passage probably you hear priests that Weddings, more than any other passage, is the one found here in Ephesians chapter 5. I do believe that 1 Peter 3 is also very crucial in terms of giving us a very definitive understanding of what a relationship, a true marriage, should look like, and we'll make reference to that later on in the sermon. But let's pick up chapter 5 here at verse 22. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Well, let's again look to the Lord. Just a note, some of you might be wondering, Brother Al Boyce had surgery this past week on Tuesday, and I spoke to Kitty on the phone and she said it was very successful, he'd already been relieved of the pain that he'd been suffering from, so we should also give thanks to the Lord for that answer to prayer. But let's go to the Lord. Father, again we are here this morning to worship you. We don't want to focus on ourselves and that's such a tendency of the human heart We want you to be glorified, we want you to be honored, we want you to be magnified. So help us, Lord, to use the eyes of faith, and even to focus not upon ourselves, but upon you. And even as we consider marriage, we want to have Christ-centered marriages, not me-centered marriages. And so again, we pray that you would help all of us to Embrace Your Word. We need the washing of Your Word to wash away the clutter and the debris that we often have in our own hearts. Help us, Lord, to see things more clearly. We all suffer from blind spots, and so we need the help of Your Spirit to open our eyes to see the wondrous things contained in Your Law. Make this our plea, believing, Lord, that you are the God who loves, who loves to bless his children. You love to give good gifts to every one of us. You've given us so much, and so we know if you've given us Christ, you will surely give us all things. Give us the Spirit, more of the Spirit, even today, to rightly understand and have your word applied to our lives, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. If you've gone to a football stadium, a very large football stadium with maybe 60,000 plus people and maybe you're at the back end of the football game, your home team is winning three points or maybe they're behind three points, but you can imagine the electricity, there's a frenzy of emotion and a cacophony of noise. Things can be so loud you can't even Talk to the person next to you. And you really can understand what people are saying. You hear the screaming voices. Maybe you can pick up a few words here and there. Go blue, go blue, or go wings. Or maybe you can hear one of the names of the players, the football players, or the hockey players. That's what it sounds like at least there in a football stadium or a hockey arena. But you could multiply that a million times over, couldn't you? and really begin to understand what this world is like. There's a cacophony of noise every day. A high level of emotion. Everybody is shouting and yelling their own opinions, perspectives on what this should be or that should be. It doesn't take place in a football stadium. It takes place in universities, on campuses and colleges. It takes place in Washington. It even takes place in churches. During the Judge Kavanaugh hearings, the judge gave an interesting phrase, snatching ambiguity from clarity. He was referencing those who find every reason why what the law actually says is not what it actually means. In other words, they play upon doubt and uncertainty. And then we shouldn't forget that the devil's first words into the ears of our first parents, Adam and Eve, were these, has God said? The devil is the biggest doubter in the world and he wants you and I to be doubters of God's word. Has God said? He loves to create confusion. He loves to create doubts about everything having to do with God and how we can glorify God in our lives. And it's clear, it's clear, so clear to all of us who are Christians that people today are more confused than they have ever been, at least in this country, when it comes to issues that were so clear 20 or 30 years ago. Confusion about gender. Confusions about marriage. What is a marriage? How is a marriage defined? Confusion as to what a husband should be or how a wife should live in her role in that marriage. Yeah, the devil is working overtime. And he's created a fog of confusion. And sinful man has only been too willing to oblige him. But the good news is God speaks clearly. God speaks definitively. God's the perfect communicator. If you can't understand God, you've got the problem, not God. God clearly defines what a man is. God clearly defines what a woman is. God clearly defines what marriage is. God clearly defines distinctive roles for husbands and wives. And there are four clear passages in the Bible where God tells husbands what they should do and what he tells wives that they should do in terms of their relationship to each other. Ephesians 5 is one of them. 1 Peter 3 is another. Colossians 3 and Titus 2. But you could say, who believes this anymore? It appears that the author of confusion, God's not the author of confusion, but the devil is. He's confused almost everybody. And when it comes to the matter of submission, the noise and the cacophony never gets louder. Submission is viewed as a bad thing. It's been used or viewed as a sledgehammer to beat up women, to squash them, to suppress them. This might surprise you, but everything God says about submission is positive. Not one bad word in your Bible is about submission. It's all positive. That's what God says. The last time we were together, we gave four positives about submission. We're dealing with the wives' role, because that's where Paul starts. I'm not trying to pick on wives, but that's where he starts. We'll get to men next time, I think, not next Lord's Day. Pastor Gary Hendricks will be with us, but the week after we'll begin to address I might have another sermon on submission, maybe not. Here are four positives about submission. This is what we said. Submission highlights God's glory. Submission is Spirit-empowered. Submission is a matter of beauty. And submission carries with it dignity. Again, everything God says about submission, so far, what we've said is positive, not negative. It's a good thing, not a bad thing. It's a beautiful thing. If we understand our Bibles, we should regard submission as a gift, not as a curse, a privilege and a blessing. This morning I come back to submission and I'm going to again give four positives about submission. Here's what they are. Submission is about witnessing. It gives a gospel picture. Submission is about witnessing. It gives a gospel picture. submission is about obeying, you obey a loving Savior. Thirdly, submission is about protecting. It serves as a protective shield. And then fourth, submission is about building. It builds a strong faith. So let's look at submission from these Four perspectives, hopefully you'll see them in your Bible. Number one, submission is about witnessing. It gives a gospel picture. One of the reasons why, when you come here on a Lord's Day, you can always expect us to open up our Bibles and preach from our Bibles is because we are convinced that the Bible is like no other book in the world. It is the only book in the world that you could say is defined by these three words. They all begin with the letter I. And they're big words, but they're very important. They're not Bible words, but they're words that have been used by theologians to help us understand what we have when we open up our Bibles, what the Bible is. It's an infallible, it's an inerrant, and it's an inspired revelation. Those are three important I-words that help you understand the Bible, why it's so unique from every other book in the world. And Jesus himself made it his ultimate authority when dealing with his enemies, the Pharisees, the Sadducees. He often used these words, it is written. It is written. What God says is true. And God defines life for us here upon planet Earth. And that applies to marriage as well. And when Jesus taught about marriage, when Paul the Apostle taught about marriage, it's very clear they understood that marriage is a God construct and not a human construct. That it came off a divine assembly line, not a human assembly line. It was instituted by God. Remember, Jesus. You might even turn there and see for yourself. In Matthew chapter 19, he's dealing here with the religious leaders of his day, the Pharisees who had cheapened marriage, and they had been shaped by the easy divorce of that day. And Jesus answers them in Matthew 19, verse 4. He answered, Have you not read? that He created them from the beginning, made them male and female, and said, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they're no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let man not separate. He takes them back to that foundational chapter of Genesis 2 and 1 and says, here God designed marriage. If you're going to understand marriage, begin here in Genesis chapter 2. And notice Paul in Ephesians 5, talking here about marriage, look at verse 31. He takes them back to the story of creation, again, when God instituted marriage for that first man and woman. But Paul, in seeking to help us understand what a marriage should be, a biblical marriage doesn't begin and stop with creation. There's something of progressive revelation when it comes to even the doctrine of marriage. It gets more glorious when you turn to your New Testament Bibles. And the Apostle Paul doesn't stop with creation in the beginning. He also understands that the gospel of Jesus Christ radically impacts our marriages. And so when he talks about marriage, He talks about Jesus. He talks about the cross. And he talks about the church. Marriage is beautifully nuanced by the gospel. You can't say that about any authority-submission relationship. Only marriage is beautifully nuanced by the gospel. at least to this degree. When he wants to teach marriage, he also tells us about the church. He is not a church building, he's talking about the church as defined by the Bible. The church is the people of God, the very people that Jesus loved and gave himself for. So it's crucial, if you're going to have a biblical marriage, to understand the church. Notice how many times he talks about the church. Here in Ephesians 5, he talks more about the church than he talks about husband and wife. Verse 23, he mentions the church. Verse 24, he mentions the church. Verse 25, verse 27. Verse 29, verse 32. Six times he mentions the church. To have a biblical marriage, a Christ-centered marriage, a gospel-shaped marriage, you need to understand the cross. But you need to understand the church. I think that's one of the reasons why Christian marriages don't look all that different from the world's marriages. We haven't understood the big doctrines of our Bibles and applied them to our marriages. The doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church. We are to have marriages that are light and salt so wonderfully different from the marriages out there in the world, and that's because of the gospel. So instead of having a me-centered marriage, the Apostle Paul says, I want you to have a Christ-centered marriage, a gospel-shaped marriage. And every Christian husband and Christian wife, when they fulfill their God-given responsibilities, listen, they are saying something extraordinarily about Christ. and about the church. They're saying something wonderful about who Jesus is and what the church is. And the Apostle Paul knows that a wife's submission is to be patterned after the church. Look what he says, verse 24. Now, as the Church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husband. The Church's submissive attitude and behavior to Christ is to be the pattern, the paradigm for the Christian wife. Just like when you pray, I'm sure you use the Lord's Prayer, don't you? I often do, to shape my prayer. You shape your prayer by the Lord's Prayer. Right? That's how you pray. You shape your submission. As a wife, you shape your submission by the Church's submission to Christ. So what does that look like? Well, I think you could say this much, the Church submits to Christ Wisely, intelligently, voluntarily, obediently, the Church submits to Christ willingly, the Church submits to Christ confidently, the Church submits to Christ completely, the Church submits to Christ joyfully. That's the pattern. That's the pattern. And if we believe that, That means in terms of everyday married life, everyday married life, nothing becomes trivial. You want significance? You want significance as a woman? You want meaning and significance? Here it is. Everyday married life, nothing is trivial, nothing is little in terms of consequence. Remember Jesus said, if you bring a cold glass of water in my name, you have a reward in heaven. So that, I think I could draw this, could you not, that every time you submit to your husband out of due reference to Christ himself, you have a reward in heaven. That sounds pretty big stuff. That sounds like it has consequence. Every day you can be piling rewards up by your attitude toward your husband and how you respond to his leadership. And every husband captures something of Christ, he should, his love, that applies to him as well. But every Christian marriage is to capture something of the ultimate marriage, Christ and his bride, the church. And notice that he goes on here to give another gospel proof to help wives when it comes to submission. Again, he's not using this as a sledgehammer. He's seeking to encourage them with the gospel. Ephesians 5, again, tells us, wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, as to the Lord. You're ultimately submitting to Christ. And when you can submit to your husband, that means you can look beyond his human face. Remember, there's another person here. There's a greater person that you are serving, the greatest person in all the universe. You're the person who has loved you the most, who died and shed his blood for you. And so, ladies, when you submit to your husband, you are saying something about Christ. You are saying something about the church. It's a gospel witness. That's the first positive. That's pretty positive. Second positive. Submission is loving. It's love for the Savior. Again, we've already touched on this, I know, but it's something that needs to be emphasized. When you think of marriage, what word generally pops up in your thinking more than any other word? Love, right? We want a marriage that's going to be characterized by love. We don't want a loveless marriage. God wants us to have a marriage saturated with love. And the Apostle Paul tells husbands here that they are to be the main driver, the big initiator or the leader when it comes to love. He says to husbands, and six times by the way, he only says to wives twice a minute, six times to husbands, love. It's a little, little unbalanced, wouldn't you say? God just knows husbands need to hear more. Husbands, love! Love your wives. You have to love your wives. And he tells them how to love their wives. But that doesn't mean wives are not to love their husbands. Of course they are. In fact, that's what Paul tells wives, or tells older women, to teach the younger women. In Titus chapter 2, he gives this sort of curriculum from the older women to the younger women. You are to teach your younger women to love their husbands and their children. So both husband and wife are to be lovers. Love is arguably the most important word when it comes to human relationships in general. And certainly the most important word when it comes to marriage. But when we talk about a Christian marriage, we have to talk about another kind of love. We have to talk about a bigger love. We have to talk about love for the Savior. That is our first love. There's no one you should love more than Jesus Christ. And the love you have for Jesus should impact your marriage. That should impact your marriage more than your love for your husband. Love for Christ. Look again at Ephesians 5, 22. Why submit to your own husbands as to the Lord? Now that word, submit, is the Greek word, hupotasso, used about 40 times in the New Testament. It's not actually used in verse 22. A literal rendering of the Greek, this might surprise you, but submit's not there. That's true of any original Greek text. Wow. It's not there. Wives to your own husbands. That's what it says. Wives to your own husbands. That's what it says. Well, am I off the hook? Well, no, not quite. Go back to verse 21. He's carrying the verb from verse 21 over to verse 22 and the verb submit is in verse 21. So he hasn't lost sight of that hupotasso verb of verse 21. He wants us to carry it through and apply it to verse 22. And it's put in the form of a present active middle imperative. present, active, middle, imperative, which tells us, it tells us this is a continuous attitude and behavior, present, active, middle voice, says it's voluntary, no one forces you to submit, your husband can't do that. He's not ever told to tell his wife to submit, God's talking here. But it's also a command. It's put in the form of an imperative. God's commanding you. Not your husband. God's commanding you. Submit to your husband. And if you don't like Ephesians 5, well Colossians 3 takes that hupotasso verb and it doesn't pull it from another verse. It's right there in the verse. Colossians 3, 18, wife, submit to your husband, same, same verb, same tense, command, imperative, continuous, present active. Now let's be honest, we don't like commands. Nobody's going to tell me what to do. Kevin Young says, Young in his book, Unholiness, it's one of the books we hope to, we've been studying for the men's prayer breakfast, but we hope to use it in our adult Sunday school class. But he says this, we are scared of words like diligence, effort and duty. You know, we're not homophobic, we're nomosphobic, which is, nomos is law. We don't want God telling us what to do. And we generally don't think like this, do we? We would never put these words together, unless the Bible did. Duty, duty and delight, or duty and love. Duty and delight, or duty and love. Jesus puts it that way. Turn to John 15, you'll see it for yourself. John 15, Jesus here in the upper room speaking to His disciples, one of the last times He will speak to them before He goes to the cross. He talks a lot about commandments, keeping commandments. John 15, verse 15 through 24, you have a span of less than 10 verses, and Jesus puts two things together, love and duty, or keeping my commandments. John 14, verse 15, John 14, verse 15, if you love me, you keep my commandments. Is that John 14? Yeah, I think I got that right. John 14, 15, John 14, 21, whoever has my commandments and keeps them and is he who loves me. John 14, 23, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word. John 14, 24, whoever does not love me does not keep my words. Four times, Jesus lets us know. Love for Him will show itself, manifest itself in obedience, keeping His commandments. Obedience, obedience comes from love for Jesus. It's the greatest motivating force for obedience. The greatest. Paul could say the love of Christ. Constrains me. When you love someone, you want to please them. And in Ephesians 5, we have commandments, again, given to both husbands and wives. Commandments should never be isolated or separated from the Lord Jesus. We're serving Him. We're showing our love for Him. Wives, verse 22, submit a command, an imperative, to your own husband. Ephesians 5, 25, Husbands, love, command your wife as Christ loved the church. Again, obedience is not easy. It never is. It's called the narrow path of obedience. Jesus has picked up a cross, a daily cross. And husbands will feel the splinters of the cross when it comes to loving their wives. And wives will feel the splinter of the cross when it comes to submitting to their husbands. We're both going to feel the splinters. It's the sacrifice of obedience. Sacrificial love on the part of husbands. Sacrificial submission on the part of wives. Do you love Jesus? Submit to your husbands. Elizabeth George In her book, A Heart After God, it says, ladies, when you struggle to obey your husband, take his face out of the picture and put Christ's face there. Don't forget your Savior when it comes to obedience. Submission is witnessing. He gives the gospel picture. Submission is obeying. It means obeying a loving Savior, but third positive, submission, and why it's a great benefit, great privilege, great blessing for every lady, every wife. Submission is protecting. It's protecting. It serves as a protective shield. I preached on submission many, many years ago. I used that very analogy. I just couldn't find my old sermon, so I don't know what I said back then. So this is all fresh stuff. But I believe, I'm convinced in fact, that a lot of confusion in our day about submission and authority stems from confusion over identity issues. There's been a substantial depreciation of male and female personhood. We live in a world that has done everything to confuse people as to the unique significance of true masculinity and the unique significance of true femininity. What is a man? What is a woman? We're equal. So you remove and obliterate all distinctions. Well, sorry, God made them male and female. He made them distinct, wonderfully distinct, equal in many respects, but wonderfully distinct. And we are in desperate need of having or recovering a biblical concept of manhood and womanhood. Here's what someone has said, because we've lost A sense of what a man is and what a woman is. Distinctive maleness in females. The consequences have been devastating. More divorce. More wife abuse. More homosexuality. More promiscuity. More emotional distress. More suicide. You can add a lot more mores. more division, more hate, more contention. When people don't understand what a man is and what a woman is, they are set adrift on a sea of confusion. And you really sentence them to a prison of suffering and pain. And if we are ever, ever to recover a biblical view of Mary, We need to recover a sense of what a man is and what a woman is. I've been listening to a... I won't mention his name. Some of you probably know who he is, but I'll mention his name. It's Ben Shapiro. He's a Jew. Nothing wrong with being a Jew. But he's an Orthodox Jew. He has no qualms telling people. But he has a... not in every respect. He doesn't have a biblical mindset when it comes to what grace is, obviously. But he has a biblical mindset when it comes to marriages. And here's what he said last week, I wrote it down. When men cease to be men, cease to be protectors, they become abusers. When they cease to be what God called them to be, God called them to be leaders. If you had three words to describe what a man should be, using your Bible to define what a man should be, you could use these three words. He's to be a leader, he's to be a servant, and he's to be a protector. I wrote that down and then I came across a very interesting statement made by Dr. Piper. He says this, at the heart of true masculinity is a responsibility to lead, to provide, and protect. When the Titanic sank there way back when and submerged under the cold Atlantic waters, remember what happened? Well, women and children were put into those lifeboats first. Men stood there. They understood what a man should be. Why didn't they jump into the boat? Well, they understood what a man should be. He's a protector. And you go to your Bible, your Old Testament Bible. I won't give all the texts, but it's very clear from several Old Testament texts, when it came to war, men went to the battlefield. Men, not women. You have Deborah. Yeah, the one exception to the rule. You open up your New Testament Bible. One of the first snapshots you have is of a man named Joseph. and he's protecting his baby named Jesus and his wife from King Herod. He's a protector. Turn to 1 Peter 3. I said I'd get there. 1 Peter 3, I think, states this matter in a more understated way. 1 Peter 3, this is another clear passage when it comes to what husbands and wives should be and the relationship of husbands and wives. But notice what he says in verse 7 of 1 Peter 3. Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel. That's not a derogatory meaning or word. He's simply acknowledging what any doctor would tell you, that women are physically weaker. That's true. They are weaker. They are a weaker vessel. They are more fragile. They are smaller in size, smaller muscle mass. Women are weaker, not necessarily intellectually, not saying, they say physically in terms of their makeup. Even you could say in one level they're more subjected to emotions, which can be a positive, wonderful thing when it comes to understanding people and engaging in relationships, but it could be a weakness in some cases. And when you think of authority in general, what does God want His authorities, those God-ordained authorities to do? He wants the government, which is the authority, to protect. It has the sword. Pastors are called by God as pastors to protect the sheep. Protect the sheep from the wolves from without, and from perverse men, says Paul, who would rise up from within. Pastors are put on call to protect the flock. And husbands are to protect their wives. I've noticed in the last couple of years, there are books on husbands, They've taken hold of the concept of a shepherd. A husband is a shepherd. A husband is to protect his wife, not abuse his wife, not wound his wife. Submission is a safe place, it should be. And we have situations in our Bible, don't we, where men fail to protect their wives. I think that explains the fall of man, frankly. Adam failed. Adam failed to protect Eve. The devil comes along, he begins to engage her. It seems to be clear that, or most believe, that Adam was standing right there next to his wife, and he should have roared out like a lion. Get away from her! He should have picked up a sword, at least a shovel, and clobbered that serpent over the head. But he didn't. He sat there like a dodo. That wasn't in my notes. And Eve should have put herself under his protective arms and said to the devil, I'm not listening to you. My husband's been given the stewardship of words. He's my defender, my protector. I'm under his protective care. You have any questions, talk to my husband. But she failed to put herself under his protective care. And he failed to maintain his protective care of her. And you see in another instance in our Bibles where someone else fails to protect his wife. And that was Abraham. I'll get into that a little later, but protection is a God-given duty of a man. And men, as husbands, you are to protect your wives. You are to shield your wives from danger, from sin, and from temptation. And that means, men, you have to protect them from bad men, from bad women, you have to protect them from unrealistic expectations of other people. You dwell with your wife. It might look differently in terms of how you protect them from the guy next door or the Christian up the street. You are to protect your wife as you know your wife from the unrealistic expectations of other people. You have to sometimes protect them from their own sin. Submission is about witnessing. It's about obeying. It's about protecting. The fourth positive. Everybody agree? Positives? Well, positive. This is a positive sermon. Submission is about building. Building a holy faith. If you haven't gone to 1 Peter 3, you can go there now and look at it. I think this again is the best passage Not in terms of the whole of a husband-wife relationship, but I do think it's the best passage when it comes to submission. It gives us submission in high definition, and Peter even gives us a face of a person, a flesh-and-blood person who captured, who lived out this role, this function of submission in the Bible. Her name is Sarah. And Peter, much like Paul, you might note, takes that concept of submission. He takes the big concept back in chapter 2. He talks about submitting to civil authority. He talks about slaves or servants submitting to their masters. So he sees that submission is for everybody. But here in chapter 3, he zeroes in upon wives. Verse 1, look what he says, Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands. That's the same language that Paul uses. It's the idios, your own husband, not somebody else's husband. Your husband. One relationship here that you have to be concerned about. Your husband. Submit to your husband. It's very personal here, isn't it? And then, it's obvious here that the situation that he envisions, it seems to me from verse 1, that this would probably be the most difficult, the most challenging for any wife to submit to, in terms of who she's married to. He describes the person, in verse 1, as though some who do not obey the Word. He's describing husbands here, men who don't obey God's Word. They are not persuaded or convinced that the Bible is the Word of God, and they deliberately, persistently set themselves over and against what God says. Unconverted! So what does a wife do? Pack her bags and leave home? That's not what he says. But he knows it's not going to be easy, ladies. And notice what he says in verse 6. He calls them to a fearless submission. A fearless submission. Live by faith, ladies, not by fear. Someone has described it, the beautiful faith of fearless submission, the beautiful faith of fearless submission. And then he highlights Sarah, and she's mentioned in Hebrews 11, the first woman we see in Hebrews 11, that great gallery of faith. It's Sarah's the first woman that's highlighted in Hebrews chapter 11. So he picks up this woman, Sarah, and wants us to understand how she, as a wife, embraced her calling as a godly woman. And again, think of her husband Abraham. He was a godly man, but he blew it sometimes. I mean, what he did, at one occasion, he lied and said, she's not my wife, she's my sister. And he put his wife in danger. Thankfully, God protected her. But Abraham failed. He failed to protect his wife. So no question, ladies, submission puts you in a vulnerable position. I think there are two things that make submission so hard for ladies. Pride. Sorry, ladies. And fear. Fear. Fear. And don't think when your wife doesn't submit to you, it's because she's proud. It might be she's afraid. She's afraid. Submission puts them in a vulnerable position. But they are to hope in God's promises. They are to have faith in the sovereign goodness of God. And ladies, you are to wage war against fear. And the only weapon you can use, the only biblical weapon you can use is faith. You wage war against fear by faith. You either live by fear or you live by faith. And that's why he emphasizes this matter of faith. And I do think that's why he brings Sarah here, puts the spotlight on Sarah. She was a woman who lived by faith. No one said submission is going to be easy. No one said that. Peter wants women to be liberated from fear. It's the woman who doesn't submit who's enslaved to fear. It's the woman who has faith, who's really free, You might think of it this way. Two women. One's a Christian, one's not a Christian. And they love skydiving. That might be a little hard to reach in terms of imagining this, but let's say they do. They both love skydiving. And I don't know if you've ever done skydiving. I would never do it in the world, but you go up to 1,400 feet. I never knew this, but 1,400 feet, and you jump out of the plane, and it lasts 60 seconds. That's about it. That's all you got. 60 seconds. Wow. Not a long time. But both women jump out of the plane. I mean, they love the skydive. And they both look free! Wow, wow! But there's a difference. The Christian woman is wearing a parachute harness. The non-Christian isn't wearing a parachute harness. And so the non-Christian, I mean, she's just smiling big time. She's free, free, free! And the Christian woman, I mean, she's free, but she knows there's a little bit of an encumbrance here. She put herself into a harness of protective submission. But she's free. She really is. But the one who is not the Christian, I mean, she really thinks she's free. And she might be singing, free, free, free, all the while she's falling. And then thud, she's dead. How free really were you? There's a way that seems right, but leads to death. Not submitting to those who God has placed over you is a way of death and rebellion against God. true freedom is found in Christ. He came to set you free. Men and women, it's kind of hard to believe He's put you back in chains once you become a wife. Huh? He must be lying then. He said He came to set you free. Free indeed. There's no one who is as free as the Christian. No one as free as the Christian, and there's no one as free as a woman who has embraced submission in a godly home under a godly loving husband and put herself into a parachute of safety and protection. Submission is a good thing. It's not a bad thing. God knows it's best, best, best. for your soul, best for your marriage, best for your Christian faith, best for your Christian witness. So God simply asks you to believe. Trust Him. He knows what's best. The most beautiful women in the world are the most submissive. It's an intelligent submission, it's not a blind submission. But they've embraced that because they trusted God. They believe God. And their faith will grow. Their faith will grow. Ladies, adorn the gospel by this wonderful gift and privilege that God's given you. A protective submission. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we again thank you for your word. We have often been confused on issues, even this matter of submission and authority. Some of us would admit that. And so we ask you to help us, Lord, to see things more clearly. Help us not to be conformed to the world, but to be transformed. Continue to teach us and mold us and shape us. and make the dear wives here willing and eager to embrace their role and help the men as well to be eager to embrace their role as men and husbands. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.