Day 18 – Ephesians 5:21, 22, 25-28, 32-33

²¹ Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. ²² Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. ²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. ³² This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³ However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. ^[1]

Apostle Paul seems to have understood the complexity of marriage. He instructs the men three separate times to love their wives, but tells the wives once to submit to and respect their husbands. What is it that the Apostle knew that we either don’t know or understand? Perhaps it is that women do not generally have an issue loving their husbands. Their difficulty lies in submitting to and respect for their husbands. Men, on the other hand, generally have difficulty loving their wives and so, seemingly to highlight love’s importance, the Apostle tells husbands three separate times to love their wives.

Most husbands would think that Paul was being unnecessarily redundant. “Of course we love our wives,” we might well protest. “Look at the things we have given them. Look at the number of hours working we put in just to make a place for them.” Paul, almost as if he anticipated the protests, pointedly explains what he means by the instruction to husbands to love their wives; it is to be after the manner of how Christ loved the Church and gave His life up for her. Further, it is to be after the same manner that men love their own bodies. If men and women want to see how God has designed marriage they should look closely at the relationship of the Church with Christ. This union, which began at creation, “is a profound mystery” in which many still struggle to this day to adequately understand.

It is really, however, not as complicated as we like to make it. To submit is to voluntarily subject oneself to another. To respect is to admire someone for his or her elicited qualities. To love, on the other hand, is to sacrifice one’s own desires to unconditionally care for another even to the point of losing his or her own life. Understood in this manner, both husbands and wives have growing to do.

Dear Father, we are guilty of relating to one another as husbands and wives in a manner the world prescribes rather than in the manner You have prescribed. We are selfish and self centered, demanding more than we have a right to demand while giving as little as we possibly can. Our marriages are in so much trouble that it does not seem to be any way out. Help us return to Your pattern and plan. Teach us to submit to one another, love and respect one another, in Jesus’ mighty name. Amen.