The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Scott Brown with the message Part 1. Please open your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 5. Begin in verse 14, Ephesians 5 verse 14. Therefore he says, Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, Redeeming the time because the days are evil.

Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not be drunk with wine, which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church, and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that he might present her to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.

So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves him, his wife, loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.

Nevertheless, let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wives see that they respect their husbands. Oh Lord, I pray that You would bless the reading of Your Word in our hearts, that You would Teach us the way in which we should go. I pray you'd keep me from error and that you O Lord now Would send your spirit to teach things that I cannot to help people in ways that I cannot so that you might be glorified here this evening. Amen. When you read this passage of scripture and you are not married, then you should read it with different eyes than the married person reads it.

And that is that you read it in anticipation, with your eye upon that reality that will come to most of you. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." Here in this passage, we see the sanctifying purpose of marriage, how God brings two sinners together to declare the beauty of His name in their relationship through everything that they are, everything that they say, everything that they do together has one central singular design. And when you prepare yourself for that, then when you do finally find yourself as a married person, You'll understand that all of your experiences, all of your conflicts as a couple are meant for a purpose. They're meant to draw the poison from your soul, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. And it is true that every single problem in marriage is solved by a proper understanding and application of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

If you're married you can just enumerate the problems that you're having. Every single one of them is solved with that understanding somehow. And you might say, well I don't know how that could be with my problem, this particular problem that's so pernicious and unique. I think that if we sat down long enough, we could come to the understanding that yes, God and His Gospel does speak to that issue somehow. The first thing that we read in this passage speaks of submission.

Verse 21, submitting to one another in the fear of God. So the whole passage is about the authority of God and submission in Christ-likeness. That's the overarching subject here. But I want to give you nine critical things you need to know about this text. Number one, it's the longest statement in the New Testament about marriage.

And what's striking about it is that it's so absolutely counter-cultural, it is. Number two, this passage tells us what is the most vital thing about marriage, that marriage is the theater upon which a husband and a wife live out the story of redemption where each each partner has his own role, his own lines, his own conclusion and it's all defined by God. Now for you who are single you just have to grasp the significance of this because it should make you ask the question, really, what kind of marriage are you really preparing for? What is it that you're trying to accomplish when you think about getting married? Well, This passage should clear up lots of wrong thinking in your mind about marriage.

You must compare what you're thinking about marriage with this and what is written here. And there's so many wrong ideas about marriage. It's so vital that we think Christianly about marriage and if you don't, you're doomed to so many heartaches in your life. Number three, It's the classic foundational text on roles of husbands and wives. And it delivers the male on roles and responsibilities and how the sexes operate together.

Number four, it gives us language to help us understand marriage. What you'll find here is such rich language. We should form everything that we are, all of our thoughts about life, from the language of Scripture. That's where we can find such blessing. And here you'll find words like submit, head, love, give, sanctify, nourish, cherish, washing, spots, wrinkles, leaving, cleaving, one flesh, respect.

This forms the beautiful structure of the language of marriage. And what really is needed today is to cut through the worldly drivel, the bankrupt gibberish that surrounds marriage today. And there are so many books that will mislead you to help you think wrong thoughts about marriage. Here's my counsel. Think Bible words about marriage.

Then you will be led in the right direction. There are thousands of books about marriage. Most of them should be thrown in the trash can because they don't deal with these words. It's the language of scripture that leads you in the right direction. You who have young children, teach them these words.

They're simple words and If you teach them daily, year after year, they will understand the beautiful texture and structure of marriage. So it gives us the language of marriage. Number five, it was written for people just like we are. Ephesus was a city of about 300, 000 people and they worshiped a female deity. These words would sound absolutely ludicrous to them.

Just like they sound so ludicrous to people in our culture. The treatment of women in Greek society was atrocious. The treatment of women in Jewish society was so cavalier that the theologians were saying that you can divorce your wife for burning your food. The treatment of women in Roman society was so abusive. Jerome tells of one Roman woman who was married to her 23rd husband and she was his 21st wife.

That's abuse. So the family life was in shambles in the Roman Empire and in the Greek world as it is in ours. And Paul is calling men and women to live in a completely different way. That's why it's appropriate for you to observe the social and cultural practices and bring the Word of God to bear and then let that be the filter and to abandon bankrupt practices. And there's so many bankrupt practices that we have been formed in regarding this whole matter of marriage.

And we should trust in the Lord with all of our hearts and lean not onto our own understanding. And in all our ways acknowledge Him and He will keep our paths straight. Number six. It exposes a wrong view of regeneration. There's an idea about regeneration that once you're converted, everything just sort of falls into place.

That somehow the law written on your heart fixes everything. And it really doesn't. We need an objective standard. Lloyd-Jones talks about this as sort of a semi-magical view of regeneration. And he argues that if we always just Automatically do the right things and why in the world do we even need our Bibles?

Because we need external arguments To change our practices And so here in this passage we find some language that just exposes a wrong view of regeneration, that somehow if you just get married, two of you are Christians, everything will be just peachy. And it's really not. And that's a reality that this passage exposes. Number seven, this passage is so helpful because it shows you how to prepare for marriage. People ask all the time, how should they prepare for marriage?

The answers really are all in the scriptures. Number eight, something new about marriage is revealed here. Now, people had been getting married for some 4, 000 years before Paul delivered this letter. But something new is revealed here. There is a mystery that is revealed in this text that was not known before.

That a man leaving his father and mother, being joined to his wife, and there becoming one flesh was about something way bigger than marriage. It was about Christ's union with the church. God created marriage for a more important reason than marriage itself. That's why marriage disappears in heaven. Because there's a greater thing that He's doing.

And so this passage tells us that there is something new. Number nine. It shows what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit in your family life. Because the way that this passage is structured is that it harkens back to the imperative be filled with the Holy Spirit. Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And then as a result of being filled with the Spirit, there are three effects. There's speaking to one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, verse 19. And then there's gratitude and thankfulness in the heart. And all of it is assumed under the way that God has structured the world with authority. There is the authority of the Father.

There's the authority of Christ. There's the authority of man over the woman. All of it is related to the way that the Holy Spirit works in the various ways that God has wired the world in terms of authority. If you don't understand authority, you cannot understand your marriage, you'll have no idea how to relate to your spouse. In verse 21, we read, submitting to one another in the fear of God.

This is a general principle of submission. It means to voluntarily yield in love. And the Apostle Paul is speaking about the general way that we we submit to one another in the church. How we bear one another's burdens. How We weep with those who weep.

We look out for the welfare of one another. All of the one anothers really help us understand how to apply this submitting to one another in the fear of God, that you are not the supreme being, that you, when you are in the church, you submit to one another. That's a general kind of submission. This is so vital because if you're single and you do desire to form a marriage for the glory of God, You have to understand that God has given you a local church where you learn how to submit to one another. In local churches you have all kinds of strange people, don't you?

Sometimes you have mean people in a local church, insensitive people. You have people that are boorish. You have other people who are worldly. There are all kinds of people in local churches. And God has designed the local church to help you understand that there's a way that you conduct yourself in the house of God.

And so this general submission is one of those ways. And so it's so critical that single people are Deeply immersed in the life of a local church so they can experience this they're in training they're in training for another kind of submission that takes place in marriage And Then there's then there's a special or a particular submission. And that's what we find in verse 22. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. So the apostle has spoken about this general submission.

And then he drills down and speaks of particular relationships where submission is required. He begins with wives, and then he moves to children, and then he moves to slaves and masters. It's a beautiful argument that he's making. So wives submitting to your own husbands does not wipe away the general submission that we have to one another. But submission becomes very specific and concentrated with a wife toward her husband.

A wife doesn't submit to everyone in the same way that she submits to others in the local church. He's classifying two different kinds of submission. One is general, and one is more specific. And so when the apostle says, wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, he is speaking of ordering yourself under, to arrange under. Now why in the world do you think that he would deal with a woman first?

Isn't the husband the head of the wife? Why do you think he would begin this whole thing by talking about women? Now, we're not told in this passage why he begins with the submission of a wife. Here's what I believe it is. A wife's submission has such powerful leverage in a family.

And if submission is broken in a family, the family is broken because the whole structure of the creation order is upset. God is the head of Christ. Christ is the head of man. Man is the head of the woman. That's the creation order.

The apostle speaks of that in 1 Corinthians 14 and it begins in Genesis. This passage really takes us as a hyperlink back to Genesis and the whole creation order. If you're not submitting to your husband, your family is in a state of collapse. It can never be what it was meant to be if a wife is not submitting. Because a wife's submission has such far-reaching impact.

If she has an unsubmissive spirit, then She will spread that in the members of the family. And they will grow up not understanding even what it means to submit to Christ or submit to a husband if they are young ladies. The danger of the culture that we live in today, this culture of self-exaltation and autonomy, the rejection of authority that is so comprehensively embedded in our consciences is so destructive to marriage and it's completely contradicted here. And then the scope of the submission to your own husband. So the submission is narrowed in its field.

God has designed a husband to lead his wife, where she is focused exclusively on her husband, and he becomes the preeminent person in her life. And then he gives the motive for this submission as to the Lord. This is really important because he's saying that the way that you submit to the Lord is the same way that you submit to your husband. So if you're a young lady here, unmarried, or if you're a woman who's married, you've just been given very helpful language to understand how to grasp what he means by that. And you're supposed to take your relationship with the Lord and you think about how you submit to the Lord now think about that for a minute think about his commands toward you and how you submit to those commands are they just suggestions no they're not at all they The Word of God is binding upon our consciences that we might obey it.

And so a wife submits as to the Lord. So in order to understand this, a wife has to maybe set aside the marriage relationship for a moment and think about what it means to be a Christian and how a Christian thinks about submission. And so that's how a wife learns how to submit to her husband. She has to think about the Lord Jesus Christ first, or she has no hope of learning how to submit to her own husband. Because she submits as unto the Lord.

Now, here's something that an unmarried young lady must consider. If in your heart You do not desire to submit to the Lord. Let that take your breath away for what it means when you get married. You will collapse your family. You will be a woman who tears down her own house.

And so I just want to challenge the young ladies in this room to very carefully consider their lives before the Lord. Yes, you desire to be married. Yes, you wish you were married yesterday or last year or maybe last decade, but there is something of great significance that you need to address and that is your own heart's relationship to the Lord because you should not marry a man until you have submitted to the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the supreme requirement for marriage. At least marriage for the glory of God.

Because the heart of a Christian is to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. You know, the submission of a wife is equivalent to saying that she no longer belongs to the Lord. I mean, I'm sorry, no longer belongs to the world, but she has a new master. A woman's submission to God is the first step in her submission to her husband. So when a woman leaves Her father and mother, she leaves everything to join a new head in the same way that she does at her conversion.

When she repents of her sins, she leaves the world to serve her new husband. And that is what happens when she leaves her father and mother to serve her husband. Now, when Deborah married me, She really left everything and followed me. And everything that was part of the direction in my life became her direction. And she assumed everything for better or for worse because she believed that God was the head of Christ, and Christ was the head of man, and man was the head of woman.

And she believed That in submitting to her husband, she was also simultaneously submitting to her Lord Jesus Christ. And that's what this means. And then the Apostle Paul declares that the wife has a head in verse 23. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is the head of the church. So the first thing we encounter here is the whole idea of headship.

And this should also help us to think about the seriousness and the significance of the rejection of authority, of the resistance to parents, of rebellion against civil laws, and how they relate to and how they dishevel the marriage. Because this passage is about authority. It is about the authority of Jesus Christ. And it's about how the authority of Jesus Christ is given to a husband. And how that makes a husband the head of the wife.

There are so many authorities that we need to submit to. And here we encounter this whole principle of having a head. And so in verse 23 we see something that is so defining. It's the absolute center of the message of this passage. And it's contained in two words that I just read.

The words, just, just as. Now you'll notice this pattern throughout the text. It appears seven times in 11 verses. In verse 21, as to the Lord. Verse 23, as also Christ is head of the church.

Verse 24, just as the church is subject to Christ. Verse 24, so let wives be to their husbands. Verse 25, just as Christ also loved the church. Verse 28, as their own bodies. Verse 29, as just as the Lord does the church.

So these words just reveal to us that a husband's Relationship with his wife is meant to be like Christ's love for the church. This fundamental relationship of comparison is the well out of which everything in marriage flows. And this really is the irreducible controlling principle of a wife's marriage, and that is that it is designed to display how a church submits to Jesus Christ. So a wife has to ask herself, how does Christ submit to the church? Or if she's single, she should also ask the same question in her preparation for marriage.

She needs to consider how it is that Christ submits to the church. She needs to set aside ideas of marriage for a minute, all of her wrong ideas about it, all her feelings about it, and to think about something greater. And she must think about Christ's obedience that he gets from his wife. So If you don't start there, you cannot proceed to marriage properly. And you'll end up just getting married for all the wrong reasons.

And you'll continue to think wrongly about marriage. And what will happen to you is that the offenses will pile up, the wrongs done between the two of you will amass, and at some point, at some point, the bag will break and the poison will flow. But you can trace that poison and all of its effects back to a misunderstanding of why a wife submits and how she does it. Now We have to recognize that this defies almost everything that your flesh is telling you about marriage. And it tells us that you cannot go to Hollywood, you cannot even consult your own heart, you may not even go to a Christian bookstore, you may not even be able to go to your own parents, honestly, to learn this.

You have to go to Holy Scripture and trust that alone. And this really is the key to every question in marriage. And so it means that the whole paradigm for marriage is centered on Christ's relationship to his church and her submission to him. Now, the problem that we have today is that we do have a younger generation who does not understand what marriage is. And as a result, they're headed for disaster.

Even some of the most exemplary courtships that maybe have happened in this room are headed for disaster. I guarantee you they are if they're not founded on this principle. The problem is that our minds are fallen, our feelings are fallen, our will is fallen, and our language is so mixed that it doesn't reflect the glory of God. And then The apostle gives three reasons for submission. And before we get to those three reasons, I just want to say that there's something very wonderful here.

And that is that we learn that God desires a wife to have two things. He desires a wife to have a head, and he also desires a wife to have a savior of the body. We'll talk about the body in my third message out of this passage. But the idea is introduced here. Paul gives three reasons for the submission.

The first reason for submission is the husband's headship. For The husband is head of the wife. So, four, you know, four, and then a reason is given. The husband is head of the wife. This is one of the reasons why submission is indispensable.

It's what a wife needs. Every wife needs a head. And this phrase takes us back to Genesis. It takes us back to creation. Ephesians 5 gives more detail on the creation narratives that we find in Genesis 1 through 3.

So understanding creation is a critical matter of marriage because of Genesis 1 through 3. Paul connects it with the doctrine of marriage here in this passage. And order and authority is the issue on the table here which was established in Genesis. You also have to understand the fall. You need to realize that in order to understand marriage, you have to understand more than just marriage.

You need to understand creation and you also have to understand the fall. Marriage is a supremely doctrinal affair. You should not send your children into marriage without their understanding the great doctrines of scripture. The very first effect of the fall was on marriage. And the couple were ashamed and they made coverings for themselves.

They were bankrupt. Out of their own minds, God had to come and make better coverings for them. And they struggled with separation. They were separate from one another. This is the result of the fall in marriage.

If there's a separation between any of you in This room who are married, you have to understand where it comes from. It goes directly back to the fall. This separation is nothing more complex than being rooted in the fall. The first thing Adam does is he minimizes his own sin. Isn't that what we all do?

This is the second step in a marital disaster. First of all, not recognizing that there's sin. Second, by blame shifting as Adam did. He says, it was the woman that you gave me. He separates, he blames, he points a finger.

Every time you do that, every time you have done that, you are acting very theologically. You are doing something that began in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. And the default just signals all these burning tensions that are created in marriage as a result of sin. Sin is the greatest problem in marriage. And every problem in marriage can be traced to sin.

And every problem can be resolved through a recognition of the glory of the Gospel in dealing with sin. And so because of the fall, all of our relationships have been distorted. And so these verses affect us so deeply because they show us what's really wrong. And what's wrong with this is so deep that you never get to the bottom of it. The Apostle Paul said it was like having a throat like an open grave, like tongues practicing deceit, like the poison of asps under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.

There's no one who does good. There's none who are righteous, and destruction and misery are in their ways. And in the way of peace they have not known, there's no fear of God before their eyes. That's the problem with your marriage. That's the problem with my marriage.

It's not so simple as fixing one little thing. Fixing your marriage requires so much more than just being a nicer guy or being more sensitive. Fixing your marriage has much, much more to do with recognizing your sin and repenting of it than absolutely anything else. And that's why so many of the marriage counseling and the books and the language that is heaped upon us is so wrong because it doesn't take us there. Now, when a single person does what Adam and Eve did in the garden.

They need to recognize what that means. That when they tolerate separation from God, they're tolerating the same thing that will destroy their marriage in the future. If you are unmarried, you 13 or 1400 unmarried people in this room, if you are here in this room and you so long to be married, please recognize that if you're tolerating separation from God, you are sowing the seeds of the destruction of your marriage and of your children's marriages and you are also putting a blight on the name of Jesus Christ. You are destroying what Jesus Christ has meant to be precious. This passage also says, as Christ is head of the church.

So now we get to the doctrine of the Church. We've seen the doctrine of creation, the doctrine of the fall, and now the doctrine of the Church. You really cannot understand your marriage unless you understand the doctrine of the Church. This is why I would so urgently encourage you fathers to make it your assiduous work to teach your daughter's ecclesiology. They need to be experts in ecclesiology.

For a husband, his course of study should be Christology, but he also needs to understand ecclesiology because he has a bride, a church, submitting to him. A husband has a greater responsibility to know both theology and Christology and ecclesiology. But for a white, her supreme subject is ecclesiology. She needs to understand what it means to be a bride, to be the church. There's also the whole doctrine of redemption that is in here as a result of this appeal to the creation and the problem that happened there in the garden.

And so the purpose of a man and a woman in marriage is to give a living illustration of the church to the world. I'll just say that again. The purpose of the marriage of a man and a woman is to give a living illustration of the church to the world. Now, When a wife does not respect her husband, she's saying that Christ deserves no respect. You understand that?

You know that when a single person does not respect her father, she's saying that God is not worthy of respect. You understand how critical this is? Do you realize that when a wife does not help her husband, she is saying to the world that following Christ and obeying Christ is not worthwhile at all. When a wife does not submit to her husband, she's saying to the world that it's ridiculous to submit to Christ. She's saying that his commands are worth nothing, that she has a better way.

She's saying that she has no need of direction. When she commits adultery, she's really just saying that Christ does not satisfy. So what a woman does in relation to her husband is significant because wives submit to their own husbands as to the Lord. I've had such delight in the last few months to read an English Puritan to my son and my son-in-law, William Gouge. I've been reading to them sections of Domestical Duties which was written in 1620.

It's absolutely brilliant. And as we sat there and read it, we've been so humbled, all of us, and so helped. But what Gouge says is this, he says, most men do not marry a vixen, they create one. He says, if you have a rebellious wife, consider that God is punishing you for your past sin. Is that possible?

Some of you who are exasperated with your wives and their treatment of you, you lived without obedience and now you're reaping what you have sown. Gush says this, maybe you married her because she's beautiful and God is punishing you for that because you did not go deeper than a pretty face. He says maybe you married her because she was rich or maybe you married her by rejecting her parents' authority. And now you have rebellion in your home, but it's nothing more than just An expression of the rebellion that you had all those years before you married her. William Gogue says this, perhaps She was given to you to restrain you from future sin by reminding you of your past sin.

A single woman must learn how to be like this by the power of the Holy Spirit. Now the term that the apostle uses is the word head, and it means head, preeminence, lord, authority. That's what it means. Over the last 30 or 40 years, with the rise of feminism, we've seen an attempt to strip the word of its original meaning. We're thankful to Wayne Grudem, who did the church a blessed service by examining the 2, 336 instances of the word kephale from Greek literature, classical literature, and non-classical literature.

And what we need to understand is that head means preeminence, authority, place of honor, right hand of God, dominion, everywhere that it's used. Does it mean source, as the feminists would pretend? Now, let's understand this. We run across what I'm just going to call the indisputable fact of headship. Paul does not encourage you to be a head.

He says, the husband is head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. Now, Paul is not encouraging you to be the head, okay? He's not commanding you to coach somehow, tonight, you know, figure out you're now the head, you're now gonna become the head of your family. He's saying, no, You are the head. This is not an imperative.

This is an indicative. It states a reality. You know the difference between an imperative and an imperative is a command. Go be the head. It's not an imperative.

It's an indicative. You are the head. So the question is not are you the head? The question is not do you wear the pants in your family or what kind of pants do you wear? It has nothing to do with that at all.

You may be a selfish head, you may be a head that nourishes and cherishes, You may be a knucklehead, but you are the head. And he's stating that the man is head of the woman. He's a man with backbone. He envisions. He suffers.

He accomplishes. He completes. He makes things happen. He's a man of dominion. He's cultivating the garden.

He's taking the raw ground. He's making something of it. He is the head, just like all who are in authority are heads. You can either be a well-functioning head or a poorly functioning head. But he's the head.

Now, here's something I'd also like you to consider, those of you who have been married for a while. Now God has stated that you are the head, but the question I want to ask us husbands, Is your wife ahead of you? Is your wife ahead of you in spiritual matters? For example, Is she ahead of you in ecclesiology? Is she ahead of you in her character that has been formed by Jesus Christ?

If she is, you should be ashamed of yourself because you are the head. You are the one that God has set to set the pace. It is true that our wives excel us in many ways, and that is such a blessing. But we should not just be satisfied with that and just give thanks and let it lie, because God has designed something far greater for us than that. We lack an adequate definition of headship because we do not understand the Trinity.

We do not understand God, and so we do not understand Christ and we do not understand what it means to be the head. We are so theologically illiterate that we don't understand what these words mean. That's why this entire year, our ministry has been dedicated to going through a historic confession, the Baptist Confession of 1689. It's almost identical to the Westminster Confession of Faith. And we're going through this confession because we believe that churches should be founded upon sound doctrine.

They should understand God and the word of His grace. And they need to understand it in detail. And the church is so long-lived on topical sermons, they really don't have any idea who God is. And so the whole breakdown of headship is really part of the fault of shepherds in the church who are not teaching sound doctrine. My two fellow elders and I have been sitting down and discussing how to apply the Baptist Confession in your family.

What does it mean? How do you put it into practice? We're trying to be practical with it, to state the doctrine and say, what does it mean? At the end of the year, we're having a conference on the same subject where we're bringing men in to give a lecture on every single one of the chapters, the 32 chapters of the Baptist Confession. And we're going to ask three questions.

How is this doctrine being attacked? We're going to state the doctrine. How is this doctrine being attacked? And how do you defend the church against the attack of this doctrine? Doctrine really matters.

We've already covered so many of the great doctrines of the faith. That means that your sons and your daughters, if they're to have a marriage of any kind of solid foundation, They need to be well grounded in sound doctrine. And this is one of the most important matters of preparation for marriage. And especially to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. The third reason for a wife submitting to her husband is that he is the savior of the body.

He is the savior. He is the savior of the body. Now what does that mean? Now it can't, it obviously can't mean that he saves her by justifying her by faith because that only happens one way. But justification by faith, salvation is pictured in the way that he deals with her by saving.

He is saving her body. So Paul's not talking about the atonement. He's saying that he he is picturing the salvation of Christ by saving her body and her soul in principle. He is saving her. The word savior means preserver and it means that he's looking out after her.

He's looking out after her. And it's the whole idea that he understands that she is lost and she needs saving. And that he is marrying her in order to do what we'll read about later, sanctifying and cleansing her with the washing of water by the Word. Every wife in this room needs the work of sanctification as she works out her salvation in fear and trembling. Husbands need to recognize that they have a role.

It's a salvific role. William Gouge defines this with such detail, it's astonishing. He says it's providing things needful. It's protecting from things harmful, providing for her mind, providing for her delight, providing for her soul, giving her the ordinary means of grace through the public ordinances. He says that often men are not saviors And he gives examples of men who are not saviors.

He says, men are not saviors who live in a place where there's no good church. That's what Gouge wrote in 1620. Or do you live in a place where there's a good church for your wife? Or carrying her away from all of her friends so that she's unknown. Or he says, in childbearing, thinking lightly of it and not thinking of her and giving her the care she needs in terms of, as He says, midwives and friends.

He speaks of husbands who are not saving their wives as those who make their wives scrimp at home while he eats and lives sumptuously while he's traveling, or his unthriftiness, or his squandering their resources, or he has no plan, or he doesn't protect her from slander, from those who would abuse her. He notes this. He says mothers-in-laws often prove unkind to wives. And this is one way that a husband saves his wife. So Paul restates what he's already said about Christ in the church.

And then he makes a statement that's very succinct. Two words. A wife is to submit how much? How often? In everything.

In everything. Of course, though, not to sin, but in everything. Even if she finds it not palatable, contrary to her culture, her refinement, whatever it might be, to submit to her husband in everything. And this is the pattern of a woman's life in the church. Now, for you single young ladies, here's a word of admonition.

Admonition. Do not marry anyone unless you are willing to submit to Him in everything. He is a sinner. You only get to marry sinners. But you must submit to a sinner.

So a young woman must, in her premarital years, must face herself honestly on the whole issue of authority. And that authority is learned with her father and her mother. How does she respond to the authority of her father? How does she respond to the authorities in the church? How does she respond to civil authorities?

How does she react when people or nature bring her displeasing situations? Because sometimes you're submitting to the weather. Sometimes you're submitting to the economy. Sometimes you're submitting to a wicked civil magistrate. But God, in His wisdom, only puts sinners as heads of women.

And I don't really understand that, except this. That Jesus Christ is declaring His glory in submission, and He is teaching a wife what it means to submit to Him. Because often when the Lord Jesus Christ leads you in a certain direction, or he brings you something, you have no idea why that happened. And you often question him and say, God, why did you do that? With your father and with your husband, God is teaching you, ladies, how to submit to Christ when you do not understand what he's doing because you will not always understand what he's doing and so he gives you a father and a husband to show you many times in your life that he will care for you in spite of the fact that you do not understand why it all is happening.

Do you see the mercy of God in that? So A father cannot afford to let his daughter continue in rebellion against him because the consequences are so significant. It means that a father should be very careful to place his daughter and his son in a local church where they learn how to please the Lord by submitting to sinful heads who are given to them. Now some of you married women are maybe thinking that these things are impossible because so much water has gone under the bridge, because there have been so many tears, there have been so many broken promises, and there have been so many offenses, and you wonder, why did I even marry Him? And you're asking, can I ever even recover from this?

And the answer is you can recover. But there's only one way to recover. And that is to submit to your husband as to the Lord. And that means that you need to submit to the Lord first. And then you're able to submit to your husband.

There's so many ways that the church loves Jesus Christ. You have to think about how the church loves Christ. And that's a whole vast study in and of itself. And it's one of the most important studies for daughters especially, that they keep the commandments, that they are one with those who are in authority, that they have kindness and tenderheartedness and forgiveness to those who are their heads, that they walk as He walked. Now, I want you to know that tonight, first and foremost, my heart's desire is that somehow, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we could be delivered from the bankruptcy of the way that we see marriage and see it replaced by a heavenly vision.

That's why we've called this conference gospel-centered marriages for a glorious church. And I want the young people here tonight to know with all of their hearts that marriage was created, was instituted to display the glory of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and that every single issue of marriage is solved by a proper application of those principles. Secondly, that married couples would find a clearer and better understanding of the purposes of their own marriage, rather than my needs, her needs, kind of view of marriage that afflicts so many of us. And that Gospel-centered marriages are indispensable for Gospel-centered churches. And brothers and sisters, this is what we need so desperately today.

And so I pray that it is clear to all of us tonight that marriage is not an end. It's only a means to an end. That marriage is not central. God is central. Repentance is central.

That a wife who submits to her husband as to the Lord is so central to everything that is on the table at this conference. And I pray that somehow God would help us with it because I know the devil has worked so mightily in us that it's almost impossible for us to think biblically about marriage. But I do pray that we think this way. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church, and He is the Savior of the body. May it be as the Lord our God has spoken.

Let's pray. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, we pray that you would help us to change the course of our marriages. I thank you for the sweetness that enters into a marriage where the gospel is central. I thank you that the gospel is the power of God and salvation.

I thank you for the hope that is in here in this room. I thank you, O Lord, that you have cast such a beautiful vision, not our own, but so much better, so much more wonderful, so much more life-giving than the one that we learn from our fathers and our culture. Oh God, I pray that you would descend upon this place and dislodge these things that have been so pernicious in our hearts and in our families. Oh Lord, we ask these things in the name of your dear son, our Lord Jesus Christ. God.

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