“Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” We know this is not the only time Paul has addressed the marriage relationship. In Ephesians 5 he writes the same thing. Wives are to submit.

I think it is important to note that both times this verse is prefaced by the same instruction from Paul. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” A good marriage does not begin with the wedding or even the courtship. It begins with all of us learning early in life how to submit. Now, submission does not mean subjection. It does not mean losing your life by being absorbed into the life of another. It means adapting yourself to others. The ability to adapt or the refusal to adapt begins long before marriage. We talk about people not being team players or wanting their own way over and above the desires of the group. Sometimes believing we are teaching our children to think for themselves we are, in fact, teaching them to think only of themselves and making them unsuitable for learning how to adapt themselves to others. I was having a conversation this week with a young person who has just joined a Board and he was having to learn how to adapt his ideas about managing employees to the rest of the board. It was difficult because he was having to understand the difference between acting as an individual and acting as a member of a board making decisions with which he disagreed. He had not been taught early in life to adapt himself to others.

But it is more than adapting simply to get along. It is adapting out of reverence for Christ. In other words, one of the basic Christian virtues and one of the witnesses of Christian character is learning how to submit in a way that points to Christ – and not just to our desire to get along or be pleasant. Remember what Paul wrote in Philippians 2: “Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”

It’s hard – especially when we are convinced we are right or we think someone is stepping on our rights. Learning how to adapt to others is a discipline that takes time – literally years – and that is why it is so important for us to begin early in life to encourage those skills in our children as well as ourselves.  That is, I think, the best way we can prepare our children for marriage.  Begin early on.

Paul says that wives are to adapt to husbands. I don’t believe he means they are to suffer abuse or remain in a marriage that is abusive. I don’t believe, as some pastors counsel, that wives are to take the abuse and pray that the husband will change. I don’t believe that women should be harassed by bosses and spiritual authorities or that we should ignore or punish them for being whistle blowers. It does not mean that wives are to submit to the unpredictable whims of the husband but I do believe that a wife has the unique ability to keep a husband on course to fulfill his calling – as he does hers. The marriage relationship Paul observed more than any other was that of Priscilla and Aquila. They were partners in work and ministry.  They traveled together and were an extraordinary team who had great respect for the gifts of the other.  Look at Acts 18 when Apollos begins his ministry. He knew only the baptism of John and not the whole gospel.  “When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately.” It was not just Aquila but Priscilla as well. A wife is a partner and not a trophy. One of the things on social media that offends me the most is to see pastors describe their wives as “smoking hot.” Have you seen that? It’s offensive and demeaning but we encourage it and we devalue our wives by thinking about them that way. Paul does not say our wives are to be hot. They are to be our partners in the work. She is not to be the boss or to desire to remake him but to help bring him into what God intends him to be that would not be possible without her.  That is different from nagging, isn’t it? It is a great complement for a man to have a woman in his life who believes in him and sees what he cannot see himself.

Husbands adapt by loving and sacrificing themselves for her. Husbands love her by becoming mature instead of remaining a boy to be taken care of. We call it the Peter Pan syndrome when a man refuses to grow up but wants to stay a boy all his life. Of course, it is even harder today for young men to grow up. I’ve noticed more and more young men who are completely unprepared for the responsibilities of marriage and worse, their ideas and expectations  have been corrupted by pornography.  A few years ago I saw a TED talk by Philip Zimbardo and he talked about the increasing dependence of young males on pornography and electronic games. Their healthy contact with real women is being reduced to practically none at all.

“Guys are flaming out academically; they’re wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women. So what’s the data? So the data on dropping out is amazing. Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school. There’s a 10 percent differential between getting BA’s and all graduate programs, with guys falling behind girls. 

What’s the evidence of wiping out? First, it’s a new fear of intimacy. Intimacy means physical, emotional connection with somebody else — and especially with somebody of the opposite sex. And every year there’s research done on self-reported shyness among college students. And we’re seeing a steady increase among males. And this is two kinds. It’s a social awkwardness. The old shyness was a fear of rejection. It’s a social awkwardness like you’re a stranger in a foreign land. They don’t know what to say, they don’t know what to do, especially one-on-one [with the] opposite sex. They don’t know the language of face contact, the non-verbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else, listen to somebody else.

What are the causes? Well, it’s an unintended consequence. I think it’s excessive Internet use in general, excessive video gaming, excessive new access to pornography. The problem is these are arousal addictions. Drug addiction, you simply want more. Arousal addiction, you want different. Drugs, you want more of the same — not different. So you need the novelty in order for the arousal to be sustained.

And the problem is the industry is supplying it. Jane McGonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21, he’s played 10,000 hours of video games, most of that in isolation. As you remember, Cindy Gallop said men don’t know the difference between making love and doing porn. The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week. And the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America — 15 billion annually. For every 400 movies made in Hollywood, there are 11,000 porn videos.

So the effect, very quickly, is it’s a new kind of arousal. Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they’re totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive. They’re also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which build gradually and subtly.”

This is not good, is it? We are bringing up generations of boys who will never become men. I’m not talking about testosterone inflamed brutes who trample over women and other men but boys who will not be capable of relationships other than those shaped by games and porn.  These are men who are incapable of loving women.

I’m going to skip Paul’s instructions for children and look at his counsel for us as parents and now grandparents.

There are two killers of spirit. There are two ways to embitter and goad your children – even when they are adults.

First, sarcasm. I’ve told you about my first year of teaching in middle school. After telling the students what my rules were for them I asked them what they wanted their rules to be for me. The unanimous choice for only one rule was “no sarcasm.” I could be strict, demanding and even sometimes unfair but it was sarcasm that they feared the most. As I’ve thought about it I’ve come to compare sarcasm to a hollow point bullet. While the entry point may be relatively small the bullet “mushrooms” inside the body and the collateral damage is enormous. The same is true of sarcasm with the child. It seems so negligible but the internal damage is horrendous.

Second, comparison. Chuck Swindoll puts it this way:

“We are to train a child according to his or her characteristic manner. Some will be artistic, others athletic, and still others academic. One may be strong-willed, and another compliant. One child can be encouraged by rewards or recognition, while another couldn’t care less.

We receive each child from the hand of God, not as a malleable lump of clay to be molded in whatever way we see fit, but as a unique, distinctive person with a destiny. We are to honor God’s creation of this one-of-a-kind individual by adapting our training to his or her characteristic manner. To fight it is to fight God’s creation.

Instead, study your children by developing an intimate relationship with each one. Help each child discover his or her road—the path he or she was created to follow. Then ask God to help you make the most of your child’s natural tendencies so that he or she can live in harmony with God’s design. And when maturity comes, his or her success will be a legacy you can enjoy together.”

That is impossible to do if we have preconceived notions about what it means to shape a child. It is impossible if we want to live our unfulfilled dreams through a child or if we impose burdens on them they were not able to bear.

The result is clear and it is devastating – we set the child on a path to bitterness and discouragement as adults.

Finally, the relationship between slaves and masters. There are some who toss Paul on the dump heap here because they don’t see him as fighting for social justice. They cannot be satisfied with the lack of language about natural God-given rights, human rights and individual freedom. There are others who have used these verses to justify the practice of slavery even by Christians. I don’t think it is either.

First, natural rights date back to the 13th Century resulting from an argument between the Benedictine monk William of Ockham and the authority of the Pope and the divine right of kings. William believed that God had endowed every individual human being with certain rights that were not granted by institutions – either the Church or the Crown – but were theirs by virtue of being created in the image of God. Later, during the Enlightenment the belief was developed even further and then in the 18th century the assumption of natural rights was developed by John Locke and others. Of course, Thomas Jefferson took Locke’s thoughts and wrote it into the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.– That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

I don’t believe these can be found in Scripture but are derived from a certain understanding of man’s relationship with God. Man, they say, has rights that God has given him and that cannot be taken away – even by God himself. Paul believed in the right of a Roman citizen to a trial before Caesar but that would have been a right granted by the Roman government and not by God. Paul’s emphasis is more on the giving up of perceived rights rather than claiming them. I’m not arguing against the notion of rights. They are a good thing and I don’t have a problem with rights and privileges granted by government or other men but I cannot find the evidence for being endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. They are rights granted by government and, of course, the authority of government is granted by God. They are good privileges and we should be grateful for them but they are not necessarily Scriptural or Christian principles.

So, the issue between slaves and masters is not one of rebellion or of God blessing the institution of slavery. Paul says elsewhere that slaves are to take their freedom when it is presented to them but not to overthrow their masters – or their government. Paul is interested in Christians treating each other with respect and giving each other dignity – but it is not about natural rights granted by God. That is not to be found in Scripture.

I am extremely grateful that we do not have slavery and believe we should do everything to fight it but it would not have been slavery that would have been the pressing issue for Paul. It would have been people with different status in society being able to function as one body – not because of rights but due to love and humility…by actually giving up what they held to be rights by virtue of their status or social standing.

Godly relationships do not begin with rights. Good families, good churches, good communities do not begin with rights. They begin with being mutually submissive and adapting to each other. They begin with being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose, doing nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit but in humility considering others better than yourselves, looking not only to our own interests but the interests of others.

It’s hard. It’s actually impossible without the work of the Holy Spirit.