Unfinished Thoughts on Submission

 In the book of Ephesians, we are commanded to submit to one another, and wives are commanded to submit to their husbands. What does it mean to submit? What does it look like practically? Why is it so hard? How can we make it easier?


I hope to answer some of these questions today in this short essay. Submission is on my mind partly because I know a godly wife submits to her husband, and I want to practice this virtue now.


Submitting is relinquishing control. This is very hard. We are almost all control freaks in some way. To the extent that you have been in positions of leadership or responsibility, you may be used to controlling the situation, to having things your way.


We are commanded to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ (Eph. 5:21). This is not because the other person is better than we are. It is not necessarily because they deserve our submission. We are called to give up our interests in favor of others because Christ gave up his interests for us. Philippians 2 tells us that though Christ was in very nature God, he humbled himself and was obedient, even to the point of dying on a cross! Christ obeyed the Father, therefore, we should obey Christ. 


By going to the cross, Christ was giving up his own interests. He was giving up what he wanted. Ηe was giving up control. In Gethsemane, Jesus prayed to the Father, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will but what you will.” Jesus gave up everything to submit to the Father. He humbled himself and was made man. He temporarily laid aside his great glory. As a man, he spent his time doing his Father’s work, and thus did not get to enjoy many human pleasures (a home, wife, children, old age, wealth, the praises of men). At the end, he was ridiculed, mocked, tortured, and put to death. Not a single one of us can give up more than Jesus gave up. And yet we struggle when faced with the choice of giving up the leftover pizza, or letting a sibling have the last word in an argument. We fight over whether to stop at Wendy’s or Chick-fil-A, which movie to watch, or how long the light gets left on in the bedroom at night. We get frustrated when a sibling doesn’t help unload the groceries or clean the kitchen, and we get mad and grumpy when we have to get up and go to work even though we don’t feel like it. We take offense because of the way someone spoke of us (or forgot to mention us). 


The sacrifices we are called to make are often miniscule compared to the sacrifices Christ made for us. So why do we find it so hard? Don’t we know that we are supposed to imitate and obey Christ? You would think that we would be so overflowing with gratitude for what he has done for us that we would find it easy to obey. When we don’t submit to others out of reverence for Christ, we are like the unmerciful servant in Matt. 18. His master forgave his huge debt, thus preventing his whole family from being sold into slavery and preserving his wealth. But when this same servant found another servant who owed a small debt, he grabbed him and began to choke him, saying “Pay back what you owe me!” This unmerciful servant had his fellow servant thrown into prison until he could be pack the debt. When the master heard of this, he was angry with the wicked servant and rebuked him for his lack of mercy. Then he turned him over to the jailers to be tortured until he paid back what he owed. It is unthinkable that we would refuse to give up our desires to others when Christ has given up so much more for us. It shows that we don’t care about what he has done for us.


So, submission is giving up our desires for the sake of others, and we are to do it out of reverence for Christ. We imitate Christ by submitting to him as he submitted to the Father. And we obey Christ by giving ourselves up for others as he gave himself up for us. Not only is this the correct response to Christ’s sacrifice, but it would be wicked and unthinkable to respond in any other way (as shown in the parable of the unmerciful servant).


Submission is hard because our natural state is to strive for our own desires. “What causes fights and quarrels among you?” James asks. “Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:1-3). Directly before this passage, James contrasts the wisdom of the devil to the wisdom that comes from heaven. The wisdom of the devil is the natural wisdom of this world. It is the wisdom of our flesh. It says that we should strive for what we desire. It says that striving for our desires is what will bring joy, peace, and security — what every person desires. But James says that this “wisdom” produces disorder and every evil practice. Is that really what we want our lives to be characterized by?


There is a battle going on inside our hearts. This battle is between the old sinful nature and the new nature of Christ in us. It is a battle between the old, sin-filled you (descended from Adam), and the new, Spirit-filled you (descended from Christ). Your old nature lives according to the wisdom of the devil, and it strives for its own desires. This is the battle that Paul describes in Romans 7:


“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work:  When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making a me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am? Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”


 Your new nature strives for what the Spirit desires. “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires (Romans 8:5).”

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