Christianity is a Family Affair

We have been studying the book of Colossians. And in the third and fourth chapters, we have begun to see how faith in Jesus Christ ought to be making a practical difference in the way we live. It ought to be changing our inner attitudes and our outward appearance.

And nowhere should that be more true than in the home. The kind of person you are in private, in the confines of your own home with your own family, speaks volumes about the progress you are making in the Christian life.

Some Christians try to put on a show. They try to make people think that they are very spiritual. But when you get those people home, behind closed doors, you often see an entirely different story.

Christian psychologist Dr. Henry Brandt tells of how one of his clients—a teenaged boy—was rebelling against his parents. The family were Christians, and the parents wanted their son to go to church, but he didn’t want to go. He simply refused. When Dr. Brandt asked him why, here is what he said:

“Why should I go to church? Look at the way my parents treat each other. Last Sunday morning we were sitting at the breakfast table in silence because my father refused to talk to my mother. And she wouldn’t even look at him. I guess they were having another big fight, which isn’t unusual for them.

After breakfast, my Dad turns to me and says “Get ready. You’re going to church with us.” They forced me to go to church with them. In the car on the way to church, they didn’t say a word to each other. There was nothing but cold silence.

But then we pulled into the parking lot and it was like a major transformation took place. Suddenly, they both put happy smiles on their faces. We got out of the car and Dad actually put his arm around Mom and they walked into the church that way. You’d think they were friends or something. They were happy and laughing and joking with everybody all morning long. They looked like a perfect couple.

But then we got back into the car to go home, and the smiles came off. And they never said a word to each other for the rest of the day. That’s why I don’t want to go to church.”

That kind of Christianity is toxic to kids who grow up in a home like that. If they do not see that there is some connection between what you say you believe and what you actually do at home, when you are in private, when your guard is down, they will abandon the faith. Because nobody wants to grow up to be a hypocrite.

That’s why the Bible teaches us that we’ve got to take God home from church. We have to allow our relationship with Jesus Christ to permeate every other relationship in our life—we have to be willing to obey the Scriptures at home—to let the Bible determine what kind of husband or wife or parent or child we’re going to be. And it also has to define who we are and what we do at work—what kind of employee or what kind of boss we are.

The Lord teaches us about our roles in the home and in the workplace in Colossians ch. 3, beginning at verse 18. Let’s examine this passage together.

Colossians 3:18-21 Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.

Let’s stop there. These four little verses talk about being a Christian at home. Verses 18–19 talk about marriage; verses 20–21 talk about child-rearing. Let’s look at the verses on marriage:

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.

Did you ever stop to realize that marriage is the only institution on earth today that was around before there was sin in the world. It’s a relationship that was given to us by God before the Fall of man. There was marriage in paradise before there was sin.

You’ve probably heard the story about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They had an ideal marriage. He never had to listen to her talking about all the guys she could have married, and she never had to listen to him bragging about what a great cook his mother was.

Seriously, Adam and Eve were a married couple. And when Adam and Eve fell into sin, that had a devastating effect on their marriage. You can see in Genesis 3 how they started blaming each other, how sin drove a wedge between them. And sin not only had a profound effect on their marriage; it has had profound implications for every marriage ever since. Let’s look at Genesis 3:16 for a moment to see the implications that the Fall had on marriage.

Adam and Eve rebelled against God and brought sin into the world. That meant that the world was now damaged; it was no longer the perfect, healthy, happy place that God created it to be. It was cursed. And one of the aspects of that curse is given to us in Genesis 3:16.

Genesis 3:16 To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

Just look at that last sentence: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” The Hebrew word that is translated “desire” means a desire to control, or manipulate, or dominate. And the Hebrew word for “rule” means to subjugate, to put down, to force your will upon someone.

So here is what happens to marriage after the Fall—it became a contest; a competition between two people who want their own way.

As human beings, we now have sin in our hearts. That means that if you are a wife, you will have within you a tendency to want to control or manipulate your husband in order to get your own way.

And if you are a husband, you will have a tendency within you that will make you want to put down your wife and force your will upon her in order to get your own way. You see, sinful creatures always want to get their own way. That’s the driving force within them. And they’ll do whatever it takes to get it. That’s how we are as human beings in our natural state, according to Genesis 3.

So if you take two sinners and bring them into close proximity in a marriage relationship, that doesn’t sound like the recipe for a real happy relationship, does it? Because both of them are naturally wired to look out for themselves and their own interests.

But now here’s where Christianity makes a difference: when you put your trust in Jesus Christ, He changes your natural state. He takes away your sin. He brings you into relationship with God. He puts to death that old self and he gives you a new you that’s alive to God and God’s way of doing things. So Jesus actually begins to reverse the effects of the Fall in your life.

Does that mean automatically, overnight, you become a changed person? No it doesn’t, because now it is up to us to put to death the old behavior patterns that are left over from our old way of life. The Christian life isn’t all automatic—there are some things God wants me to do. There are some imperatives that I have to carry out in order to experience the full effects of my salvation.

And that is true of marriage. If you want to have a happy marriage—if you want to experience marriage as it was meant to be experienced before the Fall—as a wife you need to submit to your husband, and as a husband, you need to love your wife. And the two go hand in hand. Let’s have a closer look at each of them.

A lot of people have a problem with the word “submit”. The feminist movement gets all up in arms about this and they say that Paul obviously hated women and the Bible puts women down and all that stuff. But they don’t understand what the word submit means. They think that submission means subjugation, but that is not what the word means.

The word submit was a actually a Greek military term that meant “to arrange in order under ranks”. In other words, when an officer would cry out “submit”, the soldiers would assemble into orderly ranks. They would take their places in order to form an effective fighting unit. You can’t win a battle if the soldiers are all over the place going their own way, doing their own thing. You need to get them into some sort of order so that they’re all moving in the same direction. You’ve gotta get them on the same page.

And that is what submission is. It is choosing to get on the same page. It is about being willing to take your place in an authority structure in order to see something good happen—to get a job done; to reach a goal; to move together in one direction.

The U.S. Army is a good example of this. The U.S. Army is an all-volunteer force. Everybody in the Army is there because they want to be there. They’ve chosen to be there. They’ve made a choice.

Now some of the men and women choose to go in as officers. And some of the men and women choose to go in as enlisted personnel. But that doesn’t mean that the officers are “better” or “smarter” or more valuable than the enlisted personnel—they just occupy a different place in the authority structure.

The effectiveness of the Army depends upon the officers and the enlisted personnel working together and cooperating together. The enlisted soldiers rely on their officers to plan the mission properly. The officers rely upon the enlisted people to carry out the orders properly. There will be times when the officers literally put their lives in the hands of the enlisted personnel, and vice versa. And there is trust there, because they are all working together for a common goal.

But if you were to interject an element of competition into that system, the whole system would break down. There would be rivalry, mistrust, conflict. It wouldn’t work anymore, because the element of submission would be missing.

Likewise in marriage. Marriage is a structure—it’s an organized relationship between two people. And for a structure to work, you’ve got to have commitment to the structure by the people who are in it.

A Christian wife needs to decide to voluntarily put aside her own agenda and take her place with her husband in the authority structure of marriage, willingly submitting to his leadership, in order that together they might move toward God’s ideal for them as a couple.

In doing so, she is not saying “I’m inferior to my husband.” She is not saying that women are somehow less intelligent or capable or have less intrinsic worth. She is simply taking her God-given place in the structure of marriage in order to make the structure work.

But many wives find it very difficult to do that. It may be that they have been hurt very deeply in their past by someone close to them and they’re not going to let that happen again. It may be that they feel very insecure when they are not “in control” of a relationship.

Some wives lose respect for their husband, and feel that he is not worthy to be the leader in their relationship. Other women set out to try to change their husbands and make them into their image of what a man should be.

But it is not a wife’s job to change her husband. That’s God’s job. It’s her job to encourage him and honor him and be faithful in praying that God would change him.

Now what about a wife who has a husband who is a tyrant? He is cruel to her and abuses her and treats her like dirt? We’re seeing more and more of this kind of behavior.

Is a wife to submit to that kind of a husband? Is she to subject herself to that kind of treatment? Absolutely not. That is not submission, that is capitulation, and God never asks a woman to do that.

If a woman finds herself in that kind of situation, and there is no repentance on the part of her husband and no desire to change, she needs to get away from that man. God does not expect a woman to lose her dignity as a human being at the hands of a husband who obviously doesn’t care about her and has only his own interests at heart.

You see, the Bible links a woman’s duty to submit in verse 18 to the husband’s duty to love in verse 19. THAT LINKAGE IS THE KEY TO THE WHOLE RELATIONSHIP. This is where marriage really comes into focus. It is a reciprocal relationship.

Husbands are to love their wives and treat them with tenderness, gentleness, dignity, and respect. This is the clear teaching of the Bible in all of the major passages on marriage.

And that takes submission on his part. He must submit his needs, his wants, his interests, for the greater good of his wife. Her well-being becomes his first priority.

And that teaching was a revolutionary concept, because in the ancient world, and for much of history, men have simply dominated women. A wife was treated as not much more than a piece of property. She had very few rights and even fewer privileges.

But the Bible’s teaching changed all that. It elevated women by demanding of their husbands that they love their wives with a self-giving, self-sacrificing kind of love. The word love in verse 19 is the word “agape”, and it means unconditional love.

In other words, husbands are to love their wives as their first priority. And that love has nothing to do with how they look or how they act. It is an unconditional love. Husbands are to love their wives even if they are no longer beautiful. Husbands are to set aside their own interests and needs and wants in order to meet the needs of their wives. And husbands are to take the initiative in doing this.

There once was a man who loved his wife tenderly and steadfastly for 15 years without any responding love on her part. She couldn’t respond, for she had developed cerebral arteriosclerosis, a chronic brain syndrome.

At the onset of the disease, she was an attractive, vivacious woman of sixty, who looked at least 10 years younger. In the beginning, she experienced intermittent times of confusion. As the disease progressed, she gradually lost all her mental faculties and did not even recognize her own husband.

He took care of her at home for the first five years. During that time, he often took her for visits, she looking her prettiest although she had no idea of where she was, and he proudly introducing her to everyone as his wife, even though her remarks were apt to be inappropriate for the situation.

He never made an apology for her; he never indicated that there was anything wrong with what she had just said. He always treated her with the utmost courtesy and showered her with love and attention, no matter what she said or did.

The time came when the doctors said she had to go into a nursing home for intensive care. She lived there for ten years and he was with her every day. As long as she was able to, he took her for a drive each afternoon—out to their farm, or downtown, or to visit the family—never in any way embarrassed that she was so far out of touch.

He never made a negative comment about her. He did not begrudge the large amount of money required to keep her in the home all those years, never even hinted that it might be a problem. In fact, he never complained about any detail of her care throughout the long illness. He always obtained the best for her and did the best for her.

The author who related that story is Dr. Ed Wheat, a Christian counselor. And he reveals at the end of the story that those people were his parents.

When Paul says in verse 19 “don’t be harsh with them”, he is using an expression which means “don’t throw your weight around”. As a husband, don’t be crabby and cross, or irritable with your wife. Don’t put her down. Don’t treat her or talk to her so that she will feel bad about herself. She is your greatest asset. In Ephesians 5, Paul says that a man who loves his wife loves himself.

I don’t think that a woman will have a problem submitting and putting herself under the leadership of a man who treats her that way.

There is an old legend from the Middle Ages of a prince who, along with his family, was taken captive by the soldiers of an enemy king. The prince and his wife and children were brought before the king and the king asked the prince “What will you give me if I release you.”

The prince replied “I will give you half of all that I own.” The king asked “What will you give me if I release your children?” The prince replied “For my children’s freedom, I will give you everything that I own.”

The king then asked him “What will you give me to release your wife?” And the prince replied “Your Majesty, for her I would give up my life.”

The king was so moved by the man’s devotion to his wife and his family that he freed them all. As they returned home, the prince said to his wife “Wasn’t that king a gracious man? And handsome of appearance too!”

She replied “Beloved, I did not notice the king. I could keep my eyes only on the one who was willing to give his life for me.”

We live in a culture that glorifies romantic love. Just look at the story line of the most popular movies. Listen to the lyrics of the best-selling songs. Romantic love is portrayed as the ideal, and the foundation for happiness in life.

But the Bible teaches that a truly successful marriage depends upon romantic love maturing into unconditional love.

Romantic love is based upon so many other factors. Appearance. Personality. Environment. Atmosphere. Acts of kindness. All these things are the building blocks of romantic love. It’s conditional on the presence of those factors. And if those factors should no longer be present, you no longer have romantic love.

People talk about “falling in love” and “falling out of love” and they are talking about romantic love. But when a relationship matures to the point of unconditional “agape” love, you can no longer “fall out of love”, because your love for each other is no longer dependent upon outside factors.

It is dependent upon an inside factor—a choice that you have made in your heart to love and go on loving, no matter what.

And that’s the kind of love that husbands are to have for their wives. Because that’s the kind of love that Jesus had for us.

Now we haven’t gotten very far in our study. And we’ll come back to this passage next week to talk about parenting.

But in the meantime, let’s pray that we who are married, would show our love for God by lining ourselves up with these Biblical principles for marriage that we have looked at today.

Marriages all around us are falling apart because the non-Christian world has abandoned God’s action plan for marriage. The world needs to see a positive example of loving, caring marriages among Christians.