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THY WILL BE DONE

I don’t know how many of you are oldtimer-enough to remember when Kenneth Taylor’s Living Bible first came out. First there were Living Letters in 1962, then Living Prophecies in ‘65, and so on. If the imprints are correct, Tyndale House Publishers finally gave us the long-awaited entire 66-book Bible in 1971.

There’s a reason for the chronology, because we’re going to a very difficult piece of Scripture today, found at the end of Ephesians 5, and I want you to hear how this comfortable, loose paraphrase rendered the hard verses we’re going to study all week. Listen as we read beginning in verse 21:

“Honor Christ by submitting to each other.” So far so good. Now verse 22, and hold on to your hat: “You wives must submit to your husbands’ leadership in the same way you submit to the Lord. For a husband is in charge of his wife in the same way Christ is in charge of His body the church. (He gave His very life to take care of it and be its Savior!) So you wives must willingly OBEY your husbands in everything, just as the church obeys Christ.”

I’m afraid to go on, because maybe a third of you have checked out right there. Friend, let me invite you — please — stay by! The Bible doesn’t check out; it doesn’t swerve away from the hard questions, and we need to do the same. In any case, let me remind you that this is a paraphrase — one man’s opinion — circa 1971. Now, just to calm the tempers and rising tides of emotion, let’s speed ahead to the much more recent paraphrase, entitled The Message, which is by Dr. Eugene Peterson. We’ve been using it a great deal on the broadcast lately; let’s see how the apostle Paul comes across this time with the date 1993 influencing the language. Same passage:

“Out of respect for Christ,” he writes, “be courteously reverent to one another.” The “S” word, “submit,” is already toned way down. Let’s continue: “Wives, understand and support your husbands in ways that show your support for Christ. The husband provides leadership to his wife the way Christ does to His church, not by domineering but by cherishing. So just as the church submits to Christ as He exercises such leadership, wives” — now he does use the word — “wives should likewise submit to their husbands.”

The word “obey” has gone by the boards, but “submit” is still very gently there.
Let’s proceed with fear and trembling, and first of all agree that we do feel comfortable with verse 21.

“Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Do you get a picture in your mind of Jesus, King of the universe, getting down on His knees on a Thursday evening, wearing just a towel, and washing the dirt off the feet of men like Peter? And John? And Judas? That was submitting. That was being willing to be a servant, as Paul writes so eloquently in Philippians 2. We remember Abraham, back in the Old Testament, saying to his nephew, Lot: “You go ahead and choose where your family will live. My family and I will take whatever’s left.” We find Daniel speaking respectfully to heathen kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar.

There are two reasons here in verse 21 why Christians will be willing to accept this blueprint of humility within the Body of Christ. In the King James it says: “In the fear of God.” The Bible teaches that this is God’s way, to submit one to the other. To not seek your own glory. God’s own Son didn’t do it, and neither should we. In both the NIV and this Message paraphrase, the idea is more clearly stated: “Out of reverence for Christ,” or “out of respect for Christ.” Because we love His Church, and because we always want to imitate Christ, as we studied a week ago, we come to the organized body with an attitude of submission.

There are some marvelous comments about this concept in the Tyndale New Testament Commentary, and let’s enjoy them quick while we’re still on safe and agreeable ground! Here’s what author Francis Foulkes suggests:

“The enthusiasm that the Spirit inspires is not to be expressed individualistically, but in fellowship. He [Paul] has seen the dangers of individualism in a Christian community, and in I Cor. 14:26-33 he corrects this.” That’s a beautiful Bible passage about orderly worship, by the way. Continuing: “[Paul] knew from experience that the secret of maintaining joyful fellowship in the community was the order and discipline that comes from the willing submission of one person to another. Pride of position and the authoritarian spirit are destructive of fellowship.”

Have you ever attended a church where one person just was always going to get his or her way? Even the senior pastor can’t expect that kind of autocratic power; we all need to be willing to kneel down and say to the church: “I’m here to be a servant, a part of this miraculous organism called the Body of Christ. If the majority feels like my plan or my agenda isn’t going to work, I’ll be the first person to line up at the shredding machine.”

By the way, this Tyndale commentary goes on to list some of the very practical things that this word “submit” is going to demand of us. Notice this:

“There must be a willingness in the Christian fellowship to serve any, to learn from any, to be CORRECTED by any, regardless of age, sex, class or any other division.”

Can you say “been there, done that”? I certainly can. It hurts to be upbraided and corrected and instructed by someone that you may consider your underling, but within the community of believers, we need to bring a humble heart. Friend, even Jesus did something one dark Thursday evening that He didn’t want to do. In our Discover Bible Course Lesson #4, entitled A Plan For Your Life, is a section entitled “Submitting to God’s Plan.” Listen to this:

“One powerful lesson we can learn from the life of Jesus is submission to the Father’s will. Even amid the terrible agony of Gethsemane, He cried out, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will.” After three years of His ministry, living day by day in harmony with the Father’s plan, Christ’s dying words were: ‘It is finished.’ Jesus was really saying, ‘My God-planned life is now complete and fulfilled.’”

Another commentary we looked at made the suggestion — and it’s a good one — that not only is submission a character trait that is beneficial for the organized body of believers, but it also helps US personally in our spiritual growth.

“Submission, humility, and subjection are essential characteristics of the believer,” they write.

And you know, what we need to learn from these verses and from these excellent comments from the theologians is this: submission is a high honor, not a sign of weakness! To lower yourself is not a low thing! To be humble is noble, not ignoble, brave, not cowardly. Listen, friend, Jesus Christ submitted to a higher authority, and that great Philippians 2 passage heralds the glorious news that God the Father then took His own Son and placed Him on the highest throne there is, and that “every knee will bow and every tongue confess.” The point is this: we submit and demonstrate humility as an act of noble service because we love Jesus Christ and we love the Church. In the same way, as we move into these hard, divisive verses, we’re going to find the same principle to be true. Men and women are going to submit and put others first in all relationships, not because they’re weak and inferior, but because they’re the opposite! Because they’re part of something glorious and noble, and because a blueprint exists which fosters that glory and nobility. Please mark this down: there is nothing demeaning whatsoever in the kind of submitting that Paul writes about in the New Testament. And if we think there is, we’re reading it wrong or using it wrong or both.

What we’re going to find here in these hard final verses of Ephesians 5 is that every relationship we have needs to be patterned after how things are in heaven’s kingdom. The submission, the humility, the honoring of others, the desire for order and harmony, the dignity of every believer. In our families, in our marriages, in our board meetings, and especially in our churches — we want everything to be a beautiful copy of how things are between Jesus Christ and His Church and Jesus Christ and His Father. Back in that Tyndale commentary for Ephesians, the author writes:

“So ALL human relationships, as Paul will now show, find their pattern and meaning and ordered expression under the authority of Christ. The most vital of these relationships are those of the family, for in every age the home must be the place where above all the peace and harmony, the love and discipline of Christ are most clearly manifest.”

Let me ask you husbands and you wives. And you pastors. And you church parishioners. Wouldn’t you want a home, and a church, where you enjoyed the same closeness, the same intimacy and communication that Jesus Christ and God the Father have? Wouldn’t that be an ideal to seek? You bet it would. And it all begins with that humble-sounding, meek-sounding, but ultimately noble and powerful word: submit.