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respect or disrespect. For a woman, everything is seen as loving or unloving. I can honestly tell you that all my pushing, nagging, telling him to read this or do that, and failing to pray for Mark made things worse. He felt totally disrespected, not encouraged, by me, and felt as if I was trying to fix him by making him into what I wanted instead of who God wanted. I wasn’t encouraging him toward what God had, but demanding what I wanted him to be and do.

I found that once I started praying for him, and praying for God to reveal my own heart, God gave me tenderness and patience toward Mark. I also started to see my own sins (instead of just focusing on his all the time) and was convicted to work on those. The Bible says it is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance, so we need to follow that example of kindness with our husbands. If they have unrepentant sin that needs to be addressed, we need to invite them toward change through our encouraging words and actions, rather than demanding change and disrespecting them.

The clearest section in all Scripture commanding a husband to love his wife and a wife to submit to her husband, Ephesians 5:21, talks about “submitting to one another in the fear of God.” We believe this means the husband gets to decide when he feels disrespected, and the wife needs to honor that. And the wife gets to decide when she feels unloved, and the husband needs to honor that. For example, we have conflict when Mark says, “I was loving you when I said or did __________” and I disagree. If I don’t feel loved, then I get to make that call, and he needs to work on how he can be more loving with me. On the other hand, I sometimes disagree when Mark says I am talking to him disrespectfully, but because he is the one who feels disrespected, then I need to trust him and change my tone, body language, or method of how I am talking to him.

Submitting Respectfully

Unfortunately, submission is often a misunderstood word for men and women. The culture’s lie is that a woman’s worth decreases when she submits to her husband. The truth of the Bible is that a woman’s value does not increase or decrease if she submits, because her value comes from being created in God’s image, just as Adam and Eve were.a Our value comes not from what we do; rather, what we do comes from our value as God’s image bearers. For example, my five children don’t have any less value than I do just because they submit to me as a parent; they were created in the image of God and merely depend on me for care and instruction. As Christians, this is why we believe the unborn and born, young and old, healthy and sick, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, and women and men are all equally valuable. A husband and wife are equals on the same mission with different roles and responsibilities. We are both reliant on God’s grace, and both called to obedience and responsibility.

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The Bible frequently commands that a wife submit to her husband.b Before explaining what this means, we must first explain what this does not mean.

First, a husband is not in ultimate authority over his wife. For this reason, if he asks her to sin, she must not, because she needs to be in submission to her highest authority, the will of God as revealed in the Word of God. For this reason, if her husband commits a crime, she can call the police; and if he commits a sin and remains unrepentant, she can call the pastor. The husband’s authority is derivative. This means authority does not come from him, because he is not a god, but authority comes to him from God.

Second, a husband is not, by his God-given authority, automatically more valuable, gifted, competent, or intelligent than his wife. Thus, a husband is not always right, and his wife is free to have her own independent thoughts. Because God created man and woman equal in the sense of bearing His image equally, we also carry equal spiritual worth as we partner together, and the man’s primary responsibility is to lead the marriage in a God-glorifying direction. If you have different theological convictions, you