[Re-Blog] How do I Lovingly Submit to my Husband…When We Disagree?
When I first told my husband I wanted to use a head-covering, and explained that the Bible tells women to do so as a sign of submission, he gave me a frown. Submission? The word was distasteful to him. It made him think of a brainless dish rag subjugating herself to every whim of her tyrant master. But, that’s not what he was! So, why submission? After we realized that the Bible uses the word submission to mean that the wife respects her husband’s leadership, we were back on familiar ground.
Similar to how my husband respects and “submits” to the authority of his boss at work, God expects me to respect and submit to the authority of my husband. It doesn’t mean he’s better than me; it means his role and my role are different. He has been given by God the responsibility of leading his family. I have been given by God the responsibility of respecting his opinions and “following through with his orders.” I don’t think submission is so hard to understand when put in those terms.
It’s fairly easy to follow through with orders when what your boss asks of you is something you also agree with. But what about when your boss asks you to do something you don’t agree with? What then? If my husband “disobeys” his boss at work, he could get fired! In the work realm, disrespecting your boss’s orders can get you into big trouble. In much the same way, when a wife disrespects her “boss’s” orders (or wishes), trouble is just around the corner. Marital problems develop. Finger pointing and blaming worsen the situation. Things might get uglier than that; things could end in divorce! That’s not a biblical solution, of course. But, if we don’t want that to happen to us, if we don’t want problems in our marriage, we need to think about how toprevent them before the situation gets serious. There’s got to be a better way of dealing with disagreement.
So, I’m going to throw out a few examples of how one might deal with differences of opinion in a marriage. Of course, these are my own opinions, and even though I will sometimes use quotations from the Bible to support what I believe to be the best solution, you are responsible for reading the Bible for yourself, and obeying God according to your best interpretation. Just watch out for those sneaky preconceived notions that can sometimes get in the way! In this post, I’m going to address head-covering. In subsequent posts, I will tackle other issues.
> READ THE REST: How do I Lovingly Submit to my Husband…When We Disagree? (head covering)
