Happy Valentine’s Day!
As Valentine’s Day is used to celebrate love and romance, today would be a good day to start a new series about one of the greatest symbols of romantic love: The Christian marriage.
Christian marriages differ from other marriages because it is the only marriage that consists of a powerful threefold bond between God, husband, and wife (Ecclesiastes 4:12). So, ideally, Christian husbands and wives form a team that is interwoven with and sustained by true love. In this way, their relationship and the fruit thereof will continue to grow stronger and healthier by the Word of God.
At least that is the way it should be… but we live in a complex and broken world.
Becoming a wife after Christ’s heart
Not so long ago, a church group I am in, discussed 1 Peter 3, and in particular, the part in which Peter instructs wives to submit to their husbands. The discussion was interesting, but as it went on, I realized how little I actually knew about what it meant to be a good wife from a Biblical perspective. I mean, my marriage has been great so far, but was I really living it the way Peter instructed? Because what does it mean to be submitted to your husband? And what about all the instructions Paul gives on how to be an obedient wife? Having to be quiet in church, needing a head covering, did I do those things?
To be completely honest with you, the words obedience and submission are cringeworthy to me. Not because I don’t want to follow God’s lead, on the contrary, but because to me these words have a negative connotation. Due to the various things I went through in my life, these words carry an undertone that brings back feelings of sadness, fear, and anger.
These feelings are mine and have nothing to do with the Bible. God is love (1 John 4:8), and His commands are all based on this love (Galatians 5:14) so they are not supposed to lead to sadness, fear, and anger in the one He loves. Quite the opposite: they are supposed to lead to more love for Him and for all people.
Once I realized that, I knew I had some praying and researching to do. I wanted to get to the bottom of what the Bible really teaches married women in respect to their men. The result was a massive document with a lot of information. Now, this website intentionally brings mostly longer, deep-diving articles, but this was a lot even by my standards. So, what to do? Compiling it into a book and selling it?
After prayerful consideration, I felt I wanted to give away these blessings as freely as I had received them. Even if it ends up in a book for easy reading purposes someday, I wanted this information to be available to all women (and men) who struggle with the same questions I did.
These are some of the topics that we will try to unravel:
- What is the Biblical view on marriage and divorce?
- Why did God design marriage the way He did?
- Why does the Bible teach wives to submit to their husbands?
- What does Biblical submission look like?
- What do Peter and Paul mean when they say that wives should be quiet?
- Why does Paul say that wives should wear a head covering?
- How do we resolve problems in our marriage?
- And much more!
This is a list of the articles that deal with these topics:
1. God’s design for marriage
2. Why the Bible teaches wives to submit to their husbands
3. 10 crucial qualities of Christian wives
4. Trouble in paradise: Putting the marriage series into practice
May these insights from God’s Word be a blessing to you and produce good fruit in all of us!