🧍🏻♀️ Wives submit to your husbands
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”
Ephesians 5:22 (NKJV)
The same command appears three times in the New Testament—Ephesians 5:22, Colossians 3:18, 1 Peter 3:1. Three different letters, three different contexts, one consistent instruction. And yet this is perhaps the most avoided, apologised—for, and quietly buried verse in the modern evangelical church.
Each passage pairs the wife’s command with a command to husbands: love your wives as Christ loved the Church. That pairing matters. But note what the Bible never says. It never instructs wives to love their husbands, nor does it command husbands to submit to their wives. This is not an accident or a cultural artefact—it reflects something true about human nature on both sides.
Women do not need a separate command to love; it comes naturally. What goes against a wife’s fallen nature is deference—yielding authority to her husband rather than seizing it for herself. Genesis 3:16 makes this explicit: the consequence of the Fall is that the woman’s desire will be for her husband, meaning to control and dominate him. The command to submit is God’s corrective to that fallen instinct, not a cultural imposition.
Men, on the other hand, are not primarily wired for tenderness—they are wired for respect. A husband who feels genuinely honoured by his wife will pour out love in return; a husband who is chronically disrespected will shut down or leave. The asymmetry of the commands is not arbitrary but surgical: God is prescribing exactly what each is most prone to withhold and what the other most deeply needs.
The order is not accidental
There is one more detail worth sitting with: in all three passages, the wife’s command comes first. The instruction to submit always precedes the instruction to love. I don’t think this is arbitrary. It suggests that the wife’s obedience is not contingent on the husband’s performance. She is not told: submit once he loves you sacrificially. She is told to submit as unto the Lord—a standard that does not wait for the husband to qualify.
The Church has quietly reversed this priority. Today’s preaching puts almost all the weight on husbands: love her more, serve her better, be more like Christ. The wife’s calling is barely mentioned, or is buried in qualifications—yes, submit, but only in a loving marriage, only when he earns it, only if… The result is that many women in the Church have never seriously reckoned with what Scripture actually asks of them. They have heard plenty about being loved. They have heard almost nothing about their own obedience.
The cost of this imbalance
The consequences are visible. Men are disappearing from church. A husband who receives consistent disrespect at home while being told from the pulpit that he is the one failing will eventually stop showing up—to church, to family, to faith. The feminisation of the Church has not made it more loving; it has made it inhospitable to men and has left women without the biblical framework they need to build a marriage that holds.
Returning to this teaching is not about hierarchy for its own sake. It is about obedience to a God who designed marriage and knows how it works. His commands are not a power play—they are a description of reality. Wives who submit and husbands who love sacrificially create the kind of home where children are raised well, faith is passed on, and the image of Christ and the Church is displayed to a watching world.
That is the design. Let us return to it without apology.
Update (April 2026): I have since written a follow-up — Upbringing and Marriage — which explores how wifely submission and parental discipline are not merely related but are, in the end, one and the same.