Wives, Submission, and Foolish Husbands

Tony Reinke Marriage, Wives

The following excerpt is taken from a book written for women, but one I find very helpful as a husband. The quote reminds me that my wife is called to exercise her own biblical discernment in relation to the decisions I make (or fail to make). My wife is not called to follow me into foolishness or sin. She knows this, and knowing that she knows this keeps me on my toes. I first read this excerpt around Christmas, and I’ve come back a few times since to dwell on the implications for me. What follows is the quote taken from Nancy Wilson’s book, Building Her House: Commonsensical Wisdom for Christian Women (Canon Press, 2006), pages 44–45:

The commands of submission and obedience are only difficult when we disagree with our husbands. If we agree with them and do what they say, it can hardly be called submission. Submission comes into play when we differ with them over an issue, but we defer to them and willingly give way.

But what about when the husband is in sin? This is a very important issue. What if the husband has adopted a wrong attitude and is heading in the wrong direction? Is a wife obligated to go along? It all depends. I have often been saddened that we don’t see more Abigails in the church today. She was not afraid to call her husband a fool and make arrangements behind his back without his permission [1 Sam. 25]. God blessed her abundantly for intervening in this way. She did not stay home and wait for David to attack her household while calling herself a submissive wife. She recognized that her husband was acting the part of a fool, and she exercised wisdom and prudence by going to King David herself.

If a man is acting foolishly, a woman is foolish to go along quietly. Of course this requires great wisdom. I am not advocating giving wives license to disobey in a willy-nilly fashion; that is what I am objecting to in the paragraphs above. But there are times when a godly wife should beseech her husband not to act in a foolish manner. It may involve doctrine. Perhaps she is alarmed that he is being attracted to heretical ideas, whether it is “openness theology” or Roman Catholicism. She should speak to him respectfully about this and let him know she cannot follow him there. If she belongs to a godly church, her elders would support her in this.

Perhaps he is plotting to create some kind of stink in the church. Abigail would not stand for it. A good Christian wife should go to the elders and ask them how she can be a good church member and a good wife at the same time. She should not simply stand by, hoping that her husband will do the right thing. Nor should she just accept anything her husband does as though he is infallible. If a husband is bad-mouthing his elders, his pastor, or his friends, a godly woman should refuse to go along. She should speak to him privately first, but if he is not receptive, she should go to her pastor or elders and seek their advice. This same pattern should be followed if a husband is violent, if he has a temper, if he is cheating on his income taxes, if he is not providing for the household, or if he is being sexually unfaithful in any way—and this is not an exhaustive list.

A wife is to be a helper to her husband, not a blind follower, and this sometimes involves going past him to get help. God blessed Abigail when she did this. In her case it was abundantly clear what was necessary. In other cases it might require pastoral input and oversight. But obedience and submission to a mere man is never absolute. God governs all of us. We demonstrate that we serve Him above all others when we realize that our submission and obedience to our husbands is always to be lived out within the boundaries God has wisely set for us.

Modern Day Church Fathers

Tony Reinke Masculinity, Pastor's family, Pastoral Ministry

Transcribed from Douglas Wilson’s second address at the Desiring God pastors conference:

We have to recover a proper understanding of the role of fatherhood in the church, and I don’t just mean your familial fathers, the fathers of the families that come to church. I’m talking about fathers for the church.

First Corinthians 4:15–16 says this: “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me.”

Notice what Paul says, I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. So the father here that Paul is being, the role he is playing here, does not interfere with the gospel, it is the instrument by which God brought the gospel to them.

One of the fundamental qualifications given for church leadership in the New Testament is that we must have men who know what it means to be a father (1 Timothy 3:4–5). If we continue to ignore the obvious it gets pretty complicated pretty quickly because we don’t understand how imitation governs the world. We have neglected one of the fundamental realities: we are supposed to imitate. As a result everything downstream from that goes to pieces. …

Churches need fathers to govern them, but unfortunately today’s church appears to show all the signs of being managed by the ecclesiastical equivalent of single moms. Paul requires that the church be governed by road-tested fathers. …

Now this also explains why the controversy over women’s ordination is not going to go away anytime soon. The issue is not exegesis, the issue is not what the text says. For several centuries we’ve exalted some very feminine virtues to the highest place in the church, and we have demanded that men conform to those standards. … Unfortunately, if those are the standards — if we don’t know what masculine piety looks like anymore, and we have enshrined feminine virtues in the church — then we are stuck. If those are the standards, women would do a better job at being women-pastors than men would do as women-pastors. If we must have women-pastors, then women will be better at it, it would seem to me.

I believe honestly we’re scared by masculine piety. It’s not very easy to control. It’s unsettling. So we’d rather have sweet virtues, we’d rather have feminine virtues in place, and then ask the men to conform. …

It’s not a coincidence that the requirement that bishops be road-tested family men, fathers who rule their families well, is a requirement that immediately follows the prohibition of women in ministry (1 Timothy 2:12). Because we have neglected the qualification that you must be a reliable father, we have patched together some other characteristics that we think would be “nice.” Thus we have come to demand essentially feminine virtues of our ministers, but we are stuck with this arbitrary line from the Bible that keeps the most qualified members of the church, as far as being sweet goes, out.

Assurance and Gospel Ministry

Tony Reinke Assurance, Missions

I really appreciate how J. C. Ryle connects personal assurance to bold mission. Ryle writes this in Startling Questions (NYC: 1853), pages 328-29:

Faith is life. How great the blessing! Who can tell the gulf between life and death? Yet life may be weak, sickly, unhealthy, painful, trying, anxious, worn, burdensome, joyless, smileless, to the last.

Assurance is more than life. It is health, strength, power, vigor, activity, energy, manliness, beauty. … Assurance is, after all, no more than a full-grown faith; a masculine faith that grasps Christ’s promise with both hands.

Notice how this two-handed assurance is connected to two-handed mission. He writes in The Upper Room (London: 1888), pages 78-79:

We want throughout Christendom a return to the old paths of the early Christians. The first followers of the Apostles, no doubt, were, like their teachers, “unlearned and ignorant men.” They had no printed books. They had short creeds, and very simple forms of worship. I doubt much if they could have stood an examination in the Thirty-nine Articles, or the Creed of Athanasius, or even in the Church Catechism.

But what they knew they knew thoroughly, believed intensely, and propagated unhesitatingly, with a burning enthusiasm. They grasped with both hands, and not with finger and thumb, the Personality, the Deity, the offices, the mediation, the atoning work, the free and full grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the inseparable necessity of repentance, faith, and a Christlike life of holiness, self-denial, and charity. On these truths they lived, and for them they were ready to die.

Armed with these truths, without gold to bribe or the sword to compel assent, they turned the world upside down, confounded the Greek and Roman philosophers, and altered in two or three centuries the whole face of Society.

Can we mend these “old paths”? Can we improve them after eighteen centuries? Does human nature require any different medicine? I believe the bones of the oldest human skeleton that ever was unearthed are just like the bones of men in these days, and I believe the moral nature and hearts of men, after the lapse of ages, are just the same. We had better ask for the ‘old paths.’

What a Super-Friend We Have in Jesus

Tony Reinke Friendship

I am richly blessed by a set of incredible set of friends, a fact that I am especially reminded of whenever I attend a conference like this one (DG pastors conference, Minneapolis). Each of my wise and godly friends are grace gifts from God. But I am especially thankful for Christ, my Super-Friend, to borrow a term from Ray Ortlund’s forthcoming commentary Proverbs: Wisdom That Works (Crossway: March, 2012). It is one of those “must-reads” of 2012.

Here’s what Ortlund writes:

You might have many pseudo-friends who will let you down, even when everything is on the line. But you can also have one Super-Friend who sticks closer than a brother. When the Apostle Paul was put on trial before Caesar, all his friends hightailed it. But it was okay with Paul. He was not even angry. Why? “The Lord stood by me and strengthened me” (2 Timothy 4:17). Proverbs 18:24 is saying, real friends are not found in quantity but in quality. And no one offers us higher quality friendship than Jesus Christ.

When he laid down his life for his friends at the cross, he was forsaken, though he was loyal, so that we would never be forsaken, though we are disloyal. He was the offended brother, but he opened the castle of his heart. We put our feet frequently in his house, but he never wishes we would go away.

C. S. Lewis, in his essay on friendship, says that a new friendship starts out like this: “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” Friends do not need to be alike. They just discover how much they have in common.

Guess what you have in common with Christ? Everything you care about the most.

He cares about you.

He cares about your sin.

He cares about your future.

He thinks about you.

He understands you.

He loves you.

You are not alone.

He is here.

You can receive him now.

Will you let the eternal friendship begin for you today?

C. S. Lewis on “Little Cyclones” (Young Boys)

Tony Reinke C.S. Lewis, Children, Parenting

As the father of two spirited boys, aged 10 and 4, I chuckled at these excerpts from the letters of C. S. Lewis, writing as a 55-year-old “crusted old bachelor.” (There’s some fine parenting advice mixed in here, too.)

December 21, 1953 [Letters, 3:389–390]:

We have had an American lady staying in the house with her two sons aged 9 1/2 and 8. I now know what we celibates are shielded from. I will never laugh at parents again. Not that the boys weren’t a delight: but a delight like surf-bathing which leaves one breathless and aching. The energy, the tempo, is what kills.

I have now perceived (what I always suspected from memories of our childhood) that the way to a child’s heart is quite simple: treat them with seriousness and ordinary civility — they ask no more. What they can’t stand (quite rightly) is the common adult assumption that everything they say should be twisted into a kind of jocularity.

December 23, 1953 [Letters, 3:394]:

We have not much news here; the chief event has been that last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys, aged nine and seven respectively. Can you imagine two crusted old bachelors in such a situation? It however went swimmingly, though it was very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing.

This pair thought nothing of a four-mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as they got back to the ground, ‘Let’s do it again!’ Without being in the least priggish, they stuck us as being amazingly adult by our standards and one could talk to them as one would to ‘grown-ups’ — though the next moment they would be wrestling like puppies on the sitting room floor. The highlights of England for them are open coal fires, especially if they can get hold of the billows and blow it up…

December 26, 1953 [Letters, 3:396]:

My brother and I have just had the experience of an American lady to stay with us accompanied by her two sons, aged 9 1/2 and 8. Whew! Lovely creatures — couldn’t meet nicer children — but the pace! I realize have never respected young married people enough and never dreamed of the Sabbath calm which descends on the house when the little cyclones have gone to bed and all the grown-ups fling themselves into chairs and the silence of exhaustion.

The Unwasted Life

Tony Reinke Culture, Francis Schaeffer, Humility, Love

Francis A. Schaeffer was born 100 years ago today (Jan. 30, 1912). He died in 1984. In 1974 he wrote this in his book No Little People:

As I see it, the Christian life must be comprised of three concentric circles, each of which must be kept in its proper place.

In the outer circle must be the correct theological position, true biblical orthodoxy and the purity of the visible church. This is first, but if that is all there is, it is just one more seedbed for spiritual pride.

In the second circle must be good intellectual training and comprehension of our own generation. But having only this leads to intellectualism and again provides a seedbed for pride.

In the inner circle must be the humble heart — the love of God, the devotional attitude toward God. There must be the daily practice of the reality of the God whom we know is there.

These three circles must be properly established, emphasized and related to each other. At the center must be kept a living relationship to the God we know exists. When each of these three circles is established in its proper place, there will be tongues of fire and the power of the Holy Spirit. Then, at the end of my life, when I look back over my work since I have been a Christian, I will see that I have not wasted my life.