When a wife presses into the most difficult aspects of Christian obedience, her life will shout to her sons and daughters that Jesus is telling the truth. In the Christian life, spontaneously “feeling like” doing something is not a prerequisite for actually doing it — trusting God’s promises is. And his word assures us that self-sacrifice, as strenuous as it may be in the moment, is the mainstay of unshakable joy. How meaningful might the lesson be for children if they not only heard mom say it but watched mom live it?

Once there lived a young boy who struggled to obey his mother. Now, you may be thinking, What a boring story. That boy is just like every other child. And so he was — except that he disregarded his mother’s wishes for a very particular, well-formed reason: his mother was a teller, never a shower.

“Eat less sugar,” she would mumble to him, a half-chewed chocolate muffling her voice.

“Stop using the iPad,” she would say, without bothering to look up from her phone.

“Finish your homework,” she would tell him, all while the dirty dishes grew from pile to peak.

“Go and get some exercise,” she would call upstairs, never much mounting the steps herself.

“Drink water, not soda,” “Eat fruits and vegetables instead of junk food,” “Choose sleep over media,” “Give thanks rather than complaining,” “Listen before speaking” — he heard her commands. But he never saw them.

Though his mother reminded him (nearly every day, in fact) that her instructions were “good for him,” over time the boy came to believe that her rules must not have been very good at all. For if they were actually good, she would have done more than say them. She would have lived them.

Regrettably, I’m sometimes not so different from the boy’s mother, especially in one area: submission to authority.

Words to Live By

In the spirit of Ephesians, I often pray our son would embrace parenting as given by God for his good. “Children,” Paul writes, “obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” But for as much as I herald Ephesians 6:1, I find it harder to heed Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”

One moment, I’m calmly explaining to our toddler that obedience to me as his mom, imperfect as I am, honors God — and the next, I’m unnecessarily quarreling with his dad. As I do, disrespect runs across my face, annoyance through my voice, and unbelief in my heart.

I can’t choose to trust God’s will for children while rejecting his will for wives. He breathed the Bible’s every word into existence (2 Timothy 3:16), and he calls all people — toddlers, seniors, boys, girls, marrieds, singles, husbands, wives — to “live . . . by every word” (Matthew 4:4).

Not just know every word (which would be wise). Not just tell others to obey every word (which is called for). But, first and foremost, live by every word for ourselves. And for wives, submission to our husbands, as the God-appointed head of our household, is one word we are called to embrace with our lives.

To be clear, embracing submission does not mean remaining silent. A submissive wife still speaks up. She asks questions, expresses concern, disagrees. She isn’t afraid to share her heart’s longings or spirit’s burdens with her husband, nor is she afraid to tell others of marital abuse. But what she does fear is a wife’s millennia-old temptation to rule over him whom God has appointed as her head (Genesis 3:16; Ephesians 5:23).

In the wider world, God commands both men and women to submit (Hebrews 13:17; Romans 13:1). But in the home, the call primarily rests on the wife — and therefore on the mother.

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