Submission In Marriage Quotes

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No woman wants to be in submission to a man who isn't in submission to God!
T.D. Jakes
There are some who want to get married and others who don't. I have never had an impulse to go to the altar. I am a difficult person to lead.
Greta Garbo (Greta & Cecil)
Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.
Rob Bell (Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality)
A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
Submission is the willingness to give up our right to ourselves, to freely surrender our insistence on having our own way all the time.
Myles Munroe (The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage)
It takes two to tango”; one dictates the steps and the other executes them effectively. That is how a great show is made.
Olaotan Fawehinmi (If I Were A Girl, I Would Not...)
It is not love to ignore your spouse's sin, or brokenness, or immaturity.
John Eldredge (Love and War: Finding the Marriage You've Dreamed Of)
Submission is the art of compensating for your weakness by playing to each other's strengths.
Mark Batterson (A Trip around the Sun: Turning Your Everyday Life into the Adventure of a Lifetime)
The idea of submission is never meant to allow someone to overstep another's boundaries. Submission only has meaning in the context of boundaries, for boundaries promote self-control and freedom. If a wife is not free and in control of herself, she is not submitting anyway. She is a slave subject to a slave driver, and she is out of the will of God.
Henry Cloud (Boundaries in Marriage: Understanding the Choices That Make or Break Loving Relationships)
Now listen carefully: Marriage, to me, is not a chain but an association. I must be free, entirely unfettered, in all my actions--my coming and my going; I can tolerate neither control, jealousy, nor criticism as to my conduct. I pledge my word, however, never to compromise the name of the man I marry, nor to render him ridiculous in the eyes of the world. But that man must promise to look upon me as an equal, an ally, and not as an inferior, or as an obedient, submissive wife. My ideas, I know, are not like those of other people, but I shall never change them.
Guy de Maupassant
His heart pounded faster. He’d been a patient man. Going above and beyond while she struggled to accept every aspect of her submission. It was a beautiful war where her body was the battlefield that gave way to her mind. A mind she’d set to be with him when she could be anything she wanted to be and yet, she’d chosen to be the woman who knelt at his side. Grady Bergeron, my hero in Watch Me.
Riley Murphy (Watch Me)
And Submission is the mate of Dominance. The two are destined for marriage." ~Lucian Bane
Lucian Bane (Dom Wars: Round Five (Dom Wars, #5))
is chosen freely, not imposed from without. Essentially, submission is the willingness to give up our right to ourselves, to freely surrender our insistence on having our own way all the time. Submission means putting the needs, rights, and welfare of another person ahead of our own. A marriage built on this kind of submission will grow healthy, strong, and fulfilling.
Myles Munroe (The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage)
If this happened in a Fae marriage, then the female would beat the male into submission. If she is too small to beat him properly, one of the larger women of her family would perform the task for her.
Sophie Oak (Bound (A Faery Story, #1))
Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.
Andrea Dworkin (Right-Wing Women)
Children cannot grow to psychological maturity in an atmosphere of unpredictability, haunted by the specter of abandonment. Couples cannot resolve in any healthy way the universal issues of marriage—dependency and independency, dominance and submission, freedom and fidelity, for example—without the security of knowing that the act of struggling over these issues will not itself destroy the relationship.
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
The union of a dedicated Dom and a confident submissive is a harmonious marriage of souls. There is no other experience like it.
Red Phoenix (Brie Learns the Art of Submission: Submissive Training Center (Brie, #1))
Submission means that a wife acknowledges her husband’s headship as spiritual leader and guide for the family. It has nothing whatsoever to do with her denying or suppressing her will, her spirit, her intellect, her gifts, or her personality. To submit means to recognize, affirm, and support her husband’s God-given responsibility of overall family leadership. Biblical submission of a wife to her husband is a submission of position, not personhood. It is the free and willing subordination of an equal to an equal for the sake of order, stability, and obedience to God’s design. As a man, a husband will fulfill his destiny and his manhood as he exercises his headship in prayerful and humble submission to Christ and gives himself in sacrificial love to his wife. As a woman, a wife will realize her womanhood as she submits to her husband in honor of the Lord, receiving his love and accepting his leadership. When a proper relationship of mutual submission is present and active, a wife will be released and empowered to become the woman God always intended her to be.
Myles Munroe (The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage)
But the gospel, brought home to your heart by the Spirit, can make you happy enough to be humble, giving you an internal fullness that frees you to be generous with the other even when you are not getting the satisfaction you want out of the relationship. Without the help of the Spirit, without a continual refilling of your soul’s tank with the glory and love of the Lord, such submission to the interests of the other is virtually impossible to accomplish for any length of time without becoming resentful.
Timothy J. Keller (The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God)
[J]e t'ai dressée à te soumettre, de même qu'une fleur subit le soleil et la pluie.
Pearl S. Buck
Being a good woman is commendable, but it is not enough. You need to be a sensually awakened woman.
Lebo Grand
I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I can’t promise you anything long-term. I can’t get past my marriage. But I like you more than I care to, and I’m not interested in anyone else right now.
C.D. Reiss (Tease (Songs of Submission, #2))
The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
A successful marriage needs much more than, love, care, and feelings. A woman can choose to be totally submissive in a marriage, like in a patriarchal set-up where she will have a happy married life, but not guaranteed if she will be happy or not. Or she can decide on what makes her happy and choose that life. Marriage is not about the happiness of one person at the cost of other.
Sanjeev Himachali
The introductory statement for Paul’s famous paragraph on marriage in Ephesians is verse 21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”1 In English, this is usually rendered as a separate sentence, but that hides from readers an important point that Paul is making. In the Greek text, verse 21 is the last clause in the long previous sentence in which Paul describes several marks of a person who is “filled with the Spirit.” The last mark of Spirit fullness is in this last clause: It is a loss of pride and self-will that leads a person to humbly serve others. From this Spirit-empowered submission of verse 21, Paul moves to the duties of wives and husbands.
Timothy J. Keller (The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God)
Terri had already gotten her panties into a bunch just from one little phone call, so he knew coming at her too much too fast would be more trouble than it was worth. He couldn’t exactly beat her into submission, not right away anyway. Although he did enjoy seeing her get all riled up. Nothing tugged at a man’s heartstrings like a pair of mascara smeared eyes. Randy from Spring Cleaning-- Coming Summer 2012
Brandi Salazar (Spring Cleaning)
Is biblical headship synonymous with taking control over someone else and forcing her to comply when she resists? And, does biblical submission require a wife to always do what her husband says? Does it mean she has no choices of her own or can’t ever say no without being labeled as rebellious or ungodly?
Leslie Vernick (The Emotionally Destructive Marriage: How to Find Your Voice and Reclaim Your Hope)
We make something sacramental when we make it like the kingdom. Marriage is sacramental when it is characterized by mutual love and submission. A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility.
Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
Marriage is a kind of scaffolding that protects those of us, men and women, who choose it. It protects us from our inconsistency; it helps us.
Costanza Miriano (Marry Him and Be Submissive)
Marriage is the harmony of God synchronizing two wills with the will of the Father.
Ravi Zacharias (I, Isaac, Take Thee, Rebekah)
A man who will not love his wife despite her submission is a cowardly beast undeserving of any cage, for cages are for the strong; but that kind of man-child is meant for the marshes or hay field.
Paul Bamikole
The love that once attracted us to our spouse isn’t the love that sustains our marriage. Rather, God’s love prevails in the lives of the couple who choose to, in mutual submission, place Christ first.
Anonymous (Daily Wisdom for Women - 2014: 2014 Devotional Collection)
Times and scenes like that put Janie to thinking about the inside state of her marriage. Time came when she fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it didn’t do her any good. It just made Joe do more. He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it. So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. So she put something in there to represent the spirit like a Virgin Mary image in a church. The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired. She wasn’t petal-open anymore with him.
Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
George Eliot (Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life)
It has always been essential to keep women riveted on the details of submission so as to divert women from thinking about the nature of force—especially the sexual force that necessitates sexual submission. The mothers could not ward off the enthusiasm of sexual liberation—its energy, its hope, its bright promise of sexual equality—because they could not or would not tell what they knew about the nature and quality of male sexuality as they had experienced it, as practiced on them in marriage. They knew the simple logic of promiscuity, which the girls did not: that what one man could do, ten men could do ten times over. The girls did not understand that logic because the girls did not know fully what one man could do. And the mothers failed to convince also because the only life they offered was a repeat version of their own: and the girls were close enough to feel the inconsolable sadness and the dead tiredness of those lives, even if they did not know how or why mother had gotten the way she was.
Andrea Dworkin (Right-Wing Women)
People think Biblical submission means you no longer have opinions, preferences and things like that—totally not true. It’s about preferring others over ourselves. All Christians are called to do that. I choose to give up my rights in order to bless another person.
Chautona Havig (Blessing Bentley (Marriages of Conviction Book 1))
The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. On
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
Avoid confusing compromise with negating yourself. The surrender that often has to occur in a relationship with a narcissist as “compromise” it can keep your submissive and fruitless behaviors and expectations alive. The red flags were made apparent within the first three months of the relationship. Everyone told me not to marry her or at least to wait a little longer. She was doing everything he had accused me of. Whenever she did not like how things were going, she would break up with me, and then take me back quickly.
Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
as a growing flock of powerful British ministers vied for submission of African souls, and as planters vied for submission of their bodies. Missionaries endeavored to grow God’s kingdom as planters endeavored to grow profits. The marriage of Christian slavery seemed destined. But enslaved Africans balked. The vast majority of Africans in early America firmly resisted the religion of their masters. And their masters balked, too. Enslavers would not, or could not, listen to sermons to convert their slaves. Saving their crops each year was more important to them than saving souls. But of course they could not say that, and risk angering their ministers. Enslavers routinely defended their inaction by claiming that enslaved Africans were too barbaric to be converted.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Chess worked for a wholesale grocery firm. He had thought of being a history teacher, but his father had persuaded him that teaching was no way to support a wife and get on in the world. His father had helped him get this job but told him that once he got in he was not to expect any favors. He didn’t. He left the house before it was light, during this first winter of our marriage, and came home after dark. He worked hard, not asking that the work he did fit in with any interests he might have had or have any purpose to it that he might have once honored. No purpose except to carry us both toward that life of lawnmowers and freezers which we believed we had no mind for. I might marvel at his submission, if I thought about it. His cheerful, you might say gallant, submission. But then, I thought, it’s what men do.
Alice Munro (The Love of a Good Woman)
I never married myself, and it will be the better for you and yours. The fact is, I never loved anyone well enough to put myself into a noose for them. It IS a noose, you know. Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide own own hurts- not to hurt others. He was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submissions afterwards. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends? Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry- the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy- "Such as I am, she will shortly be.
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. As in droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be performed symbolically, so Mr Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream would afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion. Nevertheless, he observed with pleasure that Miss Brooke showed an ardent submissive affection which promised to fulfil his most agreeable previsions of marriage. It had once or twice crossed his mind that possibly there was some deficiency in Dorothea to account for the moderation of his abandonment; but he was unable to discern the deficiency, or to figure to himself a woman who would have pleased him better; so that there was clearly no reason to fall back upon but the exaggerations of human tradition.
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
The Fable of the Comet and the Moon I have betrothed the O so inconstant moon, with a band of six of Saturn's seven rings, leaving the gas giant's last ring unpilfered as a cosmic lagniappe. The astrological charts cautioned me against such a star-crossed marriage, but I, being a headstrong comet hung with an enormous tail, and impetuous Luna, being a headlong stellar slut (satellites known to be as submissive as Asians for the right price), well, we both threw caution to the solar winds. Our wedding proceeded on cycle, with Luna luminescent and draped in silvery white (the craters of her complexion conveniently masked behind a veil of clouds). It was downhill from day one, Luna losing a sliver of herself every night and bit by bit revealing to me her dark side. Luna and I went our separate elliptical ways after a domestic disturbance where I called her a professional tailgater. and she called me a dirty snowball.
Beryl Dov
What makes a successful marriage is not love. What makes a successful marriage is knowing your place in this divine covenant. A man is meant to love and a woman is meant to submit. When you misplace your place there is bound to be errors and chaos. Imagine a woman loving a man? She will be heartbroken cause the man is loving another. But when a woman is submissive to a man, the man is subjected by divine ordinance to love her, cause submissiveness propel and activate love no matter how you put it. Now, let's imagine a man submitting to a woman. Well, I have no explanation to that. It is appalling and not something anyone wants to hear. Love is shown by gifts (items, good treatment, kindness etc) but submissiveness is shown by obeying, listening and servanthood. Psychologically, a servant who is diligent has more respect than a son of the house who is arrogant. So, let's go back to the drawing board and make our marriages work - Victor Vote
Lord Uzih
Girls in our society share in the masculine hero myth because, like boys, they must also develop a reliable ego-identity and acquire an education. But there is an older layer of the mind that seems to come to the surface in their feelings, with the aim of making them into women, not into imitation men. When this ancient content of the psyche begins to make its appearance, the modern young woman may repress it because it threatens to cut her off from the emancipated equality of friendship and opportunity to compete with men that have become her modern privileges... this repression may be so successful that for a time she will maintain an identification with the masculine intellectual goals she learned at school or college. Even when she marries, she will preserve some illusion of freedom, despite her ostensible act of submission to the archetype of marriage-- with its implicit injunction to become a mother. And so there may occur, as we very frequently see today, that conflict which in the end forces the woman to rediscover her buried womanhood in a painful (but ultimately rewarding) manner.
Joseph L. Henderson (Man and His Symbols)
Marriages in the bourgeois sense of the word, and I mean in the most respectable sense of the word 'marriage', haven't the least to do with love no kind of institution can be made from love - and just as little with money; but rather with the social permission given to two people to satisfy their sexual desires with each other, of course under certain conditions, but such conditions as have the interests of society in view. It's clear that the prerequisites for such a contract must include some degree of liking between the parties concerned and very much goodwill - the will to be patient, conciliatory, to care for one another - but the word love should not be misused to describe it! For two lovers in the whole and strong sense of the word, sexual satisfaction is not the essential thing and really just a symbol: for one party, as has been said, a symbol of unconditional submission, for the other a symbol of assent to this, a sign of taking possession.- Marriage in the aristocratic sense, the old nobility's sense of the word, is about breeding a race (is there still a nobility today?) Quaeritur, in other words about maintaining a fixed, particular type of ruling men: man and woman were sacrificed to this viewpoint. Obviously, the primary requirement here was not love, on the contrary! - and not even that measure of mutual goodwill on which the good bourgeois marriage is based. The decisive thing was first the interest of the dynasty, and above that the class. Faced with the coldness, severity and calculating clarity of this noble concept of marriage, which has ruled in every healthy aristocracy, in ancient Athens as in eighteenth-century Europe, we would shiver a little, we warm-blooded animals with our ticklish hearts, we 'moderns'! And this is precisely why love as passion, in the grand understanding of the word, was invented for the aristocratic world and within it―where coercion and privation were greatest...
Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from the Late Notebooks)
Mr Casaubon’s behaviour about settlements was highly satisfactory to Mr Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along, shortening the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. On a grey but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company with her uncle and Celia. Mr Casaubon’s home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put him in possession of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the south-west front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun. This was the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten yards from the windows. The building, of greenish stone, was in the old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background. ‘Oh dear!’ Celia said to herself, ‘I am sure Freshitt Hall would have been pleasanter than this.’ She thought of the white freestone, the pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rosebush, with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately-odorous petals—Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things which had common-sense in them, and not about learning! Celia had those light young feminine tastes which grave and weather-worn gentlemen sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr Casaubon’s bias had been different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
Love and Marriage Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. EPHESIANS 5:21 NIV Young couples often approach marriage thinking that their love will survive anything. Then when the first trial tests their faith and endurance, their love crumbles. Author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, “Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.” Such is the goal of a couple committed to Christ. Admit it: marriage is work. Yet God unites two people for a common purpose—to lift one up when the other falls, to give instead of receive, to exercise the art of compromise and understanding. On the other hand, a loveless marriage is one based on self-absorption or selfishness on the part of one or both individuals. The love that once attracted us to our spouse isn’t the love that sustains our marriage. Rather, God’s love prevails in the lives of the couple who choose to, in mutual submission, place Christ first. The above scripture indicates that submission applies to both men and women, yet Paul goes on to exhort women to submit to their husbands—for as a woman submits or respects her husband, he, in turn, loves his wife (Ephesians 5:22–28). The result? A man and woman united in faith, traveling in the same direction. Father, help me become the helpmate You intended. Guide me to live a submissive life to You first and then my husband. May we both follow Your lead, not our own. Amen.
Anonymous (Daily Wisdom for Women - 2014: 2014 Devotional Collection)
The world does not fully understand marriage, because it does not understand the gospel. It does not understand submission and sacrificial love, because it does not know the one great story of Christ’s sacrifice for His bride, the church. However, more often than not, couples who claim to be Christians display marriages no different from those seen in the world. There is little understanding of the beautiful picture marriage is meant to be.
Catherine Strode Parks (A Christ-Centered Wedding: Rejoicing in the Gospel on Your Big Day)
Because marriage is God’s design, His doing, and meant for His glory, Christian marriages should be different. A sacrificial and submissive marriage is shocking to the world. In such a marriage, a husband and wife do not seek their own glory but look to one another’s good first, to the glory of God. This kind of marriage is beautiful—it’s what marriage was meant to be.
Catherine Strode Parks (A Christ-Centered Wedding: Rejoicing in the Gospel on Your Big Day)
There is a level of interdependence that is needed in a marriage relationship, where both spouses realize they are part of a team and they are both contributing to making the other stronger than either one of them could be on his or her own. “We” becomes more important in marriage than “I.
April Cassidy (The Peaceful Wife: Living in Submission to Christ as Lord)
a big mess. Somebody needs to start somewhere, and though I hope that both partners are going to be willing to start and do exactly what God says, I want to encourage you to go ahead and be first. But even if it seems that one of you is more willing than the other one, continue doing what is right as a service to the Lord. Love has to start somewhere. If what you are doing now is not working, then you have nothing to lose. Everything will stay the same until someone makes a change. If you want to see what God can do then, wives, be submissive and adapt yourselves to your own husbands as a service to the Lord. There is probably no one better qualified than I am to try to teach women how to submit and adapt because I was the least likely person to ever want to adapt to anything or anyone. I wanted everything and everybody to adapt to me. And when I first began to read in the Bible that a wife was to adapt to her own husband, it gave me the creeps! Just the thought of adapting made me uncomfortable. It is amazing how miserable we can make ourselves because we will not adapt to some simple little thing that somebody’s asking us to do. But because of
Joyce Meyer (Making Marriage Work: The Advice You Need for a Lifetime of Happiness)
Marriage is not an inherently holy institution. And it cannot magically be made so by the government, by a priest, or even by the church. Rather, marriage is a relationship that is made holy, or sacramental, when it reflects the life-giving, self-sacrificing love of Jesus. All relationships and vocations—marriage, friendship, singleness, parenthood, partnership, ministry, monastic vows, adoption, neighborhoods, families, churches—give Christians the opportunity to reflect the grace and peace of the kingdom of God, however clumsily, however imperfectly. For two people to commit themselves not simply to marriage, but to a lifetime of mutual love and submission in imitation of Christ is so astounding, so mysterious, it comes close to looking like Jesus’ stubborn love for the church.
Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
It marks prayer as the heart of our devotion, the constant awareness of God’s presence, our consistent submission to his will, and our frequent expressions of adoration and praise.
Gary L. Thomas (Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?)
Both women and men get to “play the Jesus role” in marriage—Jesus in his sacrificial authority, Jesus in his sacrificial submission.
Timothy J. Keller (The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Marriage with the Wisdom of God)
On Thursday morning, that is yesterday, Mademoiselle hoped that the King would sign the contract as he had promised, but by seven in the evening His Majesty, being persuaded by the Queen, Monsieur and divers greybeards that this business was harmful to his reputation, decided to break it off, and after summoning Mademoiselle and M. de Lauzun, declared to them, in the presence of Monsieur le Prince, that he forbade their thinking any more about this marriage. M. de Lauzun received this order with all the respect, all the submissiveness, all the stoicism and all the despair that such a great fall required. As for Mademoiselle, according to her mood she burst into tears, cries, violent outbursts of grief, exaggerated lamentations, and she remained in bed all day, taking nothing but broth. So much for a beautiful dream, a fine subject for a novel or a tragedy, but above all for arguing and talking for ever and ever. And that is what we are doing day and night, evening and morning, on and on without respite. We hope you will do the same. Upon which I most humbly kiss your hands.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal de Sévigné (Selected Letters)
God creates man and woman to cherish their shared equality while complementing their various differences..Most people view marriage as a means of self-fulfillment accompanied by sexual satisfaction..The husband is the head of his wife? Wives should submit to their husbands? Are you serious?.In our limited understanding, we hear [these] words and we recoil in disgust..As soon as we hear the word submission alongside the previous picture of headship, we immediately think in terms of inferiority and superiority, subordination and domination..God made clear from the start that men and women are equal in dignity, value and worth..[submission] means to yield to another in love..The three persons of the Trinity are equally diving..Yet the Son submits to the Father..this doesn't mean that God the Father is dominating and that God the Son is cruelly forced into compulsory subordination. Rather, the Son gladly submits to the Father in the context of close relationship..submission is not a burden to bear..Onlookers will observe a wife joyfully and continually experiencing her husband's sacrificial love for her..the world will realize that following Christ is not a matter of duty. Instead, it is a means to full, eternal, and absolute delight..the first sin occurred..as a response to a gender-specific test..the man sits silently by-- like a wimp..the man has the audacity to blame his wife..the first spineless abdication of a man's responsibility to love, serve, protect, and care for his wife..Sure, through a job a man provide[s] for the physical needs of his wife, but..that same job often prevents him from providing for her spiritual, emotional, and relational needs..He never asks how she feels, and he doesn't know what's going on in her heart. He may think he's a man because of his achievements at work and accomplishments in life, but in reality he's acting like a wimp who has abdicated his most important responsibility on earth: the spiritual leadership of his wife..The work of Satan in Genesis 3 is a foundational attack not just upon humanity in general but specifically upon men, women, and marriage..For husbands will waffle back and forth between abdicating their responsibility to love and abusing their authority to lead. Wives, in response, will distrust such love and defy such leadership. In the process they'll completely undercut how Christ's gracious sacrifice on the cross compels glad submission in the church..Headship is not an opportunity for us to control our wives; it is a responsibility to die for them..[Husbands], don't love our wives based upon what we get from them..Husbands, love your wives not because of who they are, but because of who Christ is. He loves them deeply, and our responsibility is to reflect his love..the Bible is not saying a wife is not guilty for sin in her own life. Yet the Bible is saying a husband is responsible for the spiritual care of his wife. When she struggles with sin, or when they struggle in marriage, he is ultimately responsible..If we are harsh with our wives, we will show the world that Christ is cruel with his people..God's Word is subtly yet clearly pointing out that God has created women with a unique need to be loved and men with a unique need to be respected..Might such a wife be buying into the unbiblical lie that respect is based purely upon performance? So wives, see yourselves in a complementary, not competitive, relationship with your husband..we cannot pick and choose where to obey God.
David Platt (A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Poverty, Same-Sex Marriage, Racism, Sex Slavery, Immigration, Abortion, Persecution, Orphans and Pornography)
The opposition between women who are people and women who are something less does not only rest in the vague contrast between the women of the comedies and the women of the tragedies. There are more explicit examples of women who may earn love, like Helena who pursued her husband through military brothels to marriage and honour in All’s Well, and women who must lose it through inertia and gormlessness, like Cressida. In The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare contrasted two types in order to present a theory of marriage which is demonstrated by the explicit valuation of both kinds of wooing in the last scene. Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a world where she is a stale, a decoy to be bid for against her sister’s higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable, a scold. Bianca has found the women’s way of guile and feigned gentleness to pay better dividends: she woos for herself under false colours, manipulating her father and her suitors in a perilous game which could end in her ruin. Kate courts ruin in a different way, but she has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. He tames her like he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and she rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty. Lucentio finds himself saddled with a cold, disloyal woman, who has no objection to humiliating him in public. The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity, married without earnestness or good-will. Kate’s speech at the close of the play is the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend, and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both, for Petruchio is both gentle and strong (it is a vile distortion of the play to have him strike her ever). The message is probably twofold: only Kates make good wives, and then only to Petruchios; for the rest, their cake is dough.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)
Where there is no love, there is no natural submission.
Khuliso Mamathoni (The Greatest Proposal)
Submission without love is born out of fear of punishment
Khuliso Mamathoni (The Greatest Proposal)
Men who demand submission and obedience through fear and force do not represent the kingdom of God. They are rather representatives of the kingdom of darkness. Marriages led by men who use force and fear do not thrive and flourish as they should. Instead, these marriages become places of bondage and oppression, and they are reminiscent of hell, the dwelling place of devil.
Khuliso Mamathoni
Augustine suggests that in the mutual submission and self-surrender of marriage, and in the openness of the marriage relationship to children, with the demands of self-sacrificial love that the arrival of children bring, there is a discipling process. Our desires are reordered as we live out the marriage relationship (just as they are when we live out a celibate life) so that we are rendered fit for the kingdom—and marriage and celibacy alike are ways of life, thick clusters of practices, that tend to this reordering of our desires when lived seriously. In this sense marriage is properly named an “ascetic” practice.
Preston Sprinkle (Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology))
I sometimes think that the excesses of a wedding day and the solidity of a marriage are in inverse proportion to each other.
Costanza Miriano (Marry Him and Be Submissive)
In fact, they, by being helpers to humanity, were actually able to guide humanity, not be guided, and they could control and execute decisions, not wait for someone else to control and execute decisions! That same word was used to refer to women; God described women the same way he described himself. Therefore, although wives were commanded to be submissive, wives’ roles as “helpers” elevate them to have control on guidance and decisions, and with guiding her husband/making decisions while “helping” her husband, that would mean that a husband would also have to honor his wife as a “helper” and submit to her guidance under her role as a “helper.
Lucy Carter (Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics)
Due to the clarity in which these verses are presented regarding submission, the verses do support wives’ submission. Since these verses are very direct with emphasizing wives’ submission, and this submission is considered “fitting with the Lord,” it is true that God found it to be a biblical value, but, as mentioned in the main claim, husbands’ submission to their wives is also implied to be a biblical value as well.
Lucy Carter (Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics)
Evolutionary biologist John Hartung asks us to consider people who are stuck in a position that they might otherwise perceive as unfair or beneath their station (Hartung, 1987). Consider a man who holds a job that he knows does not take full advantage of his talents or a wife who knows that she is more intelligent than her husband. Acting as though your job or your spouse is beneath you could put your employment or your marriage in jeopardy. Your boss might fire you for insubordination. Your spouse might seek someone with whom he or she feels more comfortable and less threatened. The adaptive solution that Hartung proposes is called deceiving down. Deceiving down is not “playing dumb” or pretending to be less than you are. Instead, it involves an actual reduction in self-confidence to facilitate acting in a submissive, subordinate manner.
David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
To retrain the imagination and the natural impulses to resist the murky short-term delights of the pagan world is harder still. To make and sustain marriages of genuine mutual submission is perhaps hardest of all. Compromises and second-best solutions are easy. To go for the full version of discipleship is to sign on for spiritual warfare.
N.T. Wright (Paul: A Biography)
The drama of the unsocialized black has become the commanding motif of American culture. Driven to the wall, threatened with emasculation, surrounded everywhere by formidable women, the black male has summoned from his own body and spirit the masculine testament on which much of American manhood now subsists. Black jazz is the most important serious American music, acknowledged around the world if not in our own universities. Our rock culture finds its musical and rhythmic inspiration and its erotic energy and idiom in the jazz, gospel, dance, and soul performances of blacks. The black stage provides dramatic imagery and acting charisma for both our theaters and our films. Black vernacular pervades our speech. The black athlete increasingly dominates our sports, not only in his performance but in his expressive styles, as even white stars adopt black idioms of talk, handshakes, dress, and manner. From the home-plate celebration to the touchdown romp, American athletes are now dancing to soul music. Black men increasingly star in the American dream. This achievement is an art of the battlefield-exhibiting all that grace under pressure that is the glory of the cornered male. Ordinarily we could marvel and celebrate without any deeper pang of fear. But as the most vital expression of the culture-widely embraced by a whole generation of American youth-this black testament should be taken as a warning. For much of it lacks the signs of that submission to femininity that is the theme of enduring social order. It suggests a bitter failure of male socialization. By its very strength, it bespeaks a broader vulnerability and sexual imbalance. Thus it points to the ghetto as the exemplary crisis of our society.
George Gilder (Men and Marriage)
start these conversations with questions that seek understanding, not with accusations that seek submission
Gary L. Thomas (Cherish: The One Word That Changes Everything for Your Marriage)
For seven months, every single day, I went to the hole,’ he told the crowds who gathered to hear him. ‘I lost my marriage—’ always murmurs at this point—‘I lost my career, I lost my home, but that’s nothing.’ A pause. ‘My brother—my only brother—lost his life.’ Sometimes people would break into inadvertent applause at this, which was awkward. Sean learned to lower his eyes until it stopped.
Amy Waldman (The Submission)
What our marriages need to flourish are two good heads, not one head and a "neck".
Chidi Ejeagba
should “submit to one another” (Ephesians 5:21). This sort of mutual submission worked best in our marriage long before we knew what to call it. That’s because I don’t respect Dan because he is a man. I respect Dan because
Rachel Held Evans (A Year of Biblical Womanhood)
Some of the evangelical scholars and pastors who are most vocal about male headship and female submission argue that the relationship between husband and wife models the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Wives follow the leadership of their husbands, just as Jesus follows the leadership of the Father. The marriage hierarchy, like marriage itself, they argue, is embedded in the imago Dei.
Beth Allison Barr (The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth)
I pulled him closer, my wolf a mess of submissive desire. I wanted to lay myself open and let Rin have his way. I wanted him to use me, fill me, love me.
Kitt Lynn (An Alpha's Promise (Hund Valley, #1))
I asked my wife Noël if there was anything she wanted me to say at this point when I was preaching on this subject. She said, “You cannot say too often that marriage is a model of Christ and the church.” I think she is right, and there are at least three reasons: 1) This lifts marriage out of the sordid sitcom images and gives it the magnificent meaning God meant it to have; 2) this gives marriage a solid basis in grace, since Christ obtained and sustains his bride by grace alone; and 3) this shows that the husband’s headship and the wife’s submission are crucial and crucified. That is, they are woven into the very meaning of marriage as a display of Christ and the church, but they are both defined by Christ’s self-denying work on the cross so that their pride and slavishness are canceled. We spent the first two chapters on the first of these reasons: giving the foundation for marriage as a display of the covenant love of God. Marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman in which they promise to be a faithful husband and a faithful wife in a new one-flesh union as long as they both shall live. This covenant, sealed with solemn vows, is designed to showcase the covenant-keeping grace of God.
John Piper (This Momentary Marriage: A Parable of Permanence)
But marriage is designed to be a unique display of God’s covenant grace because, unlike all other human relationships, the husband and wife are bound by covenant into the closest possible relationship for a lifetime. There are unique roles of headship and submission. Those distinct roles are not the focus in this chapter. That will come later.1Here I want to consider husband and wife simply as Christians. Before a man and woman can live out the unique roles of headship and submission in a biblical and gracious way, they must experience what it means to build their lives on the vertical experience of God’s forgiveness and justification and promised help, and then bend it out horizontally to their spouse.
John Piper (This Momentary Marriage: A Parable of Permanence)
For two people to commit themselves not simply to marriage, but to a lifetime of mutual love and submission in imitation of Christ is so astounding, so mysterious, it comes close to looking like Jesus’ stubborn love for the church.
Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
Two keys to a blissful marriage are; women should learn to be submissive and avoid any confrontation”.
Abdulazeez Henry Musa
In any case, if we see the church as a singular entity—a bride and not a harem—then there might be some relevance for our discussion. Clearly, Jesus’ love toward the church is mirrored in a husband’s love for his wife, and the wife’s submission to her husband is mirrored in the church’s submission to Christ. Since Paul roots marital role distinctions in sexual distinctions, I’m not sure what this would look like in same-sex marriages. The relationship between Christ and the church requires a fundamental difference; a man marrying a man would seem to reflect the church marrying the church or Christ marrying Christ.13 The analogy demands some sort of difference, and it appears that Paul has sexual difference in mind.
Preston Sprinkle (People to Be Loved: Why Homosexuality Is Not Just an Issue)
So many marriages crumble because humility is lacking. As believers, isn’t that a little sad? We strive for control and equality, caught up in a power struggle rather than the humble self-sacrifice of Christ. So many women focus on what submission does not mean, and they never embrace what it does mean.
Francis Chan (You and Me Forever: Marriage in Light of Eternity)
Today wife-abuse is a common occurrence and, sadly, is seen sometimes in Christian marriages. Submission does not mean allowing another person to batter us, whether it battering is physical, verbal or emotional.
Linda Dillow (Creative Counterpart : Becoming the Woman, Wife, and Mother You Have Longed To Be)
Paul urges us to pray continually (1 Thessalonians 5:17). This puts prayer on a far higher plane than mere intercession. It marks prayer as the heart of our devotion, the constant awareness of God’s presence, our consistent submission to his will, and our frequent expressions of adoration and praise.
Gary L. Thomas (Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?)
Submission that a wife gives her husband is a free gift that springs up from within the wife like life-giving water bubbling up from a fresh well, not something imposed through intimidation or other outside force. Submission is the most important gift a wife can give her husband. A responsive and receptive wife willingly demonstrates that she surrenders her freedom for his love, adoration, protection, and provision.
Ed Wheat (Intended for Pleasure: Sex Technique and Sexual Fulfillment in Christian Marriage)
Submission makes love easy and enjoyable. Love gives birth to willful and cheerful submission. Where there is love and submission is missing, and where there is submission and love is missing, the result is that the other becomes a burden and a uneasy yoke.
Paul Bamikole
Think of marriage as a three-legged stool. The legs are a submissive wife, a loving husband, and Christ.
Beth Moore (To Live Is Christ: Joining Paul's Journey of Faith)
But I’d be over her. I couldn’t imagine the day I wouldn’t love her, especially not with her submission at my feet.
C.D. Reiss (Marriage Games (The Games Duet, #1))
If you fail to be submissive as a wife, you will become an agent of satan and you will go around giving ill advices to people to despise marriage and thier husband.
Khuliso Mamathoni (The Greatest Proposal)