My toddler’s sayings pepper my journal. On the drive to church: “Daddy, are you preaching today?” With eyes closed: “Mommy, I’m praying for another baby.” After reading about Jonah: “Chomp. I ate you. Bleck. I spit you out.” While watching a diaper change: “You can clean butts, but only God can clean hearts.” Too true.
Ultimately, the record I keep isn’t a matter of sentimentality or laughter (or wisdom). No, I mark my son’s speech because I want to know my son. While I can neither see nor clean his heart, I can listen to it. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34). From the most talkative of toddlers to the quietest kid in class, what’s on the inside will come out — and it will come out through words.
As a wife, I need to hear that word. In theory, I desire to pursue Christ and a marriage that reflects him. I embrace God’s call for the first wife (to help) and God’s command for all brides (to submit). I want Scripture, not society, to light the path of my femininity. Where a million other wives would call me foolish, regressive, or even oppressed, I believe my true Husband’s truer adjective for me: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Luke 11:28). I hear God’s word for the home, and I long to keep it.
But then I go to grab the car keys, and they’re not there. Where’d he put them this time? I want to start dinner at 5:00, and it’s 5:30. Why isn’t he home already? I’m ready to leave church, and another conversation gets started. Doesn’t he see how cranky the kids are? I thought the dishes would be done sooner, and it’s later — so much later that salsa has tried to lay permanent claim to my favorite blue plates. Shouldn’t he know by now? Quickly, out of the abundance of my heart, my mouth speaks, and I do not sound like a wife who knows the words of Ephesians 5:33, let alone loves them:
Let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Root of Our Respect
The temptation to disrespect differs in shape and size from one wife to the next. I love order, schedules, cleanliness — tidy words that sometimes mean tireless and tiring control. When my thoughts, tongue, or both lash out against my husband, it’s usually because he stepped on the toes of my nice and neat expectations. But for the next wife, it may be his straight-and-narrow ways that elicit eye rolls. Where one scorns her husband for keeping the car too messy, another shakes her head at him for keeping the car too clean. Whether he works out “too often” or “not enough,” oversees the kids “too strictly” or “too carelessly,” shows affection “too little” or “too much” — our disrespect can be creative. Whatever its form, disrespect is always right in its own eyes (Proverbs 21:2).
Thankfully, the One who weighs the heart is also the one who changes the heart. God never commands where he won’t also equip, and respecting our husbands certainly requires supernatural gear. For the heartbeat of Ephesians 5:33 is not polite behavior but a particular, even peculiar, kind of emotion. Google a twenty-first-century definition of “respect,” and the top hit reads something like this: “deep admiration for someone or something due to their qualities, abilities, or achievements.” Yet turn to the first-century church, and you will find that the New Testament’s definition differs greatly: The word translated “respect” (Greek phobeō) is often translated as “fear.” “Let the wife see that she respects [phobētai] her husband.”
What does that mean? Let’s start with what it doesn’t mean. Respect is not staying silent in the face of a husband’s abuse, sin, or even simple error. Neither is respect seeing a husband as superior in value, one to whom a wife should bow and tiptoe around. Rather, the wife who “sees to it that she respects her husband” is the wife who, by grace through faith, sees Christ as the head of the church — and therefore sees her husband as Christ’s appointed representative (Ephesians 5:22–23). This wife fights heart-level disdain for her husband out of wholehearted commitment, first and foremost, to respecting her God.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in the New Testament, such respect is most often a response to God revealed in Christ. When Jesus walks on the sea, calms the storm, raises the widow’s son from the dead, or himself rises from the grave, how do onlookers respond? With fear — with respect (Matthew 14:26; 28:5–8; Mark 4:41; Luke 7:12–16). And for those whose fear springs from faith, their great trembling before him leads to happily trusting in him (Psalm 2:11).
Has the risen and reigning Christ so staggered our senses, so awed our hearts, so changed our lives? Then, in an important sense, our earthly husbands will no longer have to earn our respect in order to have it. We will offer it freely, joyfully, gloriously, in reverence and fear of the One who ultimately deserves it. Even the wind and the sea obey him. Will we?
Ways We Can
If we will, daily prayer is a good starting point. To become truly respectful wives, we first admit ourselves truly helpless wives. Because, again, what God desires from us is that we become not picture-perfect housewives but female ambassadors of the gospel through and through. As much as we may scrub our lives to make them appear respectful on the outside, we convince God no further than the Pharisees (Luke 11:39–40). When he calls us to respect our husbands, he bids us to “give as alms those things that are within” (verse 41) — to give ourselves over to the kinds of affections that suit resurrected wives. God alone can source and sustain this heart-level respect for our husbands.
Along with praying for divine intervention, it’s also wise to consider our habits, particularly those related to our speech. First, as we’ve said, because our words reveal our heart. But perhaps just as importantly, because our words can alter our hearts. Habits form and shape us. The more disrespect we heap on our husbands through our words, the more we will actually disrespect our husbands. But when we daily wield our tongue to build our husbands up, in both private and public, our hearts are bound to follow suit. Consider, then, three small “guards” (Psalm 141:3) a wife might consider setting over her lips in order to help her heart to thrive in holy respect for her husband. Almost surely, she’ll find that God will bless her marriage and her witness too.
1. Respect him in your head.
Our secret conversations betray our real impulses. There’s a reason David prays, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!” (Psalm 139:23). Our minds articulate and reinforce our deepest desires and feelings. As our hands fumble for the morning alarm, what thoughts are first out of the gate about the man who stirs beside us? While we go about our day, does our mind betray gratitude or a grudge when it comes to our husband’s own priorities, decisions, and tasks? When we crawl into bed, are we more prone to rehearse his mistakes or ours?
Even our prayers can become servants of disrespect. Do we think we know “how horribly he’s sinning,” “how exactly he should change” — or do we humbly admit our finite perspective, refusing to exaggerate his faults and to forget our own? Praying for a husband to be sanctified (or saved!) isn’t a pass for a wife to sin. Rather, let us lay our minds before the One who hears every secret word from afar, pleading, “See if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Psalm 139:24). God loves to lead wives in this way. Thankfully, supernatural unspoken respect for our husbands lies along the path.
2. Respect him in your home.
Many wives wouldn’t dare to speak to a neighbor, coworker, or friend the way they speak to their husbands. Why are we obliged to apply the Golden Rule to everyone else yet often withhold its wise, peaceable practice from our husbands? They are our very flesh (Genesis 2:24); they are the ones to whom we’re joined before our Lord (and the world). Would Jesus approve of the way we address our husbands behind closed doors? As a wife, I sometimes think that I cannot read James 1:26 enough: “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.”
Would we be distinctly Christian wives? By the Spirit’s power, let us learn to use our mouths more and more for bridled, respectful speech. Freer and freer from religious duplicity, our hearts will thank our tongues for it. So too will our husbands.
3. Respect him in your hangouts.
Complaint loves company. Rather than succumbing to the temptation, what if we saw time with friends not as a chance to commiserate about marriage but as a God-appointed opportunity to showcase covenant-keeping love? As imperfect as our marriages are, Christ’s commitment to us is still the sure, sweet ground beneath them (Ephesians 5:32). When we strive to speak respectfully about our husbands and hopefully about our marriages, what do we communicate to the world about this whole Christianity thing? It’s true, good, and beautiful — so much so that even its most unpopular parts are really worth living.
Let There Be No Question
Someday, probably very soon, my son will begin to tally my speech. He may not keep a journal, but no matter. He’ll hear enough to know whether or not I respect his dad. In my son’s maturing mind and heart, I want there to be no question that I respect my husband as the head of our home. For in respecting the man, I hope to show my son (and everyone else) that the Lord and Savior who stands behind and over our marriage is “worthy . . . to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12).
Wives, Jesus is worthy of all our respect. Therefore, under him, let us see to it that we respect our husbands.
