SID: Okay, John. John, I have to ask you this question. What would you say a woman that’s listening right now who says I loved my husband when I first got married but to tell you the truth I have no feelings for this man anymore! And in fact I don’t even know why I even married him! What would you say to her?
JOHN: Well I have, I believe I have an answer. And I believe it’s not only a woman listening, I believe it’s a man listening.
SID: Of course.
JOHN: What you need to do is you need to start thanking God for what you do appreciate about him and watch how that opens up a well of joy and thanksgiving in your heart and you will re-find what attracted you to him in the first place. And what happens is in your mind, in your thinking you have gone to all the negatives of that husband. And there are probably very obvious negatives. You have to find the positives. And the way I say it is, and this is why the Bible says over and over and over to be thankful, and it says complaining kills us in the Bible, being thankful builds us. So being thankful is like climbing a stairs. But complaining is like going down a water slide. So once you get a picture of a wet and wild park it takes a long time to climb those stairs but you get down in a second on that slide, maybe two seconds. That’s what complaining does. It’s going down a slide. But being thankful is a slow climb but it will get you where you need to be.
SID: Okay. I have to ask this question because both of you are such world-class teachers. The subject of submission. Explain that from a Biblical viewpoint. And even where it says Husbands love your wives. Wives. I mean that whole passage. Explain to me very briefly.
LISA: Babe, babe, you start that. (LAUGHING)
JOHN: (LAUGHING) Okay, submission! That’s a big one for the little time we have left! But let’s just say this quickly. All right? If you look at Jesus, Jesus got down and served His disciples. And so He and what He was saying is by washing their feet that was the job of the lowest servant of a household. He said I am the base servant. He said even though you call me the Head, Lord and King which you say rightly, what the way I approach this is I am the lowest servant. When a husband comes into the marriage and he realizes yes, he’s the head of the home, but just like Jesus, because a marriage is a picture of Jesus’ relationship with the Church, just like Jesus I am going to take the lowest position in the home as servant. If he does that, he’s going to have no problems with his wife’s submitting to his, to his, to his desires
LISA: Leadership.
JOHN: as far as direction goes.
LISA: Yeah, yeah.
JOHN: However sub-mission, and Lisa and I love to talk about this, sub means come under one mission.
SID: Hmm!
JOHN: So if a godly man, a godly woman when we’re listening to God we have a mission. And I believe that when the husband is listening to God and for the sake and he’s making decisions for the sake of the wife and the children then what happens is just as it’s easy for us to submit to Jesus because Jesus would never make a decision that would be detrimental to our eternal well-being, even so a wife can make that easy transition into submitting to a husband as she submits to the Lord because she knows that husband has the heart of God and he’ll never ask her to do something that would be detrimental to her or the children and that he has taken the place of being a leader but being the lowest servant of the house.
