Relationship Series: Submission (are we seriously going there?)

Submission is not a power struggle, and if you’ve ever been taught it as “women just say yes,” this conversation will challenge that fast. Christy Dragotta reframes submission from the ground up, showing why it starts vertically with God before it ever touches marriage, church, or anyone else.

She walks through Scripture from James 4:7, 1 Peter 5:6, Ephesians 5, Philippians 2, Acts 5, John 13, Luke 17, and more to show what submission actually looks like in real life - not as silence, not as passivity, and not as a license for control. Instead, she points to Jesus as the model: strong, humble, obedient, and fully yielded to the Father.

You’ll discover:

• Why submission to God comes before submission to a spouse
• The difference between yielding and enabling
• How “servant leadership” looks when it’s real
• What biblical submission is supposed to look like in healthy marriage
• Why abuse is not the same thing as authority, and why wise counsel matters
• How Jesus’ example, from the upper room to the cross, defines strength under authority

Christy also gets personal about her own experience of wanting to return to church while her husband resisted, bringing clarity to a situation many women face but rarely hear addressed honestly. She makes the case that submission is never about becoming a yes-man or erasing your voice - it is about order, trust, and surrendering first to the Lord.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey friends, thanks for being with me today on Get Honest. Today we're going to talk about a piece of relationships that is it can be a sticky topic for people, and that is the one of submission. And it is very biblical, the principle of submission, but I think we've heard it taught in so many different ways, or at least I have. Growing up in a Bible church and then a Baptist church, this was always one of those topics that got taught on frequently. This is another area where Satan loves to bring division because people want to chop up all of the scripture and make it say this one thing and that one thing, and then there are arguments about who is to submit to who and all of these things. Let's just start where it starts. And of course, our reference point for that is going to be where Jesus submits to God. And I just want to take this back all the way to where submission starts. And submission is not horizontal before it is vertical. What I mean by that is we are to submit to God before we submit to any person. And submission to God is the main thing. And when we are in submission to God, it is going to affect our relationships. And it doesn't mean that all of our relationships are going to magically become easier because sometimes submitting to God is going to make somebody else uncomfortable, and that is going to affect your relationship. But on the whole, when we are submitting to God as our first act, it's going to impact the way that we submit to and yield to others. And so it always starts with God. And let's just look at some scripture around this. If you go to James 4:7, the starting posture is to submit yourself to God, and then you resist the enemy. When we are submitted to God, that's the first step in resisting our enemy, the devil. And our enemy is not flesh and blood. The Bible makes that very clear. What enemy we're speaking about is the principalities, the spiritual realm, the spiritual enemies that we have, the enemies of our soul that are constantly battling with the Spirit of God who wants us to yield to Him. And so when we humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, that is a posture that we choose to humble ourselves under God. That's in 1 Peter 5, 6. Then every other submission flows from that submission first. And so a lot of times in the marriage relationship, especially, so I'm not talking about just all relationships, but most often in the marriage relationship, you will see this dynamic of, well, I just need to submit to my husband, which the Bible clearly says that we are to submit to our husbands. But the way that it gets painted sometimes, and I've been in churches where this is taught in such a way that it makes women feel like they just have to be the yes man to their husband, that they just sign off on everything their husband says, and if their husband doesn't allow it, then da-da-da. But let's remember that submitting to God comes before submitting to people. And there's a place in Acts, Acts 5.29, where the apostles are told by those in authority over them, you are to stop teaching this teaching in public. You can't come to the temples and teach this teaching any longer. And they say we have to obey God. We aren't going to get our approval from you. God has given us our assignment, which is to spread the gospel in this place. So we can go to prison, you can make us face the consequences of our decisions, but we cannot stop preaching this gospel. And just like that, in a marriage, God never designed it to where if your husband doesn't go to church, you just yield to that and you don't go to church. No, if the Lord is calling you into a relationship with himself, that relationship includes community. And it is vital that you have community. And so it is not submission to your husband to just not go to church because he's not going. Submission can look like not nagging him to go, it can look like not telling him he has to go. But you can submit to God and get in a group, surround yourself with community, and that's not not submitting to your husband. And oftentimes, if a woman will step up and go to church and get involved in community, number one, that's a lifeline for you. God never intended for your husband to be able to keep you from a lifeline like that. And additionally, you will be a bigger blessing to him. You will submit more readily and with a better heart if you are surrounded by community in a place where they teach the word of God and where they love you well and they walk alongside of you. So this is not look like, well, my husband doesn't want to go to church, and so I'm gonna just submit to him and skip church every Sunday. That is not submission, and that is not what God asks, because God tells us very clearly in the Bible that we are to be surrounded with community. So I just want to encourage any of you out there that are right now using your husband not going to church as an excuse to not be involved in church or in community, I would say that is not at all honoring of God or honoring of your husband. He doesn't have to come with you, but you can just say, I'm gonna go and I am gonna do this every Sunday. Now, if there's some reason why that time doesn't work out, let's say his job makes it and you have small children and you can't take them with you or whatever, I don't know what would come up that would make it, where it puts pressure on your marriage, on your situation. Find another community to be a part of. Find a Bible study that you can attend and go out and find community locally that you can be a part of where you actually see other people, you speak with other people, and you interact with other people because that is going to be vital for the strengthening of your marriage, especially if you're a believer and your husband is not, or even if he is a believer but he just doesn't want to go to church. It doesn't look like yielding and making excuses not to go and be involved in a fellowship. So I just want to I just want to point that out because I know myself in my first marriage, that's exactly where we were. I wanted to go to church so bad. I felt the Lord calling me back into church. He was a believer, raised the same way that I was, but he was not ready to go back to church yet. And so I nagged him and nagged him and nagged him forever. He wouldn't come with me. And so instead of that, I just made up my mind. After the Lord gave me a dream, I knew it was no longer an option to just keep being outside of fellowship. And so I said, You don't have to come with me, but I'm gonna go. And I would just make up my mind every week to get up and go to church. Of course, I wanted him to come with me. But if he couldn't or wouldn't, then it didn't mean that I wouldn't go because the Lord was specifically calling me to be a part of a fellowship. So I just want that to be an encouragement. But submission to people never overrides submission to God. And so I just want that to be clear that our first submission, our first place that we submit is always to God. And then it impacts how we submit horizontally. And so let's just look at this with Christ being the model, not the exception. So he was not the exception to the rule. Oh, well, he's Jesus. So of course that was for him. He came to the earth to model for us what a believer's life should look like. In his constant pulling away to be alone with God, to pray to God, to talk to God, to seek God, to submit to God. In all of those places, he was modeling for us this is how someone that follows me should behave. It was not, I'm gonna do all this, but it's completely unattainable. Will we ever be perfect? No. But can we follow his model? Absolutely. So in Philippians 2, 5 through 8, the scripture says that Jesus, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. So he was God, and yet he did not consider himself God's equal, okay? But he made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. And therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that's above all names. So Jesus, who is our model, who is our example, did not consider himself in the position he actually held, but humbled himself and came to the earth, took on the flesh of a man that got hungry, that got tired. God doesn't get hungry or tired, he's perfect. There's nothing that confuses him. He doesn't have desires that are unholy, but man in the flesh, we have desires that are unholy. We have flesh that stands in our way. It's a dying, decaying body. And Jesus took on that dying, decaying body when before he was robed in eternity and glory. And so it's important that we look at him. It wasn't that God forced him into submission, he was willing to yield to God's will, even as far as going to the cross. We see in his flesh in Gethsemane when he is crying, and three times he asks God, Could this cup pass from me? Would you take this cup from me? If there is any other way, please. And yet he yielded to God's will and submitted to that, submitted to death. That is a strength under authority. That is not a weakness to submit to someone. It is not a sign of weakness or a weak thing to submit to someone. It is a strength inside with humility that yields itself to the desires of another. And remember, the most important is the yielding to God. After that, we yield to others. So Jesus expresses what he wants, but ultimately then submits to the Father's will. And this is a great picture. In a marriage, it's not that this man will just tell you and then you have to do everything he says. You are partners together in life for the gospel. Your marriage is supposed to be a picture of the gospel with the man operating as the Christ figure and the woman operating as the bride, as the church who submits. And both of these things look like as Jesus submitted to God, that man is to submit to God. When a man submits to God, he will become the servant leader. Our pastor says this all the time, and I think it's actually just a beautiful thing that he says. He says, if you are above serving, then leadership is beyond you. And we love to throw that title around servant leadership. And ultimately what everyone focuses on is the leadership part. That means I'm in charge. But the way that Jesus says it is if you want to be the most, you become the least. If you want to be first, you go last. And so what a true servant leader looks like, you may not even recognize the leadership title. What you'll recognize is the service and how people are attracted to that service of that one who is yielding his life and himself to God constantly. That is what submission should look like. He is yielding and submitting to the Lord, and under that guidance, you can yield and submit to his leadership. So if you are praying together about a job offer in another state, and he says to you, as he's considering all of these things and yielding to the Lord, and he's following God and y'all are praying together, if he says, I believe we are supposed to move to this state for my job, yes, submission may look like going to a place you know nobody and yielding to that authority. But you pray and you both submit to God, and then you submit to one another. And that's another thing that's discussed a lot in Ephesians 5. You know, that's where this is this topic of submission is used the most. I would say I've heard it preached from the pulpit the most. And it's talking about you submit to one another before any instruction follows about how the wife is to submit to the husband or servants are to submit to their masters. The very first thing that's laid out is you submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. So in this partnership, the two of you both get to voice your opinions. It's not one-sided. You are a helper. The same word that's used for you as a helper, as a wife, is used of the Holy Spirit, that He is our helper. And in no way is the Holy Spirit less important or less vital in the relationship of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. That is a unified relationship. They are one and they each have the way they they operate. And this is the same with you and your spouse. You are one in the eyes of the Lord. And so the two of you together come and you bring your opinions, you bring your fears, you bring all of the things together, and then you work together as a couple. Now, in an abusive marriage, this falls apart really quickly because he is not loving, he is not the lead servant, he is a leader that is a dictator that is forcing you to do things a certain way. That is not him yielding and being submitted to God, both of you being yielded in submission to one another, and then you yielding to that. That's a dictatorship, not a marriage. And so it's very important that you honor the Lord in your marriage, and the Bible has a lot to say about that. But submission does not look like just being bossed around and being the yes man to someone who is not pursuing or following the Lord. This is something I can't speak to every scenario that is going to come up, and so this is where a pastor or a counselor and choose wisely who you go to seek counsel from in this area, because many are ill-equipped to deal with abuse in marriage. For so long, there has been abuse almost signed off on by pastors, not because they actually approve of the abuse, but because they don't understand how rampant abuse is in relationships. And they don't know how to walk alongside that wife when she's in a place where she's not safe and her kids are not safe and there is abuse. And so I would very highly recommend looking up counselors that specifically address abusive marriages and what submission looks like in those marriages and look up pastors in your area that know and have experience in dealing with marriages where abuse is involved. I really cannot recommend that enough. Don't just take my word for it here. Go and find someone who is equipped to walk alongside of you to know what submission looks like. And there's gonna be areas where it's really difficult to decide is this a commandment of God that He's asking me to break, or is this just something I need to yield to to honor Him and honor Christ? And those situations are gonna be very specific to each relationship. So I won't go off on that any longer, but anytime that you are in a relationship that is abusive, you need to get others around you that can support you and help you walk through it in a way that is honoring to God. And sometimes it does look like yielding when you don't want to yield, but other times it looks like not yielding to something that he would be asking you to do that falls in the category of sin. So I'll leave that there. But let's go back to our model, Jesus, in this, and we we know that in the garden he was willing to go to the cross, he was not forced. We understand that it was strength that caused him to yield under the hand of God, not weakness. And so when we look at what did Jesus do, and in John 13, 1 through 17, Jesus sets out such a great model, and this is where he's talking with his disciples. They're all there. He gets up from the table, puts on a garment around his waist, and he goes and starts washing the disciples' feet, and they react in all kinds of ways to this. Peter is like, never, you will never wash my feet. And the other disciples are looking around like, what is going on? Because in their minds, what it was looking like was that Jesus was going to come in as the king and as this ruler and take authority, and the Romans were gonna be pushed out and their people were gonna be free. But what Jesus had in mind was that you come as a servant, you serve others. And so he very clearly demonstrated this by getting already in a servant's clothes to wash their feet. And their feet aren't like our feet. You know, we take showers every day, we have pavement, we have all these things. The disciples were walking on dirt roads covered in animal dung and all other sorts of things. So when they came to a house in their sandals, their feet were filthy. This was not like our feet. And so for Jesus to lower himself to that place of taking their feet dirty and nasty and covered in filth, and he washed them clean. And when Peter says, No, you won't ever wash my feet, he says, Well, then you can't have any part with me, because if you don't allow me to serve you, you can't have part in my kingdom. So then he, of course, takes it to the other extreme. Just wash all of me. And Jesus wanted to make this point very clear. And I think if we look at our lives, when it says that Jesus came and he was fully yielded to God and he came as a servant, you know, we like the way that that sounds, but in practicum, we don't really like it. We don't love humbling ourselves below others and serving them. It is very against our nature, which is to self-protect and self-promote and you know, look out for number one. These are the things we've been hearing, I mean, at least for me, from the time I was a child. It's very clear from Scripture that the greatest is the one who serves, not the one who is being served. And they had the idea that if you're the king, you have all these servants and everybody submits to your authority, and that's the highest place. And Jesus is saying, No, that is not the highest place. The highest place is this one who serves, the one who comes underneath and serves and does the things that nobody else wants to do. That's the one who's going to be the greatest in the kingdom. That's submission. And so it's visible in action. Submission is something, it's what you are willing to actually do, not just what you say. And there's an example of this in scripture that I love. And this is where there's it's the parable of the two sons. And this this parable is found in Matthew 21, uh, 28. And there's two sons, and the father comes to them and tells them, I want you to go and work in the vineyard. And one son says, No, I'm not going to do that, and he goes off. And the other son says, Yes, sir, I'll do it, and he goes off. And the one who said no has a change of heart later and goes and he does the work in the vineyard. And the one who said, Yeah, I'll do it, goes off and he doesn't do it. And so Jesus asks the question, which one did the will of the father? And it's not the one who just with his mouth said, Oh yes, and feigned obedience and was giving lip service to his father. It was the one who actually went, even though originally he did not have the right response. He said no, ultimately, his action was in obedience to the father. And so that's something that's really important too, is not to just have words, not offer lip service about these things, but to actually have in action submission. There is another parable where Jesus is talking to a centurion who is in charge of other people. And the centurion is coming to Jesus and he's asking him for healing for his son. And as Jesus is talking to him, he says, Oh, you don't have to go all the way to my house. You just say the word, and I know it will be done because I am a man who has authority, and when I tell somebody to do something, it's just done. And Jesus is absolutely astonished by his faith. And this again is someone that understands what authority looks like. And that when you understand your own place in the structure of the thing, it's much, much easier not to resent it. So it doesn't look like doing stuff with your teeth gritted all the time. Ugh, I just I'm gonna have to do this. I have to do this. You don't understand your place if that's the way that you come to this whole topic. I know it's been taught a lot in ways that are that can be a little offensive or a little bit hard to take as a woman. I understand that. But if your first reaction to the topic of submission is disgust or frustration, what it tells you is that you don't understand your place and the value of it to Christ. Because God never came to diminish women, he never did that. When Jesus came to earth, he always honored women in ways that no one during those times honored women. Even you think about the fact that when he rose from the grave and they went to the tomb, who went to the tomb first? What witness came and told the disciples that Jesus wasn't in the tomb? It was Mary. It was a woman. Nobody would have ever taken the testimony of a woman. But again, even in that, Jesus elevated the honor of that woman to be the one to be able to go and tell the other disciples. He could have easily had John, right, the beloved disciple, to be there with her, and therefore that testimony would stand. But instead, he appeared to her first. And so it's important that we understand when God looks at us, he is not saying that men are here and women are here. He is saying the way he has designed it is that he is in all authority. And as that man yields under his authority, he's in the right position to have a wife that submits to his authority as unto the Lord. And it's all this beautiful protection, security, it's all these things. God did not design it to be a pressing down of women or some, you know, making them less important. He says that we are all equal. There's neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew or Gentile. Like when he looks at us, he doesn't label us Christian woman or Jewish man or pastor of all. Like he looks at us as the image bearers of Christ. We are an image bearer of God. And remember, even in creation, he made Adam, and the very first thing he said it wasn't good to was that Adam was alone, and therefore he made a helper suitable, an equal with Adam, a companion that would do life together with Adam and be a helper to Adam. Because Adam was not supposed to be alone. And so it's important that we understand the structure that God designed so that we can value our place in it and not diminish our place in it or have resentment over our place in God's design. So, in closing today, I want to talk about another parable. I know we've kind of been all over the Bible in parables today, but it's a really important thing to look at the stories that Jesus told, the things that He modeled for us. I think the reason he told so many stories is because at different times in our life, as we read these stories, it's a living word. They're going to mean something to us that maybe they didn't mean the last time we read them. Because we have a deeper understanding of God and his character, or we have a deeper understanding of the situation that is being spoken about in the story. And one of the stories that I haven't heard taught a lot is actually in Luke. And it's in Luke 17. And Jesus is talking to the disciples and he's talking about forgiveness, and then he switches and he says, you know, if you have faith, as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry bush, uproot yourself and go over there, and it'll do it. And the disciples say, increase our faith, like they're asking the Lord, increase their faith. And so to increase their faith, he doesn't tell a miraculous story, a story of a healing. He doesn't raise somebody from the dead, but what he does is he tells another story, tells a parable. He's telling the story of a servant that works for a man, and he brings it to light that the servant is going to come back from working in the fields. And the first thing he's going to do is not expect for the master to say, Come, sit down, you've been working hard, eat with me, let's share a meal. What he does is he comes in and he continues his service to the master. And he goes and prepares the dinner and brings it to the master. And after the master has eaten, he takes his meal and sits and eats. And so again, it's just that structure of authority and the principle of service to that master. And when the master talks to him, he says, We've only done our duty. The point is the servant is not expecting the master to go, oh, you've done such a great job serving me today, and look at all that you've done. It's not for recognition, it's not for a puffing up or pride's sake or an increase in pay or stature. It's simply the duty of that servant to serve the master. So how it ends is in Luke 17 9, he asks them, Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, We are unworthy servants, we have only done our duty. That's what Jesus instructs them to say. And so as you look at that, I think the point is pretty clear. What he's saying is we aren't to be doing these things for the thanks that we'll get. When you serve another human being, it's wonderful if they thank you. But we've talked about this in another episode. You aren't to require their thanks because your service is as unto the Lord. It wasn't for what you get in return. When you are living life expecting a return every time you serve, that is not a posture of humility or service. That is a posture of how can I benefit from doing this outward activity that looks nice. It's the same thing as someone who says something nice to you but doesn't mean it. We are not to be doing things for the thanks or for the increase in stature. We are to be doing things because it's our duty to do so. We are made in the image of God. We don't talk about duty a lot here because I don't ever want it to come across like we have to do certain things to get God's approval. That's not true. God loved you and He sent Jesus to die for you when you were still in your sin. When you were way out, not wanting anything to do with Him. You didn't clean yourself up, you didn't all of a sudden decide that you were going to start loving Him, and so then He loved you. It's always been that He's loved you first. And while you were a sinner, He sent Christ to die for you. That's the truth of it. But as we look at our relationships, it is our responsibility to love God and love others after we receive the love from God. That is what it's all about. He gives to us, He serves us so that in return we can receive that from Him and go and serve others. He's shown us the way, He's shown us the model. And so if you are holding resentments because you are serving people and you're not getting enough thanks, I would ask you to step back from all your service and evaluate your heart in your service because that is not a pure-hearted position that you're taking. You are not in humility, you are wanting something for it, a payback, a thank you. And that is not what Jesus modeled for us. Is it nice when people recognize your work? Absolutely. But do you know who sees when no one else sees? God is seeing it all. Every cup of cold water you give to a stranger in his name, he is recording it in a book. So when we get our thanks and our praise from people, he says we've earned our reward in full. But when we get our thanks and our praise from him in heaven in eternity, that's something that no one can ever take away from us. It's eternal. So I just think it's really important that we understand what submission is and what submission isn't. And this has not been a full teaching on it, but there were just some things that I think are really important as we talk about relationships that I wanted to touch on. That service to others is a huge part of relationships. And it was a huge part of what Jesus did when he came. And so, how can we think that Jesus would model something before us and talk about it so often if we weren't to follow in those footsteps? So I pray today you just go forward with a piece about where you are in the rank, right? What rank you hold, not because one rank is better than another, but because when you understand where you fit and how God sees your position, it really changes everything. Your identity is not rooted in what anyone else says or thinks about you. It is only rooted in what God has said about you. And he has said only holy things, only good things, because that is who he is. So I hope this blesses you today. I hope you go forward in your week, just re-evaluating some of your thoughts about service to others, and then hopefully, with a heart full of joy and love, you sit before the Lord and ask him, even in the morning, this week maybe three mornings out of the week, sit with Jesus and just ask him, Lord, what is it that you want me to receive from you today so that I can go forward and serve others out of what you've given me? Because he never blesses us to let the blessing stop here. He blesses us that we would go out and bless other people. It's the way he's always structured things. He blesses so that you'll be a blessing to others. So, what does he want you to receive from him this week so that you can go out and give to others? All right. I'll see you next week. Bye bye.