Facing Prometheus — Week 17 (Sacred Lives in a Secular World) | “The Practical of Marriage” | Pastors Jason & Erica Parrish
The last two weeks have been about laying foundations — the sacredness of marriage, the theological framework of mutual submission, what biblical headship and submission actually mean. But theology that never lands in the everyday rhythm of a real marriage is theology that never takes root.
In Week 17 of Facing Prometheus: A Letter to the Ephesians and the Future Church Dilemma, Pastors Jason and Erica Parrish teach together, walking through what mutual submission actually looks like in practice — on a Tuesday night, when you’re tired, when the dishes are piled up, when you don’t agree, when life has shifted under your feet. This is marriage at the ground level.
The Text — Ephesians 5:22–33
“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless. In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own flesh but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, since we are members of his body. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church. To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband.”
— Ephesians 5:22–33 (CSB)
The Governing Framework
★★★ Mutual submission is not two people losing themselves. It is two people surrendering themselves unto Jesus — so as to create a marriage that is a place of trust, honor, responsibility, and mutual flourishing.
As we discussed last week, this is not accomplished through dominance, control, or force — but through a mutual submission of husband and wife that governs the meanings and realities of headship, submission, love, and respect.
If Ephesians 5:21 frames the entire marriage passage with “submitting to one another in the fear of Christ,” what does that practically look like in the daily rhythms of a real marriage?
What does it look like on a Tuesday night — when you’re tired, in disagreement, presiding over homework, cooking dinner, paying bills, making decisions, and the day has not gone the way you hoped?
Here are eight truths that guide our marriage.
1. Everyday Marriage Begins with Everyday Surrender to Jesus
★★ Mutual submission is not possible where there is no submission first to Jesus.
The single most important relationship in any marriage is not the relationship between husband and wife. It is each spouse’s independent relationship with Jesus. That sounds counterintuitive — but it’s the foundation of everything else. A marriage in which both spouses are daily surrendering to Christ becomes a marriage in which mutual submission to each other actually becomes possible.
When that personal surrender disappears, mutual submission collapses into negotiation, scorekeeping, or control. Marriage was never designed to be the source of your spiritual life. It was designed to be the overflow of it.
2. Mutual Submission Does Not Make Us the Same — It Makes Us Unified in Surrender
★★ This is about different expressions and responsibilities of the same Gospel.
These different expressions show up in the specific instructions Paul gives: husbands, love your wives. Wives, respect your husbands. Too often, we reduce this directly to “roles” without doing the deeper work first. We’ll deal with roles in a moment — but at the broadest level, love and respect are both defined and governed by mutual submission.
Mutual submission does not erase the distinction between husband and wife, or between male and female. We are ontologically different — and that difference is for more than just reproductive purposes. That is part of what Paul is driving at when he gives specific instruction to husbands as men and wives as women. But this distinction does not make one better or greater than the other. Dignity is assigned to both.
3. Submission Is a Posture Before It Is Practical
Please remember: the concept of a wife’s submission is a voluntary position rooted in the principle of mutual submission named in Ephesians 5:21.
★★ Submission in the context of marriage is primarily a posture of the heart before it ever becomes a practical reality in the hands.
The problem we face with this topic is that when submission is pulled out from beneath the governing reality of mutual submission, it becomes a justification for marital control. We tend to connect submission immediately and exclusively to specific roles — and that is not what Paul is doing here.
The concept of submission signifies the union of two into one. That oneness requires certain actions to be realized — primarily through submission. Oneness is not possible where there is no submission.
Submission in a healthy marriage is never the product of force or coercion. It is the product of trust. A wife is not commanded to submit because her husband demands it; she is invited to submit as a free, voluntary posture rooted in the security of mutual submission. And the proper understanding of what mutual submission means for the husband is what makes that trust possible in the first place. Submission becomes not only possible but joyful when it is rooted in trust — not in pressure or expectation.
4. Head Means Responsibility and Covering — Not Ego and Control
★★★ To be the head is not about getting your way. It is about carrying weight.
Headship in Paul’s framework is not about ego, decision-making power, or being the loudest voice in the home. It is about responsibility — carrying the spiritual, emotional, and protective weight of the family. It is about covering — the way Christ covers the church: shielding, providing, nourishing, laying himself down for her well-being.
When a husband understands headship this way, it stops being a position of authority to defend and becomes a posture of sacrifice to embrace. The question is no longer “am I being respected as the head?” It becomes “am I covering my wife and family the way Christ covers the church?” Those are radically different questions, and they produce radically different husbands.
5. Love Is About a Daily Death to Self
★★★ Love is not seen in a dramatic one-time sacrifice nearly as much as it is seen in the daily decisions of the denial of oneself.
We tend to romanticize sacrificial love — picturing the dramatic moment, the grand gesture, the cinematic decision. But the love Paul describes in Ephesians 5 is not primarily cinematic. It is the slow, unglamorous, daily work of dying to self.
It is the decision to listen when you’d rather talk. To serve when you’d rather be served. To let go of the small thing you’re holding onto out of pride. To go to bed at peace instead of holding the grudge. To pray for your spouse when you’d rather complain about them. Cross-shaped love is what shows up in those moments — over and over and over again — not just once.
6. A Healthy Marriage Is Organized Around Gift Sets, Not Rigid Roles
★★ Mutual submission creates the necessary space for each spouse to fit into their God-given design and giftedness.
The common approach to marriage is to define roles the way they have historically been defined — or the way they are understood in modernity and postmodernity. We would argue that neither of those frameworks is how God designed marriage to be.
God gives gifts. Husbands and wives both have unique strengths, temperaments, callings, and giftings. A healthy marriage discerns those gifts and organizes the practical realities of life around them — not around cultural assumptions about who should do what.
One spouse may be more gifted at finances. The other at hospitality. One at long-range vision. The other at day-to-day discernment. Mutual submission gives marriage the room to let each person operate from their giftedness rather than from a rigid template imposed from outside.
7. Trust Moves Us Forward Where There Is a Lack of Clarity and Agreement
★★ In a healthy marriage, decisions should be made through prayer, conversation, wisdom, and mutual honor.
When clarity is missing — or when one of us has clarity that the other doesn’t yet — trust and deference are what establish the way forward.
Marriage is not about the wife getting one vote and the husband getting two because he is the husband and a man. That is not biblical headship; that is cultural distortion. Mutual submission is about learning to defer to each other when the situation or decision warrants it. That deference does not strip either spouse of dignity. It orients the marriage around trust and ultimate unity.
Sometimes the husband defers to the wife’s wisdom or discernment. Sometimes the wife defers to the husband’s sense of where God is leading. The question is never “who wins?” The question is always “how do we move forward together, in trust, toward Christ?”
8. Mutual Submission Creates the Necessary Space for Change Over Time
★★★ You don’t just marry a person for who they are. You marry them for who they will become as well.
This is one of the scariest realities we face in marriage — and one of the most important. The person you married will not be the same person ten years from now. Twenty years from now. Forty years from now. And neither will you.
Marriage is a place where we will experience:
- Loss and grief
- Aging and physical change
- Pressure and stress
- Relocation and transition
- Children — and children leaving the house
- Spiritual ups and downs
- Disappointment
- Sickness
- Financial ups and downs
- And everything in between
These things change you. They impact your marriage and they leave marks on each of your lives. The goal is not to keep your life from changing. The goal is to have a covenant strong enough to weather the changes — because that covenant is built upon Jesus.
Mutual submission creates the space and grace for both spouses to grow, change, and be re-shaped by life without the marriage breaking. Where there is rigidity, change becomes a threat. Where there is mutual submission anchored in Christ, change becomes the very thing the covenant was built to hold.
Closing
Marriage on a Tuesday night, when you’re tired and life is loud, doesn’t look like a theological treatise. It looks like two people who have each independently surrendered to Jesus, choosing to surrender to each other one more time — covering, dying, deferring, trusting, growing.
That’s mutual submission. That’s a sacred marriage. And that’s a covenant strong enough to last.
