Audio Transcript

Andrea, a podcast listener in Jackson, Mississippi, writes in. “Hello, Pastor John! Thank you for your books and particularly your new book on providence. It has proven to be life-altering for me. Thank you! I was wondering if you could take a moment to address an entirely different topic — a marriage question. I have started to notice an emerging view of ‘complementarity’ online, and in my own circles, which seems a little off to me. It’s called complementarity and holds to the idea that the husband and wife take on different roles in the home, roles that mostly do not overlap. But to me it often sounds like simply a functional idea. So if the wife is a better teacher, she teaches the children the Bible and the husband doesn’t. Or if the wife makes more money, the husband takes the primary role in
caring for the daily needs of the kids.

“It’s called complementarity in the sense that each spouse is not duplicating the role of the other. Each complements what the other is doing. But I don’t know what else to call it except to say it feels like a genderless complementarity. The husband and wife do not overlap duties out of efficiency, not from deeper convictions. In fact, gender, rarely, if ever, is brought in to define which roles the man has that the woman does not, and vice versa. Do you see this functional ‘complementarity’? If so, how do you respond? And what roles in the home are most gendered? I would love your thoughts on this.”

I suppose it’s inevitable that the longer a label is used — like complementarianism or complementarity — the easier it is for the label to replace the reality. The label complementarian, as a designation for how men and women relate to each other, has been around for about 35 years. I would want to stress that labels are only valuable if they capture and communicate reality. It’s the biblical reality that we really care about, not so much the label.

Distinct by Deep Design

Now, I think Andrea is right that the label today is less clear and less precise in the reality it refers to than it used to be. She’s pointing to a particular use of the label where the reality behind it seems to have more or less vanished. People are calling themselves complementarian without any serious reference to what the essence of manhood and womanhood really are and what that essence calls for in life.

“Underneath these distinctions in roles are profound differences in the very nature of manhood and womanhood.”

From the beginning, in the late 1980s, the term complementarianism included, not just the biblical conviction that men should be the elders or pastors of churches and that men should be the heads of their marriages or homes, but also the conviction that underneath these distinctions in roles there are profound differences in the very nature of manhood and womanhood. Those differences in the unique essence of manhood and the unique essence of womanhood were designed by God in creation and were the foundation for why God assigned the differing roles that he did. What we are by God’s original design in making us male and female has always been the foundation for God’s design for how men and women relate to each other and what roles we take.

So, I would say it’s a fundamental mistake for husbands and wives, or men and women in the church, or men and women in general, to define our roles and how we function in them without any reference to the deeper design of God and who we are as male and female.

Male and Female in the Beginning

Let me try to show what I mean by referring to a couple of Bible passages. For example, 1 Timothy 2:12–14: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”

Then he gives a foundation, an argument, a ground, that goes all the way back to creation and the ruin of that creation in the fall. He says in verses 13–14, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”

I take Paul to be arguing something like this: the authoritative teaching role in the church — that is, the role of governance and teaching, the role of an elder — is to be filled by spiritually mature and gifted men because God established, in the first two chapters of Genesis, a peculiar responsibility and leadership for Adam as part of God’s design for manhood and what it means to be male in his family and in the world.

Deceiving Eve

Now, we can see this design for man’s peculiar responsibility in leadership confirmed by the way it falls apart in the moment of Satan’s temptation and the way God follows up with Adam and Eve after the fall. Genesis 3:6 says that Adam was with Eve at the temptation; he didn’t show up later. But Satan, being subtle and deceptive, totally ignores the person that God had made responsible for the life of the garden — the man. Thus, Satan attacks at this very crucial moment. He attacks and undermines God’s design and turns the woman into the spokesman and the leader and the decision-maker for humanity.

Now both Adam and Eve fall for this. Adam remained totally silent when he should have stepped in and taken responsibility for this horrifically dangerous moment. Eve willingly assumes the role of responsible leader, and the result is a catastrophic failure to be obedient to God for both of them.

Now when Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:13, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor,” I don’t think he intends to say Adam is guiltless. We know that from Romans 5, where Adam’s disobedience in fact is the decisive disobedience that brings down the curse on humanity. The point, rather, of saying “Adam was not deceived” is that Satan undermined Adam’s leadership role by not targeting Adam for deception, but rather the woman. He made her the leader at the moment of deception. The point, in the context of 1 Timothy, is this: when the roles of men and women are reversed, at the very point where leadership matters most, things go very badly for families and churches and societies.

Where Is Adam?

Now God confirms that understanding of what happened by the way he calls the couple to account. A few verses later, God comes to find them in the garden. Genesis 3:9–11 says,

The Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?”

Now, why didn’t God seek out the woman first since she ate the forbidden fruit first? Because God made man first and built into him a God-given sense of sacrificial responsibility for leadership and protection and provision. He is responsible for what just happened. That’s the price of leadership.

Male and Female in Marriage

This kind of built-in, creation-based leadership for man is confirmed in Ephesians 5. This is the second text I’m looking at: Ephesians 5:23–25, 28–29.

The husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. . . . He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church.

“How the husband and wife relate is to show the covenant love between Christ and the church.”

Paul describes the relationship as irreversible. The roles are not interchangeable. Christ and the church don’t get interchanged. They are the meaning of this relationship. How the husband and wife relate is to show the covenant love between Christ and the church, and Christ as the leader, savior, protector, nourisher, provider.

Paul roots those roles in the original pre-fall creation account in Genesis 2:24, which he quotes now in verse 31: “A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Then he applies it like this: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it [that is, the meaning of manhood and womanhood in marriage] refers to Christ and the church.”

That’s the meaning of male and female in marriage: male and female modeling Christ and the church in roles of headship and submission that cannot be reversed any more than Christ and the church can be.

Restoring the Foundation

I conclude from these two texts — 1 Timothy 2 and Ephesians 5 and others that I’m not mentioning — that the very nature of God-designed manhood and womanhood is the foundation of the roles we are given by God. A complementarianism stripped of its foundation in the God-given essence of manhood and womanhood is a label that has lost its reality.

When it comes to the hundreds of activities in the home and who does them, that will be sorted out best where husband and wife agree biblically that the man bears a special God-given burden of responsibility for leadership, for protection, for provision in the family — all carried out in the pursuit of the amazing model of Christ’s love for the church and the church’s glad submission to Christ.

The scene was reminiscent of a scary movie. Julia walked out to the church parking lot and found an ominous note taped to her car window: “I SEE YOU!”

Though she thought I was hundreds of miles away, I was actually nearby, watching the entire scene unfold. When she began to nervously look around, I took that as my cue and drove up next to her. As she stared in shock, I asked in the smoothest way possible, “Wanna take a ride?” (Yes, I had rehearsed it many times.) She joyfully got in the car, and a few hours later, I got down on one knee and asked if she would marry me. She said yes.

The cryptic three-word message was actually not the way I intended to start the morning. I had crafted the perfect poem to start our engagement day, but it got lost somewhere between my hotel and the church. With only a few seconds to write something, “I SEE YOU!” was all I could come up with.

We used to think our engagement was perfect except for those hastily written three words. Ironically, after 22 years of marriage, that note has become one of our favorite parts of the day. In fact, one of our marriage goals is to regularly and intentionally communicate what first happened on accident: “I see you.” While many fantasize about falling in love at first sight, we’ve discovered a better dream: a marriage that furthers love with each additional sight.

God Saw

It took a few years of marriage before I realized the power of sight as a way to pursue Julia. Up to that point, I was focused on developing my listening skills. Then, right when I began to make progress on that, God revealed (in perfect Godlike fashion) a new need for development: looking skills. We get a glimpse of the power of sight in the way God describes Israel’s suffering in Egypt:

God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel — and God knew. (Exodus 2:24–25)

By developing our listening and looking skills, we unlock a powerful combination in our marriages. When we listen, we communicate that our wife has been heard. When we look, we communicate that she is known and understood.

Unfortunately, far too many wives are overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness. Day after day, they feel invisible to the man they love. When I reflect on my own marriage and the real reasons why I don’t actively bless my wife as God intends, I admit that one of my main obstacles is optical. I don’t actually see what’s happening around me because I’m not really looking.

Savior with Wide Eyes

My breakthrough started with a study on all that Jesus noticed. Our Savior walked through life with eyes wide open. Jesus noticed Nathaniel under a tree (John 1:48) and Zacchaeus up in a tree (Luke 19:5). He noticed John’s disciples following at a distance (John 1:38) and the touch of one desperate woman while the masses pressed around him (Luke 8:45). Jesus watched in moments we think you shouldn’t, such as when the poor widow put all she had into the offering treasury (Luke 21:1–4). He also watched in moments we know we couldn’t, such as when he himself was the offering.

Even as he hung on the cross in intense agony, his eyes looked beyond his own suffering and responded with love. He prayed for those who crucified him (Luke 23:34), comforted a criminal next to him (Luke 23:43), and cared for his loved ones there for him (John 19:26–27). And through it all, Jesus kept his eyes on the work of his Father (John 5:19–20). Simply put, Jesus’s entire life and ministry deliberately and compassionately communicated, “I see you.”

I don’t wake each day with the burden to perfect who Jesus is for my wife, but I do rise with the great privilege to reflect him.

Three Paths to Better Sight

Empowered by the truth that God keeps me as “the apple of [his] eye” (Psalm 17:8), I made the commitment to be a man who takes literally the command that “each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4). Over the years, I have landed on three practices that promote a marriage culture that sees: stop, scribe, and speak.

STOP

When Moses discovered a bush on fire yet not consumed, he stopped to see what was going on. What happens next is worth reading slowly: “When the Lord saw that [Moses] turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’” (Exodus 3:4). When Moses stopped to see, the Lord started to lead. I believe the same principle is true for each of us in our various relationships, whether with God, wife, or children. When we stop to see, the Lord may start to lead.

Apart from praying, I can’t think of a more effective use of my time than to stop what I’m doing and think about what I’m seeing in the life of my bride. These moments are always beneficial, and the main requirement is that I create the space with a curious spirit.

SCRIBE

After taking the time to stop, I embrace the mindset of a scribe, taking notes on what I’m seeing. My observations are usually focused under a few main categories:

What makes her happy or sad?
What are her consistent dreams or disappointments?
What relaxes her or increases her stress?
What has she mentioned that could be a great “just because” gift?

I’m both excited and embarrassed when I go to scribe. The excitement comes from the awareness that God is leading; I’m seeing things! The embarrassment comes from reading previous observations and recognizing how quickly and easily they slipped my mind. But at least I see them again, because I’m a scribe. I encourage you to write what you see, because there is power in the pen (Deuteronomy 17:18).

SPEAK

Last, after taking the time to stop and scribe what I see, I speak.

My first words are to God on Julia’s behalf. Genesis 25:21 tells us, “Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren. And the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived.” I love the simple words “Isaac prayed . . . because she was . . .” As a prayer prompt, I will write these very words on a page and fill in the blank with as many things that come to mind: “Matty prayed . . . because Julia was . . .” Sentences like this give me a practical way to take all that I have seen and speak them to the One who cares for my wife most. Perhaps you don’t need a prompt like this to inspire you, but I sure do. I fear becoming the kind of husband of whom it could be written, “Matty did not pray for his wife, but she was . . .”

While the first words are spoken to God, additional words often come later. When I consistently stop to see, I find that my speech to Julia routinely lands with substance and strength. While I never assume the ability “to sustain with a word him who is weary” (Isaiah 50:4), I am keenly aware of where that ability comes from. Speaking such words begins with hearing (Isaiah 50:4), and hearing often begins with seeing (Exodus 3:4). This is the life-giving power that a husband kick-starts when he simply takes the time to see.

The part of the country we call home is adjacent to the Appalachian Trail, with some of the nation’s most beautiful viewpoints. Typically, the higher you go, the more clearly you see. For me, cultivating the simple yet consistent practice to stop, scribe, and speak is akin to walking up three giant steps that give me a higher, more breathtaking view of how good and generous God has been to me through my wife. It’s amazing what you can see when you are looking!

If we could distill God’s will for his people into a simple prayer, we may do no better than an often-repeated plea from Robert Murray M’Cheyne: “Lord, make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be made” (Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, 159).

How often does such a prayer find its place upon your lips? How deeply does such a desire shape your hopes and plans? If the longings of your heart could speak, would any of them cry out, “Make me as holy as I can be”?

God’s desire for our holiness burns through the Scriptures like a purifying fire. Paul would have us think so: “This is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). Peter would have us think so: “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct” (1 Peter 1:15–16). Hebrews would have us think so: “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14).

And in a hundred other ways, God would have us think so. Our holiness delights him (Psalm 40:6–8), pleases him (1 Thessalonians 4:1), rises before him like a fragrant offering (Philippians 4:18), elicits his approval and praise (Romans 2:29; 12:1). If you want to please a holy God, be as holy as you can be.

Holiness and Its Hoaxes

Before we consider why holiness makes God happy, ponder for a moment what we even mean by holiness. Like many familiar Bible words, holiness can get lost in a haze of abstraction. And over time, if we’re not careful, we may come to associate the word with images or ideas at odds with the real thing.

Some, for example, may hear holiness and (perhaps subconsciously) think bland or boring. Holiness belongs in a museum or antique shop, hushed and stuffy. True holiness, however, knows nothing of blandness and cannot abide boredom. Scripture speaks of “the splendor of holiness,” of holiness as “glory and beauty” (1 Chronicles 16:29; Exodus 28:2). As Sinclair Ferguson writes, holy people shine with something of God’s own brilliance:

“To sanctify” means that God repossesses persons and things that have been devoted to other uses, and have been possessed for purposes other than his glory, and takes them into his own possession in order that they may reflect his own glory. (The Holy Spirit, 140)

True holiness is breathtakingly beautiful. It participates in God’s own glory — a glory bursting with life and majesty.

Others may hear holiness and think mainly of religious ritual: food laws and temple sacrifices, perhaps, or a devotion to churchly routines. But such was the mistake of many Pharisees — those punctual, precise, “worshiping” bundles of corruption (Matthew 23:25–28). True holiness pierces to the deepest parts of a person; it touches and transforms “spirit and soul and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Holiness is a hand that plucks the heart’s hidden strings, filling all of life with heavenly melody. It is not smoke arising from the altar, but faith and love arising from the soul (Psalm 40:6–8).

Then, finally, some may hear holiness and wonder what relevance it holds to daily life. Maybe holiness seems like a cloud: miles above the ground and impossible to grasp. But true holiness has everything to do with everyday life. When Jesus and his apostles call us to holiness, they address our thinking and speaking, our eating and drinking, our spending and saving, our working and resting. Even on the most ordinary day, there never comes a moment when “be holy” doesn’t mean something practical. Holiness embraces and dignifies our daily doings.

And such holiness — beautiful, deep, broad — makes God happy.

God’s Complex Pleasure

Depending on your personality and theological background, the thought of our holiness pleasing God may raise some questions. Some, especially lovers of the doctrine of justification, may wonder, Doesn’t God already delight in me? And others, especially the sensitive and scrupulous, may ask, How could God ever delight in me?

Doesn’t God already delight in me?

For some, the idea that our holiness delights God seems to undermine (or at least sit in tension with) justification by faith alone. Doesn’t God’s delight rest on Christ’s perfect holiness now reckoned to me through faith? Doesn’t he call me “holy and beloved” before I obey (Colossians 3:12) and even after I sin (1 Corinthians 6:11)?

These questions press us toward a helpful distinction. At one level, God has an unshakeable delight in his people because we are united to “his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13), our holy Savior who remains the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). We are in Christ — wrapped in his righteousness, sanctified by his purity — and therefore fully approved in God’s sight. And yet, above this foundation of God’s unchanging favor, we really can please him more or less, depending on how we live. We can grieve the Spirit or gladden him (Ephesians 4:30); we can delight God Almighty or displease him (Ephesians 5:9–10).

The image of fatherly discipline in Hebrews 12 brings these two kinds of pleasure together. All discipline implies some degree of displeasure or disapproval. At the same time, all good discipline springs from deep love. “The Lord disciplines the one he loves” (Hebrews 12:6). Beneath the displeasure of God’s discipline is his deep and unchanging fatherly affection.

Because he loves us, he responds to our displeasing sins with discipline — and by discipline, he makes us more pleasing. He gives us the security of his everlasting approval in Christ — and amazingly, he also gives us the dignity of becoming the kind of people who will hear his “well done.”

How could God ever delight in me?

Others ask a different question about God’s delight. They understand why holiness pleases God, and they would love to know themselves pleasing before him. But they can’t seem to imagine their holiness — their small, stumbling holiness — ever being pure enough to please him. Maybe in heaven they’ll delight God, but how could they do so now?

I feel the force of the question. Our sins are still many, our present imperfections run deep, and mixed motives taint even our best deeds. This side of heaven, God can always disapprove of something inside us. So it can feel safer to simply take refuge in the righteousness of Christ and wait till we’re perfect to believe ourselves pleasing. But that would be a great mistake.

“God is happy with our holiness because the heart of true holiness is happiness in God.”

If we, though trusting in Jesus and seeking to follow him, doubt that God could delight in our holiness, we need to reckon with how often God uses the language of pleasure to describe his posture toward his partly sanctified people. He says brotherly love pleases him (Romans 14:18), sharing with others pleases him (Hebrews 13:16), praying for kings pleases him (1 Timothy 2:3–4), a child’s obedience pleases him (Colossians 3:20), even that we can be “fully pleasing” to him (Colossians 1:10). And in each of these examples (and many more), he is not lying. The holy, holy, holy God is astoundingly, wonderfully pleasable.

Roots of His Approval

If we ask why such imperfect holiness pleases God, we might give several answers. We might remember that our present holiness is nothing less than the emerging character of Christ in us (2 Corinthians 3:18), his image rescued and renewed (Romans 8:29) — and God loves the glory of his Son. We might also remember that our holiness is the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23) — and just as in the beginning, God regards the creative work of his Spirit as “good,” indeed “very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Or we might remember, as Richard Sibbes writes, that God is able to take a long view of our holiness, seeing today’s small step as part of a much bigger and more beautiful picture:

Christ values us by what we shall be, and by what we are elected unto. We call a little plant a tree, because it is growing up to be so. “Who has despised the day of small things?” (Zechariah 4:10). Christ would not have us despise little things. (The Bruised Reed, 17)

Today’s edifying speech, purity of thought, self-denying service, prayerful yearning toward heaven — these are acorns becoming oaks, buds about to bloom, mustard seeds destined to outgrow and outlast the thorns and thistles of our sin. And so they please him.

Yet we can dig still deeper.

Happiness at the Heart

At bottom, we might say that God is happy with our holiness because the heart of true holiness is happiness in God. God made the world so that people like us would find our greatest joy in him and so glorify him as the Greatest Joy in the world— the treasure in the field, the pearl of infinite price, the fairest among ten thousand (and far more). And if we could peel back the layers of a truly holy life, we would find a heart that pulses with such pleasure in God.

People growing in holiness have felt, with Paul, something of “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” a worth that makes us more ready to suffer than to sin (Philippians 3:8–10). With Jeremiah, we have left sin’s broken cisterns, drunk deeply from the fountain, and now refuse to leave (Jeremiah 2:13–14). With John, we have taken up the commandments of God and said, with a cry of joy, “Not burdensome!” (1 John 5:3). And with David, we have tasted and seen that God is good (Psalm 34:8) — his presence the height of joy, his right hand the province of pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11).

Such holiness is beautiful, a flicker of the love between Father and Son, the aroma of heaven’s atmosphere. Such holiness is heart deep, filling our innermost parts with rivers of living water. Such holiness is broad, spreading over life as comprehensively as the waters cover the sea. And such holiness makes God happy.

So, if we want to distill God’s will for his people into a simple prayer, we may do no better than M’Cheyne’s striking line: “Lord, make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be made.” And as we pray, we’ll know what we mean deep down: “Lord, make me as happy in you as a pardoned sinner can be made.”