Awake, O sleeper,     and arise from the dead,and Christ will shine on you. (Ephesians 5:14)

With this poem, Paul grounds the often-quoted marriage instructions of Ephesians 5:22–33 in the transformative power of the gospel. The gospel rouses sleepers and quickens the dead. It calls those trapped in darkness into the shining light of Christ, where, for the first time, they can truly see and do what is good.

If the gospel can accomplish these feats, it can surely transform ordinary men into husbands who love their wives as Christ loved the church, and it can surely transform ordinary women into wives who respect and submit to their husbands’ leadership. But this transformation is not automatic, and it does not happen overnight. That’s why Paul offers this apostolic marriage advice: stay in the light (Ephesians 5:8–9).

While his advice applies to husbands and wives alike, this article addresses wives. Wives who want to see their marriages transformed must stay in the light, where Christ himself shines on them, revealing truths and exposing lies that shape their expectations for marriage. In particular, light-seeking wives embrace two foundational truths and reject two persistent lies about their marriages.

Truth #1: He is still a sinner.

The first expectation-shaping truth about marriage is that even though your husband is awake, alive, and in the light, he is still a sinner. And as a sinner, he will struggle in many ways common to humanity, some of which Paul warns us about in the rest of his letter to the Ephesians.

“God sees your husband’s faults more clearly than you do. His is the superior wisdom.”

At times, your husband may be proud, harsh, or impatient (Ephesians 4:2). His unique cocktail of deceitful desires will afflict him (Ephesians 4:22). He will stumble by not actively guarding his mind (Ephesians 4:25–32; 5:18). He may be tempted toward dishonesty, theft, laziness, destructive speech, resentment, selfishness, sexual immorality of various stripes, jealousies, greed, or substance abuse. In a word, he will falter in his charge to love you self-sacrificially.

As a native Texan, my mother-in-law strictly follows this rule: turn on the light during middle-of-the-night trips to the bathroom. Failing to do so might mean a surprise encounter with a cockroach (at least in Texas).

When Christ shines on a marriage, his light exposes sins so that we can see them for the stealthy, invasive, dirty, creepy, darkness-loving, Texas-sized cockroaches that they are. The light protects us from surprise over our husband’s failures because our expectations are built on this foundational truth: he is still a sinner.

Truth #2: He is growing.

The light also trains us to shape our expectations around a second foundational truth: although your husband is still a sinner, he is growing. In the light, his sin is visible. And once seen, the way forward is clear.

In the case of a cockroach, a heavy-soled shoe is the clearest way forward, but sin requires a different kind of death — one of confession and turning and walking away, further and further from sleep’s darkness and the grave, and further into the light of Christ. The way forward may not be easy, but it is brightly lit.

If your husband is awake and alive, then Christ shines on him! He will increasingly see his sin, and he will know what to do about it. Equipped with more than a thick-soled shoe, he has everything he needs to crush the sins exposed by the light. (Ephesians 6:10–18 gives a full inventory of all the offensive and defensive weapons in his arsenal.)

These two foundational truths — your husband is a sinner, but he is growing — should shape your expectations about marriage, tempering your idealism with reality and your pessimism with hope.

Lie #1: ‘I’m more righteous than he is.’

Besides revealing two foundational truths for marriage, the light of Christ exposes two persistent lies in marriage. The first is the lie of superior righteousness. All of us indulge in pride from time to time, supposing ourselves better than our husbands. But if we stay in the light, we cannot escape the equalizing effect of the cross.

The light reminds us that we need the sin-cleansing blood of Jesus every bit as much as our husbands. Alongside them, we too must grow in detecting and killing sin. We must stand on guard against the temptations that hide behind our husband’s failures. Too often, we respond to their sin with sin of our own because the lie of superior righteousness tempts us to excuse our sin when it is provoked by theirs.

On this matter, Paul is far from silent: “Be angry and do not sin . . . and give no opportunity to the devil” (Ephesians 4:26–27). Sin hurts. Anger is a natural response to pain. But the light helps us see beyond those moments of hurt and anger to the true enemy lurking behind them. Our husbands are not the enemy, but behind their failures, the devil strains to reassert his dominance over our lives. He would use our anger against us, seducing us to react in sinful ways — perhaps by lashing out with hateful words, by giving quarter to arrogance or self-righteousness, by plotting revenge, by cynically despairing, or by withholding forgiveness.

But these reactions are from the shadows, lining the path back to the grave. The way of light and life is to “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). We should expect to find sin crouching at the door of our marital disappointments, so we proactively guard our hearts against the snare of anger by continually confessing our own sins and by cultivating a heart of forgiveness toward our husbands.

Then, when they confess their sins, we can eagerly, though not painlessly, extend all the mercy and grace to them that God has freely given us. In this way, we defend ourselves against the lie of superior righteousness that stalks us from the shadows of our husband’s failures.

Lie #2: ‘I know what’s best for him.’

Be wary also of a second persistent lie lurking in the shadows: the lie of superior wisdom. Doubtless, if you were God, you would choose a different path for your husband’s transformation than the one he is currently on. But the light of Christ breaks into our blind spots, challenging even our expectations about how our husbands should grow.

Perhaps you’d prioritize his inattentiveness or his [fill in the blank], but God sees your husband’s faults more clearly than you do. His is the superior wisdom. He exposes sin according to his curriculum and his calendar.

He may not transform your husband into the most attentive partner, but he might stir his heart to give more generously at church. Your husband may not notice a sink full of dirty dishes as much as you’d like, but he might begin to exercise more oversight when it comes to your children’s Internet access. He may continue struggling to remember what you’ve asked him to do, but over time he may grow in contentedness at work, faithfully laboring at an unsatisfying job to provide for your household.

“Stay in the light, where lies are exposed and faulty expectations transformed.”

In Christ, your husband is growing whether or not he is walking the precise path you’d prescribe. If you do not see growth in an area that is particularly grievous to you, invite Christ’s light to shine on your expectations so that you can truly see and wisely assess them. Is this trait that irks you truly sin, or could it simply be a dispositional weakness? Are you expecting your husband to do something God does not require? Stay in the light, where lies are exposed and faulty expectations transformed.

If unaddressed sin persists in your husband’s life, remember Paul’s divinely given counsel from another of his letters: rather than nagging, shaming, or despairing, “rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer” (Romans 12:12). Before you go to your husband, go to God! Recognize that God, better than anyone, can see your husband’s sin, and in his superior wisdom knows precisely what to do with it. (Even so, recognize that some patterns of sin may require outside counsel or help, especially if the sin endangers you or others.)

Let There Be Light

Stay in the light, and it will transform your marriage. Reconfigure your expectations around the truth that your husband is a sinner, and the light will protect you from surprise or disillusionment over his failures. Shape your expectations around the truth that he is growing, and the light will fill you with hope as you increasingly see your husband the way God sees him — as a dearly loved son gradually being transformed into the likeness of Christ, the only perfect husband.

And “finally . . . put on the whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:10–11), rejecting the lies of your own superior righteousness and wisdom. Then, hand in hand with your husband, grow up together into the image of your Savior.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast on this Monday. Today in our Bible reading, we read Jeremiah 23–25 together. It included a beautiful new-covenant text that one listener wants you to explain more. The listener is Matthew. He wrote, “Pastor John, hello to you. I find myself often in debates with friends and family over Calvinism and Arminianism. They’re all Arminian. I try to represent the other side with clarity and charity.

“One of the arguments that I come back to repeatedly is about free will and what I see in Jeremiah 24:7: ‘I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.’ What I see in this text is that, of course, we all have free will, the ability for our hearts to do and believe what we most desire. So, what we need are new desires that want the right things. God must act to give us new desires or we are hopeless. This is sovereign grace in the miracle of regeneration. How much of your discussions over free will centers on this fact, that we all have free will, and we all need a new heart, a new will?”

First, let me commend Matthew for defining what he means by free will. That’s really unusual. I appreciate it very much, because in most discussions people use the phrase as though it were clear, when in fact most people have very different views of what free will means. He has defined it, so I can answer his question with more precision.

Defining ‘Free Will’

He says that free will is “the ability for our hearts to do and believe what we most desire.” That’s a pretty shrewd and careful definition. Freedom of the will, he says, is the freedom “to do and believe what we most desire.” And I think that if we are going to affirm the existence of free will among fallen people like us, that’s the definition we need to use, because it answers the question of how people can be free whom the Bible says are dead in trespasses (Ephesians 2:5), slaves of sin (Romans 6:20), under the dominion of sin (Romans 3:9), blind to spiritual reality (2 Corinthians 4:4), hardened against God (Ephesians 4:18), and unable to submit to God (Romans 8:7).

“God knows how to govern all things, including the human will, in such a way that we are truly responsible.”

So, given Matthew’s definition of freedom, such dead, enslaved, dominated, blind, hard, impotent people have freedom of the will, because it means that they are free to do and believe what they most desire — namely, sin. That’s what they’re free to do. And I would agree that if we’re going to maintain that the will is free, that is the definition we should use. So, to speak of free will then is to speak of a will that is free to do and believe what it most desires — but is not free to desire God above all else.

What Arminians Want

What I have found, therefore, is that most people who reject Calvinistic or Reformed understandings of human depravity and sovereign grace — which is required to bring a dead, hard, blind person to saving faith — is that this definition of free will is not acceptable to them. It’s not acceptable because it still leaves a person unable to provide the decisive thing that leads to conversion — namely, the strongest desire to trust Christ. It leaves a person in the bondage of their strongest desires, which are against God.

Saying that a person is free to do what he most desires, but he’s not free to create desires for God, does not give the Arminian what he wants. And what’s that? A fair definition of what the Arminian requires is free will defined as the power of decisive self-determination. In other words, what the Arminian requires is that, at the precise point of conversion, where saving faith comes into being, it is man and not God that at that point provides the decisive and effective influence. That’s what the Arminian must have to make his views work. Whatever influences God may give prior to that point — call them “prevenient grace,” which is what the Arminian wants to call all the illuminating, freeing grace of God — the Arminian insists that the final, decisive creation of the strongest effective desire for Christ must be self-determined, human-determined, not God-determined.

So, Matthew asks me, “How much of your discussions over free will centers on the fact that we all have free will, and we all need a new heart and a new will?” My answer now is that I don’t usually start with Matthew’s definition of free will. It may be helpful in some discussions to define free will that way, but I find that it is most illuminating, most convicting, most clarifying to start with the definition of free will that Arminians really do need in order for their views to make sense — namely, the definition that free will is the power of decisive self-determination (or I sometimes use the phrase “ultimate self-determination”). With this definition, then, it appears that Arminians believe in such free will and Calvinists do not believe in such free will. I certainly do not believe there is such a thing as human free will defined as decisive self-determination.

Bound to Sovereign Grace

At this point in my conversations, what proves to be most clarifying is two things.

First is the abundance of biblical texts that describe the bondage of the will and the necessity of sovereign grace to bring a person out of spiritual deadness into life and faith. For example, in Ephesians 2:5–6, Paul does not say that when we were spiritually dead God gave us a kind of halfway regeneration where we now, in that new halfway state of life, provide ourselves the decisive, self-determining act of faith — the act of producing the strongest desire for Jesus that pushes us over the line to believe. What Paul says is that while we were dead, God not only made us alive but also raised us up with Christ and seated “us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” In other words, God’s action is decisive — all the way from death through spiritual resurrection to our firm, saved position in the presence of God in Christ. There are many texts that teach the same thing concerning sovereign grace. That’s the first thing.

“Without God’s sovereign grace, we would be utterly hopeless in the bondage of our spiritually dead hearts.”

The other thing that I find clarifying and helpful in conversations with folks is to point out that free will, understood as the power of ultimate or decisive self-determination, is not taught anywhere in the Bible. Not a single verse, not a single text teaches that there is such a thing as the power of ultimate human self-determination. So, where does that idea come from that we must have ultimate self-determination? It comes from a philosophical presupposition that people bring to the Bible. The philosophical presupposition is that if we don’t have ultimate self-determination, we cannot be held accountable for our own beliefs and actions before God. Well, the Bible simply does not affirm that presupposition.

The Bible teaches that God has ways we do not understand and that he knows how to govern all things, including the human will, in such a way that we are truly responsible, truly accountable — and he, at the same time, is truly sovereign. And oh, we should be thankful for this sovereign grace, because without it, we would be utterly hopeless in the bondage of our spiritually dead hearts.

So, if you find yourself — and I’m speaking to those of you who are listening right now — if you find yourself unable to love God, unable to trust Christ, don’t despair. Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). Resolve to seek him, come to him. Look to his suffering for the worst of sinners, and ask God for the grace to see and savor Christ.

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.