If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you.

In the 1979 book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Philip Hallie writes, “During the four years of the German occupation of France, the village of Le Chambon, with a population of about three thousand impoverished people, saved the lives of about five thousand [Jewish] refugees (most of them children)” (xiii).

“This village, as a whole community, worked to save the innocent.”

Hallie’s book is more than a historical retelling of a rescue effort. I would describe it as an ethical forensic analysis, looking for the root causes that explain why this village, as a whole community, worked to save the innocent. What amazes me most is how three thousand people together agreed to give themselves to the rescue.

Rescue the Perishing

It’s inspiring, to be sure, to read of individuals who answered the call to “rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11). German Christian Fritz Graebe, for example, delivered hundreds of Jews to safety during the same time period. He came to be known as “the Moses of Rovno.” The work broke him physically, depleted his resources, and forced him to cut himself off from his family lest they be endangered by his actions. He said it was the Golden Rule that guided him. Graebe’s life testifies to the truth of Isaiah 32:8: “He who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands.”

It’s a further wonder to me, beyond the heroics of individuals, how families risked their lives during this time. Exposure multiplies as the number of people involved increases — and the blow falls not just on any group, but on their family.

My admiration for Casper (Papa) Ten Boom and his family starts here. Proverbs 24:10 says, “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.” The day of adversity in view in this passage is not the day you lose your job, or even the day you find out your loved one has cancer, painful as those experiences are. No, the day of adversity is when you witness the intentional killing of innocent human beings. On that day, if you shrink back in fearful self-preservation, your faith is weak and God-belittling. The opposite is expected. “Rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11).

Casper was in his eighties when the Germans seized the Netherlands. His daughter Betsy was exceedingly frail her whole life. Corrie, the youngest, was in her fifties and was a watchmaker. Yet they ran to the point of the spear and rescued over five hundred Jews from death before being betrayed and imprisoned. Only Corrie survived.

Wonder of Le Chambon

The stories of individuals and families risking their lives are truly remarkable. How much more wondrous, then, that a whole village — with its spectrum of personalities and beliefs and its wide range of maturity, spiritual and otherwise — should agree to risk their lives and coordinate their efforts to rescue five thousand Jewish refugees.

Le Chambon’s residents were descendants of Huguenots (French Protestants of the Reformed tradition). “During hundreds of years of persecution, her pastors and her people were arrested by the dragoons of the king and then hanged or burned either in Le Chambon itself or in Montpellier to the south” (25). When the Jews were marked for slaughter, the village, led by the biblically reflective pastor André Trocmé and his pragmatic, action-oriented wife, Magda, held a proud identity and template for resistance.

I came across Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed around 1987. I was a pastor of a small inner-city church in Boston. Five years later, I was leading a citywide effort to organize churches in setting up the first of six ultrasound-equipped medical clinics dedicated to rescuing the innocent, one mother and baby at a time. My wife, Kristen, and several other women provided the original workforce. They met with women and couples in a pregnancy-related crisis and labored to help each one discover God’s provision as a parent or through adoption.

“Rescuing the innocent is not new; it’s just our turn.”

By 2002, I was writing a brief book for my fellow pastors on leading well in this sensitive but preeminent moral crisis. I wanted to examine from Scripture how defending the innocent is an outworking of the gospel itself. I also wanted to provide historical examples to show that rescuing the innocent is not new; it’s just our turn. After I went back to the midwives in Egypt and gathered examples through the ages, I suddenly remembered Le Chambon.

I pulled Hallie’s book from my shelf and was stunned. It was full of scribbled side comments and observations on André Trocmé. His motives, methods, setbacks, and sufferings were heavily underlined. I read several invocations from my past self: “Do this to respond to the SOIB!” (shorthand for “shedding of innocent blood”). Though I had forgotten the source, here were the prompts that explained my own efforts to rescue the perishing. Thirty-five years later, they still do.

Move Toward Rescue

Hallie summarizes a theme in Trocmé’s sermons like this: “If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you” (92). Was this not the case with the Samaritan? He drew near to an innocent man about to die, and then figured out how to save him. Fritz Graebe did not look for a book on how to rescue the innocent from slaughter. He resolved to do for others what he would want others to do for him if he was marked for death. He figured it out from there.

Nor did Corrie Ten Boom take a class in crisis-intervention strategies. She and her family felt compelled by the law of love to resist a preeminent injustice whatever the cost. Once resolved, opportunities presented themselves. Similarly, villagers in Le Chambon were mostly poor shopkeepers and farmers. Yet their resolve catalyzed an organizational effort worthy of scholarly analysis.

In God’s kindness, he has given me my own story of moving toward rescue. In 2006, after discovering that Miami had over thirty abortion businesses, almost all of which targeted minority neighborhoods, I felt burdened to go to Miami. I did not know a single person in that city. I sat in a local Panera, mapping out the plague by neighborhoods, and prayed, “Lord, I am here. Now what?” Soon after, a friend from Boston called me. He said, “Call my friend, Pastor Al Pino, in Miami Springs.” A year later, we stood together as we dedicated Heartbeat of Miami, a minority-led, ultrasound-equipped, church-supported pregnancy help clinic. It later expanded into four clinics, and since then, they’ve rescued over 55,000 mothers and babies from abortion.

In 2010, God brought me to China, where abortion, infanticide, and gendercide (the killing of baby girls mostly) is especially concentrated. The infamous one-child policy was in full force. I was able to meet with 75 house church pastors in the unregistered (underground) church in Beijing and present them with the four questions that have proved most helpful to me in “answering the crisis of abortion with the gospel of life.”

Now, after 29 trips to China, I can testify that the Christian leaders there used those four questions to train up an army of good Samaritans (over three million to date) committed to treasuring human life, rejecting abortion, experiencing God’s forgiveness, and rescuing the innocent, one mother and baby at a time.

God Meets Us to Save

We often experience those “it just so happened” moments, when our obedience meets God’s providence. Trocmé was saying, “Count on this happening!”

Let me offer a final example of the wisdom of his advice. Last September, in Bogota, Colombia, I handed out fetal models to 160 Christian leaders who were determined to lead well in resisting abortion.

After lunch, one pastor said that on his way to the restaurant, he met a woman who was clearly pregnant and in distress. He learned that her father was an acquaintance of his and was coercing his daughter into abortion by kicking her out of his home. He went to see her father straightaway and handed him the fetal model just received. The father choked up at the sight. The two then pledged to find God’s provision for his daughter and grandchild. And they did. Baby Violet was born December 15, 2021.

“If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you.”

ABSTRACT: Ten years after the English Parliament published the Westminster Confession, a group of Reformed ministers, including John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, met to draft a new confession: the 1658 Savoy Declaration. Using Westminster as their guide, they honed and clarified doctrinal statements and also attached thirty articles on congregational polity. Unlike the original draft of Westminster, however, they did not include polity within the confession itself, convinced that such matters should be left to Christian liberty. In doing so, Savoy not only improved upon Westminster but also took a stand that speaks a timely word to Christians today.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Michael Lawrence (PhD, University of Cambridge), lead pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon, to tell the story of the 1658 Savoy Declaration.

On October 14, 1658, Thomas Goodwin and a deputation of English congregational ministers presented a confession of faith and church order to the new Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard. Known to history as the Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order, it has been both neglected and misunderstood. On the one hand, with the demise of Richard’s Protectorate six months later, the instability of successive parliaments in 1659–1660, and the restoration of both Charles II in 1660 and the Church of England in 1662, whatever import was intended by its authors was quickly overtaken by events. On the other hand, from the beginning, its detractors, Presbyterian and radical alike, sought to marginalize the declaration as a narrow attempt to either enforce congregationalism or interfere with liberty of conscience.

But in fact, the Savoy Declaration should probably be considered “the high water mark of English Calvinism.”1 That the authors attached a clear and convincing explanation of congregational polity was a bonus that would not be lost on Baptists, who would use this document as a basis for their own confessions in 1677 and 1682.

Ripe for Reform

The story of the Savoy Declaration is part of the long and tortured attempt to “settle” the church of England as a thoroughly Protestant and Calvinist church. While Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) had accomplished much after Henry VIII’s break with Rome through the Thirty-Nine Articles, many thought the church but “halfly-reformed.” Under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Puritans in both church and government had agitated and worked for more biblical forms of church government and worship. At the same time, Reformed theology continued to refine its understanding of the import of the covenants, the significance of the federal headship of Christ in the believer’s justification, and the dangers of both Arminianism and Amyraldianism. The Thirty-Nine Articles were ripe for both theological and ecclesiological reform, but Puritan hopes were repeatedly dashed and blocked by their Tudor monarchs.

Their first real chance at further institutional reform came when the Long Parliament summoned the Westminster Assembly of Divines in June 1643. What began as a “minor tweaking” of the Thirty-Nine Articles would become, for a variety of political and theological reasons, a completely “new confessional statement.”2 What we know today as the Westminster Confession of Faith, together with its Larger and Shorter Catechisms, is considered by some to be the pinnacle of confessional standards in the English language. But the English certainly didn’t think that at the time. When Parliament finally published the confession in 1648 (without formally adopting it), they omitted the two chapters that would have established a presbyterian form of church government, and they also made other changes related to marriage, the magistrate, and the conscience.3 Clearly, more work needed to be done if agreement on a new foundation for the church was to be established.

Among the Assembly’s major conflicts were disagreements over both the church’s polity and the role of the government in relation to the church. While the Erastians saw the church as part of the government, and the Presbyterians understood the church to stand alongside the government (and ultimately over it, since the king could be excommunicated!), a group known as “the Dissenting Brethren argued for a middle way.”4 These early congregationalists included Thomas Goodwin, William Bridge, Sydrach Simpson, and Philip Nye. While they were unsuccessful in their arguments at the Assembly, it would be this group, with the addition of John Owen, who would continue to press for church reform.

Assembly at Savoy Palace

With the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649, the Church of England ceased to exist, but the churches of England remained. Functioning presbyteries existed in and around London and Lancashire County. Congregational and Baptist churches were throughout the land. Some parish churches continued as if nothing had happened. Other groups effectively became a church within a church, depending on the convictions of their pastor. And a host of sects, radicals, and heresies burst into view, not least the Quakers and the anti-Trinitarian Socinians.

Amid this confusion, the Dissenting Brethren were part of repeated attempts to provide these churches, and the nation, with both a structure and a confession that could unite the “godly” and protect against error. Goodwin, president of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Owen, vice-chancellor of Oxford, collaborated with other leading clergy to produce a series of foundational confessional documents, beginning with The Principles of Christian Religion (1652) and The New Confession (1654). The documents were meant to serve as the basis for approving or rejecting ministers, while at the same time leaving room for liberty of conscience concerning lesser matters and allowing for a diversity of church polity. While fairly broad at first, as time went on and heresy and disorder multiplied, each successive confession became more exact in its doctrinal definitions and more Calvinist in its formulations.5

The last of these confessional efforts was The Savoy Declaration (1658). Unlike the first two, this was the work of congregational ministers alone. Spearheaded by Philip Nye with Cromwell’s approval, around two hundred divines gathered at the Savoy Palace in London from September 29 to October 12. While the bulk of the company dealt with various complaints and cases, a committee composed of Goodwin, Owen, Nye, Bridge, William Greenhill, and Joseph Caryl — all Westminster Assembly alumni except for Owen — drew up the articles of confession.6 But they did not start from scratch. On the first day of the assembly, the body decided to start with the Westminster Confession of Faith, as published by Parliament in 1648, and revise from there. Each morning, the committee would present its work to the larger synod for debate and approval.7 In addition to the confession, they also put forward a “Church-order” consisting of thirty articles outlining congregational polity, the roles and limits of voluntary associations of churches, and the relationship to other true churches that are not congregational.8

It may be tempting to interpret the Savoy Declaration as a grab for power and an attempt to impose congregational polity on the nation. But that would be a mistake. Without doubt, the statement on church polity is “denominational” in its argument for congregationalism.9 Oliver Cromwell died before the synod was done, and his son Richard, who received the deputation, was sympathetic to the Presbyterians. Considering shifting political winds, there was need to make a case for their inclusion. But it’s also clear that the Savoyans viewed their statement on polity as secondary. In the preface, often attributed to Owen but more likely written by the committee, they state,

We have endeavoured throughout, to hold to such Truths in this our Confession, as are more properly termed matters of Faith; and what is of Church-order, we dispose in certain Propositions by it self. To this course we are led by the example of the Honourable Houses of Parliament, observing what was established, and what omitted by them in that Confession the Assembly presented to them. Who thought it not convenient to have matters of Discipline and Church-Government put into a Confession of Faith, especially such particulars thereof, as then were, and still are controverted and under dispute by men Orthodox and sound in Faith.10

“Unity in faith is as much a work of God as faith itself.”

They then reference the two chapters on presbyterian government, as well as matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, and the magistrate. As they observed, while most people had the copy of the Westminster Confession published in Presbyterian Scotland, they were following the Confession “approved and passed” by the Parliament in England.11

Improving Westminster

In what ways does the Savoy Declaration improve upon Westminster such that it deserves to be called “the high water mark of English Calvinism”? To begin with, the entire confession is explicitly framed within a developed covenantal framework that reflects the maturing thought of Reformed theologians. The fall is explicitly explained within the context of a “Covenant of Works and Life” as opposed to merely the permissive will of God in Westminster.12 The covenant of redemption between the Son and the Father is made the explicit basis for the mediatorial work of Christ in chapter 8.13 The most notable addition is chapter 20, “Of the Gospel, and of the extent of the Grace thereof.” There is nothing comparable to it in Westminster. It begins,

The Covenant of Works being broken by sin, and made unprofitable unto life, God was pleased to give unto the Elect the promise of Christ, the seed of the woman, as the means of calling them, and begetting in them Faith and Repentance: in this promise the Gospel, as to the substance of it, was revealed, and was therein effectual for the conversion and salvation of sinners.

Finally, in chapter 21, “the whole Legal administration of the Covenant of Grace,” described as a “yoak,” is removed in the liberty bought by Christ.14 While some of this is implicit in Westminster, and the structure of the covenants is explained in chapter 7, Savoy thinks about redemption in more nuanced and developed terms of covenant theology.

Savoy also takes sides in controversies Westminster sidestepped. In chapter 11, our justification is accomplished by the imputation of not only the “obedience and satisfaction of Christ,” but of “Christ’s active obedience unto the whole Law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness.” Far from being afraid that the imputation of Christ’s active obedience might encourage antinomianism, Savoy makes it the ground of our faith. In the same chapter, Christ’s death is explained explicitly as a penal substitutionary sacrifice, rather than merely as making “satisfaction.”15 And while not coming down as infralapsarian or supralapsarian, Savoy goes out of its way to place the fall squarely within the eternal decree rather than God’s general providence.16

Throughout, the Declaration never misses a chance to make explicit the effectual call of God, the inability of man, and the priority of union with Christ. It also underlines that the “Doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our Communion with God, and comfortable Dependence upon him.”17 In these final small additions, Savoy is not correcting or improving Westminster, but “obviating some erroneous opinion, that have been more broadly and boldly here of late maintained by the Asserters, then in former times.”18

Guarding Christian Liberty

In all of these revisions and additions, we can see the influence of John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. Owen championed the imputation of Christ’s active and passive obedience for our justification, refuting both the Socinians and Richard Baxter in Vindiciae Evangelicae. Goodwin delighted in exploring the superiority of Christ the Mediator, rooted in the covenant of redemption.19 Owen and Goodwin together represent English scholastic Calvinism at its finest, exalting God’s glory in his sovereign work of salvation.

Both men were also congregationalists, evident not only in Savoy’s appended Church-order, but in the careful reworking of chapter 24, which corresponds to chapter 23 in Westminster, “Of the Civil Magistrate.” It’s in this chapter that their middle way between the Erastians and Presbyterians is evident. Westminster gave the magistrate authority “that unity and peace be preserved in the Church,” “that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed,” “all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented,” “and all the ordinances of God duly . . . observed.”20 As a result, while the government was ultimately subject to the church through its discipline, the government was also responsible to establish the church and enforce conformity. In contrast, while Savoy agrees that the magistrate has a responsibility to promote and protect the gospel, and to prevent the publishing and promotion of heresies and errors that “subvert . . . the faith, and inevitably destroy . . . the souls of them that receive them,”

Yet in such difference about the Doctrines of the Gospel, or ways of the worship of God, as may befall men exercising a good conscience, manifesting it in their conversation [i.e., way of life], and holding the foundation, not disturbing others in their ways or worship that differ from them; there is no warrant for the Magistrate under the Gospel to abridge them of their liberty.21

The preface explains the motivation for this change. “There being nothing that tends more to heighten dissentings among Brethren, then to determine and adopt the matter of their difference, under so high a title, as to be an Article of our Faith.”22

The drafters of Savoy believed that their understanding of the government and order of the church was “the Order which Christ himself hath appointed to be observed.”23 They were not pragmatists. They were not following their preferences. They believed that to act otherwise was to sin against Christ. Nevertheless, they also understood that these and other matters were not part of “the foundation” of the faith. And so, while they wanted the magistrate to promote and protect godly religion, they also wanted to protect the liberty of a believer’s conscience from the magistrate and from themselves.

Against Imposition

That liberty reveals one of the most important legacies of the Savoy Declaration. These strict congregational ministers, articulating “the high water mark of English Calvinism,” were concerned first and foremost with what they called “experimental religion,” or what we would call “experiential religion.” They understood the importance of right doctrine and biblical polity. But they also understood that unity in faith is as much a work of God as faith itself. Human imposition, whether by government or church authority, has no place.

In our own day, when some Christians would be tempted to wield the power of government to enforce a more Christian society, we would do well to listen to those who wielded such power in their own. “Whatever is of force or constraint in matters of this nature causeth them to degenerate from the name and nature of Confessions, and turns them from being Confessions of Faith, into exactions and impositions of Faith.”24 Surely that is a timely word for us today.

We’ve now heard plenty about bad heads. In a world of depravity, where even churches are led by recovering sinners, humans have long circulated reports of poor leaders, and some terrible ones. Now we can amplify the stories with our new technologies.

Power can indeed corrupt, but not because power itself is poison. Rather, the poison is in us already. We are sinners to the core and across all our faculties. Christians have long called this “total depravity.” Leadership is not the problem; sin is.

In fact, good leadership, and healthy headship, is part of the solution to what ails us today. Many don’t even know to ask and pray for such leadership because they haven’t experienced it. But for Christians, even if we haven’t personally enjoyed healthy headship, we have a clear Good Head to look to — one we confess as Lord. We have Jesus.

“One of the first truths to rehearse about mere human heads is that they all have a Head.”

Our great need is for more heads like him, leaders who are not just kinder, gentler, and more patient, but men who actually lead — in taking godly initiative, in opening God’s word and explaining it, in prayer, in envisioning good deeds, in shaping the moral vision of our families and churches. We need heads who don’t melt into a puddle of self-pity when they don’t get the strokes they’d like, but who are ready, like Jesus, to endure personal discomforts for the good of their household, and the joy set before them.

Head of All Heads

This month at Desiring God, as we take up a focus on the “marks of healthy headship,” we begin with the one who is Head of all heads. One of the first truths to rehearse about mere human heads is that they all have a Head. Before the apostle writes, “The head of a wife is her husband,” he says, “I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:3). Before reflecting long on headship in our marriages and homes, and other spheres, we first take our bearings from the divine-human Head over all human heads.

Those with an aversion to all human headship might consider the chastening and comforting effects of grasping that “the head of every man is Christ.” On the one hand, every human head is a man under authority. None is autonomous. No husband or father or leader is unaccountable to his Maker. All will stand before the judgment seat of their Head (2 Corinthians 5:10). To have Christ as Head will be terrifying to self-serving men. On the other hand, this truth is precious and strengthening for heads who know themselves weak and in need of his help.

For Christians, healthy headship takes its cues from Christ himself. He is Head of his bride (Ephesians 5:23), Head of his church (Colossians 2:19), and Head of every head (1 Corinthians 11:3). Learning from him, then, what might it mean for us mere human heads to rule like Jesus does? What imitable forms does his headship take?

1. Covenant Fidelity

First, Christian headship is covenantal. It’s not random, free-floating, and simply spontaneous but operates in specific, given terms. Jesus is Head of his church, his bride, in a different way from how he is Head over all as sovereign. He has covenanted himself to his bride in a way that he has not to all people. So too with Christian husbands.

The husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. . . . Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Ephesians 5:23, 25)

Christ has pledged his special allegiance to his church, and he is a man of his word who fulfills it. He makes solemn promises to his bride that he will keep her, love her, and be faithful to her, come what may. Amazingly, Jesus “hold[s] fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31). And so his church responds in reciprocal fidelity, “holding fast to the Head” (Colossians 2:19).

As Head, Jesus loves not only in word but in deed. From this covenant allegiance arises costly action — even to the point of death on a cross. There he bore the cost, sacrificially giving his own body and blood, to rescue his bride. He didn’t just give her attention and energy when it was convenient, or when she seemed deserving, but “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). He showed his covenant love by persevering for his bride, to die in the worst of ways, to secure life for her.

2. Affectionate Care

The headship of Ephesians 5 is striking not only for the depths of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice but also for the ongoing, everyday affectionate care with which he tends to his wife. Husbands, take note:

No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church. (Ephesians 5:29)

Far from inaugurating a new covenant and then turning his attention and energy to other interests, Jesus daily cherishes his church. His heart expands and grows for her. She knows herself to be resourced by his great singular sacrifice in the past and also treasured daily by an endless stream of care and concern.

Elsewhere, Paul applies this language of cherishing to people who, through faith, “had become very dear to us”:

We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves. (1 Thessalonians 2:7–8)

So it is with our Head toward his bride. He longs for her, cherishes her, is affectionately desirous of her. And from such an active heart stems the holy jealousy of protection from threats to the ultimate good of his bride.

If the apostle could “feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband” (2 Corinthians 11:2), how much more the Groom himself for the protection of his bride? From love for his bride flows wrath toward her foes. The promise of his final protection — and the infinite power to back it up — is a function of his great, ongoing cherishing of his church. He loves his bride, and so will protect her, with fitting firmness and grace, from the many dangers to her good — obvious and inconspicuous, physical and especially spiritual, immediate and especially eternal.

So too with human heads. In the happy confines of the marriage covenant, daily affection and attentive care can grow and flourish. Christlike heads are allegiant to the covenant through ongoing affection toward their bride.

3. Steady Provision

Jesus both cherishes his bride and nourishes her. Colossians 2:19 connects his nourishing to her growth:

Holding fast to the Head . . . the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

Our Head makes provision and supply for the growth of his wife. As Head, he not only loved her at the cross with covenant-making allegiance, and loves her daily with ongoing concern, but he even loves her enough to take action for her growth, her improvement, her advance.

Now we add a fresh kind of encouragement to Christlike headship. Such heads not only keep covenant promises and show affection, but they find the right balance and proportions for challenging their bride to grow in holiness, to become more free from the miseries of sin. To finish the thought of Ephesians 5:25, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” not just to leave her as is, in the decay and despair of sin, but to

sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. (Ephesians 5:26–27)

Jesus supports and provides for the holy growth of his bride (Colossians 2:19). He washes her with the word (Ephesians 5:26) that is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). Fidelity and affection do not mean catering to her indwelling sin. In fact, fidelity and affection mean exposing her sin to the light of grace and investing time, energy, and resources into the path of her healing and growth.

“Our Head brings us with him into his own hard-earned rewards and well-deserved privileges.”

Good human heads provide not only materially but spiritually, and spiritual provision not only begins with teaching and aims at training, but inevitably walks through the challenges of reproof and correction. Because the husband’s head is Christ, and not his wife, his labors to bless her may not always feel like blessings, at least in the moment. But to lead her well, he must be faithful first to his Head. He will need to be ready to disagree with her at times, and confront her in sin, with fitting firmness and grace.

4. Selfless Generosity

Finally, gathering up these previous marks, and extending them yet further, and into the future, is Christ’s lavish generosity as our Head. Ephesians 1:23 calls “his body” — the church — “the fullness of him who fills all in all.” One implication, among others, is that our Head brings us with him into his own hard-earned rewards and well-deserved privileges. He is a lavishly generous Head. Not only has God made us alive together with our Head, but he

raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:5–7)

Even as the God-man, our Head doesn’t leave his bride behind when he benefits — not even with respect to the throne of heaven. How much more, then, with merely human heads.

Learning from Jesus, we enjoy every privilege and reward with our covenant partner. We keep no transferable privilege from her, but with covenant fidelity, affectionate care, steady provision, and selfless generosity, we enjoy being “heirs [together] of the grace of life” (1 Peter 3:7), even as we husbands humble ourselves to actually lead, as commissioned by our Head.