Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning, and welcome back to the podcast. We have talked recently about the tensions inside a home when a Christian is married to a non-Christian. This dynamic can happen for several reasons, sometimes intentionally. A Christian may sin and knowingly marry a non-Christian. We saw this in APJ 1560. Or two non-Christians marry, and one eventually gets saved. We saw this in APJ 1029. Or two professing Christians get married: one proves their faith over the years, or is genuinely converted, and the other falls away over time. We have seen this dynamic in APJs 680, 1690, and in 1839 just a couple weeks ago.

I don’t know which category fits today. We have limited information. But, Pastor John, six times over the years we have gotten an email from a woman named Rose. Her emails are always the same. They’re always brief. They’re always one sentence, the same sentence — this one: “Pastor John, how do I pray for my husband to be saved?” What would you say to Rose?

Oh, how I wish I could see into Rose’s sorrowful heart and pinpoint where she feels the greatest difficulty in praying for her unbelieving husband. Is it how often she should pray? Is it how to avoid vain repetitions when you’ve been praying the same prayer for years and years — hundreds of times, thousands of times? Is it how to keep on praying after decades of seeing no evident change? Is it particular texts that she’s struggling with and how to apply them? Is it loss of desire, maybe, or loss of hope, or loss of love in her own heart? Is it the cooling of trust in God? Is it practicalities like, “Do I pray out loud? Or do I pray in a closet? Or how many times a day?” Is it whether it dishonors the husband to pray for him in groups, maybe? I’ve had women ask me that. Is it whether to pray for him in his presence? “Can I do that? Can I pray for him in his face?” Is it whether to pray for others to reach out to him or whether to pray directly for his soul? Oh, how I wish I could see where the point is that she is asking about.

But maybe it’s just a heart cry: “Help — anything you can say, Pastor John, that might encourage me or keep me going.” And so, I don’t know the details of her struggle, except that it’s been a long time, evidently, because of her repeated requests.

Hope-Sustaining Sovereignty

And what I like to do is suggest a way of praying for unbelieving loved ones that I have found hopeful. It’s premised (I have to say this; it’s really crucial to say) on the biblical conviction that God is sovereign and, whenever he chooses, he can overcome all resistance and save the hardest sinner. I do not believe that human beings have final veto power over the sovereign will of God.

Some might think that this kind of absolute sovereignty over the human will, which I deeply believe is biblical, would create a sense of fatalism, maybe, or discouragement that God may not choose to save our loved one in the end. But looked at another way, it actually creates hope, this sovereign God. It means God really can save no matter what the unbeliever does or has done. Nothing can stop him.

“God really can save no matter what the unbeliever does or has done. Nothing can stop him.”

This means no amount of passing time, no amount of accumulated sin, no degree of hardness of heart, no sneering antagonism, no public mockery, no angry resistance — nothing can hinder his salvation if God wills to take away the hardness and save. To me, that’s the only hope we have that unbelievers would be saved, because they’re all dead in their trespasses and sins — and dead is dead. There’s nothing I can do. If God doesn’t do it, people perish. I would’ve perished.

Our Generous Father

So, building on this conviction of God’s hope-sustaining sovereignty, I love to pray the promises of God, especially the new-covenant promises of salvation. But before I mention a few of those, I find it encouraging to remind myself — I must do this every week or so from Scripture — that God really does delight to answer the prayers of his children. I need to see that. I need to be reminded of that in his own words. He’s not a begrudging Father.

So for example, I return often to Matthew 7:9–11:

Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Or Luke 12:32: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

“God really does delight to answer the prayers of his children.”

Surely Jesus told us these things to encourage us to pray, to remind us that we should think of him this way — a generous Father to his children. He loves to see us pray: a Shepherd eager to bless, a King eager to give to his subjects. And then, with that fresh reminder of God’s eagerness to hear our prayers and answer them, I turn to the promises of the new covenant.

Turning Promises into Prayers

Now, remember that the new covenant, according to Ezekiel 36, is different from the Mosaic covenant because it doesn’t just come with demands from outside; it comes with enablement to do the commands from inside. He says, “I will cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:27). “I’m not going to just give you statutes — I will cause you to walk in my statutes.” That’s the key of the new covenant. And Jesus said that this new covenant was secured by himself by his own blood. He held up the cup at the Last Supper: “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). He bought it, and so it is sure.

So here are some of the precious new-covenant promises that I turn into prayers for beloved unbelievers.

‘Become his God.’

Ezekiel 11:19–21:

And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

So, pray like this for your husband: “Dear Father, I pray for my precious husband that you would, in your great mercy, bought by the blood of Jesus, take out the heart of stone and give him a tender, soft heart toward you. Put a new spirit in him. Give him a new disposition to love your word and keep it. Become his God. Make him your child.”

‘Circumcise his heart.’

Or here’s another new-covenant promise, from Deuteronomy 30:6. God looks to the day when a prophet like Moses will arise — namely, Jesus — and promises this for his chosen ones:

The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.

So, you pray, “O Father, none of us loves you first and turns your heart to love us. We can’t love you unless you in your great, free, gracious love first circumcises our hearts. You must cut away the old nature of self-exaltation and self-rule. You did this for me. I didn’t deserve that any more than my husband does. O God, I plead with you, circumcise his heart so that it is set free from resistance to your truth and goodness and beauty. Cause him, O Lord, to love you because of Christ.”

‘Grant him repentance.’

Or think of the instruction and the promise in 2 Timothy 2:24–26. It applies, I think, to all of us who at any time use the word in prayer to try to lead an unbeliever out of darkness. It says this:

The Lord’s servant [now that would be me, that would be this wife] must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

So, we pray, “Father, even though no one deserves to be saved, no one deserves the gift of repentance, no one deserves escape from the devil, nevertheless, you are a God of mercy. I know this because I escaped when I was just as blind and snared in deadness of heart as my husband. Here I am praying, loving you, trusting you — amazing grace in my life! So, you are a God of mercy, and if you will, you can grant repentance, and liberation, and faith, and life. I know you have mercy on whom you have mercy. I know you are free and all-wise, and as your child, I am asking that, for the glory of your grace, you would give repentance to my husband.”

Do Not Lose Heart

And we could go on, of course — on and on, in fact — turning the promises and the works of God into prayers.

We could turn Acts 16:14 into this: “Lord, open his heart like you did Lydia’s.” Or we could turn 2 Corinthians 4:6 into this: “Father, shine into their hearts with the light of the gospel of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” Or we could pray the words of Jesus in Luke 18:27: “Lord Jesus, you said of the conversion of the rich man, ‘What is impossible with man is possible with God.’ So do the impossible, I pray. Convert my husband.”

So, Rose, we are with you in this great work of wrestling in prayer for your beloved unbeliever. Let’s not forget the words of Jesus in Luke 18:1: “always . . . pray and [do] not lose heart.”

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.

My father died of COVID on January 4th of last year. My mother died of COVID just 48 hours and 3 minutes later. At the time, losing both parents within two days of each other felt like far more than I could take.

The depth of the grief and shock that my brothers and I felt was compounded because we had to tell Mom of Dad’s death over FaceTime. It was the most difficult conversation I have ever had, and we are fairly certain that the devastating news of her husband’s death contributed significantly to her dying so soon after. Having been separated for a week by two hospital floors, she lost the man who loved her most without getting the opportunity to say goodbye.

I share the circumstances of my parents’ deaths because I believe they highlight the kind of man and husband my father was.

In Health and in Sickness

For nearly 56 years, my father loved my mother with a fierce, self-sacrificing love — in health and in sickness.

“For nearly 56 years, my father loved my mother with a fierce, self-sacrificing love — in health and in sickness.”

My mother was seriously ill for well over half of their marriage. When I was 15, she was days away from dying from ulcerated colitis, which she had battled for several years by that point. If not for God putting her in the hospital that had the only surgeon in the country who was capable of doing this particular life-saving surgery, she would have died.

In those many months of suffering, I witnessed my father lovingly care for her when the pain was so severe that the only relief she could fathom was to die and be with the Lord. He was a full-time music professor during the week and was our church’s music minister on Sundays. And he was always a very present father for his three sons. When I was 15, my father’s care for my mother was daily marked by a love I could observe but not fathom.

In 1999, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. Once again, her suffering was intense, and his care was remarkable. My wife and I were teachers at the time, and we were off for the summer, so we decided to take the nine-hour drive to live with them for a month. Oh, what a month it was. His loving care for my mother in her sickness remained indomitable. He loved; I marveled.

And in Humility

Lest my reflections above tempt you to think that my father didn’t struggle with temptation and sin, he did something that has impacted me even more than his love for my mother. I actually believe it holds the key to understanding how he loved the way he did.

Throughout the entirety of my growing-up years, from elementary through high school, if my father realized he had sinned against me (or my brothers), he would come to me and say something like, “Daniel, I was wrong to do/say that. Would you please forgive me for sinning against you?” My father never merely apologized. If he thought that he had sinned against me, he asked me for forgiveness.

Every time my father did that, my admiration and respect for him grew. Here is a man, I thought, who walks in humility before God and others. Even more than his fierce love for my mother, my father asking his sons for forgiveness has impacted and shaped me, mainly because of what it revealed to me about his God.

Skies of Parchment Made

My father was a consummate musician. I remember him telling us boys of the time when Stan Kenton, the king of big bands in the 1940s and 50s, recruited him to play trumpet for him. For all the love my father had for jazz, though, he loved sacred music all the more.

For decades, my father taught music in Christian colleges, and while he did that, he would also lead worship on Sundays at our church. My mother would play the piano while he would direct the choir and lead corporate worship.

This was back in the days when churches would have “special music” in the worship service. Over the many years I heard my father sing solos, the song that left the deepest impression upon me (and I probably heard him sing it over twenty times) was the song “The Love of God” by Frederick M. Lehman.

The love of God is greater farThan tongue or pen can ever tell.It goes beyond the highest starAnd reaches to the lowest hell.The guilty pair, bowed down with care,God gave his Son to win;His erring child he reconciledAnd pardoned from his sin.

Could we with ink the ocean fill,And were the skies of parchment made;Were every stalk on earth a quill,And every man a scribe by trade;To write the love of God aboveWould drain the ocean dry;Nor could the scroll contain the whole,Though stretched from sky to sky.

Every time he sang it, my heart would burn within me. This is the song that revealed what made my father’s heart tick. He was a man who saw the love of the Father written large, and he couldn’t get over it. Whenever he sung of the Father’s love, you knew he was singing “to the praise of [the Father’s] glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:6).

Fuel of His Love

Often, when I think of my father, my mind goes to Luke 7, where we read of the sinful woman who shed tears on Jesus’s feet. She “wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment” she brought with her (Luke 7:38).

When confronted by a Pharisee for letting a sinful woman touch him, Jesus says to him, “I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven — for she loved much” (Luke 7:47). Jesus is not saying that the woman was forgiven because she loved much. No, he’s saying that the evidence she was forgiven was that she loved much.

If we say, “Summer has come, for the temperature has reached 100 degrees,” we do not mean that summer has come because of the high temperature. We mean that the evidence of the arrival of summer is the scorching heat. Or, to say it a different way, the effect of summer is 100-degree weather. My father’s love for my mother and the humility needed to ask me for forgiveness was the evidence and effect of the Father’s great love for him, by which he was forgiven of all his sins. He loved much because he had been forgiven much.

What More Could a Son Want?

Over the many decades that I watched my father care for my mother, God the Father had graciously given me a regular glimpse of something of what it meant for Christ to love the church and give himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). My father loved my mother like he did because he couldn’t get over how Christ had loved him.

“My father loved my mother like he did because he couldn’t get over how Christ had loved him.”

But that kind of love wasn’t limited to my mother; it spilled over into how he loved his sons — into how he loved me. My father was kind to me, tenderhearted, forgiving me, and humbling himself to ask for my forgiveness, because God in Christ had forgiven him (Ephesians 4:32). He was unwaveringly humble because he knew just how much mercy he had received in Christ.

As I look back on my father’s life, it’s clear to me that he was carried by love — not by a love of his own making, but by the love of the Father in Christ Jesus, poured into his heart through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5).

Oh, how I miss him. In my eyes, his life was lived to the praise of the Father’s glorious grace. What more could a son want?