We are here today to encourage husbands to lead their families. The most common complaint wives make about their husbands is that they are not leading in the home. We also know that God gave husbands a hard job – they must lead their wives and children in very particular, highly defined ways. So, we hope this podcast will be an encouragement to them as they face the challenge and shoulder the responsibility.

Well, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and we're here to talk about the sufficiency of Scripture in marriage. And we particularly want to talk about how husbands lead their families, particularly how they lead their wives. And of course, Jason, here we go again, another neat topic to deal with here. This is a great topic.

Yeah, yeah, we've been trying to learn this for a long time, haven't we? Yeah, and it's so good to have Scott LaPierre with us. Scott LaPierre is the pastor at Woodland Christian Church in Woodland, Washington. And hey, we're going to do a marriage conference on December 11th. Yeah, come to our marriage conference, December 11th, in Woodland, Washington.

You can get the information on our website. And we're delighted to have Scott with us for a number of reasons he's a great friend but he also has written a book on marriage and I've you know I've got some of the words right here harvest house is getting ready to publish it so it'll be coming out when the same date my and I'm sure that they're okay that's a very first kill that we had to get but Go out and get that book from Harvest House. I endorse the book. I like it. Thank you very much, Scott.

Thanks for writing it. Okay, so we're going to be talking about male leadership in the home, and the Bible is unequivocal in its promotion that men are the leaders of their homes. That doesn't mean that women don't lead at all. That doesn't mean that, but God in His Word puts enormous weight on the shoulders of husbands to lead. And you got two big problems.

Number one, men are fallen. They don't always lead in a holy way. Number two, women are fallen, and they're rebellious too, And so you got problems. But the truth is God actually has placed an enormous responsibility on husbands to nourish and cherish their wives. You know, husbands are charged to do lots of stuff.

So that's our focus. We want to talk about husbands, not wives, really, necessarily. Although we do also want to recognize that in our society, the worst thing you can do is ever say that a woman should submit to a husband, and you would never want to touch the sacred cow of the sanctity of womanhood, secular womanhood. But the problem with that is that the Bible does kind of crash into the independence of a woman. That's what it does.

But it defines the kind of crash that it is, and it's actually the most wonderful kind of crash you can imagine, because it's about nourishing and cherishing and sacrificing your life for your wife. So, okay, with that. So, I think the first thing I'd like to talk about is the commands of God toward husbands. What are husbands supposed to do? So, let's just talk about that.

Well, one thing that just comes to mind as I listen to you, Scott, is really a pattern of scripture that brings us to those commands. You know, for the people of faith through the Old Testament and New Testament, we always see that God is called men to lead. You look at the patriarchs, they're men. You look at the heads of the tribes of Israel, they're men. The covenants were made with men.

And so that brings us into the New Testament where we see the leaders in the church are going to be men. And then by extension, of course, the leaders within the home, within marriage are going to be men as well. And so we have 1 Corinthians 11, where God says that just as, you know, Christ is the head of man, man is the head of woman. We've got Ephesians 5, 25, where husbands are called to love their wives as Christ loves the church. And in 22 to 24, that husbands are identified as the head of the relationship.

So by extension, 1 Peter 3, when wives are commanded to submit to their husbands, that implies that if a wife is to submit, there's an indirect command for husbands there, that if a wife is to submit to her husband, then he would be the leader. He would be the one that would be, you know, the head of the relationship commanded in verse 7 to dwell with his wife in an understanding way. So it's very clear it's not vague or ambiguous. I understand some, you know, discussions about eschatology or other things that might be a little more ambiguous, unclear in Scripture, but this isn't an area of vagueness. Right.

I wanted to launch my comments here out of a verse. It's Genesis 18-19, and God's speaking to Abraham. And in Genesis 18-19, God says this, for I have known him, I have known Abraham, in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has spoken to him." What I really appreciate about that verse is that it paints a really compelling vision of a home that is unified around serving the Lord. I think you find from Genesis to Revelation that authority in the home is hooked to mission. What's the mission?

It's serving King Jesus to look back at this through the New Testament lens. It's serving Jesus. So a husband is put in place and a father is put in place to rally his family around loving and serving King Jesus. So he's not put in authority to do whatever he wants or to promote his own ease and pleasure. He's actually put in authority to rally the troops to serve the Lord together.

And this is a compelling vision. Godly wives won't resent that vision at all. Godly wives are thrilled by a vision of a husband who is rallying the family to serve their King. In Genesis 2, 21 and forward, you have the two becoming one flesh. This unity of a husband and wife, the, it's the headship of a husband is really designed to create unity.

And both, both need to go there, but it's, it's a, it's just fundamental to marriage that there's a unity and, the husband is primarily responsible for creating that. Yeah. One of the things I appreciate that you're saying, Jason, that came somewhat of a shock to me, I wasn't raised in a Christian home. I was introduced to biblical marriage or Christian marriage headships. The mission in my early twenties, it was foreign to me.

And I anticipated that women would, you know, despise having to submit or look to a man for leadership. But the shock was that after God opened the door for me to speak on marriage or put on marriage conferences, and through my experience pastoring and counseling, the biggest criticism that I hear from women is not that submission is barbaric and that they don't want to submit. The biggest criticism is that my husband won't lead. And so while there is, you know, a rebelliousness and because of our sinful nature in every woman's heart, just as there is a propensity in men's hearts to be passive or to be harsh in their leadership, the godly woman who's regenerate, who is brought to life spiritually has a spirit that, you know, craves a man she can look up to and craves being led spiritually. I don't regularly hear men saying, my wife won't go to church with me, my wife won't pray with me, my wife won't attend this home fellowship with me, but I regularly hear women saying, my husband won't go to church with me, my husband won't pray with me, my husband won't read the Bible with me.

It's one of the saddest things when you have a deeply spiritual woman who's just longing for her husband to pray and read the Word with her and worship with her. And so I appreciate what Jason was saying about all this is in place to serve Christ, our King. And much of that relates to what happens in the home Monday through Saturday. And we've unfortunately been part of a culture that believes the Christian family is one that's largely only Christian Sunday morning, and then maybe Monday through Saturday wouldn't look different than any other family, unbelieving or secular. And that rests on a man's shoulder to ensure that his home doesn't just claim to be Christian, but is Christian and does gather around the word throughout the week that does hopefully, whether beginning or at least ending the day with prayer, engages in some amount of worship, whether that's just reading the Word or singing together.

God expects men to bring the family. It's not on a wife's shoulders to make sure the home is spiritual. It's not on a wife's shoulders to make sure that the home worships the Lord or serves King Jesus throughout the week. Yeah, and I think, you know, Ephesians 5 makes that so clear. You know what, it is true, my experience is the same as yours, Scott.

The most common complaint I hear from wives is that their husbands won't lead, and I think that's probably very common with all of us. There's also another category, and with this we could probably talk about the sins of women. There are particular sins of women. We could speak about those. There are particular sins of men as well.

One of the sins of women is that when a husband begins to lead, then she begins to consider it inadequate, and she doesn't want to follow that leadership. So there's a there's a difficulty there because you have you have a couch potato husband on the one hand And then when that couch potato husband gets off the couch, you know, his wife resists it. I've encountered that. But not as much as just the couch potato. There are more couch potatoes out there, I think, than there are rebellious wives.

That's my opinion. Yeah, I think if you want to strengthen a power struggle in the home, you make it inward-focused. You make the home sort of the central feature. And If our home is only about the home, then why aren't my preferences as valid as your preferences? But when a home is outward facing and there's a common understanding in the home that we don't exist for us, we exist to worship the Lord, honor the Lord, serve the Lord, advance King Jesus' kingdom, then everyone can sort of put their hand on the rope together and pull in the same direction, a direction set by Dad, but Dad working according to the codebook of the Kingdom.

Yeah, and even beyond that, the Spirit of the Kingdom. You know, the family life codes, you know, they're in Ephesians 5 and 6, they're prefaced with the proposition of the filling of the Holy Spirit. So you can have a man who's leading, not filled with the Holy Spirit. In other words, he's leading but not with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. But the whole matter of family life presumes the filling of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians 5 18, do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And then there are things that happen when you're filled with the Holy Spirit. You began speaking to one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Wives submit to their husbands. Husbands love their wives like Christ loved the church. Children obey their parents.

Fathers do not exasperate their children. So these are all manifestations of the Holy Spirit. So it's not exclusively a matter of whether you're leading, but how are you leading? Is it by the power of the Holy Spirit, or is it by your manhood, cranking up to be whatever you want to be? Yeah, I think thinking of male headship in the home through the lens of Jesus and how he leads his people, He is unequivocally the leader of his people.

It is not in dispute, it is not open for discussion, but the way in which he leads is so precious to his people. And I think we want to try to recreate that in every way that we can in our home. I remember Jeff Pollard giving a message, and he asked this question of the men, of the husbands in the room, is anything about your leadership, does anything about your leadership make your wife sorry that she's a woman? And that's a really helpful diagnostic question. If you're doing something in your leadership that makes your wife sorry that she's a woman, your leadership should make her glory that she's a woman in her womanhood.

Amen. Yeah, I heard something real early in my Christian life too that a pastor said that a woman will have a much easier time submitting to a godly man. And that one of the best ways for a husband to love his wife actually has little to do with his relationship with his life and so much to do with his relationship with Christ. Because if a wife sees a man who loves Christ as prayerful, as in the Word, then she can be confident in his decisions and she can put her life in his hands so much easier. But if a woman is expected to submit to a man that she has little confidence in his relationship with Christ, she's gonna be terrified about the decision he'll make about the direction that he would take the family.

And so, in a sense, I think It's actually, it's not an overstatement to say that one of the best ways for a man to love his wife is to love Christ. The greater confidence that that gives her in him. You know, I have many young people come to me from asking, you know, how do I prepare for marriage? My answer is, don't become like Christ. Just follow the Lord Jesus Christ, be filled with the Spirit.

He'll lead you, he'll lead you, he'll take care of you and your marriage if you're becoming like Christ It's the most important thing you'll ever do. It's transferable to everything. And there are not 10 things you need to do to prepare for marriage. Well, there might be some things you would list, but the most important thing is, are you becoming like Jesus Christ? Mm-hmm.

And I think it's helpful at this point to go upstream from marriage to pre-marriage and to exhort the young women who might listen to this to never accept a husband who's not ready to take her hand and run after the Lord Jesus Christ. You wanna be marrying a man whose heart is for God, who has the fruits of the Spirit in his life, so you can enter into this marriage with the confidence that he's not going to try to craft a home around his comforts and ease and preferences, but that his interest really is outward-facing, and then you're in for a thrilling life. Yeah, you don't want to say to a girl, well, he loves you, he has a job, he has enough money to get married, He's mature, no, no, no, no, no, no. Those things are good, those things are important, but they're not the most fundamental, the important things. Right, yeah, marriage is one, it's an interesting area of life in that, I mean, If I use an example, we don't ever, you don't start practicing for a game the day of the game.

You don't start, you know, studying or preparing for a test the day of a test, but we kind of start preparing for marriage after we're married. You know, that's when we start reading marriage books, going to marriage conferences. And that's funny, single people listening, you know, I've been blessed when I put on marriage conferences, and I've seen single people there and they even cringe a little, they're a little embarrassed, you know, I introduced myself and then they they're like, Oh, yeah, and almost apologetic. You know, I'm sorry, I'm here. I just heard there's a mirror and I'm like, Hey, I think you're way ahead of all the people who started coming to marriage conferences after they were already married.

And so, start learning about marriage, preparing for it. You know, so many young people, young men, kind of like you just shared, Scott, I get the same question. You know, I don't know what I'm going to do, so how do I prepare? And I'm like, well, you're not going to go wrong if you're growing your relationship with Christ. If you're reading the Word, if you're committed to the Lord, then that's going to be used no matter how the Lord wants.

Whatever profession you find yourself in, that's going to be used in that profession, in your time as a husband and as a father. So, you know, for any young people, they're making good use of their time the more that they're in the Word and in prayer as single people. So Scott, a personal note, Janet and I got engaged right in the middle of the Dennis Rainey, about the midpoint of the Dennis Rainey marriage conference. We attended the first half and we thought, We are ready for this. I already owned the ring.

And so we went and got it. Couldn't wait any longer. Oh, that's funny. That's great. Yeah, some of the guys I talked to at marriage conferences, They listen and they become convicted because I'll put a large emphasis on them being spiritual leaders in the home.

And they come to me and I think it's very genuine. I don't think it's an excuse. They'll say to me, you know, I want to do that. I want to be that. I know that I'm not.

I want to be that spiritual leader. And I really appreciate this humility or transparent they'll see from them. They'll say, but I'm I'm terrified. And I think we're kind of in this, the three of us with most of the men we know or we're close with our pastors, their men that are comfortable praying comfortable being upfront, you know, comfortable preaching the word and we kind of project ourselves on others. So because these things are comfortable for us, we assume that other men are going to be very comfortable praying with their families or reading word with their families.

But there really is, there was really, I don't think, you know, I think an appropriate word would be terror. There's really an amount of terror with many men associated with opening the Bible with their families. What if I don't know what to say? What if I can't answer my wife's questions? What if I fumble this word or this verse?

What if I'm praying and it sounds silly? What if I don't sound like that guy on the radio. And so, I mean, I know we're not focusing on women, but that's one reason I'll try to share with women how a husband will be that fearful associated with his spiritual leadership in the home. And the large part she plays in encouraging him and not disrespecting him, chopping him off at the knees. There's this one couple I've counseled and that I had encouraged the husband to read the Word with the family.

And I really believe because the wife said she wanted that so badly that once he started being that spiritual leader that their marriage would improve. So he starts reading the Word of the Family, he comes back like two weeks later and I could just see it on his face how discouraged and frustrated he was. And I said, well, what happened? Did you open the Bible with her? And he said, I did, but I'm never going to do it again.

And I said, Well, why not? And he said, she second guessed everything I said. She, she criticized me constantly. She kept saying that the, my observations about the verses are wrong. And every time we, we ran, it just ended up in this fight.

And so, you know, I see that I see the importance of a man leading, but I also see the large part that a woman plays in being her husband's encourager, because he's so afraid that he's not going to sound like, you know, Scott Brown or Paul Walsh or Vody Bochram or something. Well, maybe that guy just needed to learn how to love his wife when she's breathing fire at him. That's what the Spirit of God teaches you to do. No, that's a tough thing. Okay, so let's talk about the guy who is saying, I'm not leading my wife.

Tell me what to do. What do you want to say to this guy? Well, I mean, I want to start by telling him what not to do. If he comes to this conviction, he might very well charge in, and now he is the head of the household when he's never shown an interest in that before and he hasn't been kind of cultivating the things that makes that soft ground but now he's ready to lay down the law well the results of that are going to be very predictable. So I mean, I think his starting point needs to be a gentle, patient starting point.

He sort of created his own problem there, and he doesn't need to impose the problem that he created on her. He does need to start immediately, and he needs to be persistent, but he needs to be patient and gracious too. I mean, that's a great point. It's funny, I was an officer in the, I went to ROTC and then I was an officer in the Army, and they had these horror stories about these lieutenants, you know, they're 21, 22 years old, and they take over a platoon, you know, 20, 30 soldiers, some of them lifetime soldiers that have been in the military longer than these officers have been alive. And this officer shows up on the scene, you kind of see where I'm going and why I thought of this with your story, Jason.

This officer shows up on the scene and he needs to assert his authority. He needs to let the platoon know that he knows what he's doing. He needs to let the platoon know that that he's in charge. And so he comes off to, you know, ultra strongly and just lose all of his folders respect. And I just remember they really drilled that home that when we took over our first platoon we were supposed to be learners, we were supposed to be teachable, we were supposed to you know be receptive and one of the reasons I really that stuck with me was after I became a Christian you know hu-patasso or submit It's a word that refers to arranging troops under a commander or the arranging of divisions under a commander.

So there's this militaristic relationship with a husband and wife, almost like a husband's a platoon leader, you know, a wife's a platoon sergeant, and it's only a foolish platoon leader that wouldn't listen to him platoon sergeant or, you know, or allow him to share his thoughts. And so my encouragement to have a husband would be similar to Jason. Don't try to come off, you know, too imposingly or too strongly. And then the second thing I'd say is choose a book of the Bible, probably one you're more familiar with. And I don't think that your family worship time is the time when you should choose a Bible, a book of the Bible that you're going to be learning.

Hopefully you can learn it separately and then kind of come to your family when you have greater familiarity with it to answer questions. But don't even, I don't even think you have to feel like you're an expert because none of us know everything. We're going to encounter questions during our family worship, our family Bible studies that we can't answer. We should just be humble as men and say things like, you know what, I don't know, I'll look into it, let me get back to you versus trying to kind of pull some answer out of our sleeve that, you know, it's obvious that we don't really know what we're talking about. My encouragement is usually to the book of the Bible you're familiar with, start at chapter one, verse one, don't have a certain length of time in mind, you know, don't decide that you're going to do 30 or 40 minutes or an hour, just kind of let, you know, the spirit lead you might say, and read a verse, kind of talk about it, ask people, ask your wife, your kids their thoughts, share about it, read another verse.

There's no prescription in Scripture for how a man is supposed to do Bible studies with his family, but that's been something that I've encouraged men to do. You know, if you read the verse 5, pick up at verse 6 next time. Don't be committed to having to get through 10, 20 verses or one chapter. Maybe one time you're having a good discussion of one verse and that takes your whole family Bible study. There's been times for me, I've been shocked, I don't know how many other fathers might relate to this, that I have spent more time talking about the gospel with my children and in our family studies than I ever would have imagined.

I mean, being pastors kids who, you know, have grown up in the church, I know my kids know the Bible, but there have been so many times when it feels like the Lord has led us away from what I have planned to discuss, to talk about the Bible, or talk about the Gospel one more time. And so I think some flexibility to go where your kids' questions sort of lead so that they're interested and involved as well can be very beneficial. You know, and I would just add, it's out of the wellspring of your heart that you lead, and getting your heart ready every day before you see people that your soul is, like George Mueller said, made happy. He said he didn't want to see anybody until his soul had been made happy by the word of God. And so, you know, shepherds, pastors should lead that way, too, they should lead out of the wellspring of their hearts, but their hearts have to be saturated in the goodness of God's Word.

And that's how a husband is filled with the Holy Spirit. He's being directed from on high, not from within, and it's out of that wellspring that he leads. Well, I just wanna read 1 Peter 3, 7, just to conclude us all up. Thank you guys for... Boy, we could talk about this for a long time.

I can tell we're not even close to being done, but here's... We're gonna be done. 1 Peter 3, 7, husbands likewise dwell with your wives in an understanding way, giving honor to the wife as to the weaker vessel and as being heirs together of the grace of life that your prayers may not be hindered. Amen. How about that for a warning for husbands?

Not bad. Absolutely. Well, brothers, thank you so much for the discussion. I wanna be a better husband. I wanna be a better leader of my wife.

I really do. And I'm grateful I have a wife that actually, she follows me. She really does. It's amazing to me, but she does. And I pray that God gives the listeners wives like that too, but that they also would be men who lead and lead their wives to living water.

So thank you, Scott, and thank you, Jason. Pleasure. Thank you for the privilege. Yeah, and thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope to see you next time.

Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.