In the sermon 'The Duties of Wives' by Jason Dohm, the speaker outlines the biblical foundations and purpose of a wife's role within marriage. He emphasizes that these duties are rooted in God's original design, predating the fall of man, as described in Genesis. Dohm highlights that women are created as high-capacity, competent helpers to men, with the purpose of building a household that reflects God's kingdom. The sermon draws from key biblical texts, including Genesis, 1 Corinthians, Titus, and Proverbs 31, to outline the essential duties of wives, which include loving and supporting their husbands and children, homemaking, and embodying the virtues of a biblical woman. Dohm underscores the importance of a wife's love in transforming her husband and household and suggests that even when husbands are disobedient, wives should maintain their course by adhering to biblical principles, as described in 1 Peter. The overarching vision is to build a flourishing, God-centered home that serves as a strong foundation for broader community influence.

My topic is the duties of wives, and I'm unlikely to say anything new. I have not invented a new path for women. You'll be delighted to learn. But what I am hoping to do is to tie together things that you already know in a way that displays the wisdom and beauty of God's design for wives so that we can clearly see what a compelling vision it is. So in short I'm hoping to send you wives away saying I get to be a wife.

There's precious little of that in the world and if anyone has a right to it Christians have a right to it so I hope that's where we end up. So ask God to help us. God, you are the only wise God. You are the all wise God and you do all things well and your ways are good ways all your paths are peace so where would we go You have the words of eternal life. Thank you for the old paths and Pray that you would help us to walk in them in Jesus name.

Amen Well, here's the roadmap for the time. There will be four points from four texts and I'll talk about each one and how they relate to each other. Number one, point number one, the duties of wives originate in the beginning and before the fall. All this that we're talking about originated on the second page of Genesis, or first, depending on how your Bible's organized. And it definitely happens before chapter three, so we can't blame any of this on the fall.

This is all good, this is all God's original purpose, and it's not a punishment for rebellion in any way. Listen to Genesis 2, 18. The Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him. Men need companionship.

It's not good that they should be alone. And men need help. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 11 verse 8. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man. Women were created to help because men need help.

Help for what? Help for building a life that takes dominion. Help for building a life that brings order and progress and gain for the kingdom of God in the little world that God gives a family. God gives the family, not the whole world, but a little world, a sphere, and they're to create the kingdom of God there. Men need help doing that.

What kind of helper is this? A helper suitable for a very difficult mission of being fruitful and multiplying, men need help to be fruitful and multiply, and for taking dominion and subduing the earth in fellowship with God. Men don't need a maid for that. The Bible was never talking about a maid. Preachers should never be talking about a maid.

You should never be thinking of it as a maid. They actually need a high capacity, high competency fellow image bearer. Now think of the capacity and competency wrapped up in the reality of being an image bearer of God. So we say okay this person bears the image of God. How much capacity is wrapped up in that?

How much competency is wrapped up in that? Even a shadow of God's image in men and women speaks of tremendous capacity and competency. It cannot be any other way. So men, God has put a tremendous challenge in front of us and we are not up for it by ourselves. That is God's diagnosis.

So God has given us a suitable helper for both love, giving love and receiving love, and for building for a companionship and creating this little kingdom world. Two points to make here before I move on. First, this is God's perfectly wise design expressed before our fall and descent. So this is a privilege bestowed on all of us, not something we're stuck with because our race rebelled against God in the garden. So we have to think of these things as a privilege, God giving us something good, not as something we're stuck with because we messed up in Genesis 3.

Finally, the world looks at this and says, what a waste. Women have so many gifts and capabilities. And that's it? That's how you think they should spend the one life that they have? Friends, those are the thoughts and sentiments and words of people who don't understand the homes and lives that God is calling us to build, and the astonishingly heavy lift that is required to build such homes and wives.

When people say, that's it? What a waste. They're displaying that they don't understand the homes and lives that God is calling us to build. And so They think that you can build that kind of home and that kind of life part time, but that's not the kind of home and not the kind of life that God is talking about. I married a High capacity, high competence helper.

In college, my grade point average in physical education was 3.5, and Janet's in mathematics was 3.9. So I'm a 3.5 gym teacher and she's a 3.9 mathematician. That's how things stand in the Dome household. So she's not a golf cart, She's a high performance sports car. And I've lived with her when she had a professional career before we had any kids.

And since that time when our home has been the center of her efforts, and I can tell you which of those stretched every single gift God gave her. And it's when our building our home and building the life that God is calling us to was the center for her. That's what stretched all the gifts that God gave her. And it's not even close. Nothing has been wasted.

Okay, that our home and building this life that God is calling us to has been the center for her for 30 years, has not represented a waste in any way. All the gifts that God gave her have been needed and have been stretched. Now I love all that but admittedly it's very high level. It's just a framework. The next point in the next text fleshes it out.

So here we are, number two. The duties of wives are so clearly summarized by the Apostle Paul. So, okay, being a suitable helper, help doing what? Flesh that out. The Apostle Paul actually does that.

Listen to Titus 2 verses 4 and 5 and verse 3 leading into that, Paul tells Titus that the older women, mature, experienced Christian women, should teach good things to the younger women in the church who are just getting started as wives and mothers. Why? Because as mature experienced Christian women, they've been there and done that, and they know the things that were good about their history and the things that weren't, and they can give young wives and mothers a leg up. And so, okay, Paul, what are these good things that the mature, experienced Christian wives and mothers should be teaching to these young wives and mothers. We get it in verses four and five.

Do they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. Now, if I had asked, how can a wife help a husband build the life and home that God is calling us to build, how could you do better with a list than those two verses, you cannot. That is the perfect way to describe and itemize how a wife can help a husband build the kind of life that God is calling us to build and the kind of home that God is calling us to build. That's the list. Love him.

Sisters, let me tell you, Nothing helps a man like the persistent love of a faith-filled woman. Nothing in all of life helps a man like the persistent love of a faith-filled woman. You can't do more than that. You can't do better than that. I'm a pastor.

Sometimes being a pastor is the best thing ever. And sometimes it's crushingly discouraging. There have been a few points when I'm not sure if I could have kept going except that Janet loves me and she's in it for thick and thin. Sisters, what does it mean to love him? Here's our homework assignment.

Go study 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter, and think about it in the context of marriage. I preached on this one time actually out of 1st Corinthians 13 and applying it to marriage and I gave people homework and the homework was this is the age of the smartphone, put a reminder once a month for the next 12 months to read 1 Corinthians 13 and just think about it in the context of your marriage and I did my own homework and found it very humbling and very helpful. If you want to know what it means to love your husband with biblical love, go to the love chapter and apply it to the marriage relationship and you'll find it very humbling and very helpful. And of course what I'm getting ready to mention is only a subset of love, but one subset that I should mention is physical intimacy. That is a duty of a wife.

But now we've called it a duty. So we import the baggage of that word, and it can become an obligation to get off the list, can it not? A wife has a list of a million things, life's busy, so come over here and let's get this off the list. And it can become unworthy of the term intimacy. But Scott talked briefly about 1 Corinthians 7 last night where Paul calls this, Paul calls physical intimacy, rendering affection.

So our engagement in this needs to be consistent with the word intimacy and with the phrase rendering affection And yet it normally occurs at the end of a long day. And so it too often gets the leftovers of the leftovers. True or not true? And it isn't good that that's true. It does most often occur at the end of a long day, which lends itself to physical intimacy, getting the leftovers of the leftovers, and that's not good that that's true.

I'm keenly aware that every word I've just said applies to husbands as well as to wives. And we have to work together to keep these things alive and healthy. Let me summarize the overall point, overall, wives love your husbands. Let me summarize that overall point this way. The patient love of a believing wife is transformational for a husband.

Sisters, do you get that? That the patient, persistent, day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out, love of a believing wife transforms a husband. It takes him so far beyond what he would have been if he wasn't the beneficiary, the recipient of that patient love of a believing wife. So love your husband. What else?

Love your children. So number one, love your husband. Number two, love your children. Do you see what's happening here? Sisters, God has given you the privilege of building a household of love.

Those are all the relationships under the roof. Number one, love your husband. Number two, love your children. You are being given the privilege to build a household of love. Are you thinking of it in those terms?

You should be, Paul was. Paul tells the mature, experienced Christian women, teach these young wives and mothers how to build a household of love. What is at the very, very, very, very core of a believing household? Bringing up children in the training and admonition of the Lord. So it should be no surprise to us that God takes the high capacity, high competency, image of God bearing helper of the husband and points her at that.

Do you buy the proposition that loving your children and bringing them up in the training and admonition of the Lord is actually the same thing? Do you buy that proposition? Or at least that they're so closely aligned that they should be viewed as unbreakably connected. If so, if you buy that proposition, then the corollary would be, Mom, love those children into the ways of God. Love them into God's ways.

That's your great lever to accomplish the task, love. How are you going to get those little unregenerate children into the ways of God? Now there is this undeniable fact that this requires the spiritually dead to be spiritually resurrected and you cannot do that. Amen, I get all that, I agree with all that. But God has given you a great lever.

And the greatest lever that he's given you is love. And he calls you to love them into his ways. What else? We have love your husband, we have love your children. What else?

Home make, home build. I don't like the term homemaker, not because there's anything wrong with the term, but because of what it makes us think of. Just a woman in an apron baking an apple pie. I love women in aprons baking apple pies, but that's not what God is talking about when he says a homemaker. That is one onezillionth of what God is talking about when he says a homemaker.

So, maybe we should think home building. It's really the same thing, to make or to build. The word literally means caring for the home, working at home. The companion term in 1 Timothy 5, 14, so this is Paul's counsel to young widows. There's a word used in the same context that Paul uses in 1st Timothy 514.

It's even stronger, and it literally means home ruler. If you looked at the Greek, you would think it's despot of the home. Voicoste despoteo. House ruler. This is a builder of the home entrusted with building the home that God is calling us to build as the helper of the head of the house.

So I'm getting ready to do something dangerous, but it might be helpful, so I'm going to try it. To pull this into a corporate organization, you have a chief executive officer who is ultimately responsible, the buck stops with him, but a chief operating officer who day to day oversees the building and maintaining of the operations of the company. The chief executive officer has the authority to come down and make decisions there, but that's really not how it works practically day-to-day. He has other things normally that he's working on he has authority but normally he's been given other things to be primary for him and day to day week to week month to month The chief operating officer is building and overseeing the operations of that company. It's sort of like that.

Only mix in love. So it's way better. There's so much more to say about Titus 2, but I need to keep moving. So I haven't even touched on certain parts of this. Oh well, it's not a message on Titus 2.

Here's a summary of this point. A wife is given the privilege of building a flourishing, biblical, wonderfully healthy home. If I told you, I got a job for you. You get to build something that is flourishing and biblical, It came right out of the mind of God and healthy. Would you be excited about that?

You better be! Sisters, God has given you the privilege of building a flourishing, biblical, wonderfully healthy home. So it isn't wrong to call these duties, they really are duties, but they might be more properly known as great privileges. I hope you see them like that. Number three, the duties of wives are utterly consistent with Proverbs 31.

The duties of wives are utterly consistent with Proverbs 31. The vision of the virtuous wife in Proverbs 31 is not in any way at odds with anything that I've said. In fact, the vision of the virtuous wife in Proverbs 31 is utterly consistent with everything that I've said, because this is just the Bible saying the same thing in different places in slightly different ways but describing the same thing. So Proverbs 31 is perfectly consistent. For the sake of time, I'm not going to take you to Proverbs 31, it's a message in itself, and then some.

But here's what's there. The virtuous wife is of tremendous worth. Far more than rubies. So if you ever get a choice, You can have a virtuous wife or a bunch of rubies. Take the virtuous wife.

You can only get so far with rubies. A virtuous wife will take you way further than a pile of rubies. She has the complete trust of her husband. The text actually says his heart safely trusts in her. So she enjoys his complete trust and it's safe for him to trust her.

Have you ever had anyone that it was foolish to trust? That's not what's being talked about here at all. His heart safely trusts in her. It's so safe for him to extend his complete trust in this godly woman. She does her husband good and not evil all the days of his life.

She is a powerhouse rising early and staying up late because God has given her a compelling full life. I dare you read Proverbs 31 and tell me that's not a compelling life. If you say that, what are you looking for? That's not there. And Proverbs 31 describes this compelling and full life.

When you read the chapter, you understand why she's up early and up late. She makes certain that the household is lavishly cared for. This is the kind of house you want to be a part of because the members of this household don't get short shrift. They don't get the leftovers they're lavishly cared for. Verse 27 summarizes it by saying she watches over the ways of her household.

Maybe there's a chief operating officer watching over the ways. Not doing it all. This is actually a woman who is managing servants. She's not doing it all. She's watching over the ways of this household.

She contributes to the household economically, but it should be said that this is a home-centered woman. So when the economic contribution centers her outside the home, things are off the tracks. How do you know? Simple math. Who gets the hours?

I'm centered at home, but somebody else gets the hours. Does that pass the sniff test to you? It doesn't pass the sniff test to me. It doesn't pass the simple math test. I think where the hours are is where the center is.

Yet it should also be said that her activities extend beyond the physical home. You can't read Proverbs 31 and say all the activities are confined to the home? They're clearly not. She is buying property, for instance. She extends her hand to the poor and needy, for instance.

So she is home-centered, but she's not home-bound. No one would call the Proverbs 31 woman home-bound. That gives me an opportunity to make a very important point that will get cheated in this message. So I just want to at least lay down the bookmark for it as something that's important but I'm not focused on. And that's this.

The home doesn't just exist for the home, does it? The home doesn't just exist for the home. We are blessed to be A blessing. So God does love us, is good to us, does want to bless us, but does God intend that we're the termination point for that? Just soak up the blessing.

God blesses us in building this kind of life, having this kind of home, to be a blessing. It's actually the perfect foundation from which to go influence the world. I'm not even talking about those other things, but I don't want to just confine it to this. There's step one, build a life like this, build a home like this, and then there's step two, which is all wrapped up in the Great Commission, both in your neighborhood, your community and to the ends of the earth. This is serving that purpose.

This kind of life, this kind of home, is the perfect thing to serve that kind of purpose. You cannot skip past this to go to that. When you skip past this to get to the big things, the earth shaking things, the results are so predictable. You're not going to shake the earth if you don't have this solid foundation. You're going to get sent home with your tail between your legs, because the foundation wasn't solid.

This serves all of those things. So building this little world is a foundation to influence the world near and far, and to be building blocks for the local church. Again, not that not the home being the termination point. It's now the building blocks for the local church and and and we could go on and on and develop this. Where is the husband while all this is happening?

He is working to provide the home, to provide for this home, and he is influencing his community on behalf of the home. Proverbs 31 says he's in the gates. That means he's at home extending the influence of the home into the community. And then he comes home and leads and serves in a number of different ways. And all of that is about more than just the home.

So I'm focused on the home here, but understand that the home is this foundational building block that other things, critical things, vital things, God has intended, it serves those things. Okay, two final points to make. First, Proverbs 31 is not some sort of alternative vision, where the rest of the Bible is talking about a mom, and Proverbs 31 is talking about a super mom. Nope. The big vision of Proverbs 31 is the vision for wives.

It is the compelling vision that stretches every gift God has given you. If you think my gifts are being wasted, your vision isn't big enough. It's below God's vision. Now a warning. To saddle wives with the notion that to be a godly woman, you have to engage every one of these things in every season of life is to crush wives and mothers under a weight that nobody can bear.

Proverbs 31 is the life of a godly woman. Not all of it in every season of her life, it actually ends with her adult children honoring her and her husband honoring her. They rise up and call her blessed and he says, many daughters excel. Many daughters do well, but you excel them all. So this is the course of her lifetime.

To say, if you're not engaging every one of these things in every stage of life, when you have a bunch of littles in your house, you're not a godly woman, is to crush women in a way that this text was never designed to. Finally, look at the latitude afforded to this woman. Does this look like a woman cooped up in a little box to you? Look at the expanse of her activities, the latitude that has been afforded to this woman. Now is it true that the intentions of a wife and mother need to be reigned in for the sake of focus insanity from time to time?

If you married a high capacity, high competency woman who's a high performance sports car, probably from time to time, it's the better part of wisdom to rein in some of those things for the sake of focus insanity. But what is on display in Proverbs 31? Wide latitude. If you want to find a micromanaging husband, you'll have to find another chapter. He's not in Proverbs 31.

You have a wife enjoying wide latitude. Number four. God tells wives what to do if the man they married is or becomes disobedient. That's sort of an important topic. Okay, we have the biblical vision, got it.

But what if he's not on board? What if he's worse than not on board? All bets are off, right? If you have a cantankerous husband, we chuck the biblical vision out the window and make it up as best we can. That is not what Peter says.

Scott alluded to it earlier, but I'm going to read 1 Peter 3 verses 1 and 2. Wives, likewise be submissive to your own husbands, That even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear. I don't love the translation chased and chased conduct there because we put sexual overtones in it and it includes that, but it's like the purity of character that draws admiration. So it's beyond just that one category by a thousand. You wanna win them over with this pure conduct that just magnetically draws admiration against the way to win him.

If you're a wife that has a husband who is disobedient to the word or you're counseling, a wife of a man who's disobedient to the word, our counsel should be don't fear those circumstances. Don't be afraid. This is if you go further in first Peter 3 you end up there. Don't be afraid. Fear God like Sarah did and stay the course.

You have the biblical vision, but something's way off track, something that you don't have control over. So what do you do when there's a biblical vision, but something key is off track and you don't have control over it? And the counsel is stay the course. Stay on the biblical vision. Don't abandon it.

That is what you can do that is most likely to win over a disobedient husband. In any event, you have lived before God according to his word. If he doesn't, you have. And it's the most powerful lever you have to pull to win him, is this pure conduct that sticks to, stays the course, sticks to the biblical vision for your part. So there it is.

Number one, the duties of wives originate in the beginning, is in the mind of God, at creation, before the fall. Genesis two, 18. Number two, the duties of wives are so clearly summarized by the apostle Paul, We don't have to wonder what it means to be a suitable helper for a husband. You can go there and you actually get a defining list. Is it a comprehensive list?

I would say no, it's not a comprehensive list, But the really hypercritical things are on that list for sure. Titus 2 verses 4 and 5. Number 3, the duties of wives are utterly consistent with Proverbs 31. We shouldn't view this as a superwoman, but as A godly woman. Men, when you see qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, you should be going for those because that's not intended to be super Christian men.

That is intended to be tried and true Christian men. And for women, you shouldn't view Proverbs 31 as a super Christian woman, something attainable but as the target for all of you. Number four, God tells wives what to do if the man they married is or becomes a disobedient man. Stay the course. Don't abandon the biblical vision.

Magnetically draw his admiration from the life that you build for yourself in your home according to the biblical vision for wives and mothers. Let's pray. God these things are very beautiful, very good, very compelling. They're also mixed in with much that is mundane and thankless. Both of those things are true.

Pray that you would help the sisters who are hearing these things and their husbands. I not lose sight of the beauty and goodness of these things, because of the mundane things that are part of them. God your ways are the best ways. Just help us to trust your Word in Jesus name. Amen.