Sermon: The Christian Walk (Part Four): Mutual Submission in Godly Fear

Esteem Others Better
#1763
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 18-May-24; 83 minutes 2024-05-18

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When I finished my sermon on the last Day of Unleavened Bread, I thought I was finished with this series on the Christian walk. However, with a bit more mental review, I found out that I had ended this series with Ephesians 5:21, but I had not really fully concluded where the apostle Paul did. I did not really hit it in the way that I felt that it should be hit. Unlike Joe Baity, I am not doing a redo, I am doing an addition to this.

So, basically what we are going to be going over today is Ephesians 5:20-21, particularly verse 21, because those two verses are a fitting summation, if you will, of the Christian walk passages that Paul did there in Ephesians 5. Essentially those verses advise us to live in gratitude to God for everything that He has done and submit to each other in the fear of God. Yes, I mentioned these things, we actually read those verses, and hopefully I explained them enough kind of in summary as I was getting ready to sit down. But I really think that the section was rushed and that I should take more time with them. So I decided to do a fourth sermon on, especially, verse 21.

Now, this has a connection with the commentary I gave two weeks ago. I spoke then about Americans having a hard time with authority because we believe, as Americans, that we are absolutely free. This is ridiculous, but we tend to think ridiculous things and it is not just time to time, it is often, because we have made a government that has made us slaves. But we are like the Jews back there in John 8 who say that they have never been in bondage to any man, when we are sitting here with shackles on and those freedoms that we were once given, once had, have been taken away in terms of, "Oh, there are terrorists. We have to take your freedoms away, so that we can catch them," and other things besides. So we are actually not free and the idea that we have absolute freedom is utterly ridiculous.

But it has gotten far past the point where it has seeped into our religious life, our intellectual life, so that we think that we are even free to decide individually what truth is. Now, that is understandable if you do not believe in God, if you do not have any foundation in an absolute truth. And in this postmodern age, a good many of the people out there do not have that kind of foundation and they believe, then, that they have the idea to either believe a truth that is known and take it to themselves, or they can have their own truth. I mean, that can get pretty ridiculous too, you know, that I am actually a cat or my soul is really a dandelion now, or whatever. People just think ridiculous things because they are free to think ridiculous things and they do not have the discipline to think through things anymore, it seems.

The upshot of it, as I said in my commentary, was that we have become each a sovereign, a king or a queen of his own or her own castle, and we think that we can just do what we want, think what we want, and they can, the people in America can think that way, but it is not going to be very good on the outcome side; things are going to not be good. So because we think that we are each a king or a queen in that way, we have a hard time submitting to God's sovereignty, to God's authority.

And I concluded that commentary with a perhaps shocking statement that, as the elect of God with God's Holy Spirit, we too are not free. We are not free to determine for ourselves what is true doctrine. That is not our call really. Instead, each of us as individuals are slaves of righteousness, which Paul tells us in a couple of places in his epistles. And what that means is that we are bound to God's righteousness. What God says is true and right.

Many of us though, even though we seek God's righteousness, are in various places on the spectrum of understanding God's ultimate truth, what is God's ultimate righteousness. And it is just simply human nature, the fact that are not all of the same intelligence, not all have the same background, not all have the same vocabulary, or whatever it is, that would help them to understand what God's truth is. And thus, we have across the spectrum of the churches of God a great deal of, we will just call it disunity on doctrine, because we are all coming from it differently and we have not unified. We do not all speak the same thing simply because of these factors, and more.

Now, the connection here between this sermon and that commentary is that Americans, and truly we can say humans in general, it is not just Americans, it is just more easily seen here in America I think, but everybody has a problem with submitting, whether it is to God or to people in authority or just to one another. That is a problem; and it is a problem because of human nature. It is a problem because we are all infected by the same bug, that is, the attitudes of Satan the Devil and the encrusted attitudes of human beings as our civilizations have aged and these things have become traditions and we just follow them without a lot of thought.

For Americans, this nation was founded on the idea of rebellion against authority. That is its central tenet. That is why shots were fired in that little town outside of Boston (Lexington). It is because we did not want a 2% tax on tea. (What are we paying now?) But that was the Founding Fathers reason, or at least the public reason for why they went to war, for a very small tax that the tyrant in London was putting on us and we did not have a say in it. "No taxation without representation." "Don't tread on me." And we went to war.

That spirit of rebellion and its ensuing idea or attitude of individualism and personal sovereignty has been a hallmark of Americanism ever since for more than 200 years because, as Americans, we bow to no one. I mean, that is what we think. We proudly say, "I'm an individual, I can pull myself up by my bootstraps and hover in the air if I want to." That is just the way we tend to be because we are Americans and we think that if something is not right, we have got to go to war or we have got to take steps—because we can.

It has gotten to the point where we feel a distaste for even due deference to people in authority, we do not think very highly of them. We actually usually think that they are the lowest things on earth that we scrape off the soles of our shoes and they have not done much to prove us wrong. But, you know, we do not give deference to people who are in authority to us. In some parts of America, we do not even want police. We do not want to give police any deference because the police are the enemy. We even do not want to think that others are superior to us in any way. And so we think that the whole universe should be modeled on us because we are so great.

Now, these self-centered attitudes that we have learned or absorbed since our birth are in direct opposition to God's will. None of them are good. We think they are good. "Oh, it's the old way of the red, white, and blue. This is the way my father was and his father and his father all the way back to the Mayflower." People really think that! And then they go to the Episcopal Church or the Presbyterian Church or the Baptist church or whatever church and think they are good people. But the witness of their lives is showing that they are living in direct opposition to what God wants. But we put a smiley face on it and we call evil good.

This is not just America. Other nations have done it too, just in various degrees of it one way or another. And this is why God could say everybody has gone astray. There are none good. They have all taken a drink out of the cup of the wrath that is going to be coming on them because they have all horribly sinned, they have all gone against God's will.

Remember, He tells us very clearly in Romans 8:6-7, that human nature, the carnal mind that we all have and still try to fight against, is hostile to the law, to the rule of God. It is not subject to God's law. Paul says that very clearly. It is not subject to God's law. It does not want to be subject, it will not be subject. That is that carnal human element in us that wants to go against God in everything. And he says, indeed cannot be. I mean, those are very plain, definite negative statements. What is inside us, what is inside the rest of the world hates God and His way.

So submission or subjection to another is anathema to human nature. We do not want to be subject, we do not want to be under, we do not want to give due deference to people because we want that authority ourselves. It is just the way human nature works. Human nature, unchecked, wants to be the top dog in everything. You know what that is actually? Unchecked human nature wants to be God. You could either put that as a small g or a capital G. And where did they learn that? Give you one guess. That is the essence of Satan the Devil's attitude.

Just go back and look at Isaiah 14:12 and that area there because it is the idea that he broadcasts all over the world, all over the earth that he wants to be God. He wants to be like God, as it says in our translations, and carnal human nature, tuned to his station, laps it up. It is this feeling, this spirit that comes into them that they are the epitome of humanity, that they deserve better, that they actually deserve not just to move up socially or economically or in terms of prestige or power of some kind. They should be on top telling everybody else what to do. This is not articulated except in some of the extreme people out there like (I will just pull one out of the hat) Muhammad Ali. "I am the greatest!" He believed it. Now, he may have been the greatest boxer, and evidently he was a nice enough human being, at least to his family and friends. I do not know. But he certainly was not the greatest. But in his own mind, he was.

But God's elect, to bring it around to us, have His Spirit and He commands us to use that Spirit, that Holy Spirit, that pure, undefiled godly Spirit to prevail over our innate carnality and put on the mind and character traits of Christ. That is why it is given to us, so that we can fight that broadcast of Satan the Devil, at least in our own selves; that we can put that down and strive for what God wants of us.

So what God says in giving us His Spirit and giving us the command to overcome, is that we are commissioned to act against our natural urges and desires. We have to go against ourselves and our motives and our attitudes. We have to overthrow all those evil habits that we have learned and actively pursued for a long time that have become ingrained in us—and they are very hard to overcome—and then make new godly habits that are going to encourage righteousness, going to encourage right doing and service and those kinds of good things, rather than the evil things that we have done before. And thus live as God's children amidst an evil world.

Every one of those things that I just said is really hard. And that is why God usually gives you a long time and a lot of gifts and a lot of opportunities to try to get it right—at least a few of them. To make strides, to be encouraged, to make more strides to try to be better. So this, I will call it a godly counter movement, that is, living as a Christian in a evil world, this godly counter movement—you could also use the image of a fish swimming upstream against the current; you could call it walking the narrow path as Jesus does in His Sermon on the Mount—that counter movement, what we are called to do includes as a basic foundational principle: submission.

Submission is actually a huge factor in our godly walk. That is why Paul ends there in Ephesians 5:21, because without true submission, it does not work or if it does work, it does not work as well. And if you want to really grow, you really have to grow in this area of submission.

Our flesh rebels when the best, most godly course in whatever situation we happen to be facing is submission. Because it wants to dominate. It wants to solve, it wants to win, it wants to make others bend the knee before we have to. Because the person who is coming at this in a proud way rather than in a submissive way, thinks that by winning he will receive either fame or glory or prestige or wealth or power or some kind of earthly reward.

Whereas, if you approach it from the other point of view, that is, you face the situation with humility and submission, you know what the reward is there? There are some physical rewards, but most of them are treasures in heaven. It is not instant gratification with some sort of physical reward. It is something that has to be put off and it is part of the reward we get at the resurrection from the dead. And who in the world looks that far ahead? Very few of us, because we are not conditioned that way. We are conditioned in this world to want something visible, quick, where we could actually draw a line between what we did and what we got.

But God says the way He works is that you work and work and work and work and work and work, and you do not see anything or maybe just a smidge of something improving, but you may not ever see the results, the fruit from something you do for God because it is postponed until the resurrection. Hard to do. Humans do not like that and we have a hard time with it and that is why we struggle because we do not think far enough ahead and we do not make the connections that we need to make between doing this thing in humility and submission and God's big smile when we do it, because we cannot see His big smile. We cannot see that our submission and our humility has pleased God. And He is like, "Wow, that's great!" But we do not get the reward until the resurrection. We cannot seem to put off that desire for some sort of "atta boy!" like Jesus did. (We will get to more of that later.)

So for most of us, probably all of us, sadly, unless you are truly righteous and self-controlled, our first inclination is still to stand tall and proud, rather than lowly and submissive. And I think we all have a lot of work to do.

In this sermon, we are going to continue our investigation of our walk with God through what the apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 5. Remember, we have already gone through the first three passages of walking in love, walking in light, and walking in wisdom. That is, the first one, walking in love, is imitating the life of Christ in sacrificial love for God and for others. Walking in light is walking in the revealed goodness, righteousness, and truth that have been given to us from God. And walking in wisdom, that is, walking circumspectly guided by God's Holy Spirit.

So today we are going to consider where Paul ends there in verse 21 with mutual submission in the fear of God. I want to read the last section, the whole "walk in wisdom" section starting in verse 15.

Ephesians 5:15-18 See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit.

This is very important because this is the crux of what he is getting to. That it is the Spirit and being filled with the Spirit, allowing the Spirit to lead and guide you that is going to make all of this possible. That you can walk in love; you can walk in light; you can walk in wisdom, because you are allowing God's Spirit to empower you and direct you.

Ephesians 5:19 But be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, . . .

Just a little aside here. Some people think this is weird that we should go around [makes singing noises] talking to each other in spiritual songs and hymns and what have you. Well, I want to maybe give you a practical way of looking at this, and that is, back then there were not a whole lot of Bibles. As a matter of fact, there was not even a New Testament. There were a few epistles around and maybe a gospel or two, but there were plenty of copies of the Old Testament.

But normally churches were quite poor. They may not have been able to have any or maybe they found an old one from the Jews. Jews, usually, if they got a new one, they would burn the old one, but somehow they were able to have copies of the Old Testament. But usually a church would only probably have one. I am sure part of the early church was employed or what have you, people volunteered as scribes, and they would copy the Old Testament and these epistles, as many as they could, to distribute to the churches so that they would have this information. But it was not going to every family. It certainly was not going to every person.

And so each individual in the church had limited time with the Scriptures, you know, in paper form or in vellum form or whatever they were using, papyrus. I do not know. But as an easy way to memorize Scriptures, the early church put them to music or they used music that everybody knew. They would find a set of scriptures as we would do if we were in the same situation. We say, "Oh, the way that goes, it's like 'O Susannah.'" So they put the words of the Bible to the song that they all knew and so that is how they learned the Scriptures. They would make them into spiritual songs so that you could learn a song because it was part of a hymn. You could learn the melody, put the words to it, and know what the scripture said.

And so when he tells us here that we are to speak (he does not say sing, he says speak) to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, I think what he is telling them is to let your conversation among yourselves be what you have learned from these songs and hymns and spiritual songs that you have learned. So they were not actually singing to one another. They were saying the words that were in those songs to one another. We can easily do the same thing. We have had this hymnal for generations. And so we know certain psalms because we sing them fairly regularly. And so I could tell you, "Hey, sing what you learned or talk to each other about what you learned in Psalm 55." We have two two songs, two hymns in our hymnal about Psalm 55. And so you do not need your Bible. You could just go back to the hymn and say, "Ah, this is Psalm 55. This is what it says. 'Twas not a foe who did deride."

Now make sure you do the next one. What is that, 45? Go to 46 because, I do not know why, I have told you this before, I have told other people, hymn 45 is the last half of Psalm 55 but hymn 46 is the first half of Psalm 55. So you need to flip them if you want the right order. But you know those songs, you know Psalm 55. So talk to one another about what you learned there. I think that is what Paul is saying.

Long discursion. Let us get back on the road.

Ephesians 5:20-21 [This is important.] . . . giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God.

What we have here in verse 21 especially, is what some scholars call a hinge, or a hinge verse. And what that is, it is a verse or a small section that concludes the former section and swings naturally into the next. It acts as an introduction to the next section. So in this way, we kind of see Paul's stream of consciousness as he is going through what he is trying to get across to the Ephesians. And he gets down here to verse 21 and he puts in this hinge verse that is going to launch him right into what he wanted to say about these practical matters that he gets to from verse 22 on.

So the hinge is both things that he mentions there. The hinge is "submitting to one another" and the other part of the hinge is "in the fear of God." And they are connected to themselves, they are one hinge actually, but we were going to take them in two parts: the submitting part and the fear part, and I am going to be spending most of the time on the submitting part.

Now, he uses the word here hypotasso for submitting. That is the word underlying submitting. If you want to look it up later, it is Strong's number 5293. I will give you the general definition first. Hypotasso generally means to place or arrange under. Hypo-tasso. You can see the two parts of the Greek word: hypo, under, and then tasso, to place. So it means to place or arrange under or to subordinate.

Here, the intent in Ephesians 5:21, is to submit oneself, or to render obedience, or be submissive, or give deference to, or to be amenable to. So if somebody makes a suggestion, let us say, and it sounds right, you are amenable to that. You are willing to consider it, you think that it might help, or what have you.

In Paul's epistles, this word hypotasso almost always has to do with "order under authority." So if you are a private in the army, you are under everybody. You are under your corporal, you are under your sergeant, you are under your captain, your major, or whatever all the way up the ranks. You have been placed under or ordered under or arranged under everyone who has authority over you because of a higher rank. That is what it means.

And so in the same way a child needs to be submissive to his parents because in the arranged order of things, the child is at the bottom and the parent has authority over him. In the same way, in that culture, a slave was arranged under his master. Or even if there was another slave in the house, let us say a steward who had been placed over everything under the master, the normal slave was placed under or arranged under that steward. So it has this idea in the Epistles of Paul that it is arranged under some known authority.

So here, the idea in Ephesians 5:21 is that it denotes voluntary submission or yielding to others.

You may not know this, I did not know this until I started looking at it as deeply as I could, this verse is controversial because many interpreters (and you will find this in a lot of commentaries) say that mutual submission, which the Greek text clearly connotes, I mean, it is literally "submitting to one another," but they say that mutual submission is practically impossible. Practically impossible. That means in practice, it is impossible. They say even in a group of equals, someone will naturally take charge and become the leader. Someone will be the first among equals, someone will have authority, or be given authority, or take authority. So it is impossible, as they try to think through this, that everyone can submit to everyone! It just does not work that way.

So mutual submission, to use their theological language, rules out hierarchical differences; yet there is a clear hierarchy in church offices. Since there is authority in the church (this is the argument), and it can be seen in the structures that Paul and the other apostles present, then there cannot be mutual submission. That cannot be what Paul is talking about. So their interpretation of this verse, of this particular submitting to one another, actually means (and this is them speaking, not me), "Be submissive to those over you whoever they are." That is what they basically think it means.

Only trouble. Paul did not write that. He wrote specifically in Greek, "submitting to each other" no matter who you are. He does not put any qualifications who "one another" is other than it is everybody and everybody is supposed to submit to everybody. Now, we with human nature say, "I think the scholars have something here. How can everybody submit to everybody?"

But it is possible. You know why it is possible? It is possible because of what God puts in you when you are converted: the Holy Spirit.

And that is why I think the arguments of the scholars are a bunch of hogwash because their arguments about mutual submission are essentially a lack of understanding of God's intent because of their lack of the Holy Spirit. They just simply cannot understand it because it is an anti-carnal human nature way of looking at things. They are trying to understand a spiritual principle with physical tools and thinking processes that they learned in the world.

What they really do not understand is that "submitting to one another in the fear of God" is an attitude that undergirds our dealings with each other in the church. And it of course, bleeds out into our dealings with other people in the world. We see it in precept and in action throughout the New Testament, especially in the life of Jesus Christ, and in certain faithful heroes in the Old Testament like Moses. He commanded how many millions of Israelites going through the wilderness, all trying to go their own separate ways and do all kinds of things that God did not want them to do. But he was the meekest man in all the earth. How did the man do it? I do not know.

And we have other examples like Joseph; and David, in the Psalms especially; Nehemiah, Ruth, Esther. These were people who grasped this concept of submission. And they did not do it just to people who are above them, they did this sort of thing throughout their relationships.

Let us go back a chapter to Ephesians 4. We are getting back to some of the stuff we talked about earlier in Part One. But it is very important for us to understand that this is all one set-piece here. That it starts way back here and runs through, actually, the rest of the book. But we need to understand what Paul is basing all of this on.

Ephesians 4:1-3 I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to have a walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Here is the crux of the matter. Paul implores us here to conduct ourselves along our walk to the Kingdom in five ways, with five basic attitudes. And that is: lowliness, gentleness, longsuffering, forbearance, and unity through peace. Those are the five big things that he is talking about right away. So we get the understanding that everything else that comes after this is based on these five things and he is imploring us, that is what he says here, I beseech you; I urge you that in your walk with God you display these five attitudes: lowliness, gentleness, longsuffering, forbearance, and unity through peace.

Now, we did go through these at the end of the first sermon and each of these aspects of a worthy walk is an attitude based on humility. That is, if you were making a chart here, humility would be the big one and then these are different ways of expressing it. So he says, in our walk with God, our walk to the Kingdom of God, we are not to be self-important but lowly; we are not to be rough and demanding but gentle; we are not to be impatient and judgmental but forbearing; we are not to be divisive through contentions but peaceful, cultivating bonds between brethren. And when we take this humble, lowly approach in each and every situation, or maybe I should say in any and every situation, we are immediately arranging ourselves under the others involved in the situation.

See what I did there. I put hypotasso back into this verse. All of these things contribute to arranging ourselves under because we have approached the situation in humility. We have decided to take the low seat, as it were, and approach the problem or the situation from that vantage point. That is exactly what Jesus tells us in Luke 14:7-11 where He tell us to take the lowest place at the wedding feast. And recall that at the end of that, in verse 11, He says, "For whoever exalts himself will be humbled [that is, put down or abased], and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

So He is saying that those with His Spirit who are trying to overcome the flesh, have to take the opposite approach. Someone with just human nature will not approach it this way. They want to control the situation, they want to put down the situation, they want to do various things that we have learned in this world work on other people, but usually it means using authority, using a superior position to control the situation in one way or another. But it is usually a top down approach.

And what we are seeing from the apostle Paul here is that this is the counter thinking that God has given us to understand through His Word, that actually the other way works better; the humble, lowly approach actually works better than the top down, smash them or get rid of them type of approach.

Let us go back to Matthew, chapter 5. I have been combining a lot of stuff that I have been preaching about over the last several years here. We are not all that far from my series on the Beatitudes. It is the same thing. Jesus begins His sermon in the same way that Paul begins Ephesians 4, by telling us attitudes that we need to have so that we can do the rest of the things that He tells us in the Sermon on the Mount. Because you have got to start with humility, you have got to start with the right attitudes. And so He says,

Matthew 5:3-10 "Blessed are the poor in spirit. . . [that is an aspect of humility] Blessed are those who mourn. . . [also an aspect of humility] Blessed are the meek. . . [another aspect of humility] Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. . . [another aspect of humility because you know that you do not know enough. You do not know enough about God, you do not know enough about what He commands us to do, so you hunger for it.] Blessed are the merciful. . . [again, another aspect of humility] Blessed are the pure in heart. . . [That is another aspect of humility because God tells us that it is the pure in heart, like His Son Jesus Christ, who is the most humble Person that has ever lived, those are the ones that are going to see God.] Blessed are the peacemakers. . . [humility again] Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. . ."

So Christ begins His Sermon on the Mount here with the Beatitudes to emphasize that these humble, lowly Christlike attitudes stand at the base of all Christian living and activity. That is what we have got to start with. We have got to start putting on these attitudes, having these characteristics if we want to do what He says in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. And of course, if we want to be like Christ, we must develop these traits of humility and submission. How do I know that?

Let us go to Matthew 11. He tells us Himself what He is like.

Matthew 11:28-29 "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."

You want to know what one of the immediate rests for your soul is when you take on Jesus' lowliness and gentleness? The fight stops. It does not stop completely but you have rest because you are no longer fighting. Now, you are fighting yourself. You are trying to overcome yourself and your own weaknesses and your own sins. But this other way keeps you from fighting other people, and that is very restful.

So He was gentle and lowly. He was meek. That is the same word that is translated elsewhere as meek; and Christ shows this all the time. He proves everywhere in the gospels that He was gentle and lowly in heart, and He leaves in John the 13th chapter a final emphatic example for us of how that works when He did the foot washing for the disciples on that last Passover. He was showing them that He was willing to take the low seat in everything. He did not vie for power. He did not use force or intimidation. He did not threaten or play games of one-up-man-ship. He did not even claim His prerogatives that He had as God, as the Son of God. What did He tell the people that came to arrest Him? "Don't you know that I could call down twelve legions of angels?" If He was playing the power game, that is what He would have done.

But He did not. He was playing the gentle and lowly game of sacrificial love for all who sin and believe in Him as their Redeemer. He saw things a lot farther than people do when they play the power game. He modeled in every minute of His life the proper approach for Christians. For Christ's followers that is an attitude of humble submission and service. The very God of creation placed Himself under everyone else. Can you imagine that! The One who made us put Himself under us. Made himself a curse, voluntarily, to redeem us from our sins. It is crazy, if you are a human, if you have got human nature. But God does not think like us.

Let us go to Philippians 2. We have all been here dozens of times, I am sure. But it models for us the way to be—and we have a such a hard time doing it.

Philippians 2:5-6 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery [or a thing to be grasped at] to be equal with God, . . .

Is that not incredible? Here He was, sitting at the right hand of God, with all that power and authority that He had as the Word, and He did not think that was something that He needed to hold on to with all His might.

Philippians 2:7-8 . . . but made Himself [that was volition, He willed it], taking the form of a servant, and coming in the likeness of men [as a part of the creation]. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself [further] and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.

Do you see the steps here? Every step is downward until you finally get to the death of the cross and He has put Himself under every human being, taking their sins upon Himself as if they are greater than He and needed His help, and He would serve them. He went all the way from the right hand of God, all the way to Golgotha. That is down, down, down, down. He was willing to do the ultimate of humility, lowliness, submission in order to make sure that there was a way for our sins to be forgiven, and God's children, His elect, could have eternal life.

So He voluntarily became a worm, as it says in Psalm 22, "I am a worm, and no man." He became a bondservant, a slave. He humbled Himself, I think I have said this already, every second of His life (I think I said minute the other day, the other time), all the way to a cruel sacrificial death that He volunteered for.

Let us go to verses 3 and 4 here in the same chapter. This comes before the example, but this is what Paul is telling us we need to do.

Philippians 2:3-4 Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.

Finally, we get to a nice clear statement of what mutual submission is. This is what Paul is telling us to do in Ephesians 5:21, "in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than oneself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others," without meddling. I just added that part, but that is in another part of the Bible.

So what is he saying here? I think it is pretty clear but let me just put it in a few different phrases. Paul was saying what mutual submission looks like in action. We consider everyone better. We consider everyone more noble. We consider everyone more favored in the eyes of God. We must think that we are a mere servant among our betters. God has called us to attend to them and help them. And we think of them in this elevated way not because they actually are better. We know better. We know that they were the scum of the earth just as we were and only God's grace has brought us into this present position. So we do not think of them in this elevated way because they are actually better, but because we consider ourselves unworthy.

Remember what Mr. Armstrong used to say? A lot of you do not even really know who he is or what he looks like or you only know the sound of his voice through Dr. Maas. But he said in many sermons that I heard from him that he thought of himself as a miserable, worthless hunk of junk. And that is godly. That is what we are being told here. That everybody in the church has problems. But my problems are worse because I am a terrible person. Why did God want me? I have all these flaws. So because we have that attitude of being lowly, humble, we submit and we serve. If we are doing all this, we will be submitting to one another in the fear of God.

Let us pick up Luke 17, verse 10. Jesus says here,

Luke 17:10 "So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, 'We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty to do.'"

Because we are under, we have arranged ourselves under the Master and all those whom we serve. This is hard. This is very hard. I am not saying that I have done it or that anybody has done it perfectly other than Jesus Christ. But it is the attitude that God wants to see.

Notice, we are going to go through some scriptures here pretty quickly. These are all about the apostle Paul in his own words about himself.

I Corinthians 15:8-10 [talking about after Jesus' resurrection] Then last of all, He was seen by me also, as one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace to me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.

Let us go to Ephesians 3.

Ephesians 3:8 To me, who am less than the least of all the saints, . . .

You see where he placed himself? In the last one he was talking about being the least of the apostles. In this verse he says he is less than the least of all the saints. He was a scraping the bottom of the barrel. He said,

Ephesians 3:8-9 . . . this grace was given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all people see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the ages has been hidden in God who created all things through Jesus Christ.

Let us move forward to I Timothy 1.

I Timothy 1:12-16 [He says here] I thank Christ Jesus our Lord who has enabled me, because He counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry [into the service], although I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man [He thought a lot about himself, did he not?]; but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant, with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief. [He thought of himself as the worst sinner in the world.] However, for this reason, I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show all longsuffering, as a pattern to those who are going to believe on Him for everlasting life.

He was saying, Jesus Christ in all His grace and love picked me, the worst of the worst, as an example to everyone that He could take the bottom of the barrel, scrape all that crud off, and make that person not only sinless through His justification and grace, but a God being. And if He could do it with Paul, He can do it with anybody. That is what this passage means.

Paul is one of the most gifted, most faithful, most profitable Christians of all time. He considered himself vile and absolutely unworthy of God's grace. And he thought of himself as alive and able to work only due to that grace. That if God had done what he deserved, he would have been dead at Stephen's death. God would have just blotted him out. He was nothing.

That is what he thought of himself. Absolutely nothing. He had persecuted God's people, that was a terrible black mark and he carried that around with him throughout his whole ministry, for the rest of his life. And that God called him and forgave that sin had floored him. When he thought it through he said, "I don't understand this. Why did God consider me even a worthwhile project? Why did He do this? If all was just then I should not be alive. I should be a candidate for the Lake of Fire." But he chose him and He gave him grace.

If you want to grab on to maybe a good way to put it, he was astonished by God's grace toward him. Every time he thought, he was astonished about what God had done for him and done with him. And he felt, because of all that God had done for him, he felt bound, totally obligated to pay it forward, if you will, with his life. His Rescuer, his Redeemer had given him a chance to do something right and good, even though he was not good at all in his own mind. He was vile.

So he lived in constant gratitude with a mind and a body eager to serve the One who had bought such a worthless man at such a high price. The very Creator's blood was paid for his redemption and he felt, "This is too wonderful. I've got to give everything I have to make me even a little bit worthy of this, this grace." He felt then a deep obligation to serve Him, that is, Christ and His people, helping them attain God's Kingdom, not with great authority, not with brow beating. But he said in one of his epistles, "We persuade men."

And he modeled what he had come to understand to be the true way for the people that he was sent out to convert through his preaching and by his example. He did not do it, he did not base his ministry on his legitimate authority that God had given him as an apostle. But he did it out of gratitude for what Christ had done for him. And he felt obligated then to pay it forward. If we looked on our lives in the same realistic, grateful humility, we could have the same attitude as Paul.

Let us go back to Ephesians 5. We are going to read verse 21 and then verse 33 because I want to show you something here.

Ephesians 5:21 submitting to one another in the fear of God.

Ephesians 5:33 [as he gets to the end of the next section, he says] Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Ephesians 6:5 Servants, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ.

This is three instances of the same word. Now, we are on the second half of this, the fear of God. It is the word phobos in Greek. If you know your Greek and your Latin, you will know that that means literally "fear." So "fear" in verse 21, "respects" in verse 33, and also "fear" again in 6:5, all of that tells us that both submitting and fear, fear of God, were on his mind as he wrote this about wives and husbands and it being really much deeper about Christ and the church and all that. And then going on to children and fathers and servants and all those through through the next section.

All of the things that he tells us we need to do are based on those two principles: submission and fear, godly fear. So fear, then, is a theme here of Paul's instruction. It is the necessary companion of submission. The two go together. Submission without the fear of God makes your submission, I do not know, unguided. And fear of God without submission just does not work. It will not produce the right thing because, again, it will not have the guidance of God. If we are led by God's Spirit, he is saying here, we can submit to each other in godly fear. The Spirit is what helps put both elements together and gives it strength and guidance.

So women can submit to their husbands. This world, Harrison Butker will tell you, does not believe that. But they do not have God's Spirit and so they have trouble with women submitting to their husbands—as to the Lord. Husbands, then, because they have God's Spirit, can love their wives. It is not impossible because it is mixed with the elements of mutual submission and fear of God.

Children can obey their parents. You know why? Even though they may not have the Spirit of God in them, they have been trained under people who have the Spirit of God. And so they learn how to submit properly to that authority of their parents.

Fathers can avoid provoking their children to wrath if they have God's Spirit and they have this attitude of lowliness, submitting under the fear of God.

Servants can obey masters, masters can treat their servants with goodwill.

All of these things can happen because of those dual attitudes: submission and godly fear.

Now, if it were just phobos, we might have some trouble with this because it might give us the wrong understanding of fear. But it does not say just phobos. It says the phobos of God, the fear of God, and that is what colors what this fear looks like. Yes, fear is a literal translation. But when "of God" is added, it heightens to a reverential awe, like that same awe that Paul had because of what God had done for him. It heightens to that reverential awe because God is sovereign. He is sovereign over everything. We see Him for what He is. We understand that He is our judge. We understand that He is the great provider and we live only because He sustains us. He has got our life between His fingers. Our redemption and our eternal life occur only through His grace. He is the Holy One. We have a better picture of who God is. And so we fear, we have that reverential awe and even a little bit of terror at times when we realize that we have gone off the way or we have done something He would not be pleased with.

So because He is the ultimate Being, and ultimately just and ultimately powerful, we then owe Him all honor, all, praise, all thanks, all obedience—all the time. We should desire to do whatever He says. And like Paul, we come to realize very deeply, to the core of our being, that His mighty acts on our behalf puts us under deep obligation to live His way and to help others.

A converted Christian should feel and respond in this godly fear at all times. It should be a driving force. "I don't want to displease God." "I don't want to come under His wrath." "I don't want to do anything that's going to make Him displeased at all."

And not only are we legally obliged through all the things that Christ has done for us, but we are also in a personal, intimate relationship with Him. He loves us. He has invested a great deal in us. He has offered us great and precious promises. So with Paul's perpetual astonishment of God's grace for him, we should have that same thing in our situation, our life. And so we should not want to displease Him in the least.

So because He has commanded us to grow in the image of His Son, that is the ultimate commandment to those of us whom He has called, we must submit to one another because that is how the Christ lived here on earth. He submitted to everyone in the fear of God, even to the point of death. So we submit because He submitted and that will please God. Out of deep respect, reverential awe, we do what He instructs in His Word. We certainly do not want to disobey, because we will come under His judgment and reap the consequences of our wicked, ungodly works if we let them go unrepented.

I mean, look at some of these things. Jesus Himself says,

Luke 12:5 "I will show you whom you shall fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell [or the Lake of Fire]; yes, I say to you, fear Him!"

How about Philippians 2, verses 12 and 13?

Philippians 2:12-13 [You all know this one.] Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.

That is why we have got to do it in fear and trembling, because He holds the key and all the power.

How about Hebrews 12, verse 28.

Hebrews 12:28 Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.

And finally,

I Peter 1:17 And if you call on the Father, who without partiality judges according to each one's work, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your sojourning here in fear.

Let us conclude in I Peter 5. I know I came to this at the end of my commentary, but it is worth repeating.

I Peter 5:1 The elders [Now just notice this. This is in the context of a church and Peter is here trying to make sure that everybody understands the dynamics.] who are among you I exhort, I who am a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, . . .

He is kind of leaning on his pedigree, if you will. He is leaning on his experience, the things that he had seen. He saw Christ's suffering, he saw His attitude, he saw what He did and how, in this case, He made Himself lowly in order to accomplish the greatest act that has ever happened on this earth. So he says, "a witness of the sufferings of Christ."

I Peter 5:1 . . . and also a partaker of the glory that will be revealed: . . .

So he says, I am one of the elect. I am going to be there. I am going to be in the first resurrection. And he has seen what that means; just as a glimmer in the Transfiguration. He understood the path between the lowliness of Christ and His sufferings, and the glory that will be revealed. So he says, this is his conclusion, this is what we need to do. He is telling the elders:

I Peter 5:2-4 Shepherd the flock of God which is among you, serving as overseers, not by constraint but willingly, not for dishonest gain but eagerly; nor as being lords over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock; and when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that does not fade away.

What is he saying there in that last verse? Model your shepherding of the flock on Christ. That is basically what he is saying. And if you do, you will get the reward that Christ did. Let us go on. He does not leave it there at the ministry.

I Peter 5:5 Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you [agreeing with Paul] be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for "God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble."

You want grace? You want to be in the Kingdom of God? You want to be in the first resurrection and have those rewards? Be humble. That is what he is telling you here. The proud are the ones that are going to go into hell fire, as Jesus said back there in Luke. But if you want to be in God's Kingdom by the grace of God, be humble.

I Peter 5:6-7 Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.

I Peter 5:10-11 But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while [because this life is a bunch of suffering], perfect [actually, that word could be translated "restore"], [may God] perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. [Let Him work in you, let Him fill you up with His Spirit. And all you have to do is submit and be humble. So] To Him [the One doing most of the work, the One making it all happen] be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.

So I think the message is clear. We must all work on this fundamental attitude of humbling ourselves and submitting to one another in the fear of God.

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