— Brother Phil Enlow: Praise the Lord! It’s good to see everybody this morning. This is one of those occasions when I went to bed last night and had no idea what the service was gonna be about this morning. And sometimes it works that way. Sometimes you have something ahead and the Lord gives you time to think it through and all of that, but the Lord has different plans, doesn’t He? He doesn’t have a formula by which we do things. And I’m glad, because we need to know that we’re dependent on Him.
But as I woke up this morning, I just had some thoughts that came back to my mind and I’m just going to trust the Lord to help me to walk through a subject, because I was thinking about the glorious, ‘order,’ I guess, is the word, in God’s kingdom.
And how…what a contrast there is between God’s kingdom and the beauty and the order that there is in it and this world. And then the fact that God desires that we taste of His blessing and His order while we’re here. Because, what exists in Heaven is not meant to just remain there. You know, Jesus encouraged His disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (KJV).
You know, there are people out there who take that to mean that a special group is going to drive the Devil out of the world and turn this present world into the Kingdom of God. I don’t believe that’s what it’s talking about at all. But, it does have a reason for being there. God desires that we learn how to walk in His order, because it’s an order of blessing, of freedom, of joy, of everything that He has planned for us.
And of course, we know that in the beginning, God had a perfect order, didn’t He? There was a beautiful, perfect creation. He beheld it and He said all was good. He had angels, every single angel was…though they were servants, it has none of the connotations of this broken world. They were powerful, beautiful beings who were entirely, perfectly suited for what they were given to do. And they were given responsibility and just everything was exactly the way it should be, exactly the way the Master designed it to be.
But you remember how one of the angels, at least, rebelled against that order and decided that he wanted to, “...be like the most High.” He didn’t want to take that place, he wanted the ultimate place and he wanted to lead a rebellion, and thought that his highest good was to be found by going his own way, doing his own thing, being independent. And he succeeded in leading a rebellion that resulted in him and his followers being cast out of Heaven.
But where it affects us is what happened in the beginning, when we know that God created Adam. He invested him with the attributes of His own being. Adam was not just a created angel, he was created “…in the image of God.” The attributes, the qualities of being that we find in God, our Heavenly Father, were invested in Adam. And truly they needed to grow, and all of that, but they were there.
And Adam was given a place of great honor. All the works of God’s hands were put in his hands. He said, you’re in charge. I’m giving this to you to rule over and to enjoy. And, of course, we know that there came a point pretty early on when the Lord looked down and realized it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone. And so, He put him to sleep and before it was done, He brought Eve to Adam’s side. And they became one in God’s purpose and God’s plan. And it’s been all downhill…I mean…
( laughter ).
( laughing ).
No, not at all. But one of the points to understand in that, is that Eve was not an afterthought.
( congregational amens ).
Nor was she some sort of subservient, lesser being. Rather, that between the two, they shared the attributes of God. Adam had part of the image of God, the qualities that enabled him to lead, to love, to protect, to provide. All of those kinds of things were in him.
But other attributes of God’s nature and character, come straight from Him, were invested in Eve. And God’s plan was that she have the ability and capacity to love, to nurture. She was by no means a lesser being, a servant or anything of the sort that this world has turned ladies into. But she had an honored, awesome, perfect place for which she was perfectly designed.
And so, for a very brief period there, we don’t know how long, there was this perfect order. They existed in innocence at the time. They didn’t know what evil was. But then along came the deceiver. And the lie that he sold Eve was that she was missing out, God was holding out on her, that He knew that if she only acquired some knowledge, that she could chart her own course and she wouldn’t be sort of like a divine pet. It was almost like he was implying that she was being held down and God was being basically, selfish and restricting her from, and holding her back from her destiny.
And she fell for the lie and persuaded her husband to join her and now it’s been all downhill since, because of that rebellion. And so, the dominating characteristic of the human race, ever since, has been one of rebellious, selfish independence. I want what’s right for me and I’m gonna do whatever I have to do to get it. And so, we obviously live in a very broken world.
But I believe God is calling us out. I know you do, too. And He’s calling us out to become a part of His Kingdom! And it’s a Kingdom where those qualities that existed in the beginning, they exist in that Kingdom and He longs for us to share in that.
But we live in a culture today that is about as broken as it can be. And we have a culture in America today that is running as hard as it can away from God, thumbing its nose in God’s face, declaring that we’re not going to abide by any of your principles, any of your rules…they see them as rules. And, we’re gonna cast away your cords and throw off your restrictions. We’re gonna do what we want to do.
And, we understand the real spirit behind it is that of Lucifer. He hates God! He hates everything that is right! He hates everything that would bring about a blessing to human beings. All he wants to do is use, abuse and destroy.
And you know, we actually…there was a movement that he used, and it happens, in this case, to be the Communist movement in this country, decades ago. And they made a long list of what they needed to do in order to take over our society. It would scare you if you went back and read that list, because, probably 90 to 95 percent of what they set out to accomplish, has been accomplished!
And one of the areas where they really sought to tear things down was family and morality. And who would have thought, a generation ago, we would be where we’re at today? Where marriage is just…God’s definition of marriage is gone. Now people are whatever gender they imagine themselves to be. Nothing is sacred anymore. And God help you if you dare to say anything about it!
But you know, we need to stand up and we need to say, with love and with grace, that God arranged, God designed the universe. He designed us to work a certain way, and if we go against the manufacturer’s instructions, we do it to our hurt!
And so, it’s awfully easy for us, as often as we have heard many of these truths, over the years, to go on and just suppose that everybody gets it. But I think there’s a time and a place where we need to sort of reiterate God’s plan and purpose because it affects our lives, it affects our families! It affects the way we live! And we have young families growing up and they need to understand. We are being bombarded.
We’ve young people growing up…we had several graduate. Congratulations to every one of you! But you’re going off into a world that hates God and you better understand that. You better know that they have values that they have embraced that are absolutely anti-Christ, that will lead people straight to Hell while promising them liberty, promising them blessing and meaning in their lives. And the crazy thing, in this world, is that if the powers that be had their way, we would not believe in God at all.
( congregational amens ).
And what they don’t get, and what they don’t understand is they are taking pride in the idea, that as I’ve said in the past, they are nothing more than accidental descendents of pond scum, having no meaning, no purpose, no significance, and no hope. And that’s what they want us all to embrace and believe is the hope of mankind.
( congregation inaudible ).
Yeah! It makes no sense at all! And here we have a God who loved us, who made us in His image and who’s done everything necessary to open a door of hope so that we can be part of His eternal Kingdom and be restored back to what He designed us to be in the beginning! Well, Praise God! I want to enjoy those blessings here, don’t you?
( congregational response ).
I believe His heart is that we do it. And so, I’m just gonna go ahead and turn to some familiar scripture and ask the Lord to bring out of it what He will. In Ephesians chapter 5…and you know, we need to get back to what God’s principles are. And they’re not just principles, they’re laws of being. I’ve made this point before. God just doesn’t make up a bunch of rules. The principles by which His Kingdom operates, they come out of His being. They are just the way it is!
And it makes as much sense to go against them as it does to ignore and rebel against the law of gravity. You might decide that you want to fly, that it would be fun. But you will reap the consequences if you violate that law.
The problem is, with God’s character and God’s moral law is that the consequences don’t appear right away. You don’t do something wrong and then go splat, right away, always. But I’ll tell you, they’re real! And there’s so much brokenness that God would redeem us from and help us with.
So anyway, well, let me backtrack a little bit from where I was going to start. I’m gonna start where he says, in the middle of the chapter, part of verse 14, “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.
“Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (NIV).
That’s some good—good admonition, isn’t it? Praise God! You suppose there’d be some peace and joy in living according to such things? Absolutely, there’s freedom in that. Then it says, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Now submission is one of those things that human nature doesn’t like. It’s the very opposite of what we are…of the nature we were born with. Man, we want our way. We don’t want to be beholden to anybody. No authority is gonna tell us what to do! And boy, is that the spirit of the age, more and more and more?
( congregational response ).
I mean, just…Lord have mercy! It’s just absolutely running…we see it like a runaway freight train in our society today. But you know, in God’s Kingdom, it’s entirely different than what we envision. We think of submission as a form of losing myself. I’m losing my freedom. I’m sacrificing what I…what is good and best for me. I’m giving over my will to another. And in this world, that’s a dangerous thing, no question about it. Slavery is a terrible thing. But in the Kingdom of God, what we are submitting to is the Author of life! It’s the Author of love!
( congregational amens ).
We are surrendering to be the recipients of His love, to enjoy the place for which He has designed us, for which we are perfectly fitted, in which our highest happiness exists. But you know, as He brings us together, into assemblies, there is a spirit of submission. There is a spirit where I’m not a law unto myself. I’m not here to do my thing. I’m not here to just assert my will against everybody else and refuse to…you know, that kind of a spirit.
God longs to begin to bring that under control and to help us, to teach us this principle of submission so that we are, not so that we will be frustrated and repressed and hurt and abused and all of that kind of thing, but so that we can be set free from those things that would hold us in captivity! Our nature will drive us to distraction and to destruction, ultimately, if we give into it and we will suppose that we are being free when all we’re doing is being enslaved.
( congregational amens ).
Because our passions, our earthly desires become the master, they will drive us right into Hell, if we let them. But God wants to set us free. Well, part of that…part of coming back under His divine love and His Kingdom and its glorious order is learning how to say, no, to the rebelliousness of self. And so, He calls upon us to walk together and there’s that sense of submitting one to another. So, it’s not just a few up here and everybody else just submits, like they’re bosses or something. This is to everybody. You remember, Peter said the same thing, didn’t he? He said, “…all of you…”
( congregational response ).
“…Be subject one to another.” (KJV). So, there is that sense of community, there’s that sense of not this independent willfulness. God wants to begin to help us to govern that and to submit it and to lay our wills down. Even though we are in an imperfect state, there’s a principle at stake that is a lot more important than the issues of the moment. And God longs to set His people free! But now we get to one of the ladies favorite verses in the whole Bible.
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Verse 22, he begins to enumerate how some of this plays out. He says, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” (NIV). Well I’ll tell you, the movers and shakers of our feminist-oriented society love this one. And to them, it sounds like slavery and frankly, the way you look around the world, often it plays out that way, sadly. Lord, have mercy!
What must happen in the heart of God, to see the way women are abused and dominated and misused and treated like slaves and treated like cattle in so many parts of the world? That’s not how He designed things. Oh, my God! But neither did He design feminism that exalts this defiant, ‘I am woman’ kind of spirit. I’m equal to a man. I’m this, I’m that. That’s not His Spirit either. All that leads to is trouble and conflict and everything that’s wrong.
But here’s a place where wives are so constituted, the attributes of God that exist in them find their greatest, most perfect expression in a place of submission, where they’re not the ones with their hands on the wheel and telling the man what to do and all of that kind of thing. It just works out that way. That’s how God designed those attributes to function.
And they are an awesome, beautiful, amazing thing, when you see a godly woman, who is in her rightful place, looking to God and trusting Him and exerting a Christ-like influence. You have no idea how valuable that is, how God…how God is pleased with that, how it blesses His heart to see. And you know, the world will paint that as everything but what God wants. But oh, it’s a place of blessing!
And he says, “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
And I don’t think Paul had in mind if your husband tells you to go rob a bank that you need to do that. That’s not the idea. But there is that sense that she is always looking to him when it comes to issues of leadership. There is a recognition, that in the providence of God, God has put him over her with a place of responsibility. And the minute she tries to take that, she’s getting out of her place and it’s going to be a lot of strife.
But if she is able to see, even past the…even, yeah! I was gonna say past the failures and the limitations of the guy, which we all have. We’re in a very imperfect state. Yet, if there is a spirit in the heart of a godly woman, Lord, I want to please you, I know my husband’s not perfect. But I believe the principle. I believe there’s a place of blessing that you have for me and I want to occupy that. Lord, show me how to have the right spirit, even when things are not ‘right’ quote, unquote. It’s more important what you’re doing in my spirit, as I say, than the issues of the moment.
Oh, how we love to justify a wrong spirit in here because that’s not right, or he didn’t say it right, or he didn’t do it right. God’s interested in changing you and changing me. And we cannot change our spouse or anybody else in our circle. We cannot change them. We’re gonna have to do our…our responsibility, our place is to model Christ, to occupy the place under His rule, under His headship, under His leadership, that He has designed us for.
And the more we do that, the more freedom we’re going to have in our spirits, the less bondage we’re gonna be living under, the less of a burden of, ‘I’ve got to fix this’ kind of thing we’re going to be experiencing. But the life of Christ will flow through your heart and through your life in such a way that it will touch everybody in your circle of influence.
You read what God says about a virtuous woman in the end of Proverbs. It doesn’t sound like a slave or somebody who’s being abused, to me. It sounds like somebody who has a glorious sphere that God has carved out for her. And within that, she is even enterprising, she makes and sells stuff, she keeps her house. She turns a house into a home. The heart of her husband safely trusts in her.
There are all these wonderful, glorious virtues. Does that sound like slavery and abuse to you? No! God designed her for that! I’ll tell you, when we are in the place for which God designed us, it’s a place of glorious blessing and joy and freedom! We don’t have to try to be something we’re not, or try to fix brokenness that’s not in our power to fix.
So anyway, this is a truth and we can’t escape it. I don’t want to escape it. I want…I love to see a godly woman. And I’ll tell you, the heart of Jesus goes out to the ladies. You think about how He reached out when He was here. Society looked down on women, treated them as second class. Jesus didn’t. He honored them at every occasion. He reached out with a heart of love to lift them up and to cause them to understand how valuable they were, the worth that they had in God’s eyes. I’ll tell you, the real message of the Gospel elevates everyone who bows to it.
( congregational amens ).
But there is an order! There is a way the universe works and the way His Kingdom works, that brings us to that place of blessing. So anyway, there it is, ladies. Ask God for grace. I know there’s nobody here who has a perfect husband. My wife would certainly stand at the head of the line, for that one!
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( laughter ).
But that’s all right. All we can do is work from where we’re at and go forward. We can’t fix the past. We can’t do anything about that, but we can say, God, here I am, but I yield to you, I want to be the person you made me to be. That’s what it comes down to. What did you make me to be? Did you make me to be a feminist? No! Especially not me!
( laughter ).
I was speaking for you there. But anyway…but listen to how this is balanced. Because the Devil would take those two verses and say, boy, you are setting us up for a life of slavery and abuse. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”
You talk about a high calling. You talk about something that flies in the face of human nature. Man! This is…all you can do is say, oh, God! I’m not like this. God, my nature is to be selfish. I would take this principle of the husband being the head of the home in a selfish way. I just want to do what I want. I want to make her serve me. That’s not the spirit in which Jesus came to rescue lost, helpless sinners.