You’ve heard it quoted at you. Maybe from the pulpit. Maybe across the kitchen island. Maybe in a text at 11 p.m., right after you said no to something.
“A godly wife submits.” “I’m the head of this house.” “It’s right there in black and white.”
And every time, something in you went quiet. Not peaceful quiet. The other kind.
So let me say what I think you’ve been waiting for someone to say. Biblical submission in marriage is real. Almost nothing you were told about it is.
Biblical submission is mutual, chosen, and freely given. The moment it’s demanded, it doesn’t become a stricter version of submission. It becomes something else entirely.
Love ceases to be love when free will is taken out of the equation.
That’s the whole post. Everything else is unpacking it.
The Verse He Skips
Most sermons on this start at Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”
Back up one verse.
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Ephesians 5:21)
One another. Not wives to husbands. Everyone to everyone, husbands included.
And here’s the part that rarely makes it into the sermon. In the oldest Greek manuscripts we have, verse 22 doesn’t even have its own verb. It borrows “submit” from verse 21. Grammatically, the instruction to wives is a continuation of the instruction to everybody. The heading your Bible prints between them, “Wives and Husbands”? A translator put that there. It isn’t Scripture.
So when a man stands on verse 22 and skips verse 21, he isn’t standing on the Bible. He’s standing on a section break.
It’s one of the most common ways Scripture gets turned into leverage: quote the half that serves you, and call the other half “context.”
Then read what Paul actually asks of him:
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” (Ephesians 5:25)
Gave himself up. Not took her over. If a man claims to be the authority of the home and expects submission to be a normal part of that home, submission starts with him.
Submission Isn’t Obedience. It Isn’t Even Close.
Submission does not equal obedience, and obedience does not equal submission. A fine line of free will makes the difference.
Obedience is about the one giving the order. Submission is about the one choosing to yield. The word Paul uses describes something you do with yourself: you arrange yourself alongside someone. Nobody can do it to you. The moment someone else does the arranging, it isn’t your submission anymore. It’s their control. Compliance under threat is not submission.
Now watch where the weight lands. In a demanding home, every conversation is about whether she yielded. Nobody asks whether what she was asked to yield to was worth yielding to.
Her submission isn’t what God holds him accountable for. His behavior is.
Jesus was blunt about leaders who use their position to get compliance:
“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them… Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” (Mark 10:42–43)
Not so with you. If his version of headship looks like the Gentile rulers’ version, he picked the wrong model.
Remove the Choice, Lose the Thing
This is where I want to go further than I did when I first wrote this post. I think it’s the most important idea on this entire website.
Love requires free will. The second free will is removed, love ceases to be what it is.
And that isn’t only true of love. It’s true of everything relational.
Therapist Susan Forward gave us a useful name for what removes free will: FOG. Fear, Obligation, and Guilt. When a yes is pulled out of you by fear, obligation or guilt, it may look like the real thing from across the room. It isn’t. FOG is the quiet engine of coercive control. It keeps the vocabulary and empties out the meaning.
Watch it happen, one word at a time:
- Love that is demanded becomes obedience.
- Submission that is demanded becomes servitude.
- Respect that is demanded becomes fear. He’ll call it respect. Your nervous system knows what it is.
- Forgiveness that is demanded becomes silence: moving on without anything having moved.
- Trust that is demanded becomes surveillance, of yourself. You stop checking whether he’s safe and start checking whether you’ve been agreeable enough.
- Intimacy that is owed isn’t intimacy. It’s a debt being collected.
- Service that is required becomes a role. You’re not serving. You’re staffing.
- An apology that is extracted becomes a performance. And yours have been extracted for years.
- Yes, when no isn’t safe, isn’t yes. It’s just the sound compliance makes.
Every one of them keeps its name. Every one of them loses its nature.
Scripture already knows this. “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18). Even giving money, God doesn’t want “reluctantly or under compulsion” (2 Corinthians 9:7). He has no interest in a gift that had to be extracted. Why would He want a marriage like that?
You’d never sign a contract under duress and call it an agreement. Neither would a court. A signature pulled out of someone under threat doesn’t make a deal. It makes a case. You already know this rule in business. You’re allowed to know it at home.
Even God Won’t Do What He’s Demanding
Being submitted to God works the same way. God doesn’t demand it. He leaves it a matter of choice, and the choice is what makes it meaningful.
Think about that. The one Being in the universe who could compel anything invites instead.
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock.” (Revelation 3:20)
He knocks. He doesn’t kick the door in. So a man who claims to represent God’s order in his home is claiming more power over you than God claims for Himself.
Even Christ’s submission, the most complete submission in all of Scripture, was chosen: “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18). His surrender means something because it was freely given. So does yours.
“But Isn’t a Christian Called to Endure?”
You know you’re called to endure. You take that seriously, and you should.
But look at what Scripture actually asks believers to endure: trials, hardship, suffering for doing what’s right. It never asks you to endure sin against you as a spiritual discipline and call it holiness. Enduring trouble and enabling harm are two different assignments. And letting him feel the weight of his own choices isn’t un-Christian. Consequences are not revenge.
And if you’ve been working so hard to become a more Christlike woman, look at how Christ handled people who tried to control Him. When the crowd in Nazareth tried to throw Him off a cliff, “he walked right through the crowd and went on his way” (Luke 4:30). He didn’t submit to the Pharisees’ agenda. He didn’t submit to the crowd’s. He submitted to the Father’s, and to nobody else’s.
Christlike isn’t compliant. Christlike is anchored.
“Win Him Without a Word”
This is the other verse you’ll get handed. 1 Peter 3:1: wives winning their husbands “without words” by their conduct. It gets used as a gag order. Stop talking. Stop confronting. Be sweeter, and he’ll come around.
Keep reading. Five verses later, Peter holds up the women of faith who came before, and says you’re their daughters “if you do what is right and do not give way to fear” (1 Peter 3:6).
Do not give way to fear. In the passage about submission. The instruction is anti-FOG.
The very next verse turns to the husband: be considerate, treat her with respect, “so that nothing will hinder your prayers” (1 Peter 3:7). Peter ties a husband’s prayer life to how he treats his wife. Funny how that one never makes the marriage retreat.
If a pastor handed you verse 1 and stopped there, you’re not the first woman who wasn’t believed. And you’re not wrong for reading to verse 7.
What Demanded Submission Does to a Woman
Here’s how it works in real life. He decides what’s best for her and who she should be. He expects her to go along with it, often acting entitled to, even when it conflicts with her own soul. The message: he has more authority than she does to know what she needs and who to be, and honoring him means giving up what she knows about herself.
Along the way, she ends up less and less known, not more loved or cherished.
If a man believes it is his “authority” to determine his wife’s place in the world, he has misappropriated it. God fashioned her with purpose and personhood. He did not give men the job of defining it, or of holding power over it for their own purposes. He didn’t give him the job of defining God’s voice in her life, either. She will answer to God on her own.
Dying to self should not include killing, disabling, or silencing the Holy Spirit in you. You cannot be a light to the world when the bulb is smashed, or reflect God when the mirror is shattered. You cannot speak hope when your voice has been silenced or misused. That is not what God intended.
The FOG Test
So how do you tell the difference in your own home? Try these on any yes you’ve given lately.
- Could I have said no? Not in theory. In practice. Tonight. Without paying for it for a week.
- What was I feeling when I said yes? Warmth, generosity, love? Or dread, duty, and the guilt that shows up anyway?
- What happens when I don’t? If a no gets met with punishment, silence, a sermon or a scene, you have your answer.
- Who’s carrying the weight? Is anyone asking whether his request was fair, or only whether you complied?
You don’t have to act on the answers today. You just have to stop pretending you don’t know them. Stand firm in what you know.
And when the word he reaches for is unsubmissive, or rebellious, or controlling: submission was never a claim on your self-control. Deciding what you will participate in is self-control. A boundary isn’t a demand. It’s the opposite. And if you need the actual words for that moment, here’s what to say when he calls you controlling.
So Here’s the Deal…
Submission is beautiful. I mean that. Two people freely yielding to each other out of reverence for Christ is one of the clearest pictures of Him we get to paint.
But you can’t paint it at gunpoint.
What you’ve been living may carry the name. It doesn’t carry the nature. And you’re allowed to stop calling it by the name.
Real submission can only come from someone who is free to say no. So the most biblical thing you do this year might be getting your no back. Not to wield it. So that your yes means something again.
If no isn’t safe, yes isn’t real.
Next Steps
- Tools for Healing: my guided journal for women healing from emotional and narcissistic abuse. Nine chapters and 36 questions, rooted in faith and written to be lived with slowly. A good place to start sorting out which of your yeses were ever really yours. Instant download.
- Identity Recovery Groups: learning to tell the difference between godly submission and demanded obedience is core to what we walk through together. You can’t rebuild a healthy relationship with God, or anyone else, from a place where your own voice has been silenced.
- One-to-one coaching with me or Identity Recovery Coach Lauren Rose, when you want someone in your corner who knows the whole picture: booking portal.
Find yourself. Keep yourself.
About the author. Sharmen Elaine Kimbrough is an identity strategist and the founder of LiveFound, Inc. She holds a Master’s degree in professional counseling and spent more than ten years developing and leading the women’s programs at the Marriage Recovery Center. She writes for women recovering a self after emotional abuse, coercive control, and spiritual bypassing. More about Sharmen →
