Donahue at Home
Donahue at Home
Bad Company. All the members were from England, but they sounded more like Molly Hatchet than Led Zeppelin. And of all the groups who named songs after themselves, I challenge anyone to find a better one than theirs. [Editor's Note: I nominate, "My Name is Prince."] And to top it all off, one of their best songs, "Good Lovin' Gone Bad," could be the accompaniment to most of our modern efforts at understanding marriage.
Modern evangelism suffers from a similar fate. Someone figured out in the early 80s that cold-call evangelism was not "working" any longer, so the idea of "friendship evangelism" was (re)born. Remember the video series "Living Proof" by the Navigators, or "Out of the Salt Shaker" by Rebecca Pippert? They told us that we must develop relationships with people, show them we care about them and don't view them as a conversion statistic, and then we will earn the right to share the gospel with them.
What could be wrong with that? Nothing—except we took a helpful corrective and turned it into an excuse to not evangelize anyone unless they've named one of their kids after us. And after we're getting our emotional needs met for two years from a pagan office-mate, it isn't surprising at all that we don't want to endanger this precious relationship with anything more gospel-laden than a "God bless you" after they sneeze. How can you do relationship evangelism when you keep ending relationships with the gospel?
It has become a mark of spiritual maturity and intelligence and sensitivity as to how many people we can cross off our list as being candidates for hearing the gospel. I've heard godly, smart seminary professors explain how you should not waste your time sharing the gospel with anyone who won't affirm the law of non-contradiction. I heard one perceptive student inquire as to whether this was a failure of that professor's apologetical system or a failure of the gospel whether his apologetical system simply could not handle that purported objection, or whether the gospel was simply too weak to save those without the underpinnings of western philosophy. [Editor's Note—It didn't take Aristotle to discover that the preceding sentence cannot be true and not true at the same time and in the same relationship.]
I think I've digressed long enough [Editor's Note—Me too.] to show that Christians do a good job of taking reasonable ideas and turning them into opportunities for sin. Now back to my point, that being that men take most of the wisdom of the last 20 years on being a good husband, sew it up into a nice piece of plaid cloth, and turn it into a skirt.
Let's start with servant leadership. This is clearly based on Jesus' words in Matthew 20:26, where He said, "Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." And Jesus illustrated this principle by humbly assisting all those around him; touching the unclean leper, anointing the matted eyes of the blind, washing the feet of the disciples. The problem: the only times we men wash our wife's feet is when she told us to or when we are trying to get sexual favors from her later (or right then). The idea of servant leadership can be perverted a variety of ways by sinful men. It can be internally (with a growing bitterness against your spouse for all the nice things you are doing, for all she cares) or externally into a life of servitude with no reference to the "leader" part of being a "servant leader."
The role of the husband certainly cannot be set up in antithesis to this vision of servant leadership. But let's not use the word "servant" to turn the husband's ministry into that of a bellboy. Allow the vision of servant leadership be informed by Scripture, not by our castrating culture. Let it permeate every part of our lives and extend to that of the head repenter, the hero of the selfless, and the sacrificing leader of the household.
The second decent suggestion we've had lately is that to be better husbands, men should be more like Jesus. This has reams of biblical texts to support it, among them Ephesians 5:23-27, which 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. 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."
How on earth could we mess up such a biblical idea? When someone tells you to be like Jesus, the effectiveness of that suggestion depends upon who you think Jesus is and how you think he relates to the church. If you think he is an extension of the Democratic Party, or Sergeant York's big brother, or a drag queen, then there could be trouble. If you think he is transcendent and distant to the church, virtually non-existent, a CEO-type who doesn't commune with the ordinary employees, then that could lead to a serious misunderstanding of what it means for husbands to be more like Jesus.
A recent VISA card commercial shows cross-dressing fans of the Washington Redskins, known as the Hogets, preparing for the game. "Do I look fat in this dress?" is the question at the end of the commercial. An enthusiastic "Yes!" is the response.
Men, take off the dress. Don't let anyone, anyone, anyone, offer you a new one. Don't let good lovin' or anything else convince you to put it back on.