Discipline of Submission

The Discipline of Submission: The Posture of Godliness
an excerpt from Disciplines of a Godly Woman by Hughes

"At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." -Phillipians 2:10-11

Submission is yielding to the authority of another. Puritan preacher Jeremiah Burroughs wrote:"To keep under, that is to submit. The Soul can submit to God at the time when it can send itself under the power and authority and dominion that God has over it."
Of course the authority to which we must yield is God's authority. The Gospel reveals the truth that Jesus is Lord. Christians know this. These words express the very essence of the Gospel.
The message of the Bible is clear: Jesus Christ is Lord! It is a fact. Bringing our lives into submission to His will in everything is the key to being a godly woman. It is also the path to joy.
Jesus, our Lord, is a different kind of king, and we submit to Him, in part, by patterning our lives after His example. As Lord, Jesus behaved in a way that was different from any king the world has ever known. Rather than assume a prideful position of dominance, Jesus humbled Himself. In the Upper Room shortly before His crucifiction, Jesus silenced an argument among His disciples about which of them was the greatest by doing an amazing thing. He washed his disciples feet. We see from that passage that Jesus Christ had no identity crisis. He knew exactly who He was. He knew that all power belonged to Him. His humility on that day and throughout His life was born of this confidence.
Part of our rebellion against God is the desire to ignore God's plan for order in creation. But living in submission to God's order is essential to living under His rule.
Our instinct is to please ourselves. We naturally wish to define our own boundaries, rebelling against outside authority. So submission is something we need to learn.
When we teach our children to obey us, we are actually giving them their first lesson in submission to God's order for the family. They are learning to align their stubborn wills with their parents' will and, ultimately, with God's will. We do children no favor if we don't teach them to be respectful of boundaries and God-given authority.
Submission applies to every area of our lives, and we begin by restoring the Gospel to its rightful place at the center of our thoughts and deeds in everyday life. This submitting is an ongoing, daily choosing of God's ways over our own ways. We'll go on having to choose all our lives.
Look at all the roles we have to fulfill that require us to submit in a godly way to authority: child, employee, citizen, wives, church members, and children of God. And the Bible addresses each of these areas with teaching to help us submit.
Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane is a beautiful model for how we should submit to God's will. We learn two things from Christ's example. First, that even the sinless Son of God had to pray in order to obey! How much more must sinful people need to depend on prayer to come into obedience.
Second, the Father heard His prayer because of His reverent submission. Isn't this stunning? Even within the Godhead, submission was essential.
Is the will of God more important than our lives? It's so natural to get caught up in the ways of the world. We want so desperately to hang on to control of our lives that we forget Jesus' warning in Luke 9 "For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it."
In reality most of us will not physically lose our lives for our faith in the Gospel. But we will be faced again and again with the choice between God's will and our own will. What we "lose" is getting our own way! So we must understand that practicing the discipline of submission will not happen without fervent prayer.
Does the word submission feel uncomfortable to you? Put it back into your vocabulary. All the disciplines of a godly woman are about submitting your will to God's loving rule in daily life. Resist the popular voices that entice you to put your needs first, to protect your self-interest and rights, to push at God-given boundaries. Search the Scriptures to understand how Jesus did it-and then follow His example- because Jesus Christ is Lord!