"The Beauty of God's Good Design" - 1 Peter 3:1-6 (Larry Malament)

Sermon Quotes:

Nancy DeMoss Wogelmuth: “For a wife, submission means accepting God’s good order for her life, just as a husband submits himself to God in accepting God’s order for his life. And it gives her the privilege of representing the mystery and beauty of the Son’s submission to the Father. For even within the trinity, we see this paradoxical arrangement – seamless unity with separate roles and different identities, perfect equality with pure submission. The Father and the Son, we know, are both equally God. And yet, the Son chooses to submit himself to the will of the Father. The submission of Christian wives to their husbands is a powerful and beautiful picture of the Son’s submission to his Father and of the church’s submission to Christ. These wives, together with husbands who love them selflessly and sacrificially, put the gospel story on vivid and compelling display. Some dismiss the New Testament teaching on submission in marriage as being culturally bound and irrelevant for today’s readers, simply an acknowledgement of the cultural norm of the day. These writers, they say, were simply giving women advice on how to live a righteous and holy life within that now out-dated cultural system."

Carolyn Mahaney and Nicole Whitacre: “A gentle and quiet spirit is not a personality trait. It is the quality of a woman who meets adversity – slander, sickness, rejection, and loss – with a calm confidence in God. A gentle woman is a woman of remarkable strength and tenacity, because she does not attack back when someone sins against her. Rather, she waits on God. Knowing that God is just, she can suffer without bitterness.”

David Helm: “Sarah is the perfect choice. When Christian women hear preachers call upon them to put on a 'gentle and quiet spirit', the culture will bombard their minds in an effort to convince them that God’s word is asking them to be weak. Our culture is constantly trying to make women think that applying this principle will in the end be a setback to women everywhere. But Peter says, 'No, No. No. Look at Sarah!' Sarah was a woman who got into her husband’s face a time or two – and he needed it a time or three. Why does Peter draw our attention to Sarah? It is because she lived out God’s principle of submission by calling Abraham, 'lord' in Genesis 18:9-14."