In this insightful episode, we delve into the complexities of living out faith within marriage, focusing on the powerful role of a wife’s conduct as a silent testimony. Dr. McGee passionately teaches that our outward adornment should be overshadowed by the inner beauty of a gentle spirit. Tune in to hear how historical examples from the Bible set a precedent for both men and women in their spiritual journeys together.
The foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith.
SPEAKER 02 :
What does God expect from Christians who are married to unsaved spouses? Well, that’s what our teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, is discussing on Through the Bible. I’m Steve Schwetz, welcoming you aboard the Bible bus, and we’re going to begin in 1 Peter 3, verse 1. It’s a great study, one that’s filled with really practical advice and then some biblical answers that just might surprise you. So grab your copy of God’s Word and find your place, and let’s hear a few letters from fellow passengers whose lives have been changed by the Word of God as they travel with us. First one comes from a young man in Portugal. Well, isn’t that an incredible transformation? Praise God for second chances. We’ve all been given them, haven’t we? Now, here’s a letter. This one’s from a listener in India. I live in a village many miles from the nearest town. I’ve been studying with you in my language of Aria for the last five years. I listen to the program along with my wife, two small children, and any guests or relatives who visit us. My oldest sister came to know the Lord first in our family by listening to you and reading some Christian literature. I was influenced by her initially, and now, having grown in the Lord, I serve in the ministry. I have planted two churches, and I am presently working on the third. Whatever I hear on your programs gets more easily imprinted in my mind than when I read the Bible alone. In fact, your teachings make difficult things easy to understand. Overall, what I digest in my mind keeps influencing me in my decision-making. Wow, I can learn a lot from that. How about you? Now next we have a text message. This is sent from a listener named Jova from Serbia. He says, I am from a small village, and my wife and I pray for you always. We are old, and we cannot support you with money, but we always pray. We really enjoy listening to Through the Bible. We are simple people, and it helps us understand so much. Such an encouraging text. You know, we’re so grateful for the prayers of this couple and all of you who bring through the Bible before the Lord. And let’s pray for each other now as we begin our study. Heavenly Father, thank you for the truth that we find in your word. We ask that you’d open our hearts so that we can directly hear from you. In Jesus’ name we pray.
SPEAKER 1 :
Amen.
SPEAKER 02 :
Now turn to 1 Peter as we go through the Bible with Dr. J. Vernon McGee.
SPEAKER 01 :
Now, we did take up verse 1 last time, and I don’t want to repeat the things we said then, but I’d want to go over the verse, picking out some other things here. In the same manner, and as we said, that means likewise, which connects it with what’s gone before, “…ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands…” that if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the behavior of the wives.” Now, this presents an altogether different situation than we had back in Ephesians, where it is the relationship between a Christian wife and a Christian husband, and both are Spirit-filled believers. And in that relationship, they can exhibit what real love is. Now, I do not think that the unsaved can get any farther than the sex relationships. I believe that two believers can make sex the most precious, most beautiful, most wonderful thing that there is in this world today. And I think they’re the only ones that really can enjoy the physical relationship. And may I make this statement as we begin? I’ve counseled a great many young people that I’ve married, actually several hundred couples down through the years. I never majored in trying to marry as many as I could. I, very frankly, always did it with fear and trembling. I always counseled them along this way, and I mention it very briefly to you today. That marriage is made on three different planes. There is the physical plane, and that’s important. That’s the thing we just mentioned that the world talks about today, sex. And it’s a wonderful thing to have a wonderful wife and to be able to put your arms around her and to love her. There’s no question but what that’s a wonderful thing. The thing that I did when I got married, my wife felt like she was not cut out to be a preacher’s wife. She was disturbed by it because she’d brought up in a little town in Texas, and she’d seen how the preacher’s wife was treated there. So I took her over to talk to Dr. Schaefer one day, and I told Dr. Schaefer what her feeling was. And Dr. Schaefer, I never shall forget, said this, and she’s never forgotten it. He says, you know, I am out on conferences a great deal, and when I come home, He said, I’m not looking for an assistant pastor. I’m not looking for an organist. And I’m not looking for a soloist. And I’m not looking for the president of the missionary society. He says, I want a woman there to meet me who’s my wife, that I can put my arms around her and love her. May I say to you, that answered the question that was in my wife’s mind, by the way. And I think that’s an important relationship. Now, the second is a mental or psychological relationship. And I think it’s important today. It’s nice when the husband and wife enjoy doing the same thing. I’ve met many that are like that. We had on our tour to Bible Land a very wonderful couple. They were up in years. When I say up in years, they were in their 50s. And they would get up early in the morning, take a hike. At night, they would walk together. They would go to certain things that even the tour didn’t go to because they did things together. And it’s wonderful to have that relationship. And the thing that makes Maggie and Jiggs in the funny paper so funny is that Jiggs wants to go to Denny Moore’s where they have corned beef and cabbage and beer, and she wants to go to the opera where they have champagne. Their interests and their appetites are altogether different. And that, of course, is not healthy. The fact that husbands and wives don’t have the same relations explains all these lodges and clubs today where men can go and now, of course, where women can go. It’s to get away from the other and to do what you want to do. Then the third level is the spiritual level. And that is when two of them are believers. When problems come and trouble comes, sorrow comes and suffering comes, they are able to kneel down together and they’re able to come to God together in prayer, and they’re able to meet around the Word of God together. And you can break these other ties. A threefold cord, we’re told in Scripture, is not easily broken. When you have all three, you have a wonderful marriage. But the first two can break, and if the third one will hold, the marriage will hold. But when the third one is broken with the others, the marriage has gone down the tube, friends. I have to admit that there’s very little hope for a marriage like that. Now, this is a relationship where apparently a wife got converted after they were married, because the Scripture forbids marriage of a believer and an unbeliever. I think it’s a big mistake. And as one little girl came to me, she said, Dr. McGee, he’s not a believer, but I’m going to win him for the Lord. Well, I said, have you won him yet? She said, no, he won’t even come with me to church yet. I said, look, little girl, Your greatest influence with that young man is right now. The day you get married, your influence to win him for the Lord goes down quite a bit. You’ll never be able to preach to him again. You’re going to be living with him, and he’s going to be watching you from then on. So if you can’t get him to church now, you’re in trouble. And she didn’t like what I said. In fact, she went and got another preacher to perform the ceremony because I wouldn’t perform it. I do not marry, never did marry, knowingly, a saved and an unsaved person. I think it’s wrong, entirely wrong. She got somebody else. And then she came in two years, weeping and telling me that she wanted to talk to me. She’d gotten a divorce from him. Well, it was headed that direction before it even started. Now, here you have, though, that unfortunate relationship where you have a saved wife and an unsaved husband. What is to be after she’s converted now? Is she to change and become a sort of a female preacher in the home to present the gospel to him and to lecture to him? No, she’s to continue on in the same position of being in subjection. Now, the word here, to be in subjection, means submitting yourselves. And friends, this is a voluntary step and it’s not a command. And obviously, it refers now to an unsaved husband. She is to continue on in this relation of voluntarily being in subjection. Let him continue to be the head of the house. But wait just a minute. Suppose that he wants her to go with him to the nightclub and drink liquor, cocktails. Is she to do that? And I’m sure that even these most rabid folk today that say that she should obey her husband would agree that she shouldn’t do this. At least I hope they wouldn’t go that far. Well, may I say to you that there are those, though, that have said that. We had a lady when I was in downtown Los Angeles. They were not members of the church. She attended the church. Her husband was unsaved. And some evangelist that she had heard told her that she was to obey her husband because he wanted her to go with him to the nightclub. And apparently, it was a sort of a burlesque. It offended her sensibilities. And she was under awful conviction about it. In fact, the matter is she’d come to the place where a doctor told her that she’d have to enter an institution for psychopathic treatment because of the fact she could not go on under that type of pressure. And she felt like she had to because this evangelist talked that way to her. Well, she heard me on the radio, and believe me, I have a little different idea about it. I don’t believe Simon Peter intended for her to do that. And I talked with her, and I said that you were to continue on after your conversion to try to win him, to be subject to him. But that doesn’t mean, suppose that he wanted you to go out and commit a robbery. Were you to join him in that? Drive the car for him? Well, she said she was sure that the evangelist wouldn’t want her to go that far. Well, I don’t know what he would, the way that some of them talk today. May I say to you that this is something voluntary. She’s doing this to try to win an unsaved man. Now, she’s got to be very careful. She’s living with him. And her preaching is not going to do a bit of good. He may now, without the word, be won by the behavior of the wives. She has to preach a wordless sermon by her life that she lives before him. And that hasn’t anything in the world to do with submission to him. That means whether she’s going to live a pure life. Listen, verse 2 now, while they behold your chaste conduct coupled with fear, while they recognize that you now have changed and you want to live a pure life for God and live for Him, you don’t want to indulge in the things of the world. And therefore, that’s the testimony that you can give. I had another lady that came to me when I was pastor, and she says, Dr. McGee, I bring my husband here every Sunday. And she was the kind of woman that could bring her husband. She was a dominant personality. She says, you know, he’s not saved. And I think every Sunday he’ll put up his hand. When he doesn’t, last Monday morning, I sit at the breakfast table just weeping, telling him, oh, how I wish he’d accept Christ. And then when he comes home from work at dinner that night, she says, you know, I just sit there and weep and beg him to accept Christ. And I got to thinking about that afterward. How would you like to have dinner with a weeping woman every evening and breakfast every morning with one? I wouldn’t care for it myself, even as a Christian. And I’m sure you wouldn’t want that. So I called her up and I said, look, for a period of now a year’s moratorium, Why not just not talk to him about the Lord at all? Oh, she says, you mean I’m not to witness? I said, I didn’t say that. I said that Peter says that when you can’t win him with the word, then start preaching a wordless sermon. How about your life? What kind of life are you living before him? Well, I want to tell you that put her back on her heels. But she wasn’t living that kind of life. But she agreed. She did want to win him. She was a wonderful woman in many ways. And in six months’ time, one Sunday morning, when I asked for hands to be raised, I was amazed myself. He put up his hand. The wordless sermon had won, my friend. And I believe that that’s exactly what Simon Peter’s talking about here. Now he says something else. Verse 3, “…whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of braiding the hair and of wearing of gold or of putting on of apparel.” Now, this is something I think that’s very important, and you ought not to miss it at all. It is this, that in the Roman Empire, great emphasis was put upon the way women arranged their hair. If you’ve seen any pictures that come from that period, you know that the women loaded their heads down with all kinds of hair. It wouldn’t be their own, be somebody else’s, but they’d have it really built up and they’d wear jewelry in it. And we have today very much that same type of thing. Now, the thing that he’s saying here, and hear me carefully, if you cannot win the man you’re going to marry who’s unsaved, Before you marry, by sex appeal, you will never win him by sex appeal afterward. Now, you can put on a gallon of joy perfume and you can wear the thinnest negligee that there is. And I’ll tell you, young lady, you won’t win him for the Lord. That’s exactly what Simon Peter is saying. But a Christian woman is to dress, I think, in style. I used to tell the kids at the Bible Institute, the girls down there, that somebody had given the notion that you’re never to use any makeup and you go around looking sloppy. And I told them that we all ought to look the best we can with what we’ve got to work with, though some of us don’t have much to work with. But we ought to look the best we can. And I said, some of you would look a little bit better if you’d put on just a little makeup because you look like you came out of the morgue. And that’s not attractive. And I don’t care whether you’re a Christian or a non-Christian, my friend. But let’s understand one thing. You can’t win an unsaved man by sex appeal. Now, will you notice the next… Verse 4, “…but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God a great prize.” Now, you are to have on an ornament, but it’s to be on the inside. It’s to be a marvelous, wonderful person. Have you ever stopped to think that in the little book of Ruth, and I majored in that book and I love it, and you remember when Boaz went in the field and he saw that girl, and she was beautiful, let me tell you, that maid of Moab, Ruth, and he saw her and he fell in love with her. But did you notice something else? That he had heard of her character. that she had a marvelous, wonderful character. And believe me, he fell in love with her. And today, Avon products, they’re helpful. And other products are very good. Helen Rubinstein does pretty good. I see nothing wrong in using anything that’ll make you look better, my friend. All of us want to look the best we possibly can. But we need today more inward adornment. And that’s the thing that is important. Yes, it’s nice to look well on the outside. You remember, be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor the last to lay the old aside. Be in style. Dress up in a way that’s becoming. But don’t use that as the means of trying to win somebody to the Lord. Now, will you notice, we move on down here. For after this manner, this is verse 5. In the old time, the holy women also who trusted in God adorned themselves, being in subjection under their own husbands. Now, you’ll find that true of, for instance, Sarah. And I’ve already mentioned Ruth. She’s in the line that led to Christ, you know. And then there was not only Sarah, but there was Rachel. And it says she was beautiful. And old Jacob fell in love with her. She’s the one bright spot in that man’s life. And it was a pretty dark life, by the way. And holy women also who trusted in God adorned themselves, being in subjection to their own husbands. Now, Sarah was a beautiful woman. Several kings wanted her as a wife, by the way. And Abraham had a great problem in that connection. But she called him, My Lord. She looked up to Abraham. And it’s wonderful when a wife has a husband she can look up to. Verse 6, even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord, whose daughters are ye, as long as ye do well and are not afraid with any terror. In like manner. Now, what about the husbands? In like manner ye husbands dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honor unto the wife as unto the weaker vessel, and being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers be not hindered. Now, it would seem to me that the wife here is a Christian and the husband is a Christian when he gives instructions to the husband. But I take it it would be applicable either way. He’s to treat her as the weaker vessel, and he’s to give honor to her because of that. You see, because she is a weaker vessel, And this women’s lib today, I don’t think it’s going to last very long. I think a woman wants to be a woman just as a man wants to be a man. And because she’s the weaker vessel, she’s to be treated with honor. The man is to give first place to her. She gets in the car first. He holds the door, that is, before they’re married. And then when they go into a place, why, she goes first. He walks on the sidewalk on the outside. Why? For her protection, you see. He’s to treat her with honor. And when a woman loses her place, may I say to you, she doesn’t go up. She goes down. She falls down. And when she takes her place, she can be treated with honor and given her rightful position. And so the husband is to treat her like that. And I think every husband ought to treat his wife with something special, by the way. She’s something special. And that’s the way she should be treated. And then he says that your prayers be not hindered. One of the things today that will ruin your family altar, and there’s no use praying together, my friend, if you’re not getting along. If you’re fighting like cats and dogs, well, God just doesn’t hear cats and dogs. It’s when you’re in agreement. Now we go on and read verse 8. Finally, “…be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous.” Now, here we see the conduct in the church. We’ve moved out of the family. And there to be like-minded, believers are sympathetic, tender-hearted, courteous, which means there to be humble-minded, not trying to lord it over someone. And then verse 9, not rendering evil for evil or railing for railing, but on the contrary, blessing. Knowing that ye are called to this, that ye should inherit a blessing. Now, if you want the golden rule, here it is. Here is turning the other cheek. And a believer is to do that in the church of other believers. That will break down all of the little cliques today, and it will stop all this church fighting if we take this position and remember that we are representing the Lord. Now, we must stop right there today. Until next time, may God richly bless you.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s true. We do represent the Lord. If you’d like to learn more about what that means and how you can live your life as God’s ambassador, representing him in all that you do, why don’t you download then a copy of Dr. McGee’s free digital booklet, Living the Christian Life God’s Way. This great teaching is based on one of Dr. McGee’s most popular sermons from Romans chapter 8. If you want to download that copy, just go to ttb.org. And while you’re there, be sure to check out another great booklet by Dr. McGee titled, Why Do God’s Children Suffer? The perfect complement to our study of 1 Peter, Why Do God’s Children Suffer? gives believers seven scriptural reasons why God allows us to go through trials and then four benefits that we’ll receive along the way. These aren’t pat answers or quick scripture verses given to make you feel a little better. But instead, it’s really a deep look at God’s love for you and the important reasons why he allows difficulty into our lives. Again, to download this booklet and more than 100 others by Dr. McGee, just visit ttb.org and look for free booklets. Or if we can help you find what you’re looking for, call us at 1-800-65-BIBLE. Now, Dr. McGee has some great insights into 1 Peter 3, verse 6, so be sure to join us next time. I’m Steve Schwetz, and as always, I’ll be here on the Bible bus, saving a seat just for you. Our study today was made possible through your prayer and financial support. We’ll meet you back here next time. In fact, we’re going to do this together, Lord willing, till Jesus comes again. In which case, we’ll meet you in the air.
