As a follower of Jesus, I consider the Bible to be the guiding force for my life. I want to live and be like Jesus. Yet, in all honesty, there are things in the Bible that I give a mental nod to and then gingerly keep on stepping past them. Ephesians 5:21 is one of those passages for me. Now don’t get me wrong. Not all of the passage bothers me. I love the part about giving reverence to Christ. The dictionary definition of “reverence” is “a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe.” I feel those things. I do those things. I get that. It’s just that there is a word in this passage that I DO NOT like—“submit.” That word is not a good word in our culture.
As a Baby Boomer, I grew up in a time when men were to show no feelings, but demonstrate courage in the face of adversity. We were to never give up, never submit. NEVER! But there is that word, submit, and it is being used as a directive for my life.
In rereading the passage we see that submitting is not separated from reverence for Christ. It flows out of our reverence for Him. It is not enough for us to give Jesus an inward acquiescence. We show reverence by living His life His way through our actions. You can’t do one without the other. When viewed through the eyes of Jesus, submitting takes on a whole different meaning from the one I held. To me, submitting meant that I was weak, unimportant, inconsequential.
Hollywood and my culture taught me the wrong meaning of the word. “Submit” means “to give over or yield to the power or authority of another.” Ephesians 5:21 isn’t telling us to yield to another person. It is telling us that we yield to Jesus! When we do that, we give Him the authority to guide us and show us how to live—not my will, but His.
If all of us at Loma Linda University Health thought and lived like that, what would things look like? No one would be lonely. No one would feel insignificant. We would be drawn together in our goals and efforts. Our Loma Linda University Health values would be an everyday byproduct of all we are and do. People who came into our midst, whether students or patients, would tangibly sense that this place is different. They would see that we really live out what we say and we continue the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus Christ, “to make man whole.”