Power Walk Ministries

Guest (Male): Thank you for joining us today for this broadcast of Power Walk with Pastor Paul Cannings. We're so glad that you've tuned in to join us. Our current series is titled Relationships, Marriage, and Family, and it's based on God's structure for marriage and family, which He put in place since the creation of mankind.

If an earthly producer of a product is the key expert on how it functions, well how much more the God of the universe who made us? He knows all about us and is the only one who understands us. Today, Pastor Cannings takes us through God's instructions for our lives, especially in the area of marriage and family. Here he is now with the message, Consequences of Ignoring God's Structure.

Dr. Paul Cannings: My mom had a way of working her way through her commitment to submit by teaching us what bothered her without saying it's her husband. Let me give you an example. She would say things to me or to my brothers like this: "You are going to clean your own room because your wife will not be your slave." When you grow up and you hear that over and over again, you start to realize she's saying something to make sure that you don't become like your daddy.

But she's not saying anything negative about your daddy, because my mom would never do that. She would never put her husband down in front of her kids. So she was saying certain things that taught me that there was frustration even while she submitted to her husband. But in this text, there's no frustration. People come up loving, people come up powerful, people come up Christ and the church.

So how is it that we come up broken, but this comes up cohesive? It's got to be a difference. So let's study the difference today. I had to learn it as a husband and even as a pastor. I've got to die at the house as Christ in my home, and I have to die at the church. So understand at the end of the day, I only have to carry out as a gender what Christ would teach. I must be about my Father's business.

Here's the first thing, ladies and men. Here's the first point I just want to walk you through today from a structural perspective. If God's order doesn't work, God does not breathe into your home. That's what He's saying first. If God's structure does not get respected, He does not breathe into your home finances, joy, spiritual growth. That's why the product that comes from that home when He's not breathing into it is frustration in kids, hate in kids, shooting and killing one another, drugs, alcohol.

All these things come out as the product because God didn't breathe into it. When God breathes into something, there's joy, there's peace, there's strength, there's problem-solving, blessings. He says blessings come to your home, when you don't even have a big six-figure job, He still blesses, because He breathes into it. So what you're doing is allowing God within His order to breathe into your house, and if you don't allow it that way, He blocks.

Let me show you how He did that in Genesis. If you look at Genesis, you would not find that God breathed into the woman; no verse says that. It could have happened, but He didn't tell us that. What you find is that God breathes into the man and He particularly goes to the rib, and if you study the rib biologically, physiologically, it's a place that protects soft tissue of the lungs.

So if a rib gets broken and it punctures a lung, the person can die. So what is He doing? I breathe into the man, I take a rib, put it into the woman, because what is He doing? You as the helper will protect the breath in the home, so I'm breathing into him, not you. You protect what I put in. You even go to 1 Timothy 5, and you will find that the woman protects.

Not physical protection because even when you come to the man, God naturally builds him stronger, because he had to go out and fight wars. He had to stand at the door and protect the family. So God built him that way. When God gives him headship, He builds the man to the brain; He builds the woman to the heart. He designed it this way.

So that's why we can't redesign it, and when we try to redesign it, we've got trauma in our culture. Trauma, hate in our culture, racism and anger and killing. We cut out the breath. So guess what you have? Death. So finding God's order is finding God's breath. That's why it's huge.

So look at verse 22, chapter 5. He says, "Wives, be subject..." It's not there. What He's trying to get the woman to first do is submit to the Lord, which is something she has to do anyway. You go to chapter 1, He's going to tell the woman, everybody, "You are Christ's workmanship" in chapter 2. He's going to say that God is the one who provides us the Holy Spirit to work inside of our lives so that as a result of the church, you are now functioning under the headship of Christ.

That's why I keep telling the single girls, I said, "If you can't submit to God as a single, you will not be a wife." So a man, if he's really a man, shouldn't find you when he's looking. Because the Bible tells a man to go find a wife, not a woman. So if you're not willing to come under the headship of Christ, he shouldn't look for you.

Why is that huge? Because she doesn't even know what submission looks like if she doesn't first learn how to submit to God. Because in verse 22, He does not bring up submission first; He brings up headship first. So if the woman is submitting as to the Lord, He comes to the man and He says to the man, "You be the head of the house," not the dictator. He didn't even say leader; He said head.

Paul is particular about his words here. He says the man must be the head of the wife. So we have to discuss what headship is. Here's the first thing about headship we would find in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 3. It says headship cannot take place in the home if Christ is not leading him. If Christ is not the head of him—He didn't say leader—then the man has no right to be the head of the wife.

Let me give you an example: Ananias and Sapphira. So when you come to Ananias and Sapphira, Sapphira is following her husband because she's supposed to, but he's not following God. Peter literally looks at him and says, "You are Satan." Saved as he was, Satan influenced him, because he committed to a lie. He didn't just lie; he committed to lie.

In John chapter 8, verse 44, it says anytime a person not just lies, but commits to lie, Satan influences them. She followed him into a lie, and the person who's responsible to the second part of headship, Peter, is now responsible to God, because who's the head of the church? Christ. Look at chapter 1.

If Peter walks away from Christ, he ends up being cooked up with Satan. And that's why you see in chapter 1, look at verse 22, he talks about headship not just in chapter 5, it's in chapter 1. He says, "And He put all things under subjection under His feet and gave Him to be head over all things to what? The church."

Well, who is the church in chapter 5? The wife. But if a man is not willing to bring himself under the headship of Christ, and if the woman chooses to be a church in the house, she has to be a wife who sees God as her leader. Verse 22, she don't see that in the home? He's saying, "You just lost your job, dude." You got fired.

You say, "Come on, give me an example of that." Abigail and Nabal. Okay, you got a principle in the New Testament and God gives us stories in the Old Testament. Abigail had a husband, by his very name he's crazy. Abigail ain't about to submit to a man who's going to cost the whole family death. So she knows about David, because he's been fighting wars, these little skirmishes everywhere.

And she said, "Oh no, no, no, no, I'm not going to let not just..." And don't forget now, she has servants under her, all these people under her. And she says, "Oh no, no, no, I'm going to make sure my tribe, this head over here, because he chooses not to be wise, I'm going to go to David and manage this." Now what does God do? Bless her.

Because he was functioning evil. That's why a woman gets to see the difference before she gets married, and when she gets married, she gets to respond to the difference. So we don't have this carte blanche headship; we have a headship that's accountable to God. So here's the next thing about headship in this text: it shapes the home. Look at chapter 2.

It shapes the home, and in that shaping of the home, that's how you breathe peace into the home. Please hear me. Peace is not a feeling in the Bible. You know where that challenged me was when I was a probation officer and I went to the jail to deal with this kid who I wasn't about to let out of jail.

He just had an attitude about him, and he wasn't teachable, so there's no point in letting a non-teachable person with a bad attitude back out in society just because you like him. Especially when he's taking old people's money. He beat them up, got their Social Security money. And that's how he did his stuff. He knew when they got paid in that project, he knew who they were and he got their money. So I ain't letting you out.

So I went in and I did the worst thing, which you're not supposed to do. I went in the jail and sat with him. You don't do that, that's crazy. I went in there and sat with him. That's my youth minister stuff. I looked at him and I said, "Why are you doing this, man?" He says, "I'm good. I got a peace about it." I said, "You got what?" He said, "I got a peace about this, man. I got to eat." That's how he put it. "I got to eat. I'm good."

I don't know why that triggered this in my head, but it did. Maybe it's a God thing, I don't know. I said, "Man, God, wait a minute, he has a peace and it's truly a peace because I'm looking in his face, he's peaceful about this." And God hit me. Peace is not a feeling. Because people could arrive at peace out of wickedness. People could arrive at peace when they feel they were right about something. "And I'm good now, I got it all out. I told them what I felt. I'm good." Peace is a person. The Holy Spirit is our peace.

Guest (Male): Thank you, Pastor Cannings, for urging us to turn to scripture on how to handle relationships. God promises to give us wisdom when we ask Him. I hope you'll take a few minutes to visit us online at powerwalkministries.org. That's powerwalkministries.org. When you're there, learn more about our ministry and prayerfully consider coming alongside to support us. We need your support in prayer as well as in finances.

So if you'd like to become a Power Walk partner today, log onto powerwalkministries.org or call us at 281-260-7402. That's 281-260-7402. Or write us at Power Walk Ministries, PO Box 920517, Houston, Texas 77092. And we so appreciate your support. And as we leave you, remember God's instructions on headship. May we live within God's position which He designed for us.