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Welcome to The Overflow—the bonus round of faith and real-life conversation with Brandon and Susan Thomas. Every week, they unpack the powerful insights, behind-the-scenes experiences, and personal reflections that didn’t quite fit into Sunday’s sermon.
This is where the conversation gets practical, honest, and a little bit unscripted. Whether it's an encouraging word, a deeper dive into Scripture, or a hilarious moment from their week, Brandon and Susan bring fresh perspective and spiritual fuel to keep you going.
It’s real talk, fresh takes, and full hearts.
These are the conversations too good to cut and too real to miss.
Well, hello, and welcome to The Overflow. We are looking forward to today's conversation. And honestly, it's a hot topic in our world and in our culture. We're gonna talk about submission.
Speaker 2:Yes. Submission and marriage. And this concept comes from the book of Ephesians.
Speaker 1:Yes. It does.
Speaker 2:And I wanna read I want you I'd love for you to read that for us. Can you look that up real quick?
Speaker 1:I will submit to you and do that. So, yes, I'm happy to read this. Ephesians chapter five is where this passage of scripture is found. And, you know, marriage is such a consistent topic that we are passionate about, that our world needs to hear about. I mean, the the family is the foundation that God created, humanly speaking, for us to flourish.
Speaker 1:Do I say that right?
Speaker 2:You always say that word interest flourish. You go flourish.
Speaker 1:Wait. Did I do it the right way that time? Flourish?
Speaker 2:Think you did actually. Flour.
Speaker 1:I think you broke me.
Speaker 2:Flour. Flourish. Flour.
Speaker 1:So you say flourish?
Speaker 2:Flourish.
Speaker 1:So you know what? If you in the comment wanna say flour or flur, I don't
Speaker 2:know if
Speaker 1:you can say that in the comment.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Flourish. But the family if the family does not flourish, our world falls apart. And so it's a big deal to understand God's design for relationship and marriage. So Ephesians five verse 21, it says this, and further submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. For wives, this means submit to your husband as to the Lord.
Speaker 1:For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of the body, the church. That's Jesus. As the church submits to Christ, so wives should submit to your husbands in everything. For husbands, this means love your wives just as Christ loved the church.
Speaker 1:He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God's word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself.
Speaker 1:No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it just as Christ cares for the church, and we are members of his body. As the scriptures say, I'm reading the whole thing. A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one. This is a great mystery, but it's an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. So again, I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Submit one to another, and then he breaks it down as to what that looks like between a husband and a wife.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is a hot topic. And usually, when people talk about this topic, they only quote, wives submit to your husbands. Yeah. Okay?
Speaker 2:They only talk about that part. Mhmm. And they do not read the first part, which is so important, let me look it up here. It's so important, further submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. And then it's clearly in verse 22, he's saying now for wives, what this looks like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay, so submit to your husband is talking to you, but it's fulfilling what we just read, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. So first just locking in on, I think we understand what the word submit means. It really is the same word today as it was then in the Greek, as we look at that. It is to defer, it's willing, it's a willing behavior, it's a gift that I give.
Speaker 2:Here what Paul is talking about, he's talking about marriage, he's talking about how to get along in marriage, and talking about family. He's saying, we need to have a posture of submitting to one another, not just you submitting to me. We can talk about you submitting to me, but it's under the umbrella of we submit to each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's very important to understand that word submit and understand what God is actually saying rather than putting our own definition in place. And it's exactly what you said. It is a yielding. It is a willful decision on the part of a person to, in a sense, surrender some of my preferences, some of my desires, some of my decisions even to willingly surrender that, to willingly yield to another person. I really think at its core, it's selflessness.
Speaker 1:I think it's a a posture of selflessness. But it is more than that. It's that's part of the foundation, I believe. But it does get into strategy and it gets into you know, that's where my brain goes. A strategy within the home that we're about to talk about.
Speaker 2:It is a a big time strategy for the home and the enemy has that strategy that wants to rip us apart. He has a strategy to rip us apart. Yeah. No doubt about it.
Speaker 1:He does.
Speaker 2:The posture toward one another, okay? So, how we are facing one another. What is our posture toward one another in marriage? And Paul here is saying, our posture needs to be submit to one another. There's some ways that we can describe what this means.
Speaker 2:This can be described as, the posture toward one another should be give to one another. The posture should not be take from one another. A lot of us, our posture is what are you giving to me? What can I take from you? And what Paul here is saying is no, attitude should be generous.
Speaker 2:The attitude should be serve. Not domineer, not dominate. In Song of Solomon, chapter five, you have this massive conflict between Solomon and his bride. And it's so real, and it's so human. He is knocking on the door, and he wants intimacy.
Speaker 2:He is, and it seems as though they have different bedrooms that wouldn't have been unusual in a palace of a king. He wanted to come and see her that night. And so he's banging on the door. Her door is locked. And basically, without looking it up, she says, I'm tired, I don't want to, I'm not interested.
Speaker 2:And he keeps knocking, she's like, no, I'm not, it's not happening tonight. Okay? Then he goes away, because he's been rebuffed by her, and then she has regret. And she opens the door hoping to find him still there and he's gone. And it leads to her chasing after him and all this stuff, and finally they get together and they're generous with each other and their love is rekindled.
Speaker 2:Okay, all that to say, what a human moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so human.
Speaker 2:He is demanding sex and she is withholding sex. Yeah. That is two people in a posture of Taking. Taking. Talk about that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think this is the the broken side of what God intended. This is the broken opposite of what God desires in marriage, and that is this mutual giving, this mutual submission one to another. And I think something that really strikes me is that when it comes to submit one to another, he then tells specifically how the girls to submit and how the guys to submit. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And we're I think it'd be fun to unpack that just for definition's sake because he says, wives, submit to your husband. But then when he tells the husband what to do, it is the greatest act of submission of all. Mhmm. For him to give his life for her like Christ gave his life for the church. Jesus submitted his life to the father.
Speaker 1:God, not my will, not my will, but yours be done, which led to Jesus dying for the church, dying for us, and paying for us to be able to have right
Speaker 2:relations That with
Speaker 1:is profound.
Speaker 2:I'd like to interrupt this conversation Okay. With something that's very important to get out of the way. And that is, this is the overflow. Yeah. One of the reasons we have the overflow is good, strong, biblical teaching.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we wanna give our voice to some hot topics. This is a hot topic. And I wanna pause and I wanna talk about our view of roles in marriage.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, I think it's very relevant to this point. And what I mean by that is, there's different views, and these are technical terms I'm gonna give. One is that your marriage should be egalitarian. Okay, I know these are big words, but it's the overflow. If I can't use big words, I don't wanna do the overflow.
Speaker 2:Okay? Egalitarian. Another view is complementarian, or soft complementarian, whatever you believe. And then there's hierarchal. Okay, those are the three big categories.
Speaker 2:And people, categories shift and all that, but I'm gonna define them. Egalitarian basically means that there's no difference between us, okay? That our roles are the same, we can shift in and out of roles, and then complementarian says, hey, I see your leadership and you are a leader, but we have different roles. We are different. You're a woman, I'm a man, God made us differently, let's figure out how God made us different and let's execute that to the best of our abilities.
Speaker 2:And then the hierarchical view is, I am man and you are here to serve me. Clearly, don't believe that, it's ridiculous. But truly, it is kind of a subjugation of women at its worst. We are complementarian. Some people would say soft complementarian, I don't know what that means, but we are complementarian, meaning we complement one another.
Speaker 2:Submit to one another. How do we submit to one another? We submit to one another by fulfilling our different roles, okay? So I'm gonna ask you a question, Susan, that's gonna prove that you're a complementarian, okay? So, who is, who bears the headship of the family?
Speaker 2:Do we both wear the headship of the family? Like Christ is the head of the church? Who is the head of the family?
Speaker 1:The husband.
Speaker 2:Okay. The husband has the headship in the family like Christ has headship over the church. Mhmm. That is complementarian. If you would say there is a person, and that would be the male, that would be the man in the relationship, that is head.
Speaker 2:Okay. So what does that mean by head?
Speaker 1:I believe the husband, as we read in scripture, God has appointed the husband to be the leader of the home. There is structure for the relationship where God says, this is where there is order, is that we have a leader. And and it doesn't mean, as you've said so many times, that wives, we are not leaders in our home. But at the end of the day, there's there's a person who is responsible for before God for the the way the family operates ultimately, and that husband is the head over that.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna take it one more step because I think this is interesting, and it's the overflow, and this is what I wanna do. I wanna talk about church leadership. Okay? What about in church leadership? So, we talked about the home.
Speaker 2:Okay? What about in church leadership? Susan, senior pastor? Brandon Susan, co senior pastors? What are we?
Speaker 1:You are our senior pastor.
Speaker 2:And why is that?
Speaker 1:Because you're our leader.
Speaker 2:Okay. Do we believe that you could be our senior pastor of Keystone Church?
Speaker 1:We do not. Why? Because God has headship in his local church.
Speaker 2:That's right. Okay. So that this should deal with some questions. The point is, are we cofounders? To the men, I wanna