The Covenant Household

by Douglas Wilson

Husbands are not to be the autonomous boss-man of their homes. Being the head of the home does not mean being the loudest in the home. The husband is the true authority in the home, of course, but what is the nature of biblical authority? Being the head of the home does not mean being the most irritable one in the home. Being head of the home does not mean that you get your way all the time. We must be free from all individualism in marriage.

Headship does not mean that the husband gets his way in all the petty things. It does means that the husband cannot blame his wife for the state of their marriage. Just as Christ assumed responsibility for things He did not do, in the same way husbands should be willing to take responsibility for things their wives do.

The reason many husbands do not have authority in their own home is because they do not take responsibility there.

If you want to know whether a husband is loving his wife, take a look at her ten or twenty years after they have been married. What is his love doing to her? Is it taking a toll on her or making her go to pieces? But love bestows loveliness.

But the two sexes nevertheless are created to function differently: men initiate, women respond; men sacrifice, women receive the sacrifice; men are to give their love, women are to grow in loveliness. A saintly woman is not the same thing as a saintly man.

It is amazing to me how much some wives can love with how little encouragement they get. But when a husband really loves his wife, he will discover that as he gives these blessings to his wife, his wife consistently gives a bigger return. He shovels blessings on her, and then discovers that she has a much bigger shovel. He who loves his wife loves himself. She is always able to return more in blessing to him than he has given to her. Godly wives are multipliers.

And if you want to transform your family, then you must be willing to die—and you cannot do this on your own. You have to look to the Christ who died, in order to imitate Him, daily taking up your cross and following Him.

The Word of God does not permit a man to say that he did not know she felt that way. If you are not working on understanding how she feels, then the disobedience is yours, not hers.

The Bible says that men are to provide for their own, period, and there is no excuse for not providing for their needs. If men do not do this, it is tantamount to apostasy.

If a man has a slack hand and becomes poor because of it, that poverty is always visited upon his household. That is the way the world works. Husbands need to work hard and be more industrious than they are. Even when a good excuse comes up, assume masculine responsibility for all of your work. This is because lazy men make other people poor.

In particular, single ladies should not even dream of marrying a man they do not respect, because once they are married, it is their obligation to respect him—whether or not he is respectable. Your husband probably does fall short in many places that you are correct in noticing, but you must respect him anyway. Our generation talks a lot about unconditional love for wives, but almost no one talks about unconditional respect for husbands.

When a man loves Christ more than anything else and his wife is number two, she receives far more attention and love as number two than if she were number one. Because he is an idolater, a man who worships his wife has cut himself off from the source of all love. He is going to run out of strength very quickly, but if he loves Christ the way the Bible says to, then he will have the strength to love her as Christ loved the Church. If your one central goal in life is to keep your wife happy, then the one thing I can guarantee is that you are not going to make her happy.

True masculinity entails the taking of responsibility, as well as physical maturity.

In a church where marriage is valued, the boys should want to be married before they are ready to be married. When you see little boys playing at war and little girls playing house, the feminist movement catechizes you to think that this is something that society is imposing on them. However, what is happening is that the little kids look at the adults and they want to grow up to be like them. Young boys should want to grow up to be like their dad, and little girls should want to grow up to be like their mom. If the boys are not training to become men, when they grow up, they are not going to know how to be men. Parents need to honor this process and ought to make plenty of room for it.

Third, a man should be prepared for his vocation. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:8–9, “For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” A man not prepared for vocation is not prepared for marriage. As I often tell young men, women are expensive. This does not mean that a young husband needs to be in his final occupation before he marries, but he does need to have a sense of purpose, direction, and calling. A man in his second year of med school doesn’t have his practice yet, but he does have his direction.

A man should enter into his marriage expecting to exercise leadership and knowing how to make a decision.

When godly husbands sacrifice and bleed, their wives want to obey them and follow them because they know the husband is being a sacrificial man, which is to say, a masculine man.

This means that a faithful husband needs to be disciplined and focused, but wives should not make the mistake of thinking that because the standard is required it should somehow be easy. We do not need to coddle men, “Oh, poor baby!” but wives do need to understand the obstacles the man is overcoming. If he is being faithful to her, she should be grateful and expect it, but she should also know the nature of the gift that is being given to her.

God is constantly generous to us and overflows to us, and our duty as fathers and husbands is to be like Him, which means we must have stuff to give away. So when a man wants God to prosper his business, when he wants God to establish his family, when he wants his children to learn to work and thrive, those are all good things. When the children have a good reputation, God is enlarging a man’s territory.

A husband sometimes even has to protect his wife from other family members: things her parents or her in-laws might say to her might be very harmful, and in such cases the husband needs to step in and say, “No, you may not say that: I am my wife’s protector now.” A godly husband is a wall around his wife.

Exceptional cases make bad laws, and we do not adopt general expectations for a class of people based on those exceptions. Within the Church today we do not get that reaction when we are speaking to men. This is because the biblical teaching on federal headship can at first glance be confused with our generation’s predisposition to male-bashing. However, if a preacher turns around and gives women the mildest of exhortations, people’s feelings get hurt.

So, as a woman reads this, she should hear the Word of God and be ready for what God is saying to her through it. She should not go to her husband in a panic, asking whether she really is a help to him. If she is not helping him, and chances are that someone reading this book is not helping in some ways, then he might actually have something to criticize. However, since the wife is panicking, she will just melt down at what he says, and he will then be tempted to take what he said back and patch it all up. Then the two will stagger down the road for another couple of years.

Frequently, wives give their husbands what they would like to be getting. She shows him signs of her tenderness and thoughtfulness and expresses how much she loves him. However, this is not what God said she should make sure to render to her husband.

Suppose a wife wonders how she could ever possibly respect her husband—because, as it turns out, he is a bozo. However, if a husband said he cannot love his wife until she makes herself more lovely, we would know that the problem lies entirely with him—husbands should love their wives unconditionally. However, this also goes the other way: wives should not sit in judgment on their husbands and wait until he passes a test before she shows respect. She is required by God to respect him now

This is said because some women do eat the bread of idleness. Women are to be praised for cleaning up, cooking, preparing, providing, and doing all these things for their families because there are some women who do not do them. A godly wife has managerial responsibilities and must cultivate those skills: she is the executive officer of the home. The Greek word that means “keepers at home” above could also be translated “house-despot.” So take off your shoes where she tells you to.

Far too many modern people eat their meals on their way out the door, or they microwave it and eat it leaning over the sink. But if you want to build a civilization, you need to have families that sit down at a table together. This means that there must be something on the table that makes it worth it, so a woman should study how to be skilled in how she makes the family meals. Some of you may think this is straight out of the 1950s, but it is actually what the human race has been doing for a long, long time. We are living in a weird little historical bubble where we are trying to repeal the law of gravity. Men are supposed to bring home the bacon, and women are supposed to make it edible.

Incidentally, this means that husbands need to give their wives a chance to hear the sermon regularly. It is a challenge for little ones to sit through a service, and keeping order in the service is hard. Husbands should not be sitting and listening to the sermon at the time while their wives are trying to keep the troops in line. The husband and wife together should take turns keeping order, because both of them need to hear the Word of God.

Women should know what the gospel is, and they should know the doctrines that are being preached and taught. After all, it is women that are raising up the next generation of preachers. Where did Timothy get his unfeigned faith, if not from his grandmother Lois and mother Eunice (2 Tim. 1:5)?

We see here that both Aquila and Priscilla explain to Apollos that what he was teaching was insufficient. Priscilla here was not teaching in the synagogue, but she was a part of the team out in the parking lot that set Apollos straight.

A godly woman dresses well. Proverbs 31:22 says, “She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.” Modesty and decorum do not entail dressing in a feed sack.

Women are the ornament of the Church. In the first few centuries when the gospel was first spreading, the Christian women were well cared for and were especially attractive to the pagan men as a model for what wives should be like. Women should aspire to be like that.

When things are going wrong within the family, one problem that often appears is that the father tries to fix the problem by issuing commands. Blockhead fathers will point to Ephesians 5 and then act surprised when just telling everybody to submit does not fix all the problems. That kind of spirit is totally antithetical to how God established His family. At the same time, look at Job: he does not go to the Lord in sacrifice and point to his own godliness and complain about his children’s sins. Job takes responsibility—and authority flows to those who take responsibility.

If a son is not taking responsibility for his actions, chances are good he learned that evasiveness from his father. But if the father takes responsibility for his son, then he is far more likely to bring his son to real repentance when he tries to get his son to take responsibility for his actions.

You did all the “right things,” and you feel you are the only one doing anything right. You do not want to be blamed for things you did not do. However, you are content with Jesus taking responsibility for things He did not do. Remember, this is the absolute center of the Christian faith.

So, ask God to unsettle everything. Ask God to enter your marriage and family and to knock down all the brittle faux masculinity in order to shatter it. God will not despise such a prayer. If a man says, “Lord, mess up this family,” He will do it and there will no longer be a complacent, disobedient marriage anymore. Many of us do not want radical Christianity, radical discipleship, or radical responsibility to come in and disrupt everything.

Obvious and glaring sins are not as dangerous as the sins that we believe to be virtues. This is why, for example, Jesus said that prostitutes and tax collectors were closer to the kingdom of Heaven than the well-respected theologians of His day—the tax collectors and sinners knew they had a problem, but the self-righteous Pharisees did not know that sin had them by the throat. They thought they were virtuous and wise when they were really white-washed tombs.

prevent families from breaking down, and indeed many of the greatest moral failures have manifested themselves in the traditionalist camp. If we all retreat into our traditionalist enclaves, then all the same corruptions will erupt inside them.

Strict rules do not fix the problem. Retreating into an enclave does not fix the problem. Building a neo-Amish compound does not fix the problem. The old Adam will follow you in there.

We can have terrible disasters in classical Christian schools. Many schools think that classical education should be hard, and since eating gravel is hard, they make all the kids eat gravel and call it classical education. A lot of spiritual energy could be spared if we consider some of the root problems.

Many Christians grew up in non-Christian homes and God still intervened in their lives, and God can do the same for wayward children as well. But this is like asking whether we can glorify God in a plane crash. That does happen, and people do walk away from plane crashes, but we do not plan for that kind of thing: in the ordinary course of events, we want a smooth plane ride.

It is hard for us when someone comes up and says something our kid did was wrong, sinful, or shameful. Of course, there are times when parents should stand up for their child, but your operating assumption should not be to side with your child against anybody else automatically. If parents automatically side with their own children, they are going to be wrong more often than they are going to be right. We are not born with eyes in the back of our heads. At the same time, the neighbors do not have most of the backstory to your kids and they do not know all the challenges. So when we offer counsel to someone, it should be with fear and trembling, and we should not set ourselves up to personally rebuke all the parents in the church. But if you see something, and the parents are missing it, then you should go with an inquiry for them.

The besetting sin of homeschoolers is the sin of tuning out criticism—when criticism comes, you get defensive, and you get your back up. So if parents are homeschooling and someone rebukes them, the godly response is to consider it oil on the head, even if the correction is in error. The best thing is to listen to the criticism and bring it before God. Nobody wants to be blown back and forth by whatever people say, but everyone should want to be open to learn. So those parents who are homeschooling, where this applies, lose the defensiveness.

Our task as parents is not to get your kids to conform to the standard: our job is to get them to love the standard.

Godly parents should therefore be confident, trusting, quiet, and serene. Now of course, godly parenting means exhibiting good works. The next-door neighbors should see you doing a lot of stuff. They do not see you lounging on the sofa inside, trusting God, as your kids run around feral and wild. We do not just wait for God’s lightning bolt of grace to strike the kids because . . . soli Deo gloria.

God does it both ways. He brings up faithful covenant children, and He also provides us with remarkable testimonies. At the same time, it is the parents’ duty to give their children a boring testimony.

when kids were little, that is when they should have learned the basics of moral government. Their teen years are when the restrictions should be taken off, because they have been learning how to be self-controlled. Parents should take these controls off, but of course this should not be done blindly. Teenagers still need input and direction.

To just count profanities is not Christian worldview thinking: it is just skimming along the surface. What parents should do is tell the kids to go ahead and go, but then tell them they need to be prepared to offer a movie review at dinner the following night. That kid will not have the ability to offer anything like a thoughtful review that engages with the movie, and now they are off to the internet to look up the number of hells and damns in it. But superficial analysis remains superficial whether the parent is doing it or the kid is. Next time they ask to go to a stupid movie (Stupid Movie 4), the parent can just tell them that they are not engaging with the world like a Christian and that they need to learn how to do that first. They need to interact intelligently with what they are being fed. This is not just about profanity counts and bad scenes: it also has to do with plots, aesthetic values, culture, and morality. The reason they can’t go to Stupid Movie 4 is not because their parent has any criticism of the movie (he hasn’t seen it). The reason they can’t go is because their parent has doubts about the child’s critical abilities.

Leave it to Christians to be more concerned about backwards gibberish than about frontwards wickedness. Avoid dumb distractions; they are not worth it.

Dissensions often occur because parents express vague doubts based on insufficient knowledge, which causes them to ask foggy questions instead of checking things out for themselves. Parents need to know what their kids are listening to and watching, and they need to be engaged with it. And “engaged with it” means knowing what it actually is.

Fourth, avoid sanitized imitations. The evangelical subculture has no shortage of cheap imitations of whatever the world is currently doing. Everything the pagans do, evangelicals can do five years later, and worse.