I think women have it all wrong when they say submission is some hard, miserable thing. Even in a great movie like War Room, the women sit around and bemoan, “It’s hard to be a woman” because they have to submit to their husbands. This chapter in Numbers 30 is about vows. Particularly it’s about women making vows.

A vow is a promise to God. We can use Hannah as an example. She prayed to God and said that she would dedicate the child to the temple if the Lord gave her a son. He did and so she did. Vows are a serious matter. You don’t want to break a promise to God. But we see in this chapter how a daughter’s father or a wife’s husband can disallow the vow and break the promise, and the girl or woman will be free from it. This is a picture of responsibility and authority.

You can’t have the responsibility without the authority to carry out your responsibility. The father, the husband, he bears the weight of responsibility for the family. He must have the authority to carry it out. Women under authority are free to cast off the weight. We can pray. We can encourage. We can be a helper. But we’re free from the weight of decision. We’re free from the weight of authority and responsibility. Celebrate it, don’t complain about it.

Wives, your job is to love and respect your husband and to love God. What does that look like? For one, it means loving and trusting God.

Know that God is your provider, so you never complain about your husband not being your god and providing for you.

Know that God forgave your sins and holds no debt over you, so you never see your husband as owing you something.

Being upset or worried over a decision your husband is making has only to do with your not trusting God, your not knowing God well enough to know His love and care for you, your lack of prayer and trusting God to be God and be in control.

If you are impatient with your husband, you don’t lack patience; you’re not loving him. If you speak unkindly to your husband, you aren’t frustrated; you are not loving him. (1 Cor. 13)

God is love. If you have God, you can be full of love, so that you don’t NEED love from anywhere else and you can give it without fail and without end.

What a joyful lot in life – to be called to love fully and freely.