This one I heard at a church potluck, and some might say it's not fair to use something spoken in an informal setting, so let me clarify the situation. Seven or eight of us ladies were standing behind the long table, laden with all the wonderful dishes everyone had brought—from deviled eggs, layered salad, and broccoli salad to ham, fried chicken, lasagna, hash brown casserole, and a pot of pork laden collard greens to pecan, apple, and pumpkin pies, chocolate layer cake, Texas sheet cake, earthquake cake, carrot cake, Italian cream cake, and cheesecake. As we stood there, having sorted and laid things out in an orderly fashion, people constantly passed in front of us, dipping, scooping, stabbing, and otherwise loading their plates. We were not exactly alone and out of earshot. And really, where does formal end and informal begin? When people can hear what I am saying, I am influencing them whether I want to admit it or not.
I once asked a class in a different time and place, "What is wrong with that statement?" Half a dozen voices immediately spoke up with the obvious: "It's his house too." While I understand, and teach all the time, that the home is the woman's domain and he has no right to micromanage it (1 Tim 5:14), part of her management is making it a comfortable place that the entire family wants to be at not a photo shoot for House Beautiful. If he ever strays because he found a woman who simply let him be comfortable instead of worrying about "messing up her house," this wife will carry some of the blame. These are the kinds of small things that wear on a relationship and can eventually erode it to its bare bones. Usually they are symptoms of something far more important as well.
One of those things might be this other issue. How exactly is this an example of a submissive and respectful attitude toward one's husband? I say it again and again: anyone who has trouble with submission has trouble being a Christian at all because Christianity is a religion of submission and service. How can anyone read that scene in the upper room with the Master washing the servants' feet and not get it? That statement at the top is simply disrespectful. Period.
So let's be careful about our attitudes toward our husband, but also what we say, where we say it, and who is present at the time. Several younger wives heard that comment, which was made by a wife of several decades. That afternoon, her light certainly did not shine. It may even have put a few others completely out.
Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious. For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord…(1Pet 3:3-6).
Dene Ward