Spiritual Disciplines: The Discipline of Submission
Key Points
- 01Submission is the outward discipline that distinguishes genuine convictions from stubborn self-will.
- 02Gethsemane shows the heart of the discipline: "Not my will, but yours be done" — full knowledge of the cost, full surrender to the Father.
- 03Philippians 2 sets the pattern: Christ emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and was obedient to death — and we are called to that same downward mind.
- 04Every discipline has a corresponding freedom; the freedom submission gives is no longer needing to win, defend, or be right.
- 05Submit to God first and to one another out of reverence for Christ — to spouses, parents, employers, leaders, and governing authorities.
- 06Christian submission never extends to enabling abuse, surrendering your conscience, obeying sin, or staying silent in the face of evil — with the apostles in Acts 5, we obey God rather than men.
Watch the Full Sermon
Sermon Summary
Closing out the first installment of Grace Life's spiritual disciplines series, Pastor Dave Waters steps to the pulpit with a topic almost nobody volunteers to hear about: submission. He admits the word itself sets off alarms. "If the meek are going to inherit the earth, what happens to all us type A people?" he reads from a bumper sticker, and the room laughs because everyone feels the tension. But Waters insists that biblical submission has nothing to do with personality type or being a doormat for the planet. It is, instead, the outward discipline that exposes the difference between genuine convictions and what he keeps calling "stubborn self-will." Every Christian discipline, he reminds the congregation, carries a corresponding freedom — and the freedom that submission unlocks is the freedom of no longer needing to win.
Waters opens Matthew 26 and walks the church into the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, prays the most consequential sentence in the discipline: "Not my will, but yours be done." Waters lingers on the human cost — Jesus had watched crucifixions; he knew what Roman nails did to olive wood and to bodies; he had every reason to ask for another way. And yet, with full knowledge of the suffering ahead, he surrendered. From there Waters traces submission through Philippians 2:3-8, where Paul tells the Philippians to count others more significant than themselves because Christ, though equal with God, "emptied himself by taking the form of a servant" and "humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross." The Gethsemane prayer and the Philippians hymn become the two beams of a theological cross the rest of the sermon hangs on: greatness, in the kingdom of God, is downward motion.
From that center Waters works outward through a striking number of passages. Mark 8 — deny yourself, take up your cross, follow. Matthew 23 — do not be called Rabbi, do not be called Father, you have one teacher. Ephesians 5:21 — submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. James 4:6-7 — God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble; submit yourselves therefore to God. Hebrews 13:17 — obey your leaders, because they are keeping watch over your souls. Titus 3 — be submissive to rulers and authorities (cue a self-deprecating aside about still waiting on his IRS refund). And 1 Peter 2:18-20 — servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, even to the unjust, because enduring sorrow while suffering unjustly is a gracious thing in the sight of God. Waters quotes Richard Foster — "self-denial is the foundation for submission; it saves us from self-indulgence" — and argues that Jesus did not merely go to the cross; he lived what Foster calls "the cross life," taking women seriously when his culture did not, sitting down with children when his culture would not, picking up a towel when no rabbi would.
Waters closes by drawing tight boundaries around what biblical submission is not. It is not enabling abuse. It is not surrendering your conscience. It is not obeying sin. It is not silence in the face of evil. It is not treating some people as spiritually superior to others. He reads Acts 5, where the apostles, ordered to stop preaching, answer plainly that they must obey God rather than men — and Waters pins the principle there: "When man invites me to sin against God, I am not in submission if I agree to sin against God." The discipline of submission, he tells the congregation, starts the moment you are willing to ask whether the hill you are dying on is a genuine issue or just stubborn self-will. It produces freedom from the exhausting need to be right, freedom to count others as significant, freedom to obey God first and everyone else second. He sends the church out with a benediction shaped by Philippians 2 and Acts 5 in the same breath: count others more significant than yourselves, but ultimately obey God rather than man.
Scripture References
Going Deeper
The Greek verb behind "submit" in most of the New Testament passages Waters opened is hupotasso — literally "to arrange under." It is a military word in its classical use: soldiers ordered in ranks under a commanding officer. The middle-voice form Paul reaches for in Ephesians 5:21 (hupotassomenoi allelois — "submitting yourselves to one another") softens the chain of command into something startling: a body of free people voluntarily ordering themselves under one another, not because any one of them outranks the others, but "out of reverence for Christ." That grammatical detail matters for the whole sermon. Paul is not commanding domination; he is naming a stance the believer takes. Hupotasso in the middle voice is something you do to yourself, not something done to you — which is exactly why Christian submission and forced compliance are not the same act.
Gethsemane sits on top of a long Old Testament pattern of surrendered prayer. Abraham on Mount Moriah, Hannah at Shiloh, David in 2 Samuel 15 walking barefoot out of Jerusalem ("if I find favor in the eyes of the LORD, he will bring me back…but if not, here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him"), and supremely Isaiah 53's suffering servant who "opened not his mouth" all stand behind Christ's "not my will, but yours." The Gospel writers want us to see Jesus consciously stepping into that pattern. Hebrews 5:7-8 picks up the thread explicitly: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered." Obedience, the writer of Hebrews insists, was not effortless for Jesus — it was learned in the dark, the same place we learn it.
Richard Foster, whose Celebration of Discipline has been quietly shaping this series, treats submission as one of the "outward" disciplines alongside simplicity, solitude, and service — outward because it is practiced in our relationships rather than in our private devotional life. Foster lists seven acts of submission, working outward in concentric rings: submission to the triune God, to the Scriptures, to our family, to our neighbors, to the body of believers, to the broken and despised, and to the world. The point of the list is that submission is never a single decision but a posture practiced in widening circles. The first ring shapes the others. If we cannot surrender our will to God in the closet, we will not be able to surrender our preferences to a spouse, our convenience to a stranger, or our reputation to the truth.
For a congregation trying to actually live this discipline, three practical exits from the sermon are worth keeping in front of you. First, learn the Gethsemane prayer by heart and pray it slowly when you feel the rise of self-will — substitute the specific issue ("Father, if it is possible, let this conflict pass — nevertheless, not my will but yours"). Second, practice Waters's diagnostic question in every quarrel before you speak: is this a genuine biblical issue, or am I just being stubborn? The discipline begins, he said, the moment you are willing to ask. And third, hold firmly to the line in Acts 5. Biblical submission has a non-negotiable ceiling: when human authority asks you to sin against God, the discipline of submission requires you to disobey. That is not rebellion but a deeper obedience. Read together, these three practices form the cross-shape Foster called "the cross life" — vertical surrender to God producing horizontal love toward people, week after ordinary week.
More Sunday Sermons
Spiritual Disciplines: The Discipline of Bible Study (Part 1)
Spiritual Disciplines: The Discipline of Giving
Spiritual Disciplines: The Discipline of Fasting
Spiritual Disciplines: The Discipline of Meditation
