Is It Lawful

Saturday night is the bad night. Not Sunday. Saturday.

She lies there and runs it: what has to be ready, what has been missed, who might not turn up, and mostly the shape of the moment when it goes wrong and she is spoken to in front of whoever is standing there.

It is shouting. She has tried other words for it for three years and it is shouting.

Afterward there is always a version. He was under pressure. It was not about her. He apologized once, eight months ago, in a way that ended with an explanation of what she had done to bring it on.

She is a volunteer. She gives about eleven hours a week and has done for four years, and she is good at it and everybody there knows she is.

And she has been taught, in that building, by people who are entirely sincere, that a submitted heart absorbs it. That the way of the cross is downward. That you do not answer back to leadership.

Three years of absorbing. And a Saturday night she has stopped mentioning to her husband because she is tired of the look on his face.

If somebody has taught you that a submitted heart takes it, this article is for you, and I am going to be very plain.

One question that stopped everything

Let me say it without hedging, because you have had three years of hedging.

That teaching is wrong. It is not a hard case and it is not a matter of emphasis. Nowhere in Scripture is submission a mechanism for absorbing being shouted at by somebody who wants a room run their way, and a heart is not made humble by being shouted at, it is made careful, which is a different thing that looks similar from outside.

Now read what Paul said when he was tied up and about to be flogged, because it is one question and it stopped a machine.

And as they bound him with thongs, Paul said unto the centurion that stood by, Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?Acts 22:25

He does not shout back. He does not fight. He asks whether what is being done is allowed, and he asks it of the person doing it, calmly, while tied up.

The chapter tells you what happened next: the centurion went straight to the commander, and the whole thing stopped, and the men who had been about to do it were afraid.

One question. Asked by a man in restraints, about whether a thing was permitted.

You are allowed to ask whether a thing is permitted, and asking it is not rebellion. That is not my opinion about your Saturdays. It is written in Acts 22:25, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

So three years of absorbing has not been submission. You have a question you are permitted to ask out loud, and asking it changes nothing about your submission to God. The word settled that long before you volunteered, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in that room while you read this.

What submission is and is not

Here is the distinction, and it is worth having clearly, because the word has been used on you for three years and you have never been given the whole of it.

Submission in the New Testament is voluntary. It is something a person does, freely, out of love for Christ, and it is always mutual before it is anything else: submitting to one another in the fear of God comes first in that passage, and almost nobody quotes that line to volunteers.

What is happening on Saturdays is not voluntary. Nobody has offered you a choice. And a submission that a person cannot decline is not submission, it is compliance, and those two words get swapped constantly in exactly the rooms where they should not be.

And notice the shape of the apology eight months ago. It ended with what you had done to bring it on. That is not repentance, and you have known that since the night it happened, and you have not let yourself say it.

I am not telling you the man is wicked. I do not know him. He may be under real pressure and genuinely sorry each time and entirely unable to stop.

What can be said is this: whatever is going on in him, the effect on you is a Saturday night you have stopped mentioning to your husband, and that is worth taking seriously on its own.

You have a dignity God gave and no ministry can spend, and it is intact tonight. Acts 22 has a bound man asking whether a thing is lawful; His Spirit is the one who lets a person see plainly what is being done to them without any of it becoming their fault.

Now, plainly, and this is the part that matters most on this page. Nothing here is telling you to leave that ministry, and nothing here is telling you to stay in it. I do not know your church, your friendships, your history there, or what it would cost you either way, and a page that issued you an instruction would be pretending to a knowledge it does not have. That decision is yours, and it belongs to the people who actually know your life, and to God.

What can be said is that you are allowed to tell somebody who can act: an elder, a trustee, a safeguarding lead, a denominational officer, a friend outside the building. Naming it is not disloyalty. And if any of this has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today: in the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and if you are in danger right now, use your emergency number.