Wives and Husbands

²¹ Yield to obey each other as you would to Christ.

²² Wives, yield to your husbands, as you do to the Lord, ²³ because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. And he is the Savior of the body, which is the church. ²⁴ As the church yields to Christ, so you wives should yield to your husbands in everything.

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it ²⁶ to make it belong to God. Christ used the word to make the church clean by washing it with water. ²⁷ He died so that he could give the church to himself like a bride in all her beauty. He died so that the church could be pure and without fault, with no evil or sin or any other wrong thing in it. ²⁸ In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they love their own bodies. The man who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ No one ever hates his own body, but feeds and takes care of it. And that is what Christ does for the church, ³⁰ because we are parts of his body. ³¹ The Scripture says, “So a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one body.”^{[a] 32} That secret is very important—I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³ But each one of you must love his wife as he loves himself, and a wife must respect her husband.