Christian Living

By Georgia Purdom. © Answers in Genesis. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Common Misconceptions

The verses most commonly quoted concerning the wife’s role in relation to the husband’s role are Ephesians 5:22 and Colossians 3:18:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord (Eph. 5:22).

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord (Col. 3:18).

Many women struggle with the concept of submission in marriage because they mistakenly equate being submissive with being inferior. From Genesis we know that men and women are equal in God’s eyes because everyone, regardless of gender, is made in God’s image. Genesis 1:27 states, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

A sermon delivered at Calvary Baptist Church, Derby, Kansas. Reprinted with permission from As I See It, which is available free by writing to the editor at [email protected].

Tonight, I want us to study a single word in the NT: proskartereo. It looks and sounds like a perfect candidate for use in a Jeopardy category: “twelve-letter Greek words that are difficult to pronounce”!

This word caught my attention as I ran across it at various times over the years in my studies of the NT in Greek, and I thought its various occurrences and uses rather interesting.

It is a compound word, composed of the preposition pros, which means, “to, toward, in the direction of” and kartereo, a verb with the root idea of “to be strong, firm.” So it literally means “to be strong toward something or someone.” As used in the NT, the word carries the sense and meaning “to be devoted to, to be dedicated to, to focus on, to be committed to, to persist in” some purpose, object or person.

This word is used ten times in the Greek NT, six of which occur in Acts. I want to briefly note each of these uses.