Dear Sister
PLFern, thank you for your reply and questions. God is indeed working in you to will, and to do of His good pleasure (Php 2:13).
I will first reveal the woman being spoken of in Eph 5:22 is not only a perfect recipe for good marriages which many suppose to making the wife a slave as it were to her husband; no, a wife and husband have become one and the same love we are shown by God to us is relevant between us. Eph 5:21 makes this more clear:
Submitting yourselves one to another . . .
The woman here is the bride of Christ, and her husband the picture of Christ. A key:
as unto the Lord.
I will give you an URL link here that is a good study, and when you get there simply do a search (Ctrl F) for the word “Submitting” and read down a couple pages. I hope it helps you and we can progress from there.
http://www.gracegod.com/Study Books/Ephesians - Exaltation of the Sons of God.pdf
A dear brother Gene Hawkins gave the following Marriage Seminar which I transcribed from CD’s I’ll give excerpts from here.
"If you put it down in a very practical and simple manner,
the wife must be subject to the headship of her husband, and the husband must be subject to the needs of his wife.
Now the first thing I want to notice is that as Paul will tell us here in (Eph. 5:25), "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;" We know that the marriage relationship is typical, or it is the same as the relationship between Christ and His people; Christ and the body. The difference is this, we know that Jesus is never going to fail or default on His role as the head, but we as husbands have to recognize that we can be miserable failures in our role as being head to our wives. Though Jesus does not fail or default, never does Jesus come down and demand that we be in subjection to Him. So in that sense of the word with us as Christians, if Jesus is going to be the head in my life, I'm going to have to willingly surrender it to Him.
The first thing that we must realize is that a head is not a dictator, and this is what you find so often in Christian circles today. It has been so misused and abused that when a woman says that she is to be in subjection, the entire community goes berserk and it is because they do not understand what headship means. Headship? Both wives and husbands must realize, and get it in our heads that headship doesn't mean dictatorship. The position of a head is actually a position of loving ministry."
If these things set off alarms please let me know. Love in Christ Jesus.