"We live in a culture that despises authority at every level. Whether the authority of police, or of government, or of parents, or a husband's authority in marriage, or pastoral authority in our churches--our culture has programmed us to despise authority. We find it hard to think positively about authority for one very simple reason: we are sinners who want to be in charge of our own lives. We want to be captains of our own destiny. We want to govern our own futures. And here, one of the lessons of the Trinity is that God loves what we despise; namely, God loves, exercises, and embraces rightful authority--submission relationships. God loves this authority-submission structure because God embodies this very structure in his trinitarian relations of Persons. If we have difficulty embracing authority and submission, we can be helped by two things: 1) recall that it is our own sinful urge for independence that leads us to despise authority and want our own way; and 2) reflect on the fact that in the very eternal relations that are true of the Persons of the Trinity, authority and submission are lived out with love and joy. We must learn to embrace what is eternally true in God, and this means, among other things, embracing rightful authority and rightful submission." -Bruce Ware
