An outspoken evangelical leader preached a potentially controversial sermon this weekend, saying “nagging wives” are like water torture.

Mark Driscol, pastor of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle, made the comments Sunday during a sermon based on a Bible passage from Ephesians, which reads in part:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

While the passage does not mean men are smarter than women, Driscoll explains, he says it does mean the “wife sets a pattern for others to respect her husband.”

“If the wife disrespects the husband in front of his coworkers, will they respect the husband? No,” Driscoll said. “No. Women who publicly disrespect their husbands, they encourage others to disrespect their husbands. And this doesn’t mean you don’t disagree with your husband but you do so respectfully, privately.”

Women who are quarrelsome, who are nags, they are not submitting in accordance to the Bible, Driscoll says.

“Being married to [nagging wives] is like a life sentence, and the guy’s just scratching on his wall every day,” he told the congregation. “Proverbs talks about certain women—they’re like a dripping faucet. You ever tried to sleep with a dripping faucet? Plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. It’s what we use to torture people who are prisoners of war.”

However, controversial comments seem to be par for the course for Driscoll.

The pastor faced backlash in January after tweeting that President Barack Obama likely “does not know” God. He also called James Cameron’s blockbuster film “Avatar” satanic and argued that masturbation is a form of homosexuality if a woman is not present.

Earlier this year, Driscoll and his wife, Grace, published a highly controversial “marriage book” called Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together, which the Daily Beast described as “cringe-inducing” and which some see as “evidence of Mark’s pervasive obsession with sex and a degrading view of women.”

Read more: Huffington Post