This first was published on The End Time in October 2011. It’s a lesson we need more than ever today, 8 years later and the world grows ever more hostile to Christianity and the name of Jesus.
It’s a tough crowd these days, isn’t it? Lots of people are hard of hearing when it comes to Jesus, sin, and things of faith. Atheists and agnostics are heart-hardened, and even more so these days. Liberal Christians are hardened to Jesus, too. They want to stop talking about hell, sin, judgment, and courts, but only speak of love, peace, joy, and freedom. They, and their mouth-pieces, the ACLU and the like, tell Christians to sit down and shut up. Others simply warn, “stop saying that!” But we won’t.
As the cursed world spirals ever downward to its prophesied end, physical illness, cataclysmic wrath events like tornadoes and floods keep happening, spiritual darkness hovers over families, we might be tempted to give up crying out to Jesus for comfort and help. Don’t cease crying out night and day. Persevere in prayer and petition.
Consider Bartimaeus—
[Blind Bartimaeus] began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many were sternly telling him to be quiet, but he kept crying out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” And Jesus stopped and said, “Call him here.” So they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take courage, stand up! He is calling for you.” Throwing aside his cloak, he jumped up and came to Jesus. And answering him, Jesus said, “What do you want Me to do for you?” And the blind man said to Him, “Rabboni, I want to regain my sight!” And Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” (Mark 10:47-52)
Son of David was a Messianic title. The blind man’s choice to address Jesus that way was an immediate indicator that the blind man knew who Jesus is. His very next comment was a plea for mercy. Sinners know they need mercy, and this blind man knew he was a sinner, and that Jesus could dispense mercy to him.
But the people were shouting loudly for the blind beggar to sit down and shut up. I can just hear them say, “Hush! You’re making a scene“…when the crowd and the noise and the scene around Jesus must have been unlike any other near Jerusalem, ever! And they were telling the blind man to be quiet, over all that noise…that is how inappropriate they thought he was being. But would the blind man be quiet? No. He shouted LOUDER.
Jesus stopped, and He called for them to bring the man to Him. Just as He told the disciples not to shush the children but bring them to Him instead, (Mark 10:14) He ignored the people’s warnings for the man to be quiet and said for him to be brought.
The world will call for evangelical Christians to be quiet and that is precisely the time when the world most needs to hear of sin, and the remedy for it, Jesus. Keep shouting, make a joyful noise, sing, rejoice, make a clamor! We shout redemption! We shout pardon from sin’s judgment! We shout the cross and Him crucified! Told to be quiet, we shout louder! We have the Good News, we see Jesus coming, we call out, take courage, stand up!
“Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zech 9:9)
“O clap your hands, all peoples; Shout to God with the voice of joy.” (Psalm 47:1)
“They raise their voices, they shout for joy; from the west they acclaim the LORD’s majesty” (Isaiah 24:14)
Recognize the Messiah, son of David, and shout to Him for your own salvation! Your faith will save you.
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. (1 Thessalonians 4:13)
It is good news that He loves us and is waiting to call us, His bride, home to Him soon. He is preparing the place in which we will dwell for all eternity, untainted by sin at last. We will gaze at one another through the spotless lens of the Holy One who redeemed us to Himself, and we will love Him and each other perfectly. His light will shine upon us untainted by clouds, pure as the blazing Light that shines supreme, transcendent, unmatched, our eyes shining as the reflection of His matchless glory. Angels will sing praises to Him and we will join in, love glowing out among all creation in glory, as only He can be! Why He chooses to share Himself with us, I will never know, but that knowledge and fact only makes me love Him all the more. He saved a wretch like me, and changed me from creature to daughter of God!
I sincerely hope you all are well. If you are not, then I hope that good news of what awaits us revives you, that we have the perfect assurance of the incomparable riches of His grace.
Beloved, these things are true, these things are noble, these things are just, these things are pure, these things are lovely, these things are of good report, there is virtue and they is praiseworthy—meditate on these things. (Phil 4:8-9 paraphrased)
God will judge the unrighteous. But we love Jesus and love casts out all fear. Whoever is in Jesus has no fear, because He is GOOD! His promises are true. His mercy endures forever.
“The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;” Lamentations 3:25
“Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.” Psalm 27:14
“In that day they will say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the LORD, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.” Isaiah 25:9
Are you glad in His salvation? We wait, and we love, and we endure, but are we glad? He saved us! The most important person in the universe who was and is and is to come came down from his Holy Mountain to serve us, teach us and save us. He left glory to give us His righteousness. Be glad in it. Even as we wait, we have more days to rejoice in the hope in us, and to be the light to others in that hope.
It’s summer. Hold your loved ones close. Have picnics, catch fireflies, dip toes in the sand, go on a road trip, read a summer book. Unplug, unwind, let go a bit if you can.
Here is something lighthearted to end what I hope is encouraging to you.
I listened to a great John MacArthur sermon that discussed how sin starts and what happens when we allow sin to continue without ending it at its root. MacArthur’s sermon is titled “Hacking Agag to pieces” and you can listen to or read part one here, and part 2 here. I recommend it.
There is a section of the two-part hour long sermon that made me think of a Bob Newhart skit. In the skit from MadTV, Newhart is a psychologist seeing a patient for the first time. Now, here is the salient part of MacArthur’s sermon about sin:
“Now what is he [Paul] saying? I’ll tell you what he’s saying. Stop lusting. It’s not too mystical. Stop lusting. It’s like 1 Corinthians 6:18, “Flee immorality.” Do you want to put to death the lusts in your heart? Then stop entertaining them. Peter doesn’t describe some complex program of therapy, he says quit lusting. Stop it. Put it out of your life. There’s no point sitting around waiting for some heavenly power to erase lust. There’s no point spending hours and hours or years and years looking for the right formula to chase away the demon of lust. Here’s a most simple straight-forward means of killing sin, stop lusting…stop it. It’s kind of like James 4 which says resist the devil and he’ll flee from you. Stop lusting and you’ll stop sinning.”
Here is the Newhart piece which I believe makes a great companion to the MacArthur point about sin. Watch the first 2:40:
LOL! If you want to get the impact of the point, then listen to MacArthur’s full part one of ‘Hacking Agag to pieces’. Then think of the Newhart skit. We laugh at the moment when Newhart says “STOP IT!” but there is truth to those words. We engage in self-indulgent therapies for sins we maintain are generated outside of our bodies, not inside. We let them linger, run around, placate them because those sins are ‘not our fault’. But MacArthur is right. There is no complex therapy that will help us stop sin. There is no divining rod to pass over us to erase it. It is up to us to stop it at the root. And that root is our thoughts. Do not think about your lusts. Do not entertain thoughts of them. STOP IT.
“Easy for you to say that!” you might make a charge against me. But I’ve been there. I’m still there. I have to work really really hard at not letting sinful thoughts enter into my head. When I find them, I have to work at telling my brain to “STOP IT”. It’s work. Paul said in Romans 6:12 “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts.” Do not. It is as simple as that. “Present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.” If you put on your armor, resist the devil, and guard your thoughts, “For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” (Romans 6:13b-14). And that is a very good place to be.
I don’t doubt that there are real cases of abuse and intimidation and oppression out there. There always have been. What’s different is that due to the current ‘intersectionality’ culture, everyone feels like they have a victim story to tell, and that it’s all valid and without scrutiny, thank you.
Do I know what I’m talking about? Yes. I’m personally familiar with various abuses.
But you know what? Because I am not a snowflake, I don’t focus on any of that. It happened, it’s real, it hurt me or my family members, but it’s in the past. You move on. I am a new creature, a new creation, with a bright future to look forward to. I have a Father who will not disown me, who understands me because He made me, a church family, riches in heaven, fruit of the Spirit growing every day. I have a sweet life in Christ, and being a victim is not a part of that.
Some of the things I read women claiming is misogyny or oppression or abuse, just isn’t. It isn’t ladies! People like Beth Moore don’t help when she writes about her experiences of being “ignored” or “made fun of at team meetings”, “dismissed and ridiculed and talked down to”. Ladies, being talked down to is not abuse, it’s not misogyny, it’s not oppression. When someone “disrespects” you it isn’t necessarily “because of gender”, and even if it is, so what? No need to make a federal case. Ladies, just get on with things. It’s inconceivable that someone with the (sad) amount of influence Beth Moore has in our evangelical world would make a federal case of ‘being disrespected’.
Christian women in other parts of the world are being persecuted to such an extent that to be ‘ignored’ would be a blessing. One woman pseudo-named Maryam for safety purposes talks of her father being put in jail for complaining to police about the Muslims that block his store, and the threats of acid attacks on her sisters, and the Muslim gang of men that tried to stone her as she walked down the street.
One thinks of the Christian women that have come before us in history, like Amelia E. Barr in the 1800s, who with her husband emigrated to the US from England, lost the business opportunity they emigrated to, moved to Texas where her husband and 4 of her sons died of yellow fever. She was left alone to raise her daughters, and she worked tirelessly to do so- successfully, Barr had no time to whine about not being heard at team meetings. As a matter of fact, she said this:
“In my life I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man’s work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me.”
As I discussed these things with some younger women on Twitter, the longest conversation I’ve had on Twitter for the last ten years, none of them got it. As a matter of fact, one woman posted the Wonder Woman gif (not this one but similar.)
I replied that they’re funny, thinking they’re all warrior princesses, while no one is making the armor, cleaning up after Wonder gal, or cooking her meals. Everyone is a warrior princess. No one is a servant. In today’s cultural language of “I’m empowered, because I recovered from my abuse” stances, being a servant (slave, gasp!) without an abuse story is distasteful and frowned upon. We’re all chiefs, no one is a bottle washer.
Amelia Barr was a warrior princess. So was Susannah Spurgeon, Katy Von Bora, Gladys Aylward, Susanna Wesley. They got on with things. They got things done. They didn’t have time to write whiny blogs and post gifs of Wonder Woman. I don’t mean to be mean, or dismissive, but I do mean to exhort our ladies for greater strength and restraint in touting one’s self, even when speaking of the negative that needs (does it really?) to be told.
I read this of the Apostle Paul’s constant thankfulness. Here was a man who really was abused, oppressed, and hated. He endured so much for the sake of the Gospel. And yet he never called himself a warrior prince, he never set out to grab empowerment from telling his story, never boasted except in Christ. John MacArthur Romans Commentary:
During his second Roman imprisonment, he may have spent time in the wretched Mamertine prison. If so, we can be sure he was thankful even there, although the city sewer system ran through the prison. I was told on a visit there that when the cells were filled to capacity, the sewage gates were opened and all the inmates would drown in the filthy water, making way for a new batch of prisoners. But Paul’s thankfulness didn’t rise or fall on his earthly circumstances but on the richness of his fellowship with the Lord.
Even if Paul was never incarcerated at Mamertine prison, you know for sure other Christians were, and more thanlikely died that way.
Do you know what Christian women do? They persevere. They endure to the end. They forgive. They know that love covers a multitude of sins. If there’s abuse like physical beating, we go to a shelter. If there is rape or harassment or stalking, we go to the police. But not every slight is abuse. Not every want that’s denied is oppression. What we do is as Jimmy Buffett sang.
“Breathe in, breathe out, move on.”
Let’s stop gazing at the lint in our bellies and thinking it is the thorn in our side. The American-female empowerment through abuse-story telling culture has to stop. Women, Sisters, breathe in, breathe out, (tell the authorities if necessary) and move on.
Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, (Hebrews 12:1)
We have a sin-nature. Everyone born after Adam (except Jesus) inherited it.Before salvation when we flowed along with everyone else int he world who wasn’t saved, we never noticed it. After salvation when we turned 180 degrees and faced the full brunt of the flow of the world’s enmity against God, then we felt it.
We feel it every day inside of us. Paul certainly did. In Romans 7:15 he pleaded out loud,
For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
And he definitely had been a Christian a long time and had lots of practice at it.
Believers can never conquer the sin nature. We can subdue it, wrestle with it, have some small victories over it. It might retreat to a dark corner of the heart for a while until a more opportune time, but we can’t be victorious over it.
With the Spirit’s help we can grow in righteousness, putting the squeeze on the remaining space in us that the sin-nature has to make room for. It might shrink back, but it can never leave us. Why?
The sin-nature is part of our flesh. Like this:
We can chip away at it, but the sin-nature remains an integral part of our biology.
After the resurrection when Jesus gives us new bodies in eternity, and we are glorified with no sin particle left in us, we will stand tall and proud, trophies of His glory. Like this:
Our roots in Christ, our sap His righteousness, our leaves His mercies, beautifully made and reaching for the Son.
Until then, we continue killing the sin in us-
For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. (Romans 8:13)
We’re losing the meaning of our uniquely Christian words.
I listened to a Phil Johnson interview where he talked about being caught off guard this spring with the flooding-in and vehemence of the social justice movement and the racial equality woke movement.
It is a true fact that many of our younger people think that ‘social justice’ is the same thing as ‘biblical justice’ when they certainly are not.
Biblical illiteracy is high, and with the lack of actually reading the Bible, younger people are losing the meaning of foundational words like justification, sanctification, glorification. It doesn’t help when venerable theologians choose to use phrases like “future justification; instead of ‘justification’ and confuse, well, just about everybody.
Some years ago I enjoyed the Apologetic Index’s listing of the Emerging Church: Glossary of Emergent Terms For Those New to the Conversation. It was funny, if you were up on the movement. It was also sad to see how devastatingly accurate those writers were about the co-opting of normal terms and made to mean something new. Like this entry to their ‘dictionary’-
Christ – An incredible, outstanding man in the Bible who left behind a valuable story that enables us to make the world a better place. Some people (including some in the emergent conversation) say he is a divine being, but this concept is subject to deconstruction.
Since we in our native countries speak a language to each other and are subsequently understood, we tend to think that language stays the same. It doesn’t. Language isn’t static. Meanings shift and move all the time. Hogwash was a word that came into use, rise int he 1700s, peaked in the 1800s and now you rarely see it written anymore and even more rarely, spoken. Lots of words that are currently in use weren’t a existence when I was a kid, because the thing the word refers to wasn’t invented. Compact Disc (and even that is dwindling as digital music takes over), surf-n-turf, head trip, grok, miniseries, and biohazard were words that were new when I was growing up.
New words today would include adulting, sup, suh, trill…sigh, are currently trendy words.
Or words still exist but change meaning. When I was growing up, incontinent means liable to pee one’s pants. 2 Timothy 3:3 uses the word incontinent-
Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
No it does not mean that men everywhere will be dribbling. The word in the 1300s-1400s used to mean without self-control emotionally and physically, now it evokes only the lack of control over the bladder. We don’t use the word dayspring much anymore. Suffer in the old translation of “suffer the little children to come unto me” has a different meaning now. We don’t see words like froward, graven, cleave, or husbandman in common use these days.
So words fall in and out of use, new words emerge, and old words shift meaning.
However the thread of Christianity depends on a unity from one generation to the next of mutual understanding of our important words. Words handed down that form the bricks of our faith must be used, taught, and widely understood. We must understand the important terms.
Defined by Baker’s Exegetical Dictionary, public domain. More at link
Justification is the declaring of a person to be just or righteous. It is a legal term signifying acquittal.
Accordingly it is not surprising that salvation is often viewed in legal terms. The basic question in all religion is, “How can sinful people be just (i.e., be justified) before the holy God?” Justification is a legal term with a meaning like”acquittal”; in religion it points to the process whereby a person is declared to be right before God. That person should be an upright and good person, but justification does not point to qualities like these. That is rather the content of sanctification. Justification points to the acquittal of one who is tried before God. In both the Old Testament and the New the question receives a good deal of attention and in both it is clear that people cannot bring about their justification by their own efforts.The legal force of the terminology is clear when Job exclaims, “Now that I have prepared my case, I know I will be vindicated” ( Job 13:18 ).
Justification means that God brings down the gavel and declares a person righteous, despite their crimes, because they have passed through the Righteous Door of Jesus. This was enacted when Jesus died on the cross, becoming sin for us, and then His righteousness was imputed to us. Therefore God can and does declared His elect justified, i.e. no longer under penalty for their crimes.
Phil Johnson wonderfully explains it here in this sermon-
Our church has a healthy demographic of college kids. The other day I was watching an Instagram video story a young friend posted of a bunch of the youths in high spirits romping around the college campus at midnight, then heading to CVS for sodas, laughing and pushing and giggling.
I smiled, remembering my own hi-jinks and clean fun- road trips and loud laughter and silly fun. Ahhh, youth.
Those kind of memories are satisfying because that is how youths act, college or no. They’re boisterous, they’re lively, they’re carefree, they’re happy.
Kim Shay at The Upward Call blog published a good essay a few days ago about older women not being a trope. (In TV or Movies a trope is a common overused theme or device). In many TV shows, the older women is depicted as silly, or a gossip, or a busybody. Think Hyacinth Bucket (Bou-quet) or the sanctimonious Church Lady of Saturday Night Live by Dana Carvey. Or Mrs Bridgette McCarthy on Father Brown, a church secretary, gossip, and often at odds with and acerbic toward other characters.
It was a look at how older women should act according to Bible verses that command reverence and sober-mindedness.
I’m an older woman now I’m almost 58 years of age. I have completely white hair, overweight, a lumbering stiff walk, and oh my achin’ back. All the things that come with old age, including sagging skin, age spots, and general droopiness.
Not me. Yet.
I remember being a teen at a friends’ house listening to the latest music laying upside down, college road trips, my car stuffed with gangly youths, a young adult with my posse playing bar trivia…it was yesterday. Ladies, age creeps up on silent cat feet (with apologies to Carl Sandburg). The boisterous hi-jinks no longer suit. If I were to gadabout at CVS at midnight with pals, they’d lock me up for being crazy. Why? That’s not how older women act.
They line the wall at dances sitting in folding chairs, purses firmly atop lap. They tut-tut at the beauty and litheness of the young ones sailing by. They cook and serve the meals with a knowing nod and quiet hospitable satisfaction. They accept collect calls from grandkids at midnight when the car breaks down on the way home from hi-jinks. They rearrange the potlucks on the sagging table, they form the cleanup swat team afterwards. I should say instead, we. I’m a we now.
I know some of these are a writing trope in themselves, but they are tropes because they are true.
Kim wrote: “My husband once asked me with regard to the women who have spoken at my church’s women’s conferences: “Why is the speaker always young and beautiful instead of old and plain?”
I was noticing that, too. So many of the speakers at conferences now are younger women (in addition to all ages of men). Do younger women have something to say? Yes, but so do older women. And the elder females have been at it longer.
So since we have been at it longer what do we say about how to conduct ourselves? Well, whatever the Bible says about our conduct. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of biblical behavioral standards, I’ll mention that whenever I discuss behavioral standards, particularly applied to false teachers, these comments receive the most negative feedback of all the kinds of comments I make online. People hate to be reminded that the Bible endlessly outlines behavioral standards of any kind. There are general calls for certain kinds of good behavior, there are specific calls for individual demographics, and there is a reminder that we will be judged on how we behaved as well as what we believed.
In one set of verses we read about how we are to act, and the reason for it-
as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, 5 beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; 6 by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; 7 by truthful speech, (2 Corinthians 6:4-7a)
Why? “so that no fault may be found with our ministry” (2 Corinthians 6:3b).
But what specifically of elder women? If we are married to a overseer, act in ways that aid him in keeping order in the household. (1 Timothy 3:4). If married to a deacon, the same, (1 Timothy 3:12. Additionally, deacon’s wives must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. (1 Timothy 3:11). I am assuming that wives of pastors and deacons aren’t entirely youthful because the qualifications for pastors are not to be recent converts (1 Timothy 3:6) and to have built up a good reputation- which takes time. (1 Timothy 3:7).
If we are a widow, Paul in 1 Timothy 5 described real widows as: “Now she who is a widow indeed and who has been left alone, has fixed her hope on God and continues in entreaties and prayers night and day.” Which reminds me of Anna at the temple in Luke 2.
A widow could be put on the list for church aid if she had behaved in the following way-
A widow is to be put on the list only if she is not less than sixty years old, having been the wife of one man, 10having a reputation for good works; and if she has brought up children, if she has shown hospitality to strangers, if she has washed the saints’ feet, if she has assisted those in distress, and if she has devoted herself to every good work.
An elder married woman is not to be contentious, as Syntyche and Euodia were. (Philippians 4:2). Titus 2 is the famous verse that outlines how older women are to act-
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
Reverent in behavior. Self-controlled. Kind. These are not hard to understand and not unreasonable to ask. When I write about behavioral standards other women rush to scream and rant, but really, what is there to rant against? They want to lose control? Be irreverent? Unkind?
Anyway, the Bible outlines behavioral standards for all ages. As I pass through the aging eras and enter the golden gate of elder womenhood, I’ll try to be mindful of how the Bible expects me to behave, so as not to discredit the ministry. Plus, I’ll try not to be a trope!
Further Reading
This makes a nice companion piece. Jared Wilson, that whippersnapper at age 42, not only muses on growing old, but provides some helpful tips to grow old gracefully.
I spent 42 years striding the earth, self-satisfied with my smartness and artful living. I was at enmity with Jesus, hating Him and loving self. I sinned, sinned some more, and sinned again. I deserved a meteoric projectile to the head. Like this guy:
A man managed to escape the first eruptive fury of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, only to be crushed beneath a block of stone hurled by an explosive volcanic cloud, new excavations at the site suggest. Archeologists working at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, Italy, found the man’s remains almost 2,000 years after he died.
Stunning pictures from the scene show a skeleton pinned beneath the stone. The impact crushed the top of the man’s body. His head might still be buried beneath the block of stone.
Instead, what I received was patience for over four decades, and protection from death (which I deserved, Romans 6:23). At the moment of appointed time for Jesus to come into my life, I was given grace, the Spirit of repentance, salvation, justification, adoption, eternity in glory, co-heirship with God, righteousness imputed, spiritual blindness lifted, the indwelling Spirit…and so much more.
As a craven wretched sinner, I deserved a meteor to the head. Instead, I received loving tender reconciliation.
Let the image above, which is dramatic enough as it really happened to an unfortunate citizen of Pompeii in 79AD, sink in. Don’t let a day go by without praying in thankfulness to Jesus for salvation, and not getting what we really deserved.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— (Ephesians 2:8)
I was destined for great things. My mother promised. Women can do anything. My mother said. We should be feminists. My mother urged. All in our family are successful- entrepreneurs, professors, businessmen, doctors. So that was proof.
I was indeed on that trajectory when Christ interrupted my plans, humbled them, humbled me, and plucked me from the secular notion of success and began the long road of transforming my mind into acceptance of Christian success.
It took a long while of shaving, sharpening, and altering before I ceased to yearn for the worldly conception of fame, honor, and prosperity. Perhaps that is why I’m so sensitive to unsuitable female Christian yearning. Perhaps there are still vestiges of the old yearnings in me still. Likely both.
It’s been discouraging to see the speed with which women who claim to be Christian push and clamor for secular notions of worldly success. They set aside the Bible’s promises, commands, and duties for greener grass. They know not that the grass will wither and burn. The biblical framework for female duty and contentment is no longer enough, if it ever was, and swing out sister there they go into the world of fame, honor, and prosperity.
We read recently of so-called Bible teacher Beth Moore’s yearning for opportunities for leadership she lamented would never come her way, so she quit seminary.
1988:
“After a short time of making the trek across Houston while my kids were in school, of reading the environment and coming to the realization of what my opportunities would and would not be, I took a different route.” (source)
And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15).
We read of author Sarah Young, author of Jesus Calling, and her yearning ‘for something more’ … because the Bible wasn’t enough.
2004:
I knew that God communicated with me through the Bible, but I yearned for more. Increasingly, I wanted to hear what God had to say to me personally on a given day.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, (2 Timothy 3:16).
We read of Elizabeth Graham’s letter to the Southern Baptist Convention, and her yearning to be more than just a wife and mother, sent in 2009 and resurfaced this week.
2009
“I have aspirations of being a wife and mother, but I also desire to be more than that, and I see very few opportunities within the SBC to do so.”
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
Discontent! Feminism, First Wave, Second Wave, Third Wave, wave upon wave of secular assault has taken its toll. It has infected women. Gangrenously killing the healthy flesh even while it races about the body calling for more, ever more yearnings that suck the blood from healthy tissue and turns it dead as it stands.
Discontent is a killer.
Satan whispers to women that being a wife and mother isn’t enough. That unless you are a leader, out there, in front, you’re behind. That staying at home means you are missing all the opportunities, all of them! … for what, he doesn’t say. He just stirs up discontent with where women are, with what they have.
Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. (1 Timothy 6:6-8).
If there is great gain in contentment, there is great loss in discontentment. It’s safe to say that is a corollary.
From the 1990s television comedy show Seinfeld, we see a conversation between Kramer and George. It takes Kramer less than a minute to infect George, who goes from jaunty and content, to craving, to yearning, to having no reason for getting up in the morning. Discontent works just that fast in the Christian body.
How long has this discontent in women been present on earth? Since the beginning. Eve had a conversation with Kramer, the serpent, and suddenly she was discontent because she wasn’t like God, she didn’t know good and evil. She yearned.
In researching for this essay, I discovered an incredible, hilarious, and bulls-eye essay about the poison of “Discontented Women”. It was written in 1896 in the height of the Suffragette movement of First Wave Feminism. Its author Amelia Barr (1831-1919) was a mother, widow, and novelist. The 10-page essay is found easily online in lots of places, and I am also going to quote liberally from it below. It was published in the North American Review in 1896.
Discontent is a vice six thousand years old, and it will be eternal; because it is in the race. Every human being has a complaining side, but discontent is bound up in the heart of woman; it is her original sin. For if the first woman had been satisfied with her conditions, if she had not aspired to be “as gods,” and hankered after unlawful knowledge, Satan would hardly have thought it worth his while to discuss her rights and wrongs with her. That unhappy controversy has never ceased; and, with or without reason, woman has been perpetually subject to discontent with her conditions and, according to her nature, has been moved by its influence. ~Amelia Barr, 1896
Puritan Thomas Boston argued that discontent is actually a violation of the Tenth Commandment, expressed in his monumental sermon “The Hellish Sin of Discontent.” He wrote:
Question: “What is forbidden in the Tenth Commandment?” Answer: “The Tenth Commandment forbiddeth all discontentment with our own estate, envying, or grieving at the good of our neighbor, and all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his.” … [Discontent] is the hue of hell all over.
Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
“But, but”, women say, “changing diapers and wiping noses is boring! Tedious! Monotonous! Being out in the world is better!” Mrs Barr replies,
In the van of these malcontents are the women dissatisfied with their home duties. One of the saddest domestic features of the day is the disrepute into which housekeeping has fallen; for that is a woman’s first natural duty and answers to the needs of her best nature.
It must be noted that this revolt of certain women against housekeeping is not a revolt against their husbands; it is simply a revolt against their duties. They consider house- work hard and monotonous and inferior, and confess with a cynical frankness that they prefer to engross paper, or dabble in art, or embroider pillow-shams, or sell goods, or in some way make money to pay servants who will cook their husband’s dinner and nurse their babies for them. And they believe that in this way they show themselves to have superior minds, and ask credit for a deed which ought to cover them with shame. For actions speak louder than words, and what does such action say?
In the first place, it asserts that any stranger — even a young uneducated peasant girl hired for a few dollars a month — is able to perform the duties of the house-mistress and the mother. In the second place, it substitutes a poor ambition for love, and hand service for heart service. In the third place, it is a visible abasement of the loftiest duties of womanhood to the capacity of the lowest paid service. A wife and mother can not thus absolve her own soul; she simply disgraces and traduces her holiest work.
Mrs Barr pulls no punches! Of these women who eye the world as their salvation and a salve for their discontent, I am reminded of one of the women of the She Reads Truth Bible study online organization. Diana Stone loves to write, so much so that at first she employed a nanny in the home part-time to help with her daughter, and then decided to load her daughter to day care, so Diana could return home and write. And so, any stranger could and did substitute a poor ambition for love.
Mrs Barr continues:
Suppose even that housekeeping is hard and monotonous, it is not more so than men’s work in the city. The first lesson a business man has to learn is to do pleasantly what he does not like to do. All regular useful work must be monotonous, but love ought to make it easy; and at any rate, the tedium of housework is not any greater than the tedium of office work. … And as a wife holds the happiness of many in her hands, discontent with her destiny is peculiarly wicked.
Lest one think that Mrs Barr was writing from a catbird seat, she emigrated to New York from England with her husband, leaving her home country behind forever. Her husband’s business prospect failed, so they moved from New York to Texas, where her husband and four sons promptly died of yellow fever, she lost many other of her 12 children, she managed on her own, eventually moving back to NY and began teaching and writing novels and poetry. She never remarried.
Mrs Amelia E. Barr wrote, like Sarah Young, Beth Moore, Diana Stone wrote. Mrs Barr did it out of necessity, working away so as to put food on the table for her children. Not, as Diana Stone says, because she made writing a priority over her children and returned to a comfy home after unloading her kids at a daycare. Not like Beth Moore, who wanted ‘opportunities’ but quit seminary because those opportunities (read, teaching men) were denied her because she is a woman. Not like Sarah Young, who yearned for more besides the only truth given to us (the Bible). Writers all. Whiny discontents, all.
Mrs Barr wrote in her autobiography,
“In my life I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man’s work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me.”
She did it, and she did it cheerfully and wholeheartedly. In 1850, without air conditioning, without kitchen appliances, without word processors, without a smart phone, and with 12…9…6…3 kids under her feet. She wrote:
Don’t fail through defects of temper and over-sensitiveness at moments of trial. One of the great helps to success is to be cheerful; to go to work with a full sense of life; to be determined to put hindrances out of the way; to prevail over them and to get the mastery. Above all things else, be cheerful; there is no beatitude for the despairing. ~Words of Counsel: 9 Tips for Success, Amelia E. Barr
Mrs Barr concludes her essay Discontented Women,
In conclusion, it must be conceded that some of the modern discontent of women must be laid to unconscious influence. In every age there is a kind of atmosphere which we call “the spirit of the times,” and which, while it lasts, deceives as to the importance and truth of its dominant opinions.
Many women have doubtless thus caught the fever of discontent by mere contact, but such have only to reflect a little, and discover that, on the whole, they have done quite as well in life as they have any right to expect. Then those who are married will find marriage and the care of it, and the love of it, quite able to satisfy all their desires; and such as really need to work will perceive that the great secret of Content abides in the unconscious acceptance of life and the fulfillment of its duties — a happiness serious and universal, but full of comfort and help. Thus, they will cease to vary from the kindly race of women, and through the doors of Love, Hope and Labor, join that happy multitude who have never discovered that Life is a thing to be discontented with.
Happy is the woman who unashamedly says “I am a wife.” “I am a mother.” If we are not ashamed of the Gospel, we are not ashamed of any element within it, including the role He has given us to reflect His glory and image. ‘Just a mom’? Might as well say ‘Just a Christian’ when in fact being a woman, a wife, or a mother is all, because we have all, in Christ.
Further Reading
I heartily recommend the full Amelia Barr essay Discontented Women. And these other items as well
I want to accomplish a lot this summer, and not slide into laziness as I usually do. There are many temptations. The Tony Reinke book 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You spoke to me. I don’t have a smart phone but I do have a laptop and I enjoy being online all day. But I succumb to distractions just as the Reinke book noted people do with smartphones. I need discipline, and I also need to re-invigorate the atrophied “reading books” muscle I’ve let shrivel.
I noticed that my lengthier reading times, with hard copy in hand, seems to be shrinking as I absorb much smaller bytes in shorter bursts on the screen either on the laptop or Kindle. It bodes ill for lengthier Bible reading, Commentary reading, and so on. This needs to stop, and stop now.
Therefore, I made a schedule to determine if it’s even possible to read 7 books, listen 34 seminary lectures, and learn 90 pages of complicated biblical doctrine, plus continue blogging each day and keeping up with my own Bible reading, and all of it absorbed comprehensibly. The answer is to schedule it out over my summer vacation and then ‘just do it.’
The Romans day is due to a new class being offered at church, led by our elder who is a Middle School Bible teacher who specializes in teaching Romans. John is because our teaching pastor is preaching through John this summer (and beyond).
The Chou lecture days are tough as is the Biblical Doctrine day so I scheduled an easier day on Friday. Seems to be working so far. I’m going through Exodus with Dr Chou of The Master’s University and Seminary. Many of his lectures are online *(but hurry, WikiSpaces is being shut down. Download the lectures to your computer before July 31). Pairing Lundgaard’s Enemy Within and Owen’s Indwelling Sin, which Lundgaard’s book is based on, seems to be a good idea so far. Or, apparently I need a double dose of learning how to slay sin, lol.
The goal is to glorify God and enjoy Him, by learning about Him and retaining and then acting on what I’ve learned. I want to aid my sanctification in as many ways as possible. As I grow and mature, I hate my sin worse and worse.
Anyway, that’s what I’m up to this summer. What’s on your plate this season?
Tackle Biblical Doctrine along with Jessica Pickowicz and the study guide she created especially for this monumental book. It’s here.
the-end-time.org 