All right, we're going to get started.
I'm excited to be here with you.
There was a dead silence right there, a pin drop on here.
So, man, again, like Chris said, my name is Keith,
I'm lead pastor here, and I'm excited to be in this.
I'm excited about today as we get to explore this.
Before we go any farther, I want to say a shout out
to University of Idaho, Go Vandals,
and to Central Washington University, Go Wildcats.
We're excited to have you guys be a video as well.
So we are in this series.
We've been talking about this idea of how we're
created, this design, and specifically,
over the last couple of weeks, last week, and then this week,
we're talking about how this looks like for men
and how this looks like for women.
And we're talking about the fact that there's a difference.
And I want to just hit on some of those differences
real quick before we get into this.
So I begin to get on the internet and find out,
what do people say are differences not yet, not yet?
Hold on, hold off, hold off.
I'll give you, all right?
So I want to give you some ideas about this.
And so first of all, when it became to kind of understand
what is the difference between best friends
when it comes to men and women?
It says this, that diamonds are a girl's best friend.
However, dogs are man's best friend.
So you can kind of see the difference in who's smarter
in that, definitely women.
In terms of what it looks like in a bathroom,
a man's bathroom has six items, a toothbrush, toothpaste,
shaving cream, a razor, a bar of soap, and a towel.
The average number of items in a typical women's bathroom
is 337, of which a man would not be able to identify
more than 20 of these objects.
So that might just be a difference.
There's a difference in whether or not guys
or ladies love cats more.
And we can say that definitively women love cats.
Men say they love cats,
but when women aren't looking, men kick cats.
And so that might be a part of it.
When it comes to colors, and for us to understand
how women and men kind of see the colors differently
and how it looks like, I have a graph for you,
you kind of illustrate some of this, yeah.
So there you go.
There's a lot more basic for that.
And when it comes to picking out shampoo,
there's two different ways to look at this.
One, you can see all the different things.
And then the bottom one, it says shampoo.
How men pick out shampoo, it says shampoo.
And so that's kind of how it works in this.
But again, I'm really excited ladies
to talk to you specifically today about this
because I really have some stuff that's been on my heart
for a while about this.
And I don't get a whole lot of opportunities
to talk to you.
I don't get invited all to the ladies' events.
So I'm gonna seize today.
I'm gonna seize this moment to be able to communicate
some things that I think are incredibly important
about what God has to say about femininity
and about womanhood.
To start this, I think it's fair for you to say
why are you talking to us about this
and what's your context for femininity, Keith?
And so I'll let you know what my context for femininity.
One, I have a mom.
So I think I have a picture of, yeah, there's my family
and my brother looks like he's really angry
about something.
So also, as you can see, I have a sister.
So I have a mom, a sister.
And so that's a helpful perspective, obviously.
Not only that, but I have a wife and I have a daughter.
And I want to tell you in part, okay, just a second,
I'll get to him, okay?
When it comes to this whole process,
what I'm seeking is like, how do I figure out
how to tell my daughter how to be a woman?
Like last week I talked about how is it that I teach
my boys how to be men and that's overwhelming.
But then there's a picture of my daughter here.
She's on the beach and so I say, let me take your picture.
And she strikes that pose and I'm like, oh no,
this is not gonna go well.
But when it comes to being girly, she has no problem.
Here's at the park.
No, here's at her birthday.
So there she is posing for her picture in a frame.
Here's another photo of her with a massively big bow there.
And then I think I have one more.
This is her last week.
My wife says, hey, let's go to the park.
And so she decides that when she goes to the park,
she's gonna wear her park attire.
Evidently, her park attire is all pink with a ring on
with a necklace on and with a tiara.
So this is my little girl.
She is a 100% girl, 100% pink.
There's nothing that you have to do to convince her about this.
But the question is not whether or not she's girly or not.
But the thing is, as we begin to probe deeper into this,
it's not just about wearing plastic tiaras
and it's not just about wearing pink.
There's got to be something more
that it means to be a woman.
There's got to be something more that femininity
requires than just wearing pink.
And that's where we're at today, asking the question,
what is it that's beyond just being a girl
that it means to be a woman?
And for me, this is something that I really want to speak to
because I think it is incredibly misunderstood.
I think that femininity is dramatically under attack.
And I think that it's so under attack
that sometimes we don't realize it
because of how far we've drifted
from what God has to say about it.
There's a push for femininity to look like masculinity.
And ultimately the end goal of this kind of push
is for there to be just ambiguity in humanity and humanness.
And I think that this is not going to lead us.
I believe that this doesn't lead us to human flourishing.
That when we take and make something that's kind of neutered
or something that loses its specific understanding
of masculinity and femininity,
it's not gonna lead us to flourishing.
And I think that we've already established that
and we can see some of these things.
But the question is, what is it that it looks like?
And I believe that you ladies are created
with an inherent femininity.
And that when you embrace this,
it is going to bring clarity and security to your life
in a way that allows you to flourish.
But I think that right now in our world,
it is incredibly difficult for you to be a woman.
It is incredibly difficult for a woman to be in our world.
There's an overwhelming pressure to look a certain way.
And there's a sense of comparison that is so physical
that every single girl loses
because there's always someone who is prettier.
And at the same time that there's that side of it,
there's this reaction to what it means to be a woman.
And that basically it's saying that you should act like a man.
And so that you should look like a woman,
but you should act like a man.
And what that creates in the personhood of a woman
is such a dramatic fracture of what it looks like
that you're really searching, I think,
for what does it mean?
So I'm supposed to look this way,
I'm supposed to act this way,
but what does it really mean to be a woman?
What does this look like?
And I think that as we begin to kind of pursue this,
for me, I believe it's so much easier to teach my boys
how to be boys and it will be to teach my little girl
how to become a woman.
Because I think in some ways there's a sense
that you women are,
that there's an escape from femininity for some of you.
And I think there's two reasons for this.
One is that maybe in the past,
you've received negative attention for being a girl,
for being a woman.
And this is really seen in some of these commercials
that say, what does it mean to do something like a girl?
And there's this negativity that's associated with this
that somehow you want to escape femininity
because there's a negativity affiliated with that.
Maybe that's in your major,
maybe that's within other things in your world,
but you're not wanting to be feminine
because it has these negative connotations.
But for others of you,
there's, you want to escape from femininity
because you got a lot of positive attention
when you were a girl and that made you uncomfortable.
That you were put into positions where your femininity
was kind of exposed and that puts you in situations
that it didn't make you feel safe.
It didn't make you feel secure.
It made you feel exploited.
And I think that these are the two things,
they're two of the things that make us kind of decide
to not want to press into femininity,
but to escape from this.
But I want to tell you that this is something
that is not God's plan.
And we started off with God's design.
And God's design from the very beginning was intentional,
was intelligent, and God created all this.
And specifically, he created humans.
And we see that God created humans in his image,
which means that our inherent worth and our value
comes from God alone, not from anything that we do,
not from our comparison to other people,
not because of our gender, but it comes from God alone.
In Genesis 1, 27, it says this.
So God created mankind in his own image.
In the image of God, he created them male and female.
He created them.
And we have to land here before we can go anywhere else
and exploring what it means to be male
and what it means to be female.
Because God specifically says,
I'm gonna make humanity in my own image,
but I'm going to make them male and female,
intentionally designed to be different.
And so God pushes this way.
And last week, we established that this was deeper
than just biology.
This was at a personhood level.
It means that we aren't just humans,
but we are men, and we are women,
and we possess a God-given masculinity and femininity
that is given to us by God to reveal God's glory.
And so in this, my hope is that we begin to see
that the desire of God is that masculinity
is to be self-evident and unquestioned.
But the truth is, this is not the reality that we live in.
We live where masculinity has been distorted.
And we live where femininity is distorted,
and it's under attack.
And I want us to see how this began.
Why is it under attack?
Why is it distorted?
Because maybe if we can understand what is wrong,
we can begin to understand
how it ultimately is supposed to look.
And before we go any farther,
I want you to hear for you, if you're single in this,
the Bible is specifically talking,
and all of this text and principles
are specifically talking in the marriage relationship.
So that's where we're going to directly speak to today,
the marriage relationship.
But I think as you begin to hear this stuff,
you can begin to understand that indirectly
this affects those of you who aren't married.
If you're single, if you're a single guy,
if you're a single girl here today,
you're going to hear some stuff that begins to say
that still is the trajectory of womanhood.
This is the essence of femininity.
And I think that we'll be able to put this together.
But we're going to start with the distortion
because I think that that brings clarity
to what this looks like.
So yes, last week we talked about this.
We have the creation where it was perfect
in the way that men and women were put together.
And we see the fall.
And last week we got into that specifically
on how sin entered the world.
And when sin entered the world,
it fractured the way that God intended it to be.
And now we have this shadow of the way
that God intended it to be.
And we have the sin that enters into the world
and it distorts primarily this understanding
of the roles of masculinity and femininity.
And I want you to see how core this is.
This is not a peripheral topic,
because when we see sin enter into the world,
it affects men and women differently.
When we begin to see God describe,
here's what's going to happen when sin distorts these roles.
It's at the very core of how we are
and it's the very core of creation.
So if you have your copy of the scripture,
you can turn with me to chapter three, verse 16 of Genesis.
And we're just going to be up on the screen
and also it's going to be on our app as well.
But it says this.
So after we see this, this is God saying,
this is the description of what it looks like
after sin has entered the world.
To the woman, he said,
I will make your pains in childbearing very severe.
With painful labor, you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband
and he will rule over you.
So I want you to see the effects
of what sin happens in womanhood.
The first thing that you need to understand
is that sin affects women in motherhood.
Sin affects women in motherhood.
And what we can look at,
it seems like when we look at this,
it seems pretty self-explanatory.
However, as I begin to read and do research,
most people who understood,
most Jewish women who understood this text
in the very beginning,
understood that this cursed went beyond
this simple act of childbearing
and includes the raising of children as well.
And this concurs with scripture
throughout the New Testament
that speaks to the woman's unique capacity
and responsibility in raising children.
It reads like women will naturally migrate
towards feelings of responsibility at their core
for the well-being of their children
and that the curse of sin affects them in a unique way
and that the entry of sin into the world
will affect them in a way
that's significantly different than men.
And we attempt to explain this
and begin to understand this with words like
mother's intuition
or that there's something in the heart of a mother
that's in some ways different than that
which is just in the heart of a man.
And in this, when we begin to see the sin affect a woman,
there's this idea of bringing children into this world,
the nurturing, the responsibility of this,
but then the effects of sin on her children
are pretty devastating to the heart of a woman.
So when she begins to put her effort into raising kids,
when there's a sense of being felt responsible for this
and sin affects her kids,
I've seen this over and over
and maybe you've seen this in mom's calls to you, right?
And how mom is checking up on you
and there's a sense by which there's a responsibility
that's placed on that that seemingly unique
in the way that it falls on a woman's shoulders
that's different from that of a man.
And so when we begin to think about this,
there's a role that women and specifically mothers
in this are assigned that is one of incredible respect.
So, right?
So you don't like it when someone talks about your mama.
I mean, there's a reasons why we have yo mama jokes, right?
And not just yo daddy jokes,
because yo daddy jokes aren't near as funny as yo mama jokes
because there's something that strikes
in the core of who we are.
There's something that when we hear someone talk
about our mama that, you know, I'm gonna,
that's fighting words, right?
Because there's something there,
there's a unique aspect of that.
So that's the first part of how sin kind of hits that.
The second part we begin to see
and your desire will be for your husband.
Now, when we read that, that seems like all of a sudden,
like something happened and then all of a sudden
Adam got hot, you know?
And so all of a sudden, I didn't desire him, but I did.
You know, so if I think about it almost reads
as if the narrative would go like something like this
from the woman's perspective,
like Adam was just this dude, right?
And then all of a sudden he ate the sin apple
and all of a sudden I realized he is so hot,
like there's no one on earth that's sexier than this guy,
right?
And then he eats the apple
and all of a sudden he starts covering stuff up, right?
And so I didn't realize what I had, you know,
naked guy walking around the garden.
That was utopia, right?
That's not what we're talking about here, right?
That's just wrong on a whole lot of levels, right?
But this is not what is happening with Eve.
Eve didn't eat the apple and all of a sudden Adam got sexy,
right?
Send him into the world and bring sexy back.
This is not how this all worked together, right?
This is something uniquely,
this is something that's different.
The more accurate reading is this relationship
is going to get distorted and it's designed
so that your desire will be for your husband's position,
right?
Your desire will be to be over your husband.
And in fact, there might be a footnote in your Bible
that this word for can be also be translated against
and that's a more accurate rendition
so that your desire will be in fact against your husband.
See, this is where this makes sense.
When we begin to see sin enters the world
and there begins to be an upsetting in the order
that God created in this way.
And this responds with this idea
that your husband will rule over you.
That's a distortion.
We talked about that last week.
That's a distortion of God's intent in this.
And so God's intent is that God,
that guys would have this loving sacrificial,
humble leadership of a woman, not a rule over kind of,
that's the distortion,
but it should be a humble,
others centered sacrificial leadership.
And in this, the right way for this to be working
in terms of design is for women to be able to respond to that
in a way that accelerates this whole thing together.
So this is the distortion that happens in this.
When we begin to see this played out,
we see verses like Proverbs 21, 19,
it says this, this is the distortion, right?
Better to live in a desert
than with the quarrelsome and nagging wife.
And so this is a guy saying to another guy,
hey, you know what, when it gets like that,
when it gets distorted,
I'm just moving to the desert, right?
I'm getting out of here.
So the other side is when we talk about all of these,
these are these sinful realities.
This is what the Bible speaks into.
So the rest of the Bible is taking this
and is pointing back to the fall,
is pointing back into this understanding.
And so last week we talked about
what biblical masculinity looked like.
We looked at what godly masculinity looks like
and discovered that it was rooted
in Christ's action towards a church.
Specifically, godly masculinity is motivated
by the sacrificial love of Christ
and mimics this initiating sacrificial love specifically
for husbands towards their wives.
And even more specifically,
this looks like men accepting the responsibility
through leading, protecting and providing.
And so with that understanding of masculinity,
what is the reciprocal femininity?
What does that look like?
How is that to be your son?
That's the question that we have to answer today.
What is this?
I think oftentimes we ask, what should a woman do?
What is her roles?
But I think it's far more helpful for us to ask,
what is a woman?
What is her design?
Why did God place woman in our midst?
And so we're gonna explore that.
And to explore that,
we're gonna go to the second chapter of femininity,
the introduction of woman.
And so in the second chapter of Genesis,
what we're gonna see in verse 18 is what happens
when things are not going well,
God said, hey, that's not good.
And so I'm gonna win woman to save the day, okay?
So verse 18, the Lord God said,
it's not good for the man to be alone.
I will make, and here we begin to see this,
I will make a helper suitable for him, a helper.
Yay, that's an inspiring word, ladies, am I right?
You know, this is what my little girl longs for,
this idea of being a helper.
This is what I get frustrated sometimes
because our translations are so weak in this.
And if we were to be people that understood this word
in its original language,
I don't think there would be so many things
that would fight against this idea.
You see, this idea in the original Hebrew,
the word is easer.
And easer, it has this word of helper,
but it's more specifically this idea of sustainer
beside him, sustainer beside him.
And here's what you begin to see, some context for this.
The word easer is used only 20 other places
in the entire Old Testament.
And in every other instance,
the person being described as the easer is God himself.
This is when you need him to come through desperately.
And so what we begin to see is easer is only used twice
in the Genesis creation narrative,
specifically pointed towards women.
And then throughout the rest of scripture,
it is used as a military term.
It is used as a term of a warrior
and protecting in this kind of way,
in a way that is helping and coming alongside.
It is not a weak word.
An easer is someone who is for you.
And a woman as an easer reflects God as an easer,
as an ally, someone who nurtures and brings strength in this.
This is a powerful, powerful term
about how something comes along for something greater.
In the New Testament, this idea of helper,
this is, we get the word paraclete.
So paraclete is the word that is kind of
the synonymous word here,
but this is the word that is used to describe
the Holy Spirit, the person of the Trinity.
Jesus says, I've come and I've done my thing
and now I'm going to leave
and I'm going to go back to heaven
and I'm going to bring something.
It's better that I go because there'll be someone
more powerful who is going to come in your midst.
And that is the helper.
That is the paraclete.
That is the Holy Spirit.
And when we begin to get this,
we begin to understand that the role of the Holy Spirit
is to be responsive to the Father
and responsive to the people that is helping.
So this is this beautiful thing.
This is a beautiful moment
where we begin to see the power in this.
Where we begin to understand that the heart of this,
that we don't see the Holy Spirit
as any part less of the Trinity,
but something that hits crucial into the whole Godhead
to make this work.
And if I was trying to think about,
what does it look like?
What's an idea that illustrates this?
And there's this picture of the flying buttress.
Maybe you don't know what a flying buttress is,
but I want to show you up on the screen.
It's this sense of this is typically seen in cathedrals, right?
And they build these very tall, right?
In order to be able to push up towards the heaven,
to be able to get a sense of spirituality,
pushing towards God.
And what is required is the load paths.
You can't go high without having something
that's alongside of that.
And so what you see is these flying buttresses
that come alongside and begin to say,
in order for this to accomplish its purpose,
this cannot happen without the flying buttress.
And this is a picture,
and there's another picture of how it looks like,
maybe in a more realistic kind of way,
but this is the essence of what God is calling,
what it looks like for us to be people
that connect to this calling.
And this is what it is.
Ladies, that throughout scripture, in various ways,
it points to women as being responsive
to godly masculinity.
See, this is this action for us,
or I'm sorry, not for us, but for you as women.
This is this action for you to say,
in light of a godly masculinity,
of a sacrificial understanding of who they are
because of the gospel towards me.
It is the response, it is my role,
it is my function to be able to respond in this kind of way.
So that at the heart of a woman,
it's a responsiveness to the sacrificial love
displayed for her and to her.
And so if we were kind of put this in the same kind
of category as we did for masculinity,
a godly woman is to be responsive
by being available to be led, protected, and provided for.
Again, this is not because of capacity,
this is because of calling.
And you might think like, you know what,
if there was a man who treated me like that,
I would just naturally go towards that.
And that would seem like a no-brainer,
but this is an issue in our world because of pride,
because of fear, but more specifically, I believe,
because we have an absence of an understanding
of what it actually means for us to live
in the image of God.
In the Amago Dei is what we said it,
that when women don't understand
that their value comes from God alone,
they will seek it in something else.
And if being led by someone else,
by a man appears to be a place
where they ascribe less to themselves,
then no matter how godly this man is,
they simply won't respond to this kind of man.
And this kind of woman will typically choose
a passive mate, and as we saw last week,
that the passivity of men is the root
of all ungodly masculinity.
And so here's the hope, is that godly femininity
responds to godly masculinity.
In the face of sacrificial love,
a woman allows herself to be loved.
She allows herself to be lovingly,
sacrificially led, protected, and provided for.
And whenever a man leads a woman like this,
and sacrifices for her, and she responds
negatively towards that,
she responds in a disrespectful kind of way.
I promise you ladies, it's like a dagger
to the heart of a man, and it opens up
a deep wound of disrespect in this.
And this is not, again, because there of any less value,
or any less capacity as a leader, or anything like this.
This is you taking the heart of Jesus on.
In Philippians two, we see Jesus comes,
and he gives up voluntarily some aspects of his deity
in order to accomplish something greater.
He said, I'm going to give up this to accomplish this.
This is, ladies, this is you being Jesus.
Men, you have an opportunity to be Jesus as well
because of the self-sacrificial love
that Jesus had for his church,
as he gave his life up for her to put her first.
And the beauty of this works together
is what Paul's talking about
when he begins to paint the picture of these roles,
and he starts off and said,
it should be mutually submissive to each other.
That men, you should be submissive to women,
in that you put them first in the sacrificial love.
That ladies, you should be submissive to men,
in that you would say, I have the availability,
I'm humbly yielding to allow you to lead me
in this kind of way.
And this is this beautiful picture.
And ladies, you might be saying,
yeah, that would be easy.
Keith, where are those guys?
Where have you stashed those guys away?
Where does this look like?
That's a unicorn, right?
That's a unicorn kind of dude, right?
I don't know if I've found that.
But I think that we should start pushing towards this.
And here's what I believe, women,
that you've been uniquely called to pull out
in the heart of a man, godly masculinity,
by reflecting the characteristics of God.
And so I wanna go through three characteristics of God
that you women possess.
Three characteristics of God that women possess.
And I want you to see this.
And these are gonna be on a continuum
because there might be some men
that possess some of these characteristics
and there might be some women that possess
or don't possess many of these characteristics.
But I want us to see these, there's two categories
on kind of a sliding scale here
that when we begin to think about this,
women, you should be pointing towards these things.
This is the characteristic of God
that you uniquely can demonstrate.
And men, your characteristics of God
that you can uniquely demonstrate.
But then we're pulling apart from this
so we can clearly see masculinity and femininity
in the way that reflects God's character.
The first thing is we begin to think about
what it looks like, what are characteristics
of God that women possess.
It's this, that godly femininity
reveals God's relational character.
That godly femininity reveals God's relational character.
That ladies, that God has placed within you
a greater desire towards relational connection.
We see this from the very beginning.
As the creation of woman has relationship all over it.
As we begin to see the curse has relationship all over it.
That at the very core, the relational capacity of women
exceeds the relational capacity of men.
Their ability to connect, their ability to go deeper,
it is a deeper understanding of relationship in this.
That ladies, you can sit and talk for hours
and you don't need an activity to keep busy.
This is very difficult for guys.
It's like let's do something
and maybe on the way we'll talk about this stuff, right?
For you ladies, language and being able to interact
is a form of relationship building.
For most men, this is the sense
of getting something done on purpose.
There's a purposefulness behind all of this.
There's a unique capacity, ladies,
that you have for relationship that exceeds that of men.
I'm talking in general terms.
You might say I know this one guy
who's more relational than this one girl.
Yes, but in general, when we begin to understand
one of the unique things that I think women have
is this invitation towards relationship,
this connectivity towards other people
that push us into being known.
And this is essential for our culture.
This is essential for our church
because if we do not pursue and allow femininity
to thrive and flourish,
then we end up being cold, distant people.
See, there's a difference
and this ladies doesn't mean introvert and extrovert.
It's something altogether different.
In fact, I have a picture.
This might be what it looks like
to have a face profile and you don't check it for a week.
Just, I thought this was a funny kind of understanding
of what this looks like.
Do we have that?
Yeah, what happens when you don't go on Facebook
for a week?
A guy and anyway, so that could be something.
That might be true of you, maybe not.
So first of all is understanding of the characteristic
of God is revealed in the relational understanding
of women.
Number two, femininity reveals God's nurturing character.
Femininity reveals God's nurturing character.
Now, this is pervasive across the Bible.
So I can't give you just one text
because there's so many of these things
over and over and over.
Psalm 131, Psalm Isaiah 66, 13.
First Thessalonians 2, 7.
All they paint pictures of this nurturing capacity of women
and to see how these reflect the nurturing capacity
of the Lord.
Nurturing is life giving.
The purpose of nurturing is to create strength
in another individual,
helping them to be who God intends them to be.
Nurturing is equipping others around us
to live out their God given calling.
To be a safe, inviting, vulnerable individual.
To be able to be someone who allows others
to come to them, I promise.
Generally, when you begin to have femininity on display,
it is an inviting thing that the desires to nurture
and to help them to become who they are.
Nurturing has nothing to do with our personality
or our individual or our season of life.
If we have this capacity,
it is simply put a capacity that every woman possesses
because she's an image bearer of God.
And God is a nurturing God
and his character is on display in femininity.
And this is a crucial thing for us to begin to understand God
because we begin to understand
that the heart of most women is a nurturing heart.
And one of the things that I think that we do
in terms of the relationship, in terms of nurturing,
is that when this is not put on display
to the extent that it should be put on display,
everything moves and I begin to think about our songs
and preaching towards this really feminization
of who God is, that we're always talking about God
as being, hey, God loves you so much and that's very true.
And God wants to be in a relationship with you
and God desires to know your hurts
and all of these are these feminine qualities
but I've seen myself because I think the attack
on femininity has its effects upon our society
that the way that we view God,
we're having to over correct on the feminine side
because we've lost some femininity in our culture.
When I begin to think about in cultures
where it was more evenly balanced,
we begin to see theology that was more evenly balanced
in this kind of way but I feel like I'm always talking
about this nurturing side of God to correct
what we don't see in the femininity
as it begins to reveal the character of God.
So women, you have to absolutely be who you are,
possessing femininity to be a part
of revealing the character of God.
This is essential to relational, that you're nurturing,
that you're being able to press into people's life,
to be inviting people into your life.
This is an essence of what it means to be a responsive
kind of godly woman in this.
Even as a single woman, you can nurture people around you,
your love, affection, softness and care
in a way that most men cannot do.
And you begin to see this role in a role
that pushes people to Christ and helps them to blossom
even in their femininity, ladies with other ladies
as you begin to say this is a part
of the characteristic of God.
This is where you get to see and press them
into what it means to be beautiful.
And that brings me into my last kind of point in this
that when we begin to see this essence of what it means
to be godly and its femininity, it's this idea of relational.
It's the idea of the characteristic of God
by being nurturing.
But it's also in this idea that God's desire,
what we begin to see is femininity reveals
God's desire for beauty.
Femininity reveals God's desire for beauty.
See, when I begin to think about my guys, my boys
and I begin to talk to other parents,
there's a sense of little boys when they want my attention.
It's always to look, dad, look at what I'm doing.
Like look at how far I can throw this thing
or look how tall I can build this building
or look at the size of my poop.
Like, you know, it's all this stuff that say,
look what I did, dad, look at this, what this looks like.
It's true, I'm just being straight up.
With my little girl, it's not look at what it would do,
but look at who I am.
Like my boys don't twirl.
My little girl twirls, right?
And it's much more not look at what I did,
look at what I created, but look at who I am.
And this is a reality that I think that you desire.
I want to give you a quote.
I think that there's something in his that is incredibly,
incredibly oriented towards revealing beauty.
It says this, Stacey Eldridge says this.
We desire to possess a beauty that is worth pursuing,
worth fighting for, a beauty that is at its core,
who we truly are.
We want a beauty that can be seen,
a beauty that can be felt,
a beauty that can affect others,
a beauty all our own to unveil.
Ladies, you are the crown of creation.
There's nothing that God created that is any more beautiful
than who you are.
And God created you that way on purpose.
It's a little like the thermos and the goblet.
Guys, let's be honest, you're the thermos, right?
This is who you are.
And what you do with thermos is when you're done,
maybe you just throw them in the back of your car, right?
You don't do that with the goblet.
Ladies, this is who you are.
You are the thing that God has created
that he sees as beautiful.
You're the crown of creation inside and out.
And ladies, what I want you to hear today,
I want you to hear that your heavenly father believes
that you are beautiful.
I want you to hear your pastor say that to you,
that your heavenly father believes that you're beautiful
because over and over, I don't believe that many of you
really believe that about yourself.
I believe that somehow you think, yeah,
there's a certain sense of me that feels beautiful.
And when I hear that song on the radio,
that I don't need anything else,
that my beauty's inside of me,
that there's something that longs to believe that,
but also there's something that I believe
that needs to be added to who I am
to make me beautiful or accepted.
And that is an absolute lie that you are beautiful
because God made you this way.
You're the goblet, not the thermos.
Rest assured that that is how God created you.
And it's not because of anything that you have to do.
And the other thing is I need you to know
that this goes beyond the depth of your skin.
It goes deeper than your skin.
In 1 Timothy 2, he says this,
and I want women to be modest in their appearance,
that they should wear decent and appropriate clothes
and not draw attention to themselves
by the way they fix their hair,
or by wearing gold or pearls,
or expensive clothes.
For a woman who claimed to be devoted to God
should make themselves attracted
by the good things that they do.
So ladies, you are attractive.
God has made you attractive,
and that's a sense that there's a mystique to you
that draws things in that you're inviting people into,
but I need you to make sure
that the beauty that you possess,
that you don't fall into the trap of the tendency
to exploit your God-given beauty in this,
because this cheapens the mystery of a woman's beauty.
This is what girls do.
This is not what women do.
Girls dress to draw the eyes of boys.
Women dress to protect their hearts
and to protect men's hearts.
See, when we begin to understand,
am I cheapening beauty, or am I embracing beauty?
This is a core thing about who you are
that God's made you this way,
and I want you to be drawn to that,
and not exploit that,
because it always, it gives back to this image of God thing,
that if you believe that boy is gonna create you,
give you that worth,
and you're gonna dress to pull that out of him,
but if you believe that God believes that,
you're going to be a secure and confident woman,
and that's what I desire for you to be,
not a crazy woman,
but a secure and confident woman,
and that your exterior would reflect your interior,
and this would be something that guards your heart,
Proverbs 4, 23 says this,
above all else, ladies,
guards your heart for everything you do flows from it.
What you believe about yourself and your heart,
are you beautiful?
Guard that, protect that, that must be protected.
This is what we do,
with beautiful things in our world,
we protect them,
we do this with our national parks,
when we see something,
this is beautiful,
this shouldn't be exploited,
but protected.
See, ladies, your beauty isn't a tool,
it is to be treasured and protected,
and if you use this as a tool,
then you will draw men,
ungodly masculinity,
that will exploit that.
And this breaks my heart,
and this is what I desire for you,
that these traits are what reflects
the characteristics of God.
That ladies, I know that when you hear this,
for some of you,
you're terrified when you hear these things
about godly femininity responding to godly masculinity,
because you're afraid of God,
responding to godly masculinity,
because you've been hurt,
you've lived in environments
where there's been a distorted masculinity,
not a godly masculinity,
and the last thing that you want to do
is let anyone lead you,
because you've been burned by that before,
and if the statistics are correct,
one in three of you has been exploited,
has been taken advantage of sexually,
and I believe that that's actually pretty low
in this land that we live in.
And so what you need to hear from your pastor,
I want to say that I'm deeply sorry
that it makes me sick,
and it makes me almost uncontrollably mad
when ungodly masculinity takes advantage of femininity.
That if I could take and eliminate one sin,
it would be this thing,
because it destroys the design of God,
it exploits when it creates hurt,
that is at the deepest level of most women,
all because that the design of God wasn't followed,
and people exploited things, distorted things.
But what I want to say is that ladies,
for those of you who've been hurt by this,
and it's really hard to hear some of this stuff,
the answer is not to forsake masculinity,
the answer is not to give up on being feminine,
the answer is to embrace God's design,
to hold out for a godly man that you can follow,
respond to, be led by, be loved by,
and be 100% secure in his arms.
It's for you to have the standard of a godly man
that is worth following.
This is what our hope is towards,
that if you've been hurt in the past,
your hope is towards a godly man.
And I promise you, the guys, ladies, sorry,
this starts right now.
It starts with needing God, not needing guys.
If you don't fully believe that God gives you worth,
even if just a little part of you believe
that some guy can give you worth,
then whether or not this guy is godly enough,
is gonna get really fuzzy for you.
And you're going to compromise in this kind of way.
If you don't believe 100% God gives you this worth,
and then when the fuzzies wear off,
you're gonna see this guy,
and whether or not this man will sacrificially love you
because the gospel has permeated his soul,
every part of his life.
But the problem is oftentimes it's too late,
and we engage and we get into these sacrificial,
sorry, covenantal relationships in this, in this place.
And we're taking and putting on guys
something that only God can fill in our hearts.
And for you married ladies, here's the thing.
If your husband is struggling to love you sacrificially,
your complaints alone will not change his heart.
Your responsive and your respectful devotion
to your husband will do more than you realize
to draw out a gospel motivated sacrificial love,
because here's the reality.
When most men realize that they are called to lead,
they immediately get incredibly insecure.
They immediately start thinking, how do I do this?
And ladies, like we said last week,
remember that most men have never seen
godly masculinity modeled to them.
And so what we're trying to do ladies,
we're doing the best we can.
We are putting into places to train guys.
We have a boot camp that we do.
Where for 24 hours, we yell at them.
We yell at them for 24 hours.
We make them carry heavy things and chop wood
and realize it's not about them.
We run around, there are town carrying bricks
that is, you know, this idea of carrying
the weight of responsibility.
At the end, we have them hold bricks
while other men tell them the capacity that they have to leave
and the unique things that God has put within them.
See, this is what we desire to make this flourish.
This is our hope for all of this.
And I wanna give you some specifics in this.
I want you to get this and to understand
that all of what I'm talking about,
it really comes from a place that I wish you could see modeled.
The problem that I have today as I'm using only words,
but let me give you a baseline
for what this looks like in my life.
I'm married to a woman almost 15 years
and this is an amazing woman.
She has multiple degrees.
She has a degree, graduate degree in theology.
She has a job outside of her home.
She doesn't know exactly how to use our vacuum
because we split the chores
in our domestic responsibilities.
She has all of this capacity.
She has way more ministry capacity than I do.
She is both incredibly relational
and incredibly administrative.
I'm neither relational or administrative.
I don't know how I got into this position, right?
I don't know what I have to give.
My wife is so much more competent in this thing,
but in order to understand how we live in God's good design,
when we have began to say,
not because she doesn't have competence,
but because of a glad yielding of responding to my leadership.
This is how our world works and it is beautiful.
And I love my marriage and I believe my wife
feels incredibly secure in this.
In fact, before I left, she said,
go tell them what this looks like because it's a beautiful picture.
What does it look like to respond in this kind of way?
And for you ladies, what does it look like outside of the home?
What does it look like as you respond
in terms of responding to masculinity outside of marriage?
What I want to say to you is outside of marriage
and to a lesser extent outside of the church,
when men don't step up to lead,
this doesn't mean that there's a leadership vacuum.
Ladies, you need to step up and lead
when there's no men that are leading
in the way that they need to lead.
And also, I want you to know that you are not to be submissive
to ungodly leadership outside of the home.
Now, in a covenantal relationship, we work that out
and that's struggle and stuff like that.
But if you have a boss, if there's something else
that is in a position above you,
if they are not living out a godly,
sacrificial kind of love, you're not called to submit to them.
You're not called to be responsive
to that kind of masculinity.
This is not the overarching thing that you need to hear.
You need to understand that this is in the context
of a godly masculinity in our churches
and in more specifically in our marriages.
And this is what I want to say.
It begins for you, the confident display of womanhood
begins with this understanding of the image of God
being displayed in a humble, yielding way.
But the beauty of all of this fits together
in the design of masculinity and the design of femininity
to paint a bigger picture.
And this bigger picture is to paint the way
that God receives glory.
And so why does femininity exist?
Why does masculinity exist?
Why does sexuality exist?
Why does male and female exist?
All of this exists to point towards God's glory.
So the end of all of this is not just,
okay, here's what I understand and have clarity about
as a woman, here's what I understand
and have clarity about as a man.
The end of this is that masculinity and femininity
and the relationship to each other
point specifically to God.
It draws out his character and points to a bigger story
than just the story between a man and a woman.
It is to reveal God's glory.
It's pointed to us for us to see God and how God works
and the beauty of flourishing that he's given
to all mankind, all humans in order for us
to live the way he desires.
And so he's saying marriage, this is a picture
of what I want you to see, femininity, masculinity.
It's a picture of something bigger than just gender.
It points to the glory of God.
And this is the thing, when we begin to see,
in the end of Romans one,
when we begin to see femininity degraded,
when we begin to see masculinity degraded,
what it leads is to social issues
and the breakdown of this leads us to the reality
of Romans one, where it gets pervasive across our culture.
It doesn't lead us to flourishing.
And so I hear, I hope you hear all of this
and I hope that you begin to say, I desire to live more
as a man, I desire to live more as a woman
and to be able to have that worldview
to ascribe value to those things
because God has given me intrinsic value before all of that.
And that ladies, that you would feel honored
that God created you as a woman.
That you would feel his pleasure
and you will feel his worth
and you would feel that you have purpose
in all the things that you are called on
to display his character.
So as we conclude, I'd like to,
just like I did with the guys last week,
I'd like to ask you to stand up.
I'd like to, ladies, I'd like to ask you to stand up
and I wanna pray over you as we conclude this.
So it'll be guys that come up here to lead us in worship.
But I want to end today and just to pray over you ladies.
So if you're a lady here, I just want to, again,
to pray over you in this way.
So if you'll join me in prayer, God,
I ask that you would help us to understand
that being made in your image
has incredible implications, God.
And that Lord, across this room,
that there would be ladies that feel more like a woman
than they ever have before.
That there is a validation to this,
that there's something that they see,
that maybe they've never seen to the extent
that they do now, that you have a beautiful plan
and that plan, as if you would draw out
what you've put within them for the glory of yourself, Lord,
for your glory and for the flourishing
of all mankind, Lord.
So maybe walk in that and embrace femininity.
We ask all this in your holy name, amen.
