Mere Breath
Excellent sermon series by my pastor. This is two parts of a 6 part series, all available here. But these two, in particular, are extremely helpful to me as a woman, wife and mom.
Except: “Lady wisdom has built her house and set a feast, and she invites the simple to her table (Pr. 9:1-6). In the Old Testament, this is what Israel was for. The tabernacle and temple were built as glorious sources of the wisdom of God for the nations, and for a few minutes during the reign of Solomon, we saw a glimmer of this (1 Kgs. 4:29-34, 10:1-13). Recall that “wisdom” is not some kind of esoteric mystery or a philosophy degree from the university. In the Bible, wisdom is given specifically for building houses (Ex. 31:3, 6, 35:26, 31, cf. Solomon), and wisdom builds houses that are flooding with life (Pr. 3:18, Eccl. 7:12). As a woman’s body is designed to give life, this constantly proclaims what she is for. This often includes the glory of bearing children, but that is merely a season of life and a symbol of what all womanhood is for. If a man is called to live by dying, a woman is called to die by living. A home is a place where there is bread to strengthen hearts and wine to make hearts glad (Pr. 9:5). A home is a place where wholesome words are spoken like nourishing food because a perverse tongue is like poison (Pr. 15:4, 31:26). To be a woman is to be a life-giver, a nurturer, a place of rest because of your obedience to and your love of the Word of God. This is the fear of the Lord (1 Pet. 3:2) which is the beginning of wisdom and a force for good to be reckoned with, as glorious and fearsome as an army streaming with banners (Song 6:4, 10). But the woman who forsakes the covenant of her God is building a house that leads down to death and Hell (Pr. 2:17-18, 9:18).”
Excerpt: “The Bible does not teach that women generally submit to all men. Rather, the Bible teaches that one woman freely agrees to submit to one man and this relationship is guarded and blessed by a public ceremony called a wedding. In our culture, in the name of freeing women, we insist that a man be free to have as many women as he wants, for as long as he wants, with no strings attached, leaving the women to pick up the pieces. Often in our day, those pieces come in the form of little babies flushed down the toilet and left in trash dumpsters, not to mention all the chemical, physical, and emotional scars. But this is not to say that every man who goes through the motions of a wedding ceremony keeps his vows honorably. This is why the Bible also teaches that a Christian woman must only submit to her husband in the Lord. In other words, the Christian wife is free to obey her husband as he leads her to obey Jesus, and she is free to obey him in so far as he is free before God (e.g. hunting, fishing, computers, books, peanut butter). But should her husband plan to disobey Jesus, she must respectfully seek to thwart him (e.g. 1 Sam. 25). This may include sexual sin, financial folly, theological infidelity, as well as cases of neglect or abuse (Ex. 21:10-11, Eph. 5:29). A husband who tries to lead his wife into Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy should be respectfully refused. A wife is actually being unsubmissive to go along with a husband’s disobedience: she is being unsubmissive to Jesus.”
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