Grace Thoughts

Tim Kelley: Hello friends. Welcome to Grace Talks, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelly. Grace Talks has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelly. The number one thing I do in ministry is obviously study and teach the word of God. Secondly, I find myself This is not what it was designed to be in Bible College. I find myself talking about relationships. Talk about relationships all the time. Sometimes more times than not as parent child re I'm sorry, a husband wife relationship, or sometimes it's just parallel relationships and parent child relationships.

But how we manifest relationships and how we get along with each other and how we process two sinners in the same home um is is tricky sometimes. And so this is why we're taking this time out and spending four or five weeks on this. We do this every year usually right after Easter. Um now you noticed Fred Astaire and Ginger from this point forward I'll call them Fred and Ginger. Um they um they That was spontaneous. If you noticed how she walked into the little ring there and she was, oh, you want me to dance type of look?

And then she broke into this beautifully choreographed dance with Fred Astaire. And you know they didn't practice that at all or anything. That was just they were just rolled the film. And of course you know that's ridiculous. There was That was the movie part of it. Um they practiced hours and hours, thousands of hours to get that routine as perfect as it was, as graceful as it was. Um it was planned, it was choreographed, it was practiced and practiced and practiced. And even though in the general rule in dances a man have has the lead, I promise Ginger Rogers had much to say about that performance and how it all played out.

I'm sure she didn't just say during the whole hours of practice, anything you want, Fred. Anything you want, Fred. And just follow Fred around the dance floor. Okay, Fred. No, I'm saying I'm sure Ginger Rogers had an opinion. And I'm sure she shared it because as Fred Fred Astaire was a professional dancer, so wasn't she. And as he was a professional in her field, so wasn't she. So I'm sure she had quite a bit of input into that um routine. What's important there is it takes it takes work, a lot of work on to make that look like that.

And it also was it it wouldn't have looked that good if each person did not understand their roles and did not understand their function. Ginger Rogers understood she needed to follow Fred Astaire's lead. If she tried to lead, that would have not looked that well. In fact, they would have been bumping heads and bumping and brawl right in the middle of the floor. So understanding what it means to lead, understanding what it means to follow, and understanding how to complement each other, I call it the marriage dance because this is what we want to look at today and looking at biblical womanhood.

Understanding order, role, and function is imperative if we're going to produce such a performance. Understanding um um order, role, and function is imperative if we are going to have a marriage that brings glory to God and is a place of rest for each one of us. Now in order to understand the biblical woman, we must first understand what the Bible says about femininity. Um I'm a Christian. I'm a preacher, as some of you figured that out by now. And and um and I have a biblical worldview. There's actually a Bible on here. Um I have a I I filter my my life and my family and my money and my identity and all those things.

I filter them through the word of God. If culture violates the word of God or flies in the face of the word of God, then I reject what culture is doing and I embrace the word of God because I believe the word of God is breathed and breathed on by God, inspired by God. And I believe it has ultimate wisdom and God's best and God's best for us in mind. So if culture violates the word of God, I don't obey the culture. I don't embrace the culture. I embrace the word of God. That means I have a biblical worldview.

I I look at um I look at life, I look at family, I look at politics, I look at um my my my my marriage, I look at my finances, I look at how to raise my kids. I filter it through a a biblical worldview. So with that and said, we'll define that a little bit more for you in a moment. Understanding um biblical womanhood is vital um to balance what culture is forcing down our throats. Now what was it like to be a woman at the time of Jesus? This is important. For the Jews, this like the whole culture really developed a low view of women.

Women were seen as servants. A common Jewish prayer was, God, thank you that I'm not a slave. Thank you that I 'm not a Gentile. And thank you that I'm not a woman. That's how they viewed such a a low place of women in their eyes. Now another interesting thing from that day, from the biblical time, the divorce rate of the Greek culture was virtually nil. Very little divorce amongst the Greeks in Bible times. That sounds like a good thing, but it really wasn't. It was be simply because there was no need for divorce because a husband would have prostitutes to take care of all of his sensual needs.

He'd have concubines to date deal with them on a daily cohabitate cohabitation basis. And the wives were used more as for procreation and business management. They'd manage the households, the the husband's household. They would They would have the husband's back that way. But you would marry a wife not because you all loved them, you would marry a wife because you trusted them. There's a difference. With the Romans, divorce was not the exception, but the rule. To Roman old Roman historians spoke of a woman being married for a 23rd time and the man for his 21st time.

Marriage was one step above legal prostitution. You could trade in your marriage in a moment. Get in disagreement. Next. As a young pastor, I I may have told you this story before. I don't remember what I say from week to week. And um I was probably three years and the the senior pastor and I was asked to do a wedding for somebody on the outside. They said, hey, can you do our wedding? And they didn't come to our church. They just got me through the yellow pages I think. So I said, sure. So I sat down and we put the wedding together and I did the did the ceremony and I got the wedding license.

And as I was signing the license, these folks who are about my age, a little older than me, they were weren't about the late 30s. And in this particular case, it was her when I signed the license, I said, number of marriages before, nine. I said, OMG. Before they said OMG, I actually said, oh my God. But but but back then I now I just say OMG. And then And then I looked on below it and then I looked at his. It was his seventh. They weren't 40 years old yet. 16 weddings between them. No wonder their parents didn't come.

Marriage was disposable to them. I'm going to show you in a moment how Jesus and Christianity was the greatest liberator of true womanhood even to this day. Go to a non-Christian nation and look at how women are treated. Go to Fox News or CNN and look how women are treated around the world. They're treated barbarically. Some of you might not realize that a woman could not vote in America till the 1920s. In Switzerland is 1971. Now I don't know what the problem with that is. I would just raise all the voting age to 50 personally.

You can't vote till you're 50 because then you've figured everything out after 50. But think of that. And just less than 100 years ago, women couldn't vote. In the 1960s, in my lifetime, a man um for a woman to get a loan, to get a lease or a loan from a bank, she would need a man, a male to co-sign with her. What you'll see today is that there's very little difference in opportunity. In fact, you'll find there are more women in medical school than men now and women are entering the workforce and the and the executive level workforce at a higher clip than men are.

Yet you'll still find some income in inequality inequality which the lady can do the same job, she should get the same pay. Feminism in its origin was to put women on equal footing with men in society like the civil right movements was for minorities. And that's good. They should have been able to vote. They should get paid the same. They should have equal opportunity as as the male should have. Radical feminism, however, which is something much more recent, looks to wipe out sexual differences, what wants to redefine role and function and wants to minimize the high gift and calling of motherhood.

USA Today, 1970s started a revolution or at least the debate back then was working women, should they work or stay at the home? It's one of the one big discussions of the day. In the 1920s, one out of five women worked at home worked outside the home. In 1990s, 75 to 80% worked outside of the home. And also in the '90s, women started returning home or cutting back job responsibility when economically possible. Now let me just stop there and say a little bit about about this. Sometimes it's impossible not to have two incomes, just to make ends meet in our culture today.

It's expensive to live out there. But it's also expensive to have two car payments and uh the the new 82-in plasma TV high def which I'm not against. If you have one, you should just donate it to the church. Um I'm not against any of those things. But what I'm I'm getting at, if if um if I'm trying to be more American than Christian, if I'm looking at I want this and my whole life is obtaining this and obtaining that and obtaining this and having the bottom line go up and up and up to the to the neglect of my maybe my home.

This is what we began realizing in the '90s. Is it worth it? How the modern culture refined how the modern um culture defined feminism, has it worked out on us? Has it worked out well, I should say? How's it impact been? Has the modern rules of relationships and sexuality worked out for us? For we as a culture, as we fly in the opposite direction of God's intended design, which we saw last week and we'll see this week, how's it how's it worked for us? We're getting away from those old mores, that old time religion. We're getting away from all that stuff.

We're going to do things differently now because we're modern. Well, how's it working? Over 50% divorce rate, how's it working? 75% of some of our children in minority ethnic groups are without dads. 75% 7.5 out of 10, 75 children out of 100, no dad at home. How's it working for us guys? It's why we have a biblical worldview. Cuz the Bible wasn't like we're not like the Greeks or the Romans. The Bible tells us to stay together. Jesus gives very narrow ways that we can just end our marriages. The word of God tells us how to be men.

We talked about that last week and support our family, support our kids.