Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: I want to talk about successful women today, because I believe successful women—when we think about it, we think, "Oh, a successful woman is a woman, perhaps, with a career and a big house and five perfect children and they're all off to Harvard and Yale." We think of this as success, and perhaps it is, in measure. I want to think about those sort of people today because they need Christ, and the potential of praying for that group of women is great. They are a mission field, and when won to Christ, can be a huge blessing in their own situation.

There were two such women, Mary and Martha, that were wealthy women. Martha, particularly, had a big house, and we read about this in Luke chapter 10. She had a big house and she used it for Jesus. Jesus' disciples, verse 38, were on their way and they came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made, and she came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me."

"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you're worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better; it will not be taken away from her." I do not know whether Martha and Mary were among the many women in Luke chapter 8, but I suspect that at some point they would have traveled with the Master. They certainly ministered to him out of their means. They were among this group that we read about of godly, gifted, rich, wealthy, influential people. Martha opened her home and said, "Everything, Lord, I have is yours."

There had been a point when she knelt at Jesus' feet at the tomb of her beloved brother. She said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." She believed that. We do not know where she met Jesus, just as we do not know where her sister Mary met Jesus. But they had come upon the Lord Jesus, they had been convinced he was the Christ, the Messiah, and they had begun to minister with him. So at this point, they were not traveling with him; they were back home in Bethany, and Jesus was coming through on another missionary tour.

Martha said, "You know where you've got to stay, just bring everybody in." If you do not have the gift of hospitality, that is a real need of prayer. God is not going to give you a gift that you have not got; you have got the gift you have to discover. If you find that you haven't got the gift of hospitality, that does not mean you don't have to do it. There are many gifts that we do not have that, out of duty, we have to exercise. So how do you exercise a gift you haven't got? You do it badly.

That is my famous story and you all know it well. You do it badly. If you can't do it goodly, you do it badly. You do it heartily with a smile. You cook dreadfully, but you cook anyway. They will eat it and it will be all right, and as long as they don't get ill, that is fine. I do not have the gift of hospitality. I know I do not have the gift of hospitality. But all my life our house has been an open house, and I have exercised a gift I do not have badly and heartily for Jesus.

It has been wonderful. I have had more joy exercising a gift I did not have than I have had in exercising gifts that I have. The blessing of the world coming through my house has been one that I would not swap for anything at all. There are some things we do because we belong to Jesus. Now, Martha did have the gift of hospitality, and I suspect Mary did not. Together as sisters, their personalities and their gifts were so different.

Martha was doing the thing she did have a gift for doing and doing it well, doing it wonderfully well. Here was Mary, who had other gifts, mystical gifts, exercising her own gifts. Usually the thing worked beautifully, I suspect. They were so different, they loved each other, they ministered together, they both loved Jesus, and they were together in him. But there is always the seeds of a problem when you get two very different people living in one house.

I suspect that Mary and Martha through their lives, two very different types of women, had often had problems together. Here in the honesty of the scriptures, we see one surface. As Jesus and the horde of people that he always had around him came into the house, who knows how many people Martha was trying to take care of? Remember, it was at a day and age where all the water had to be carried from the well to the house. There would be 12 disciples, and there would be the many women.

I always wonder what the many women were doing when Martha seemed to be doing it all. Maybe they, like Mary, were sitting at his feet, and maybe he had a little crowd around him and he was teaching them a Bible study. Nothing irritates you more than not only to have other men watch you work, but to have women watch you work. You end up doing it when all the time I am absolutely sure the only thing Martha wanted to do was sit at his feet and listen to his word.

She was missing out. Some of you ladies, I know, go through that frustration. You say, "I'll go in the nursery because somebody has not turned up that said they would do it." You think, "Oh, I did need to sit in there and hear the Bible study today and I'm hurting and I'm hungry." But you pick yourselves up and you go back there and you get the food ready, or you go into the nursery and you care for the children. Don't you sometimes feel a little bit irritated? Don't you sometimes think, "They're all sitting in there listening to the word?"

Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to get the coffee ready. Somebody has to look after the children so they can sit in there and listen to what I would like to be listening to. Inside, Martha got all riled up. You can be wealthy and generous and influential and gifted and have the hospitality and get thoroughly angry. All those gifts, and yet it is the attitude of times like that that the Lord Jesus looks at. She was the hostess with the mostest, that was for sure. But I tell you, she had an awful lot to cope with that day.

Having an open heart and having an open home for Jesus means an awful lot of work. It does not just happen, and even to have people in your home is not easy when you are running in all these different directions to care for them properly. There is a lot of work, but there is a lot of worry because Jesus at this point was a wanted man. Notice Jesus Christ did not get arrested in Martha's home; he was safe there. I suspect he was safe there, and even though they wanted to arrest him at this point, they did not arrest him because of her influence.

She was a mighty woman around that place. Everybody knew Martha, and she was a very eminent and prominent lady indeed. There is worry when you really serve Jesus sometimes. I think of Lydia in the book of Acts. Lydia opened her home, and her home became the place where the infant church was nurtured. She was a businesswoman, again, a prominent, wealthy, successful woman. Paul came down and found her at the river where the women met for prayer. She was a woman of prayer.

She was not a Christian woman; she believed in God. She was there as a proselyte. Paul met her and led her to Christ and she said, "Come home with me." First thing: "Come home with me." She brought Paul and his friends into the home. Then, of course, Paul, in typical fashion, got himself thrown into the Philippian jail. As you know what happened: the jailer got saved and there was this big earthquake. Stewart always says that is because they were singing hymns and he must have had a bad voice and it caused an earthquake.

The doors fell down and here they were and the jailer got saved, and where did they go? Lydia's house. Sometimes it is dangerous. Here she was with this man who had caused all this trouble and the jailer who said he had become a Christian. The whole thing was just exploding around their ears and the authorities did not want any of this to happen. Lydia finds her house full of these people who are suspect to the authorities. Sometimes that is what it can mean to keep a home for Jesus.

Talk to some of the missionaries today. Ask what it is like to live and to work and to labor in a communist country. Some of our missionaries are still under communist regimes. Ask what it is like to open your home and have people who are suspect to the government because they are Christians in your home for a Bible study, and how that threatens you and your children and the whole situation. It is not easy to be wealthy and influential and use your home for Jesus.

We know so little about that in this country. What a blessing it is that we have a free country. And yet with a free country, we do not even open our home for Jesus. With all the freedom and opportunity that we have, and all the success that we represent—because it is all relative, wealth is all relative. Any of the other places in the world would look at every single one of you, I do not care what your financial status is, and say, "You are incredibly wealthy compared to what we are."

We are wealthy, every single one of us. Are we using our wealth and our influence and our success for him? Martha was the practical one; she really enjoyed what she was doing. She was a doer. But what goes for you often goes against you. Your strengths are often your weaknesses. She just loved doing, but she overdid. Jesus said to her, "Martha, Martha, we don't need a seven-course dinner. One course will do." There is a little play on words there.

"We don't need seven dishes, Martha. One will do. Why don't we just have soup and toast?" She had forgotten in the joy of putting on this party for Jesus—she had forgotten Jesus and the people. The people are always more important than the party. The goal is always more important than the doing of it. Those of us that love doing—I love doing for Jesus. I am a Martha; I am not a Mary. I am a Martha, and I suspect that 90% of us are Marthas.

Doers tend to overdo. Of course, dreamers like Mary tend to be lazy, so they have their own problems. But at the moment, we are focusing on this practical, successful woman, Martha. "Martha, Martha, you're busy with many courses when one dish would be quite sufficient. Mary has chosen the best dish, which will not be taken away from her." Mary has chosen the best dish. Martha is rebuked by the Lord.

It is interesting to me that she had been distracted by the much serving. Are you distracted? Do you give service with a scowl because you have forgotten in your busyness to be in front of God and let him touch your heart and let him give you a word from himself? Service with a scowl—that is what happened to Martha. She was doing her work to the glory of God. Have you ever met anyone that does their work to the glory of God like that?

She just forgot that perhaps this—and Jesus knew it—was the last time she would be able to sit at his feet in the flesh, look in his face, and listen to his word. Jesus knew it; she did not. Quite honestly, what's more important: a seven-course meal or a chance to sit and look at God incarnate and listen to his word? She was distracted, she was disgruntled. There was a sense of frustration. She was not noticed, she was not appreciated.

"Don't you care, God, that my sister has left me to serve alone? Alone. I only I am the one that serves Jesus around this place. Everybody else gets into this prayer and all of that stuff. I'm the only one that's really doing anything practical." Do you ever feel like that? Martha did. You get very disgruntled, you get frustrated, you feel isolated. "I only I am left." I think of Elijah, who looked around and said to God, "I only I am thy prophet. I'm the only faithful one in Israel."

When we get distracted by the very service we render Jesus, by the things we do for him, and we do not spend time sitting at his feet and looking in his face, then we get disgruntled. We get disgruntled not only with our sisters who are doing something that we would like to be doing, or doing something differently from us, but we get distracted from the Lord Jesus himself. We are cumbered about with much serving, just tied up in knots.

There is one thing worse than planning a party that ends up planning you: it is being unappreciated, especially by the guest of honor. I think Martha felt the guest of honor did not appreciate what she was doing. Have you ever felt unappreciated by God? If you do not build into your Martha character the "Mary-ness" that is necessary, then you will finish up thinking that even God does not appreciate what you're doing.

The practical is just as spiritual as the spiritual is spiritual. But it is the attitude and the priority that matters. It is the question, "What does Jesus want me to do at this point?" It is the leaving undone the things that can be left undone because the thing that cannot be left undone must be done. She even got disenchanted with the man. She was disgruntled, disenchanted, distracted, and depressed. She was anxious and troubled about many things.

Missionaries often get depressed about the whole thing. You say, "Oh, missionaries never get depressed." Missionaries often get depressed because there is so much to do. They have to be such a Martha on the mission field. That is one way we can pray for them: "Lord, give them time, give them space in today for the Mary-ness." Our personality has a lot to do with it. If you are a Martha, you have to work on being a Mary. If you are a Mary, you have to work on being a Martha.

Don't criticize other people because you are a Mary and they are not like a Mary. They are a Martha. But remember that you need to do some things. You need to be practical sometimes. You need to do a bit of work for Jesus. Hard work, dirty work. Get our hands dirty. Do the thing that takes time and energy. Roll up our sleeves and use the elbow grease. At other times, the Marthas need to be the Marys. We need to lay aside the doing that we so dearly love and build into our lives the obsession with the feet of Christ that Mary had.

Mary, too, was a successful woman, and Jesus said she had chosen the best dish. She had chosen to eat the spiritual food. That does not mean that the dishes that Martha had prepared were no good; it means they were the lesser dish. All our doing is the lesser thing. It is the being in front of Jesus that really matters. If we would follow Jesus and be the missionary that we must be, it does not matter if you are doing it over here, or in Bangladesh, or in South America, or in Wisconsin—that is just geography.

A missionary is simply a woman who went with Jesus and ministered to people that Jesus attracted to himself. She ministered to people that Jesus wanted to reach for himself. That is a missionary. By that definition, every single woman listening to me who professes to know the Lord Jesus as her Savior is a missionary. You do not become a missionary. You do not graduate from being an ordinary Christian to an intense Christian to a missionary. You are a missionary because you have a mission.

What is your mission? To go with Jesus wherever he leads you, whether in Galilee or Wisconsin, and to minister, to serve people. Successful women are serving women. They serve Jesus, serve people, and serve their world. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the example of Martha. We thank you for her readiness to serve. We see her later in John chapter 12 serving—this time, no rebuke from the Master. What an epitaph she had.

Lord, we would be like Martha today. Some of us need to hear this message because we have been saying, "Well, my job is to pray and I'll let Martha do the serving." All of us need to serve. Those of us that love the doing of it, the practical side of things, Lord Jesus, we need to build into our lives the Mary-ness that we see here. We need to know what it is to sit at your feet, look in your face, and hear your word, and then get up and serve the people and care for them.

Help us to look for those priorities in our lives and to build them into our hearts. Jesus, I pray that among us you would lay your hand in a very special way on successful, gifted, wealthy women. You would help them to come to you and out of their means minister to you and to your disciples. Thank you for taking those women with you on your missionary journeys. Teach us from what we've heard today so that we might be a true Martha and a true Mary. In Jesus' name, Amen.