Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: I'd like you to turn to Luke's gospel, chapter 10, verse 25. On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "What's written in the law?" he replied. "How do you read it?" He answered, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself."

"You've answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this, and you will live." But he, wanting to justify himself, asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" In reply, Jesus said, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.

So, too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn, and took care of him.

The next day, he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said. 'And when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.' Now, which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him." Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise."

Let me give you a little bit of background to this story, because we read in another gospel, another account of this, and it seems to be a little bit different. The man who came and asked Jesus the question seemed to be recommended by Jesus in the other gospel, in Mark's gospel, for his integrity. Jesus said, "You're not far from the kingdom of heaven." And so, God, or the Lord Jesus, who was God, with his ability to see behind the questions that men asked, recognized that this man who was coming to test him had a sincere attitude.

In fact, the man had come upon Jesus as he struggled with the Sadducees, who were baiting him. And the man had appreciated Jesus' answer. In fact, in Mark's gospel, it says this man, this expert in the law, saw that Jesus had answered wisely, and so he came out with his own question. Now, the Jewish party was a very correct party, as we know. The experts in the law from that party had divided 613 individual statutes and laws into two camps: the heavy statutes and laws and the light ones, the great ones and the little ones.

They had so many laws it was very difficult to keep them all because they were so complicated. The Sadducees were a Jewish party representing the wealthy and the sophisticated. They denied the resurrection. They accepted only five books of Moses as really kosher. So, they were a little Jewish party within a party. Jesus had been struggling with them and what they were asking him, struggling in the sense of battling with them and trying to show them that they were just arguing about things that didn't really matter, when this question arose from this expert in the law.

And so, Jesus tells him a little story to get his point across. Before he tells the story, however, he gives a little bit of doctrine, and then he illustrates it by the story of the Good Samaritan. And the doctrine is simply this: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus replies, "What's written in the law? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself." Now, the first part of this was the Shema. And this was recited every morning and evening by the pious Jew.

It was the Jewish confession of faith, and you can pick it up in Deuteronomy and Exodus and all sorts of places in the Old Testament. But Jesus links it to Leviticus 19:18, which was to love our neighbor as ourselves. He links it to the loving of the neighbor to show that the natural outgrowth of loving God is to love each other, is love for your brother or love for mankind. The Old Testament Hebrew word for heart is interesting. It's the central organ of the body. We know that; medicine tells us that.

And so, it came to mean the center of man's moral, spiritual, and intellectual life. And whenever you read heart in the Bible, it has all that meaning: the seat of the emotions, the passions, the appetites, the place where vital action is centered. It's the term that's used for the deepest part of us, the place where we have our most meaningful experiences. And I think that means relationships, the place that we live and move and have our being, the place where we dream our dreams, the place where we shed our tears.

Surely, it is the place of our relationships. All this is wound up when you say heart. And that's what we're going to talk about: giving our heart to God. Remember our text that we began the whole series of talks was Romans 12:1 and 2: "I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service" or your spiritual worship, "and be transformed by the renewing of your mind that ye may prove what is that acceptable and good will of God."

And so, we're thinking about giving God our bodies, we've thought about giving God our minds, now we think about giving God our hearts, which is really gathering up all that we have said. And yet, I want to use it in the sense of our relationships and our emotions today. I'm sure you've heard me tell the story, or you've heard Stuart tell the story of Cheeky Charlie. He was a middle-aged man in Liverpool, England. And in the days that we used to take open-air meetings—they've sort of gone out of vogue nowadays—but in the days when we used to take open-air meetings, we used to just simply find a crowd of people or gather a crowd of people in some way or other and then just try and share the gospel with them.

And down on the docks in Liverpool at the lunch hour, we used to have lunch hour meetings. And there was a very dear friend of mine, Pastor Richard Case. I was in his church for a little while, who ministered down in that very rough part of Liverpool behind Lime Street, which is known all around the world for all the dreadful things that go on. And Pastor Case would take us out, his church people out, and we would try and minister there. And he'd always get a crowd. He was a very popular preacher.

Cheeky Charlie was a professional heckler. They were the people that went along to open-air meetings or political meetings and shouted out questions or gave the preacher or the presenter a hard time. And on this particular occasion, Pastor Case was speaking about Revelation 3:20 about inviting Jesus into your heart. Cheeky Charlie started to heckle him. "That's stupid," he said. "Your heart's just a blood pump. That's all. Why, I passed a butcher shop on the way here today, and I saw one hanging up in the butcher shop, just a heart hanging on a hook."

Except he couldn't say H's, so he said, "an 'art 'angin' on an 'ook." And Pastor Case said, "Charlie, is that all you think the heart is?" "Yes, and how can Jesus come into an 'art 'angin' on an 'ook? It's silly, stupid." And so, Pastor Case said, "Charlie, are you married?" And Charlie said, "Yeah." And Pastor Case said, "Did you ever do any courting?" That's the old-fashioned word for dating. And Charlie said, "Yeah." And he said, "Did you ever take your wife down to a beautiful place where there was moonlight and a quiet little river?"

"Did you ever look into her eyes and say, 'My darling, I love you with all my blood pump'?" Charlie said, "Well, no, I never really did do that." And so, Pastor Case got his point across. When we say "I love you with all my heart," we do not, obviously, mean our blood pump. But the heart, being that central organ, has come to mean the deepest part of us and essentially the part of us that has to do with relationships. So, Jesus talked about loving God, the capacity the human being has to love God.

But the problem is we're born with heart trouble, with a heart defect. Sin has spoiled the heart and prevented it loving God as it should, prevented it having a heartbeat for God, for turning towards God naturally and loving him with all our heart and mind and soul and strength. We're born that way. But God has X-ray eyes. Do you remember in 1 Samuel 16, when Samuel came to town, he came to anoint a king? And so, the father of all these fine boys in this one family began to parade them in front of Samuel.

And Samuel, who was a godly man but only a man and didn't have X-ray eyes, began to look at them. What did he look at? He looked on the outside. And Eliab came along. Now, Eliab was the biggest and the best of this large family of boys, as it happened. And as Samuel looked on him, he said, "This must be the Lord's anointed. This has to be him. Look how big he is and strong and handsome." But remember, that's the spirit of the age, isn't it? That's the spirit of the age talking because we look on the outside.

We say, "How beautiful, how gorgeous, how manly, how tough." That's the spirit of the age. And Samuel, though he knew it not, even though he was a godly man, was looking at Eliab and saying, "This has to be the Lord's anointed" because of how good he looks on the outside. And it's in that little verse of scripture there, 1 Samuel 16:7, we get a hint of God's X-ray eyes. "Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart." Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.

And so, even though man was born with heart trouble, God has X-ray eyes. And as he looks on the heart, Genesis 6:5 says, "God sees the heart of man and sees that it's only evil continually, evil continually." So, the diagnosis of this heart trouble is that our heart has a defect. It is evil continually. Jeremiah 17:9 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." It's an evil heart, it's a deceitful heart, it's a desperately wicked heart that we've been born with.

And there's a psalm that says, "The fool has said in his heart, 'No God.'" Now, it doesn't mean the fool has said in his heart there is no God. That's not quite correct in that translation, but you'll see in the NIV and others it says, "The fool has said in his heart, 'No God.'" That's what it means. "No" to God. The heart that is born in every baby, in every child in that nursery, in every baby in those cribs, says to God of its own volition, "No."

God says, "Do this," the heart says, "No." God says, "Do that," the heart says, "No." Paul said, "I struggle. There's something within me that says I won't do this when God tells me to. I will do this when God tends me in another direction." And so, the diagnosis is the fool has said in his heart. It's a foolish heart, deceitful heart, desperately wicked heart, and evil heart. So, the prognosis is very, very bad indeed. The uncircumcised heart, the hard heart, the wicked heart, the perverse heart is the seat of sin.

The Bible talks about the heart with all those words in front of it. It resists God. It defiles the whole man. "Out of the heart of man come evil thoughts, murder, adulteries, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander." Now then, maybe we should have bypass surgery. Maybe there needs to be something done to our sinful heart. Maybe that's what we need to do. You know something? That won't help. It'll only patch it up. And out of the heart of man will still come all these awful things.

What we need is a transplant, a transplant. Nothing less will do. Ezekiel 36:26 says, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I'll remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decisions and be carried to keep my laws." There will be a force within our life that will carry us to make us careful to keep his laws. But you know you can't have a heart transplant without a donor, can you?

Where can we find a donor? Well, you know Jesus was the donor. The problem is donors are usually dead. The only donor that we could find as a human being with a heart like that with such bad defects was still alive. Usually, when you hear in the papers about a donor being sought, what they're talking about is someone that's been killed in a motorbike accident, somebody that has no option. But here we are talking about a donor being found who was very much alive and well.

A donor that said, "I will die to give my heart to the human race. Willingly give my heart that there may be a heart transplant within us." So, the donor was found, and of course, his heart was suitable. It was a perfect heart. You know when people are trying to find organs to donate, they have to be perfect, they have to match, right? So that the body will not reject them. And the heart of Jesus given in the operation upon the cross was a perfect, perfect heart.

God volunteered to die. The surgeon, if you like, is the Holy Spirit, and he transplants the heart of God, the mind of Christ, if you like, by his Spirit into our heart. He gives us a new heart. So we're renewed by grace. It is stitched into place. The stitches on our heart, if you like, are God's laws, putting it firmly into place. Romans 2, verse 15, "The requirements of the law are written on the Gentiles' hearts. The conscience bears witness to that, so there's no excuse."

And there is the swabbing or the cleansing of that heart as the transplant takes place. In one of the psalms, it says, "Create in me a new heart, renew that right spirit within me." There is a cleansing. And it is never, ever rejected, even though there are things within our human heart that would reject that heart of Jesus, that would try and say, "It's not compatible with what I want to do." It can never be rejected. You know what it says in Psalm 112, verse 7?

"The man will have no fear of bad news because his heart is fixed, steadfast, trusting in the Lord." And I love that. He has stitched his heart so firmly into place in our being that even though we would like to reject him maybe sometimes, even when our own sinful nature—and that's what we're talking about—resists and wants to reject that new heart that has been transplanted in us, it cannot because it's fixed within us. And we need not fear bad news. You know, I watch some of these heart transplant patients.

They lie in bed and every day they're waiting for bad news: "Is my body rejecting this heart?" But the Christian need never fear bad news. You will never reject Christ. He is fixed within you by the operation of the Holy Spirit. Isn't that a beautiful picture? And you see God will take that stony heart and give you a heart of flesh. This way you'll have a new heartbeat. All the valves will be open: agape, phileo, eros, the three sorts of love that God makes it possible for us to use to love him and love other people.

Maybe a valve is blocked before you get that new heart. But God makes it possible as he comes into our life. Agape: the concern for the other irrespective of the cost to yourself, the concern and commitment side of love. That valve is right open, and we've got a new heartbeat. Phileo: the friendship side of love. We're able to be friends with God and friends with other people suddenly. Our relationships begin to get sorted out because that valve is open.

Eros: the emotional feeling part of love, which is very important, is able to be released when we are given God's new heart and the blood begins to come through our spiritual veins, if you like. And suddenly we find that we love God with all our hearts, all our heart. Primarily, it's the valve of agape that is blocked when we are born. The two other valves are still open. Phileo: the human love. You can love others without loving God. You know people that do that.

Eros is certainly open. The feeling, sexual, sensual, good-feeling part of love is open. So, phileo and eros are doing very well. But the baby is born with that one vital ventricle blocked: agape. What happens when you get that new heart is all the valves are open, and the agape love is the most important. That's the love you're going to need to love God with and to love others rightly with. The one that governs all of your other loves so that you submit your loves to agape to keep sweet and to keep fueled.

It doesn't mean that we love God just with our head. It isn't a love devoid of feeling, but it means that our love doesn't depend on feelings to do the right thing in our relationships. So, we love God with all our mind and all our will, with all our moral character. We do the right thing whatever we feel like. That's loving God. We also relax in a friendship with him. We understand. What is phileo? Friendship. What is friendship? Listening, spending time, talking.

And then the emotion part of love. There is a place for emotion, obviously, in our attitude and feelings for God. There is a place for it, but it mustn't be the place. It is not the most important part of our relationship with God. So, we love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength. We cannot do it without receiving the heart of God himself to love him with. We're such beggars. We have to even ask God for love to love him with.

Secondly, we love others or we love our neighbor. And we come back to the story here and we ask a very important question: Who then is my neighbor? If God has given me love by walking into my life and enabling me to love him back, then as Jesus tells us, that should spill over in brotherly love or love for other people. Love for our neighbor. Who then, said this man, is my neighbor? How do I know who I have to love? Jesus told this little story.

Your neighbor is the man in the ditch. It's as simple as that. And I can say that to you, applying it. Your neighbor is the woman in the ditch, the child in the ditch, the man in the ditch, the girl who's been robbed by another woman of her husband. She's your neighbor. The child who's been robbed of her mother by her mother's boss. That child is your neighbor. The man who's been robbed of his job by the recession. He's your neighbor.

The teenager who's been robbed of her virginity by her high school date. That kid is your neighbor. They're in a ditch, big ditch. The woman who's been robbed of her reputation by malicious gossip. She's your neighbor. The man or the woman, the father or the mother who's been robbed of their health by disease. They're your neighbor. There's plenty of people in plenty of ditches today. Who is your neighbor? Anybody in a ditch. You think of somebody in a ditch?

I can think of a lot of people I've met even in this last week in a ditch. They're my neighbor. And because I have received that heart transplant, I am required of God to do something about that person. How am I going to do it? With my body, remember? It will not be lived out in a vacuum, this Christianity. I cannot look at the man in the ditch and say, "I love him" without my body getting involved. Motivated by that transformed mind telling me what I can do for the man in the ditch, the practical loving thing that I need to do.

How do I love him or her? I love him or her as myself. Love your neighbor as yourself. So, you have to ask a question: Well, how do I love myself? Implicit in this is the permission to think rightly with acceptance about yourself, incidentally. Jesus is saying it's all right to love yourself in the right way. A healthy concern and respect for your selfhood, your personhood is very important, and you are permitted by God to have that. You are told that that's all right.

But wrapped up with this is a very obvious repercussion of what Jesus is saying. When you see someone in a ditch, how are you to love them as you would love yourself? If you were in that ditch and you could stand outside yourself, what would you do for yourself? Well, whatever you would do for yourself, you do for your neighbor. You love your neighbor as yourself. Well, I know what I'd do for myself if I was lying in a ditch. I'd do everything I could for me; wouldn't you do that for you?

And that's how you're to love the man in the ditch. It's very difficult to even do this if you have a poor self-image because you're so busy caring for yourself, you're not able to get out of yourself to care for others. And so, a good self-concept is very important. I was talking to Bobbi who was married to this macho man who was playing for the Miami Dolphins all those years when they went to three Super Bowls, and she was his wife.

But she was telling me that she had a very poor self-image because she had a poor view of herself as a woman in the creative purposes of God. She said, "When I looked at Genesis, I saw Adam not doing very well because he didn't have a mate. And then I seemed to hear God say, 'All right, Adam, I'll make you a woman, but you'll be sorry.' Then I heard preachers say things like the woman deceived the man. She was not good for the man because she deceived him."

And she said, "I didn't realize till I really studied the Bible, it doesn't say that. It says the woman was deceived by the serpent. Why was the woman deceived? Some people think because she didn't have all the information that was available to Adam. Adam directly heard from God: 'Don't eat the fruit.' Some think the man told the woman. So she didn't have that direct information, perhaps, that Adam had or as much of it. Who knows how long Adam was around before Eve was ever created? We don't know that.

And so, she was more deceivable. Not because she was a woman, or maybe because she was a woman. Adam, on the other hand, was not deceived at all. He did it knowing everything he needed to know. Satan went for the woman because he knew he had a better chance of getting to her. And as you begin to see this, you begin to see, oh, maybe my view of why God created woman is all wrong."

And if you don't have a good sense of God creating man and woman equal, blessing them both, and not creating one inferior, then you will feel inferior and you will never be able to help the man in the ditch. What you need to do is go back to Genesis and read those creation stories and see how God made man and woman equal. Now, of course, the fall came. And when the fall came, things happened. We know that. What happened?

The relationship between God and man collapsed, and also the relationship between man and woman collapsed. Man became domineering. Stott says headship degenerated into domination in the fall. Headship degenerated into the wrong sort of domination of man over woman in the fall. And redemption is meant to roll that back. Redemption, the cross, is meant to restore the relationship as it was before the fall. So we get into the whole big debate at the moment on the man-woman issue.

Is the fact that man shall be head over the woman prescriptive or descriptive and all of that? Well, we don't know. All we know is that when sin entered the heart of man, he became very abusive to woman, and that is certainly not what God had in mind. And redemption's meant to make the difference. In Christ, neither male nor female. The difference made right again. In Christ, heirs together, Peter tells us, of the gracious gift of life.

So, in the sense that we go back to creation and say, "What did you have in mind for me as a woman?" you can find there a good self-esteem, what you think about yourself, whatever image you have of yourself. You can find a good self-esteem as you go back to creation and see what God thought of you, see how he loved you, see what he had in mind for you, and that he didn't make you to deceive the man and to punish you for it.

That Adam was held just or more guilty than the woman, for he was not deceived. And as you come to realize how much God loves you as a woman and you get all that sorted out, then you'll be able to help the man in the ditch. I have spoken to battered women who have said to me, "I must deserve it." Their self-image is so low that when they are abused by a man, they really have come to believe they must deserve it.

So how do you think about yourself? Do you love yourself? Then you'll be able to love your neighbor in that healthy respect and attitude that you love yourself with. Let's look at the story for a minute. Practically, then, how can we help the man in the ditch? Practically? Well, he took a risk. You're going to have to take a risk if you're going to help somebody in the ditch. If your love goes out to God and therefore goes out to your brother, you'll take a risk.

If you're not on risk's edge somewhere, you will not learn to depend. If you do not learn to depend, you will not learn anything new about God. If you do not learn anything new about God, you will stop growing in the Christian life. So I would ask you: Are you risking something? And there is no place I know where you risk more than in your relationships. "Don't ask me to ring up my mother-in-law. We haven't spoken to each other for ages," a woman said to me last week.

That's too much of a risk. What was she risking? Her mother-in-law rejecting her yet one more time. She wouldn't risk it. "Don't ask me to sit down with my teenager and find out what he's up to. I don't want to risk it." What don't they want to risk? That parent doesn't want to risk finding out what the teenager's up to and what that might mean in working out whatever's happening in the family dynamic of relationships.

There is no greater place than to find out if you're going to risk things than in your relationships, in the affairs of the heart. "Don't ask me to love again," someone else says, "I've been too hurt." That's a risk. "Don't ask me to help somebody in a ditch." So the man took a risk. He could have been robbed, but he took the risk anyway. Why? Verse 33: Because he had compassion. He came where the man was. He took pity on him.

He got near enough. He went to him where he was, it says. Spurgeon said, "If you want to give a man a tract, wrap it up in a sandwich." I like that. If you want to give a man a tract, wrap it up in a sandwich. We've got to do the practical thing for those we profess to love and specifically in our relationships. So when should I begin? When you're going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. What does that mean?

Well, Jerusalem to Jericho was the trade route. Everybody went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They went down because it is down. It is a huge height. Jerusalem, Jericho is probably about the lowest place you can get, heading for the Dead Sea area. Jerusalem is on these hills. So when you go from Jerusalem to Jericho, you do go down. But it basically simply means they were going about the business of the day. And so, where do you see these men in the ditch?

You see them in the supermarket. You see them in the club. You see them today when you leave this particular fellowship and you go out to do your business. That's going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Whenever in the course of your day's work you see a man in a ditch, don't be a priest, too busy running to the temple, too busy running to Bible studies even, to attend to the man in the ditch. Never do that, please, never do that.

A dear lady who's a close friend said to me, "Jill, I'd love to come to Bible study, but that's the only day I can look after my grandchildren." And in that particular situation, there's a ditch situation; she's doing the right thing. Now, I'm not asking you not to come to Bible study, I assure you; I want you to come. But you get the point. The priest was so busy running to his religious meetings he didn't have time for the man in the ditch.

And the Levite, he was too busy with his gift. Levite's job was to put down the letter of the law on paper correctly. And that's what they did. They didn't help men in ditches. They were gifted to be Levites. And you know the other reason we pass by on the other side is because we say, "That's not my gift. That's the social concerns." This church is very big, it has all sorts of ministries. Isn't it nice that we've got a little group of people that can look after the people that are troubled with pornography and abortion and all those things?

That's their gift. Lots of people in ditches. Our gift is the heart transplant of Jesus. And that lays a heavy necessity on me and on you to attend to the man in the ditch. We are not to pass by on the other side. Thirdly, loving God doesn't only mean loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, loving our neighbor as ourselves, it means loving our family. For this, I want to remind you in Romans 12, back where we began these three messages that are laying out this series.

In Romans 12, after urging us to do all this, presenting our bodies, etc., verse 3, it says this: "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ, we who are many form one body and each member belongs to all the others."

And then he goes on to talk about we all have different gifts, etc. Those that have teaching gifts ought to be teaching. Those who have encouraging gifts ought to be encouraging. What he's doing here is talking about God's family, and it is a natural practical outgrowth of giving yourself body, soul, mind, and heart to God. You will be involved somewhere in a church fellowship. God's family will become important to us. We must not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, the Bible tells us.

And I think I mentioned last week how difficult that is for some of us, how hard it is to come into a church fellowship and to really become part of it. That's why these small groups afterwards are so important, so important. So we'll love God's family, but we'll love our own family, too. And I want you just in the closing moments to turn to Titus 2. Titus chapter 2, and verses 1 to 5 might be a place you'd like to stay in.

Loving God means loving the stranger, the neighbor. And loving God means loving the church family, and also loving God means loving my family. And here you've got the whole family talked about. The whole family. My own family, living with the choices I've made. I'd love to tell you about choosing the right partner to get a family going, but it's really not relevant, I don't think. And so I'll pass it by. Although I will, in passing, say if you still have the choice of choosing a partner in marriage, make sure that you find the places in the Bible, in Corinthians particularly, that talk about how you should choose: that we must not be unequally yoked together with an unbeliever.

That's very important. Choose right. But most of us are living with the choices that we've made. How are we then to love our husbands? You must teach what's in accord with sound doctrine. Teach the older men to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love and in endurance. Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good.

Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, to be subject to their husbands so that no one will malign the word of God. And in this passage of scripture, and it's a whole sermon in itself, it's a whole series of sermons in itself, I just want to point out a few things as we close. We are to love our husbands, those of us who have the privilege of husbands.

Those that do not know Jesus, we are to love into the kingdom of God. There's a special group here that helps women who are married to unbelievers, encourages them, helps them to be linked up with people that will pray for their unbelieving husbands because we really believe that the Bible gives us hope and promise in many places that we will see our husband won to Christ. And those of us that have a Christian husband, we are to in the right sense be submissive to them.

That doesn't mean trampled all over. It means responding rightly to them in love. We're not talking about inferiority. We're talking about a right response to a husband who hopefully loves us. Then children, I mentioned here. We are to love our children. We are to be busy at home. This doesn't mean we must only be busy at home. For many of us are at work and I see nothing in the scriptures to forbid that at all.

It just means that if you're busy at work, then you're going to be extra busy at home. It just means be busy at home in the sense of not a slanderer. And in another place, we hear about women that leave the things they should be doing at home and wander around from house to house spreading gossip and slander. And that's the thought that comes back here. If we are busy being the mother and wife that we should be, we won't have much time for talking about other people and busy in other people's lives—busybodies in that sense.

We are to be busy at home, not busybodies. What are we busy doing? Loving our children. How do we love them? With this wonderful new love that God has given us as he's brought his heart into our lives. There's lots of places in the scriptures. If you have a good reference Bible, it will take you all over the scriptures at this point to show you how practically we are to express and show our love to our children.

We are to love our parents. It says we are to be reverent in the way we live. That brings to mind "Honor your father and your mother." This is a huge thing. What do we do with our parents as they become older? Do we cast them off? Do we set them up somewhere where they can look after themselves? Or do we have them in our heart? What are we going to do? What does the heartbeat of God tell me to do for my aged parents?

We are to be reverent. And the word reverent means to have a holy awe of God and a hatred of evil. To do the right thing for our mom and our dad, whether that means cost to ourselves or our family or not. Our parents, honoring them because we honor God. And then our in-laws. Are they in this passage of scripture? I think they are because it says, "Not slanderers. Not slanderers." And if there's one thing I hear in the in-law situation more than anything else are the weird jokes we tell about mothers-in-law.

I used to have a whole lot of jokes about mothers-in-law until I became one. Then I threw the book away. It's quite different from the other side of the fence, I discovered. And so, am I a slanderer of my in-laws? Do I say snide, sly things behind their backs? For some of us, our whole relationship is a joke, if we were really honest, and that's not good enough. Getting back to the book of Ruth, I think about Orpah and Ruth and Naomi.

And Orpah and Naomi had a sort of relationship, kissed each other and went their own way. Ruth came to a crossroads in her life and identified with her mother-in-law and said, "Beseech me not to leave you. Your God shall be my God, where you go I will go." And she identified with her mother-in-law, committed herself to a bitter, hurting woman, and turned a bitter woman into a better woman. And the relationship became something that the whole town talked about.

You know, if the whole town is going to talk about the love that these Christians ought to have for each other, then they're going to have to see it practically lived out in my life and yours. Let's pray together. I'm becoming aware that perhaps there are some people listening to me who have a need of a transplant even now. And this is something by the operation of the Holy Spirit that is possible. Christ can come into our heart. He stands outside it.

Not the blood pump, obviously, but the seat of our deepest need. And those of you that perhaps have never had the opportunity or have passed it by or aren't sure whether Christ really came in, perhaps would like to take advantage of this moment in the quietness. You might like to say, "Lord Jesus, I do know that my heart is evil. Says 'no' to God an awful lot. And I do understand that patching it up isn't going to help and that what I need is the heart of God, a transplant."

"And I ask you now to take this stony heart and give me a heart of flesh, a heart that's going to praise my God, a heart from sin set free. By your Holy Spirit, stitch it into place. Fix it in the deepest part of my life. Forgive me. And help me have a right sense of myself as you see me, as you made me, as you plan for me in love now to be, that I might escape my self-absorption and see with new eyes the man in the ditch."

"Send me out of this place able to take the risks that will be necessary to help those who have been robbed of so much. And Lord, perhaps some of those very people are within my own family. Help me to spend time in your word and in passages like this one in Titus or other places, learning how to love my husband, how to love my children, how to love my in-laws, how to love my parents. And then Lord, I know that I will fulfill the greatest of all commandments."

"Help me to love God with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind, with all my strength. For Christ's sake, amen."