Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Very familiar passage, but let's read it again to remind ourselves, starting at 38 of Chapter 10. As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he 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 so she came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care? My sister's 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, and Mary has chosen what is better or best, and it will not be taken away from her."

One of the things that matters to the Lord Jesus more than anything else, so he tells us in his Word, is our personal relationship with him. And this matters to him even when it doesn't matter to us. Grace. This relationship depends upon communication, as all relationships depend upon communication. It involves listening to his Word and responding in talking back, or what we call prayer. Because prayer is really the speaking part of our relationship with God.

Today I'm going to talk about listening to God, and then I'm going to talk about talking to God. And there are two parts to prayer. Just as a marriage is not going to do very well if only one of them ever talks and the other never listens, so our relationship with God doesn't do very well unless we learn to listen as well as talk. I would bet if we took a survey and if I asked you, "Do you pray?" everybody would probably say yes. If I asked you, "Do you listen to God?" I wonder how many of you would say, "Yes, I listen to God. I know what that means. I understand what I have to do to listen to God," and you'd be able to articulate what that looks like.

God amazingly invites the human race into conversation. It's incredible when you think about it, except you go all the way back to Genesis and see that he put man and woman in this perfect environment and said, "Now every night we're going to have a talk. I'm going to come and, when your work is finished, we're going to walk in the garden and we're going to talk, listen to each other, and just talk."

And then sin came and Adam and Eve did not want to talk anymore. They went and hid behind a tree of shame somewhere in the garden. God came looking for them, for he's a seeking God, and he said, "Where are you?" It wasn't that he didn't know where they were. He knew perfectly well where they were, but he invited them back into a dialogue of grace. Let's talk. Let's talk about this terrible thing that's happened.

So God has always, from the beginning of Scripture, invited the human race to talk. "Let's talk," he says. "And will you please listen to me?" By the time we get to the prophets and certainly Isaiah, it's a theme. Every time God speaks this way or that, the theme is there. In Isaiah chapter 40, he says, "Haven't you been paying attention? Haven't you been listening to me? Haven't you heard these stories before?"

We can get so used to church and so used to Jesus and so used to our Christianity that God could very well lean out of heaven and say that to many of us today. "Haven't you been paying attention? Haven't you been listening? Let's talk. Let's talk. Talk to me," says God. In Isaiah 1, he actually complains that Israel, his people, pay more attention to their animals than they do to him. "The ox knows his master. You give more attention to your animals than you give to me," he says to Israel. Oh, dear Lord, I hope you wouldn't say that about some of us.

Listening has always been important where God is concerned. In Isaiah 1:18 he says, "Come, come on, let's talk. Let's reason together. Let's argue this out. Let's agree to agree with me. Let's talk." I want to talk about that. When the men and women that God had made were wrestling with the fact they'd been born sinners with Adam's nature, they found that they were born with a nature that said no to God. That had not been God's plan. His plan was that we should be born with a nature, which Adam and Eve were, that says yes to God.

In fact, there's a verse in the Psalms that says, "The fool has said in his heart, 'No God.'" In your Bible, it might say, "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God," but the actual translation is, "The fool says in his heart, 'No God. No!'" And that's what happened when sin came, and that's what sin does. We spend our lives saying no to God.

The idea of conversion or the idea of being born again or the idea of Christ coming into our life means there is a total turnaround, 180 degrees, and we begin to say yes to God. I call it the yes of the soul. "Yes, God! Yes, God!" instead of "No, God. No, God." We have many grandchildren and I'm going to try again to get this story right because I do not want to identify the child that I'm going to talk about. But we have a child—I'm not even going to tell you the sex of this child.

And it was learning to talk. This is a long time ago. And it shared a room with a sibling who shall be nameless as well. And it was very excited because it would go to bed earlier, but it would stay awake so that when the sibling came, it could talk. It was learning the incredible use of a very few words. And so it would talk and talk and talk and the sibling could never get to sleep. The sibling complained to me and I said, "Well, what does it talk about?" And the sibling said, "Well, it just lies there in bed thinking of all the ways it can say no." I love that. And it's typical of the human race. No, no, oh no, no, no, no. Why doesn't it sit there thinking of all the ways it can say yes?

Because it was born with Adam's nature. That's why. And the world says, "No, God. You won't have my life. You won't have my attention. I won't listen to you." But when we come to Jesus, surely it's different. Then we can't wait to sit at his feet and say, "Yes, yes, yes!" Isn't it different? The amazing thing is we're still wrestling with this part and we will until we go to heaven and we're free and we're perfect.

So when we're with God and we're arguing something out—something perhaps we don't want to do, something perhaps we don't want to be—we find ourselves wrestling inside with the no and the yes. But the more you sit on the step of your soul and the more you come into this marvelous grace dialogue with God, the more you'll find yourself saying yes. Yes. The yes of the soul will be the norm instead of the haphazard.

When you look at a passage of Scripture, it's always good to peek around the corner of the verse. My husband always says, "Yes, Jill, but don't go all the way up the block." So I'll try not to. But there are other things, people, to find in this passage. You say, "Well, there's Mary and there's Martha, there's Jesus and the disciples." Yes, but there were many others as well. And even in those that we see in this little passage, that's 16 people to begin with.

But I assure you there were more. Lazarus would undoubtedly have been there. He had not got sick and died at this point. And Mary and Martha and Lazarus lived together in this house. They think that Martha was probably a widow and that she kept this beautiful home for her brother and for her sister Mary. Both the women now at this point are single. We don't know whether she was ever married or whether she was a widow or not, but at this point, the women are on their own.

And then there'd be the servants and those parking the donkeys at the back and those going to get all the food Martha decides she's going to cook—this seven-course meal because Jesus is coming. I assure you, you have to go to the well to get enough water for all those people in that house. That's just the water. And then you have to go and get whatever it was they'd use—the grain or the flour, which you'd have to sift all the bugs out of before you could start making the bread, never mind all the courses. So you can imagine the amount of work that this was going to be.

But Martha loved Jesus. And Martha was good at loving Jesus. And Martha served Jesus, and Martha was good at serving Jesus. And she wasn't going to give him any old thing. She was going to do the best. So we have all these people in the story. And whenever you read a passage of Scripture, ask yourself: Who's there? What's happening? And what's the point of it?

Well, the point of it is this: Our relationship with God through Christ is the most important thing in the world. Yes, it is. It's more important than our family. It's more important than anything. It's more important than any dream we have, any ambition we have, any love that we have in our life. It is the most important thing. That's the point of this story. It is the better part. It is the best part. And we should treasure our relationship. We should nurture our relationship. We should enjoy and revel in our relationship with God. And it starts with learning to listen.

So this isn't just a talk by a lady to other ladies. This is for men, both the young and the old, young adults and college age, shy and the bold, pre-teens and teens overburdened within. This is for everyone! Listen to him, you see. Don't switch off. Switch on. Say to God—and we can all do this—"What do you have to say to me? I'm listening." Like Samuel: "Speak, Lord. Your servant is listening."

They lived in Bethany and their home was what I call a hospitality home, a Bethany house. There are many Bethany houses in the Scriptures when Jesus was here. If you just go through one of the Gospels, you find here and there it says, "Jesus was in the house." And it doesn't tell us whose house it was. I want to know whose house was this that opened their doors to Jesus? Whose house was it when Andrew and John followed Jesus right at the beginning? And he turned around and saw they were following and they didn't know what to say, so they said, "Well, where are you staying? Whose house are you staying at?" And he said, "Come and see." And they went and they spent that whole day. Whose house was it? We're not told.

It was a Bethany house. It was a house that had said, "This house has no walls. The world can come and meet Jesus in this house." And our wedding verse was: "It was noised abroad"—this is the old King James—"It was noised abroad that Jesus was in the house." And it's the story when people heard Jesus was in the house and remember what happened: The whole village came into the house. They weren't invited; they just came.

And the crowd was so great that the four friends who had a sick friend couldn't get to him and they went on the roof, remember, and tore it apart and let the man down in front of Jesus. That was the sermon that was preached at our wedding. I remember John Hunter was the preacher, a very famous British preacher. And he said, "Jill and Stuart, let your home be a Bethany home. Let everybody know that Jesus lives in your house and the world will beat a path to your door. And don't have any walls around your family and your home. Let the world tramp through it this way and that, and let there be a highway for Jesus."

And we have, in measure, been able to keep a Bethany home until this period of our life when we're never home to keep a Bethany home. But Mary and Martha's home was a Bethany home and everybody knew when Jesus was in the house. And they literally would tear the roof off to get in that house.

So Martha has got her work cut out for her because there's the leper, Simon the leper, who lived in Bethany, who'd been healed. He would have wanted to come and his family. And now this is the end of Jesus' three years, so think about how many people have been healed around Jerusalem and around the area. And so this house was absolutely crammed with people. A Bethany house.

I always wonder, by the way, who paid for the roof in that story? Somebody paid for the roof. It really is expensive to keep a Bethany home, let me tell you. And things get worn down when you keep a Bethany home. But oh, joy to have Jesus in your house and let it be known. That's the way.

So Jesus comes to Bethany and he invites anybody that wants to listen to him to come and sit. And he takes the position of a teacher, sits down ready to teach. He has already been talking to the disciples if you read the few chapters coming up and you've heard them talk, so I'm sure you know that they've been talking to Jesus and he's been trying to get them to listen to him. And he's been saying, "I'm going to Jerusalem to die. I'm going to be crucified."

The disciples didn't want to hear. They didn't want to listen. They wouldn't listen. They argued with him. Peter said, "That's not going to happen to you," and the others just had a conversation on their own about who was the greatest. Jesus kept saying, "Listen, this is—I've so little time left. You're not going to be ready." And that had just been happening before he got to Martha and Mary's house. They wouldn't listen.

So he takes the place and realizes that this is the last time he will be in this beloved house with these beloved people. It says in John's Gospel, "Now Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus." Now I know he loves us all, but the Bible actually says he loved these people, loved these people. Last time he gets before he goes to the cross, he is urgently needing everybody in that room to sit down and listen to him. He wants to explain what's going to happen to him. And one woman does it, namely Mary. Mary.

And of course, we now meet Martha, Martha. That's what Jesus called her, so that's what I call her. Martha, Martha. Martha, Martha is in the kitchen trying to put this thing together she has decided Jesus wants from her. And it's not working because everybody's in the living room, not particularly listening to Jesus, but enjoying the company.

And that is something that can distract you from Jesus. Better to be friends with Jesus than friends with Jesus' friends. But so often we're friends with Jesus' friends and we're enjoying each other and we're enjoying the fellowship, and here's Jesus wanting to sit us down and tell us to listen to something incredibly important, but we're having fellowship and we don't have time to do that.

And so here's Mary who takes, the Bible says, every opportunity to pay full attention to Jesus and listen to his teaching. And she is there. She is as close as she can get to Jesus. Mary has a fixation about the feet of Jesus. She follows his feet—look in Luke chapter 8, we believe she's one of those women that was helping support Jesus out of her own means, following Jesus, Martha too. She kneels at his feet. She sits at his feet. She anoints his feet. Oh, to have an obsession with the feet of Jesus! It's what we should be doing. In that position of submission, that position of surrender, "What do you want to say to me, Lord? Let's talk." That's Mary.

But Martha is distracted by the very thing she's trying to do for God. And that can happen. It can be that even the things we love to do in our service for Jesus can be more important than Jesus. Sometimes we can be more enamored of the work of the Lord than the Lord of the work. And in our work now overseas with missionaries and leaders around the globe, that's what I attend to. That's my job.

My job is to help them attend to their interior life because if you don't, you don't stay on the mission field; you come home. And if you don't, you can't preach a sermon. And if you don't, you can't evangelize, certainly when it's dangerous, because you dry up. You burn out. And you're so busy, you just run out. Run out of what? Energy, ideas, strength—all of that.

And what you need is the power of God. And where does the power of God to do the difficult thing come from? Sitting at his feet, looking in his face, listening. That's where it comes from. And some way, somehow, as you read the golden book together, God will remind you, "You don't have enough strength of your own, but I have, for I am the resurrection and the life." So what do you need? What do you need more than the resurrection and the life sort of power? Have you ever seen a dead body? Have you ever looked at it and said, "What power would it take to raise that?" Jesus has that power, and he lives within us, right?

So when I run out of my little human energy, guess what? I have this energy of God. But to appropriate that, you need to spend time figuring out how it works. You need to listen to God. You need to say, "How, when I am spent, do I find more strength? How, when I am given out, do I find I'm filled and ready to give and give and give and run and run and serve and serve? Where's that power come from and how does it work?"

And sitting on the steps of your soul, he'll tell you. You'll figure it out. And you have to let him point out the points. Something different—and I write about this in my little book—there's something different about him reading the Bible to you instead of you reading the Bible to him. You see, quite different. Try it! And he'll point out the points and you'll say, "Aha! Yes, got it! I see! That's what I'm doing wrong or that's what I'm not doing. And you mean this could be this and that could be that?" And sitting on the steps of your soul, you read the book together and he points out the points. And it makes sense. That's what Mary teaches us here.

But this poor woman called Martha, Martha, who most of us probably relate to more than Mary, Mary. Martha, Martha was too practical perhaps and not mystical enough. Is this to do with personality? I don't think so. It's to do with choice. Was Martha the doer and Mary the prayer and the mystic? Calvin, in his commentary on this passage, says he thinks that Mary was Martha before she was Mary. Why would he think that? Because she chose. She had to choose.

And who knows what personality she had? We know the personality Martha had. But don't take it for granted and say, "Well, that's not my gift." Prayer isn't a gift. Prayer is a total necessity. Prayer is the Christian's vital breath. It's not a question of, "Oh, she's the prayer and I'm the doer." All of us must choose the better part. It just is harder for those of us that are Martha, Martha to do it.

And so the Martha, Marthas use their ingenuity. The Martha, Marthas use their intelligence. The Martha, Marthas use their system. The Martha, Marthas have an idea and a program and they have it all in little boxes. And the Martha, Marthas do it. And find themselves...