Gender Wars - Part A

Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Both men and women are from God. And really what happened is sin, as we discovered last week, entered into the human experience and contaminated and complicated every relationship since. And since then, we have gender wars. Today on Connect with Skip Hytik, Skip begins his message, Gender Wars, and talks about the struggle between men and women that started when sin entered the world. But first, we want to tell you about an exciting resource bundle available to you this month. Someone once estimated the cost of the services that mothers perform.

The amount was huge. We know moms don't do it for money. They do it out of love.

While we can't repay our mothers, we can honor them. Here's a great suggestion. It's a special bundle of resources we're calling the Heart Songs package. It features heart songs. There's a psalm for that, a powerful five-part series led by Lenya and Janae Hytsig designed to teach you to depend on God's love, power, and comfort in every season of life. You'll explore what the psalms say about love, jealousy, fear, security, and longing.

Maybe you can think of a time when you really, really wanted something. This psalm is kind of about that. It's this longing, this desire, this hunger that the psalmist is expressing, and his longing is for home. In addition to this encouraging series, you'll also receive the Sheology Quiet Time Journal, perfect for daily Bible reading to make notes as you follow the Heart Songs series or for your personal prayer time. Plus, you'll get a bag of Skip's Library Roast coffee, the coffee Pastor Skip chooses when he studies in his personal library. The Heart Songs package is our thanks for your gift to support the Broadcast Ministry of Connect with Skip Hytsig.

So request your Heart Songs package today when you give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer, or call 800-922-1888. Okay, let's turn to Genesis as we begin today's teaching. All right.

Good morning. Now, sweetheart, this is the male brain. Is it now? With a hat on it.

Is it made of styrofoam? Well, now, be careful. I want to tell you about how men think, the male brain, okay? Men's brains, you see, they're filled with files. Files. Does that make sense, files? As in a file cabinet? Yeah, we have a file for, well, for everything. We have one file for the car, one file for the kids, one file for you, one file for somewhere in the basement, your parents. We have a file for sports, for everything. Wow. Now, the most important rule of the male brain is that we open one file at a time.

I can't have... No, no, no. One file at a time. Once we're done with one file, we put the file back to its proper place, and we're careful not to touch any other file. One file cannot touch another file. Kind of like food on a plate. Second most important rule, no multiple files.

No multiple files. Right. That causes confusion.

I bet it does. I don't know what to do. They're all open.

More than one is open. What do we do? Like on the telephone and asking questions. Here's the secret, and women don't know this secret. There's a file in the male brain that women really don't know anything about. Women. Don't you want to know? Okay.

It's marked, ready? Nothing. It's a nothing file. You have a nothing file. We have a nothing file. It's our favorite file. Favorite file. It's our favorite file. All the files in our lives, nothing file is a favorite file. Why is that?

There's nothing in it. We can go to that file and keep going back to that file endlessly. That explains why we can channel surf.

Go from one channel to the next. And I say to you, honey, what are you watching? And I say nothing. Or I'm just sort of sitting around and you say.

Honey, what are you thinking? And I say nothing. Which seems humanly impossible. But it's actually true. And the other thing is that women are envious of this file because they don't have a nothing category. That's true.

They never think about just nothing. Always something. Always something. Well, sweetheart.

Yes. This is the female brain. With red hair. Doesn't matter what color hair, the brain functions the same. And ours are filled with fibers like fiber optic wires that are in a menagerie of colors, complicated patterns, and they're intricately connected. Sort of like the red hair on this thing. You cannot touch one fiber optic wire without engaging them all. You talk about money.

We go to mommy and to manners and the menu. And before you know it, it's like the 4th of July. It's all lit up. So you can't deal with just one file.

No, no, no, no. They engage. And do you know what energizes? You know, it gets these files. The juice flowing.

I want to know. Emotions. The more emotions, the more those files. You know what emotions do to these fibers?

Fry them? Once there's an well, a little bit like that. Once an emotion engages a certain fiber, it is locked into our memory bank and can never be deleted.

Oh my. Well, how do we fix that? You cannot fix it. That's the problem because men keep trying to fix our wires. We don't want you to fix our wires. We want you to listen to us. So like you go to cut the blue wire and you know what happens if you try and fix us? System failure. And the only thing you can do reboot and hear the whole thing all over again.

So anyway, do not try and repair. And not only that, we want you to hear us and know our emotions. We have a compelling need to say, let's talk. I want to talk.

Can we please talk? What file are you in? Nothing. So our worst fear is that our emotions might get put into your nothing file.

Not going to happen. Would you turn in your Bibles this morning to the book of Genesis chapter three, Genesis chapter three, let's pray. Father, we give you our bodies as Paul wrote, as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable, which is the smartest thing we could do. It's the most reasonable way to serve you. And we pray that as we give you our bodies and engage with our mind, that Lord, our spirit would grow, that we would understand your plan and understand behind it all your great love for each and every one of us.

In Jesus name. Amen. Well, men and women are different from one another. I wonder if you agree with that statement. We're different from one another.

Okay. It doesn't take a lot of brain power to figure that out. There's a book out called Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. That's how it's described the differences between male and female, or as one person put it, men are like dogs, women are like cats. Or as another person put it in terms of the hi-fi system, men are the woofers, the big bass speakers, and women are those higher pitched tweeters.

Sounds are nice and clear and distinct. Another person said, well, men in terms of clothing are flannel, while women are floral. When you get differences that are that apparent, and you put those differences together, it makes for an interesting marriage relationship because no one, no one, no one is perfect. As we mentioned last week, a happy marriage is the union of two forgivers.

Forgivers, no one's perfect, but I have a riddle I'd like you to figure out. There was a perfect man who met a perfect woman, and after a perfect courtship, they had a perfect wedding. Their life together was, of course, perfect.

Somebody said boring. One snowy, stormy Christmas Eve, this perfect couple was driving away. This perfect couple was driving along a winding road, and noticed someone at the roadside in distress.

Being the perfect couple, which I don't think is the couple that mentioned boring, they stopped to help. There stood Santa Claus with a huge bundle of toys, not wanting to disappoint any children on the eve of Christmas. The perfect couple loaded Santa and his toys into the vehicle.

Soon they were driving along, delivering the toys. Unfortunately, the driving conditions deteriorated, and the perfect couple and Santa Claus had an accident. One of them survived the accident.

Who was the survivor? The answer? The perfect woman.

She was the only one that really existed in the first place. You notice I'm biting my lip? Everyone knows there's no Santa Claus, and there's no such thing as a perfect man. Now the male responds to that. So, if there's no perfect man, and there's no Santa Claus, then the perfect woman must have been driving.

This explains why there was a car accident. Hey, would you agree that there's both an attraction between men and women as well as a tension between men and women? Because of the differences that we have. I've listened to, for years, the male species and the female species sort of point at each other and go, I don't get you. I don't understand you.

You are so weird trying to figure each other out, trying to understand and get in each other's brains, hearts, spirits. You may have heard the story about the man to whom God appeared, spoke, and granted him one wish. And the man said, Lord, what I really would like is a bridge from the mainland all the way to Hawaii so I could drive there whenever I felt like it. And God responded, and he said, well, that's a very selfish and materialistic request.

Do you realize the amount of concrete and metal it would take to provide a structure for that kind of superhighway from the mainland to Hawaii? Do you have another request? So the man said, well, yes, Lord, I do. I really want to understand women. I want to know how she feels. I want to know what she thinks when she gives me the silent treatment. I want to know why she cries and says nothing's wrong. I really want to know how to make a woman happy. After a long pause, the Lord spoke and said, now, back to that bridge.

Would you like two lanes or four lanes? You know, all joking aside, even the Bible talks about the intricacies of relational differences. The writer of Proverbs, Solomon, said of the three things he didn't understand, yea, for, he wanted an answer for, he writes this, how an eagle glides through the sky, how a snake slithers on the rock, how a ship navigates the ocean, and how a man loves a woman.

Now, science can provide answers to the first three, but many men are still trying to figure out number four. And get this, Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. The Bible says God gave him great wisdom above all those who lived on the earth. And he's over there going, I can't figure this out.

This is so difficult. And if Solomon couldn't figure it out, well, where does that leave us? Oh, by the way, Solomon was the guy who had 700 wives and 300 girlfriends. I don't know how many of you have heard of him. 300 girlfriends, I don't know how wise he really was.

Can you imagine trying to keep track of a thousand birthdays? That'd be like totally impossible. But here's the truth. Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Both men and women are from God. And really what happened is sin, as we discovered last week, entered into the human experience and contaminated and complicated every relationship since.

And since then, we have gender wars, and that is the topic of today, gender wars. That's why I've had you turn to the book of Genesis in chapter three. Now we're going to work our way to chapter three.

We're going to begin with some verses we have talked about or even read in Genesis one and two. And then we're going to find ourselves in chapter three. We want to know what happened. We want to not only know what happened, we want to know what now.

What do we do about it? What does it mean to us? So as we look at these three chapters, verses out of each one, and we think about gender wars, I want you and I to examine it from the standpoint of a design. You have an architect or a designer who had an intention in his mind when he designed men, women, marriage. It was a great design, but God's design was marred.

Something happened to the design. So I want to talk about with you the magnificent design in chapter one, that God designed a man and a woman to rule together. The matched design in Genesis chapter two, that God designed a man and a woman to have separate roles to complement each other.

But then third, the marred design, how what happened and continues to happen is men and women want to rule over each other. Back to Genesis, the first chapter, in verse 26, we discover his intention from the beginning, God's magnificent design. Verse 26, Genesis 1, then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God gave him authority over every creep and every creature. So God created man in his own image. Now notice in the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Please notice, first of all, in God's original magnificent design, that he designed men and women in his image, not just the male, well, I am made in God's image, I am the man.

No, the male and the female. Both of them were created in God's image. What does that mean, image, the image of God? Well, theologians will answer that by saying, to be in the image of God means that we are capable of expressing God's communicable attributes, attributes like intellect, emotion, will, choice.

All of those are part of his communicable attributes. We share something with the creator that other creatures do not share. To press it perhaps a little bit further, like the Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are a tripartite being.

We have a body, a soul, and a spirit created in God's image. Okay, now, being equal, our equality in the image of God does not mean interchangeability. It's like an engine, in an engine, men, you might have the cylinder head and the crankcase made out of exactly the same material, same weight, same cost per inch, etc. But those parts are very different. You cannot interchange one with the other.

They are similar, but they are very different. So equality in the image of God doesn't mean interchangeability. You have a man, you have a woman, both of them, though unique, are in the image of God.

That's first. Second, you will notice that God designed the man and the woman to rule his creation together. Did you notice the wording? He said, to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it. Notice the word dominion. That expresses our relationship to the rest of creation. We are to represent God being over all of the rest of creation. We are not the same as a horse or a cow or a dog. We are a superior kind in the image of God designed to rule over his creation.

But here's the point I want to make. The male and the female were to rule together. That's the magnificent design. We were to be co-regents, co-ambassadors, co-rulers, representatives of God together, ruling over creation. If I were to distill these thoughts into two principles, I would say then that marriage should, number one, mirror God's image and marriage should, number two, manage God's realm.

That was his intention. That's the magnificent design ruling together. If we turn to chapter two, we understand that this couple was a perfect match. You might say a match made in heaven. God brought the woman to the man.

It's a match design with unique roles that are blended together. Chapter two, verse seven, the Lord God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils. Nashama Chai is the Hebrew word or words, the breath of life. And the man became a living being. If you scoot down to verse 18, the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone. We already covered that.

I will make him a helper comparable to him. So God did that, and God brought her to him. And down in verse 23 of chapter two, we read, Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

So follow the chronology. God creates a man, a male, places him in the garden. He has the job of being the chief gardener, the animal namer, to tend to God's creation.

But one day God looks out and goes, not good, not good is that man alone. I'm going to make him a helper, somebody who will help him, complete him, in God's words, a helper that is comparable to him, or a better term, suitable for him, somebody that's suitable for him, somebody that suits him perfectly, somebody that is comparable just for him. Now the word comparable or suitable is literally, as we told you a couple weeks ago, somebody who is like opposite him, like opposite. It sounds like an oxymoron, I know.

Someone who is like opposite. And the word, as we mentioned, suggests something that completes a polarity. In a pole, you need a south pole, just like our planet has a north pole and a south pole. And both of them, though different, complement each other and are there for the rotation and existence of our planet. That's the idea.

That's the role. Two poles, they may be opposite, but they complement one another. Now let's get back to this whole difference thing for just a moment. Women and women are similar, but different on a number of levels. We're of the same species, so we're similar.

We're on different wavelengths. We are polar opposites in many respects. Somebody once said, the average man has four items in his bathroom, toothbrush, bar of soap, razor, and a towel from Motel 6.

A woman has an average of 328 items in her bathroom, and the average man is unable to identify most of them. Big differences. Lenny and I are opposite in so many regards. I like things cool. I am warm, so I want the windows open. She wants a blanket over herself. She's cold.

Our thermostats are different. I get in a car, I want the air conditioning turned up. She wants it turned down. I want the air conditioning turned up. I want the radio turned up.

She wants it turned off or really low so we can talk. You know, we were kind of bantering back and forth at the beginning about the difference between the male brain and the female brain. There's a book out on brain physiology, provocatively titled Brain Sex, the Difference, the Real Difference Between Men and Women, written by a man and a woman.

Ann Moyer and David Jessel. The book gives empirical evidence, scientific evidence, for the difference between the sexes, male and female. In the introduction of the book, it reads, quote, men are different from women. They are equal only in their common membership in the same species, humankind. But to maintain that they are the same in aptitude, skill, or behavior is to build a society on a biological and a scientific lie.

And the book gives chapter after chapter of scientific empirical evidence to that regard. The book goes on to say that men and women are different because their brains are different. Now, I said different.

I didn't say better or superior or inferior, but we're different. And it will help us, and it will help us get along with each other if we understand that we're different. Well, let's make that happen. Lenny and I are taking a tour group to Israel next summer in 2024. And I can't wait. We'll start in Tel Aviv, head north to Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, and the Jordan River. We'll spend several days in Jerusalem and see the Garden of Gethsemane, the Upper Room, and so much more. And we'll wrap it all up with a swim in the Dead Sea. Now, I've been to Israel many times, like over 40. In fact, I can honestly say, though, that visiting the places where the scriptures unfolded, where Jesus lived out his earthly ministry, it never gets old.

No, it doesn't. The incredible sightseeing will be punctuated by times of worship and teachings that you'll never forget. And Jeremy Camp and Adie Camp will be with us to lead worship. Make plans to join us next summer in Israel. For more information or to book your Israel tour 2024 with Skip and Lenya, just go to inspirationcruises.com slash C-A-B-Q.

That's inspirationcruises.com slash C-A-B-Q. Or call 800-247-1899. Come back next week as Skip concludes his message, Gender Wars, from the series, Keep Calm and Marry On. Make a connection. Make a connection at the foot of the crossing. Cast all burdens on his word. Make a connection. Connection. Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.