In Genesis 1, the Bible says that God created human beings as male and female. Abigail Dodd says that's at the core of what women need to understand about who they are as women. To be a woman means to have been created.
Now that sounds like nothing, right? It's kind of like saying X is X. But I do believe this with all my heart. And I'm just trying to say what God has made in woman, in that word even, as it defines what we are, is itself fully valuable. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.
I'm Bob Lapine. Does the Bible give us a clear sense of the difference between men and women? And what are we to understand about how we were made differently? We're going to talk about that today with Abigail Dodds. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us.
I just met our guest for today's program a little while ago, and I'll introduce her, Abigail Dodd, joining us on Family Life Today. Welcome. Thanks for having me.
We're happy to have you here. I can already tell. I know what you're going to say, Bob. Okay, let's see. I know what you're going to say. I can already tell. That Anne and Abigail are going to have a great conversation today. I think that's true.
Okay, that wasn't it. That's exactly what I was going to say. I was going to say I can already tell she is a very courageous woman, because just to tackle the subject she has tackled in this book in this day takes some courage, don't you think? I think it does take courage, and it takes conviction.
This has to be a conviction for you to put your thoughts into words. And also, she's brave because she's left her five children that are five from five to 15. Maybe it's not brave. Maybe it's just she's – She needs a break. She's got a couple screws loose. Abigail is a writer.
She lives in Minneapolis, married with five kids, a regular contributor at Desiring God Ministries. And the subject you've decided to tackle is the subject of trying to come up with a biblical definition or understanding of womanhood and femininity. And the reason that – I don't have to explain why that's so courageous to try to come up with that. We have this cultural idea of what masculine and feminine are, and now we've got a backlash against the cultural saying, no, there shouldn't be any definition.
And you're trying to say, okay, what does the Bible tell us about how men are different than women, and how can we embrace that and believe it? And you knew you were sailing into headwinds when you sat down to write it, didn't you? Right. Yeah, I don't think you can live in this world and not know that you're tackling something that a lot of people maybe don't want to hear about or are very apprehensive about hearing about.
And I get that. I think I can be apprehensive when I pick up books on this topic, because there are so many ways to go wrong. And there's so many ways to step on people's toes unintentionally, even as you're trying very hard to say something true and winsome and godly. What you say might not line up with another person's lived experience or with damage that they've had done to them in their experiences. And so to try and wade into those waters is difficult, but still necessary and just still so important that we understand that Christ applies to every single bit of our life, and there's none of it we should leave unturned. One of my sons has coined a phrase, I don't know if he invented it or if he heard somebody else use it, but he talks about genderalities.
Isn't that a good phrase? It's this idea that we've got these preconceptions of what gender should be based on cultural standards rather than on biblical standards. And some of this comes out of, I think I've told this before, he was at a youth retreat when he was in junior high and the speaker was saying, you know, guys and girls are different. Guys like sports and girls like to read.
Okay, so my son who loved to read and wasn't particularly athletic comes home and goes, so what am I? And I've had those same experiences of hearing the people up front use some generality to describe what it means to be a woman and then kind of come away scratching my head thinking, huh, I don't know if I fit. And so does that mean I'm not a true woman or does that mean I'm not a biblical woman?
And that's why we have to go back to the word over and over and be looking at what God is saying about what he's created, what he's made and what that means. You know, my grandmother was a farmer's wife and I mean, she worked out in the hot sun. She is sweating and working alongside him and my mom, a farmer's daughter. I mean, nothing gave her more joy than to take the chainsaw out and do some yard work. And these were wonderfully feminine, godly women who were not afraid of some sweat and hard work. And so I just think we need to make room for those kinds of things when we talk about men and women. So I just want our listeners to hear, wonderful, godly, sweating, chainsaw-wielding women. That's right. That can all work together, right?
That's right. That just described my wife. I like that, actually, because Bob's wife, Mary Ann, she loves to do yard work and mowing the grass.
So do I. And I think that it doesn't mean we're not feminine. No, not a bit. Right. And I mean, the Proverbs 31 woman, my goodness, I'm pretty sure she was getting some sweat going. This woman was remarkable.
Right. When we first started working together on Family Life Today, Ann, I remember you saying, I wonder if this is going to work because I don't think of myself as, you said, I don't think of myself as a typical woman. I don't.
What do you mean? Well, I think that I was a tomboy growing up. I like to play outside. And with the boys, I like to play football and all the sports. And she's good at it.
Yeah. And so I, and I'm also, I think when I was growing up, I thought of women as kind and as nurturing. And I tend to be tough and loud and I think, oh, I don't fit that mold.
And she's good at it. Gentle, quiet spirit. You go, I don't know, but I got a gentle, quiet spirit. The first time I was at the weekend to remember a marriage conference and they were talking about what a woman is and that nurturing part of her. And she has, those were the words, the scripture of a quiet and gentle.
I thought, oh, I don't even fit into the Bible. And I think some women feel like that. Have you found that? Yeah, I think that's a very common way to feel. And I know I myself have thought that like, wow, I have too many strong opinions. I've got too much going on. I care too much about all the wrong things, things like that. And I think, you know, for all of us, those principles set up, I have a gentle and quiet spirit that Peter is admonishing us to be like, you know, that's something that we need to learn with an older woman's arm around our shoulder. Who's telling us, I felt the same way when I heard that. And here's how God grew me in that area.
Even so, because isn't he wonderful to do that? But it's a really hard thing, I think, to hear sometimes from on high or from a certain way that's a little bit more detached where we think I have no model for this or I just don't know the steps forward. If that's what I'm supposed to be, how do I get there? Because I have more opinions than I know what to do with. And I want to say them all.
And I want to be really, really adamant about all of them. And so tempering all those things by the Holy Spirit's help and in the community of believers is such a valuable thing and a way of growing in grace in those areas that we know are biblical. And yet not feeling alienated, recognizing that, yeah, my natural bent may be a certain way. And yet that doesn't mean I can't cultivate a gentle and quiet spirit by his grace. Well, you open the book with sort of, in my opinion, angst, sort of a look at the womanhood in the church today. Talk about that a little bit, because it felt like it's coming from your soul. That was the word that I felt today, because you say I'm partly distressed over the state of Christian women. And that feels like an angst to me.
What made you write that? So we are always facing winds from one direction or another. And so the culture is kind of blowing us all in one direction in terms of there are zero differences between men and women. As a matter of fact, a man can be a woman.
A woman can be a man. And then sometimes those winds, they generally are blowing into the church as well. But often we've got our nose to those winds a little bit.
We know they're there. And so we are generally trying to push back to some degree, although I think we still can be, all of us can be blind to some of them anyway. But then sometimes what happens is we'll swing the pendulum the other way really hard to make sure that we don't think like the world, act like the world. But we might not do it with our feet in the scripture.
It might just be a reaction. And so if that happens, then what you do end up with is legalism or things of that nature. And so that's sometimes the angst I feel is the different ways the pendulum is swinging coming from different angles can really make it hard to feel like which way am I supposed to be pushing against? What am I aiming at?
What am I aiming for? And so my burden was really just to say we can't talk about what it means to be a biblical woman without putting Christ in the conversation. We can't abstract Christ away from what it means to be a biblical woman. We need the new birth. We need to see ourselves as having been made through Christ and for Christ.
And once we do that, our conversations have such a more sturdy footing. So we can look to biblical examples of women and all of a sudden our feet are much more settled on solid ground when we've really thought through what it means to be made through and for Christ. But you know that 90, and I don't have the exact number here, we'll say 97 percent of what the Bible says about living the Christian life is not gender specific. Right. So the fruit of the Spirit is for all of us, right? That's right. And the imperatives that follow the indicatives, those are for all of us. Right. There's only a few places where language gets gender specific, and that's where you say if the language of the Bible gets gender specific, we ought to stop and go, okay, why did he turn here and say, women, this is for you?
Right. I try to give an analogy, like if your uncle writes a letter to the family and he's telling all about something that happened and he's dear family and it's a whole long letter. And then he pauses at one point and says, and to my niece, and then says something else and then continues on. Now, the main points of the letter are probably in the body that goes to all the family. But to the niece, she will pay certain attention to the part that's written with her name there. But just like the Bible, the gospel is the good news about Jesus Christ. And the point of the Bible is to get us to Christ, to know and reveal the person and work of Christ. That's how we know the Father. And so that's the point. And yet there are really specific ways that that applies to men and women that the biblical authors don't hold back on. And so it can't be received, though, without understanding that bigger piece. We will not love anything in the Bible unless our old heart has been taken out and a new heart put in.
And so that was another thing I really wanted to lay the foundation for is, without the new birth, without a new heart, this will not – Make sense. Yes. In fact, it'll chafe. Yes, it'll chafe. I was going to ask that.
How do you think it chafes? There's a verse, I think it's in the Psalms. I wish I had the reference off the top of my head. But it says, the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.
Behold, I have a beautiful inheritance. When you think about lines, lines are marking things off. They're restrictions in one sense.
It's kind of like saying the fences are great around here. And we can't say that without a new heart because our – especially our American mindset says restrictions are not good. I have complete autonomy. I am completely free to do and rule over my life as I wish. And so for God to come down and say, there are some boundaries for your good. Well, if rules to you are just simply a way of limiting, oppressive, you will not love the rule giver. But when you realize the rule giver is a loving God who puts lines down in pleasant places, not to give you some unhelpful restriction, but because this is the absolute best thing for you. Then when you have that view of God, which you can only get through Christ because he's the definition of love. And so that's how we understand that God really is love. Then you see the lines and you say, I know who this is coming from. This is coming from my loving Father.
He only ever does good to me. And then you start to discover the ways that these lines actually are good reorients your thinking. So the person who is just thinking Galatians 3 28 right now, they're just going, but it says there's neither male nor female. These distinctions that you're trying to impose in Christ, the distinctions go away. And women should have the freedom to be and to express and not that the boundaries between men and women have been dissolved in Christ. Well, I love that passage from Galatians, and I don't like it when people pit scriptures against each other. Well, this is the scripture that people over here like to use, but we kind of stay away from it because we're afraid it might undermine our point of view. Because I think what an incredible gift that yes, in Christ, I am a co-heir.
I really am as his daughter, full, complete air with Christ. And the way I understand that is it's not that distinction vanishes. In heaven, we know that it will be every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. So the distinction will still be there in that sense in terms of tribes, tongues, peoples, and nations. And so that's the way I tend to think of it is it's this diversity brought to unity in that we are all heirs together with Christ.
But not that that flattens everything about us. Equal value, equal worth, equal inheritors, equally loved by God, with still God-given distinctions that are a part of who we are. Yeah, I mean, the distinctions, and I can feel it as you talk about womanhood, it's in your subtitle, Free, Whole, and Called in Christ. I want to hear what you would say as a woman who's holy woman, because I think Bob and I probably understand manhood. Do we understand womanhood? You know, honestly, I've been here for more than 25 years to ask the question, come up with a biblical definition of masculinity and femininity, is one of those things that we keep coming back to not wanting to go too far and not wanting to blur what the Bible teaches.
Just find what's the sweet spot. That's why when I saw this book, I said, I'm glad Abigail's figured it out. We'll get her here.
And she's bold enough to write about it, exactly. To Dave's point, if you had to come up with that one sentence, here's what it means to be holy a woman, w-h-o-l-l-y, a woman, what would you say? To be made holy a woman is simply to be created by God as a woman.
Now, that sounds like nothing, right? It's kind of like saying X is X. But I'm not trying to tell you what the attributes of a Christian woman are because I think we can find those in the scripture. But when we ask the question, what is it to be a woman? I simply want to say something so foundational because our culture is saying that to be made a woman isn't a woman. And so unless we start with to be a woman means to have been created, that means you're a creature. It means you didn't make yourself and it means you don't decide what you are.
It means to be created by God as a woman. And so that has implications for your body. It has implications for the instructions that you're given in scripture. And certainly there is a deeper essence to that, that you're right, I'm not going to be able to put words to. And it's also in his image. And so we bear qualities of God that we represent him, which is beautiful that are distinct and can be different from men.
And we don't always embrace and yet God is reveling in his creation. This is a conundrum and we've got to be careful about being too boxy and saying femininity means this. And if you're not this, you're not feminine because that may depend on in what environment is this happening, right? Well, here's another question for you. Do you feel free to be holy woman in the culture and in the church?
Well, I think I would say yes. I feel completely set free in Christ to be exactly as he's made me. And I feel that I don't think you'll have the freedom piece until you've had new birth. So I would say being holy woman, W-H-O-L-E, even if you aren't a believer is something that we can't get around. And one of the things that gets said in the church is I don't like it when people treat me as just a woman. I want you to see me as a human or I don't like to be treated as just a woman.
I want you to see me as a person. Now to that, I would say amen to treating people as people. But the part of that that misses something really valuable is that to be a woman is to be fully human. And so we shouldn't talk about the word woman as though it's small and degrading. But if I want to treat someone like they're important, well, then I'll treat them more like a human or a person or a man. No, I would like it for everyone to treat me as a woman and let that be as big as it really is.
It's a full reality. I'm a human as a woman. And so you should treat me accordingly, not as though being a woman is only the small slice of specifics. But if you were going to treat me really well, then you would treat me like a person. It's like, well, why not just treat me as a woman and then you decide that that is a good thing. It is a valuable thing.
And so we get into these semantics because we are trying to be seen as valuable. And I'm just trying to say what God has made in woman in that word, even as it defines what we are, is itself fully valuable. So do you feel free and to be a whole woman and to embrace biblical femininity in the church and in the culture? I feel total freedom in my relationship with Christ. I feel like he celebrates me. I feel like he compliments my gifts and my strengths and I feel freedom to be who I am in him. However, I don't always feel that freedom in the church or in culture. You don't feel like everybody else is giving you that freedom. And I'm always thinking, what is this person?
What is this church? Will they celebrate me as well or the culture? Are they celebrating me to the point where it's an idolization of me being a woman?
It's a tricky path to walk. And yet I do know in Christ he celebrates me. And I think culturally speaking, when Jesus walked the earth, it was a different day. There were many Hebrew scholars that wouldn't even believe that women had a soul. And so you have Jesus walk onto the scene where he is elevating women and even using him in his teaching was unheard of. John 4 with a woman at the well, that was unheard of that he would not only speak to a Samaritan woman, but he would have a conversation and even ask her for water.
He would become unclean. And so, yeah, it's a tricky day and yet a beautiful day to be alive as a woman. And in a place called America is very different from other parts of the world. So I'm hearing two big ideas out of the conversation we've had today, maybe three. One is that the first thing in understanding what it means to be a woman or a man is to experience the new birth. Apart from the new birth, you're always going to have a distorted view of manhood or womanhood. Second thing I'm hearing is that it's hard to nail down into a sentence or a phrase what masculinity and femininity are. There are shades, there are gradations, there are words we can put to that. We don't want to get too concrete with what those words mean or try to box somebody in.
But maybe it's more about the direction you lean than it is an absolute descriptor of you. And then the last thing I'm hearing both of you say is at the end of the day, the freedom you feel to be the woman God's made you to be depends on whether you're concerned with what he thinks about you or whether you're concerned with what church people or the broader culture think about you. If you're looking around for affirmation of your womanhood from your peers or from the culture or even from folks in the church, you're probably going to be frustrated. But if you're saying, Lord, I want to be the woman, in our case, Dave, the man that you've made me to be, I want to fully embrace the fact that you made me as a woman or as a man, and I want to live for you. And when you look to his word and understand his pleasure in that, you can kind of tune out what everybody else is thinking about you and just live in that. It would sure be nice if there was a book written on this, Bob. Wouldn't that be nice?
What a thought. That women could read. As a matter of fact, Abigail has spent a long time working on a book called Atypical. This is hard to say on radio. So the word is atypical woman. If I search for it on the web, do I search using the word a?
Do I start atypical? You don't know, do you? Yeah, I don't. Okay, just go to familylifetoday.com. We've got it in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can order the book from us online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY and say I want a copy of Abigail Dodd's book, Atypical Woman, free, whole, and called in Christ. We're happy to send it to you. Again, you'll find it online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And we want to take just a minute and say thank you to those of you who have already gotten in touch with us to say we want to help you take full advantage of the matching gift offer that has been made available to Family Life during the month of May.
We've got some great news. That matching gift offer has now been expanded. It was $250,000. We've had an extra $100,000 added, so every donation made this month is going to be matched dollar for dollar up to a total now of $350,000. We're very excited about this, and we have gotten permission for those of you who would like to join the Family Life team as monthly legacy partners, every donation you make for the next 12 months is going to be matched dollar for dollar as long as there are funds in that matching gift. So your giving goes even farther when you become a monthly legacy partner, and legacy partners are the financial backbone of this ministry.
You're the ones who say we want to make sure this program continues to be available in our community, online, and around the world. When you become a legacy partner, in addition to the thank you gifts we want to send you for your donation, a copy of Aaron and Jamie Ivey's books called Compliment, a flash drive that's got programs that have been some of the most influential programs in my own life over the last 28 years. In addition to all of that, when you become a legacy partner, we're going to send you a certificate so you and your spouse can attend an upcoming weekend to remember marriage getaway. We'll cover the cost of the registration for you as a legacy partner, and that's transferable.
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You can give online at familylifetoday.com, or you can give by calling 1-800-FL-TODAY. And thanks in advance for your ongoing support of this ministry. We really appreciate it. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow. Abigail Dodds will be here again. We're going to continue our conversation about understanding womanhood and femininity.
What is it God has in mind for women when he makes them women? We'll talk more about that tomorrow. Hope you can be with us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, got some extra help from Mark Ramey this week, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today, hope for tomorrow.
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