The High Dignity of True Women #1

Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word. Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in The Truth Pulpit. On Tuesday evening, just past, I preached a message titled, When Marriage Gets Difficult.

It was in the normal course of the teaching I've been doing on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5. And I started that message and invited response to it. I said, after you've heard this message, if you would like to hear more on the subject matter, let me know. I had a number in my mind, a little range of numbers, not like Gideon's fleece. I said, if the response falls within this range, I'll go for it and I'll preach a few messages on marriage. Well, that little range that I had was not nearly adequate to cover the responses that I got.

It was two or three times what I had expected as what would be a serious demand for it. Dozens of people have reached out to me and asked for more teaching on marriage, more teaching on difficult marriages, and I want you to know I'm happy to oblige. I am your servant. And on such a serious topic, it's a privilege for me to be able to bring the Word of God to you on this topic. For the next two or three weeks, maybe Sunday and Tuesday, we're just going to pause everything and I'm going to respond to the things that you said are on your heart in response to the Word of God.

I am excited about this. I believe that it will strengthen our church and strengthen your families and strengthen your marriages. One of the things that I said, and if you haven't heard that message, you really need to.

It'll set the context for things. One of the things that I said in an effort to put you all at ease and those who will hear the messages in other places, it's not a problem to have problems. Difficulties in marriage are to be expected. Scripture deals repeatedly in many, many books of the Bible describing difficult marriages, giving us instruction on marriage, explaining some of the causes of problems in marriage. The Bible is a realistic book. That's one of the many things that I love about the Bible.

It doesn't create this unattainable air of satisfaction and everything's perfect and all of that, like you see people portray their lives on social media. The Bible meets us where you and I know life is at. Now, not everybody has problems in marriage. One dear saint went out of his way to tell me how many years he'd been married and how good his marriage has been, and that was an encouragement to me. But I know that there are many of you like me that over the course of time, you've found difficulties in marriage, and as I've said, I'll say this once and not repeat it for the rest of eternity.

That's a joke. Any problems that we've had in our marriage have been my fault. They really have been. And so I preach with a sense of sympathy as one in need of grace as we come to this, and as I was preparing for this Sunday, I had prepared a full message that I thought would be the perfect way to go. And then as I continued study and thinking about everything, I think the Lord led me in a different direction for what we have here this morning. I can say this. I can only wish with all of my heart that I had heard this message that I'm about to preach this morning much earlier in my married years.

I think it would have helped and it would have shaped me in a way that would have been beneficial and would have facilitated a better way to approach marriage than what I did for so long. So this start of our series on dealing with marriage and thinking about marriage, this opening message, beloved, I want to tell you, I assure you that this is not what you're anticipating at all. This is not at all what you're expecting me to say. I also want to just put your minds at rest and just enable you to kind of let your guard down a bit as you hear what I have to say.

I am not here this morning in particular. There will be no element of rebuke in anything that I say. There's not going to be any scolding or, you know, laying out of unattainable goals or anything like that. We just want to look at Scripture and see what Scripture says in a way that I think will help everybody in the room, and not simply those that are married, but those that are not married. Both women and young men alike are going to find in this things that give them direction for the future, even if they're waiting on marriage, let alone well into marriage. And so we're going to turn as a start to Ephesians chapter 5, which is kind of the preeminent passage in Scripture about marriage.

We're just laying background today for it, but I'm just going to read the first three verses for reasons that will become apparent over the course of time. And just one final thing, I just can't tell you enough how important this is as you hear me today, I'm on your side. If you've been a bad husband, a bad wife, your teeth are grinding because of how difficult marriage has been for you or how much hurt it has brought to you, I'm on your side. I'm on your spouse's side. I'm on everybody's side here.

I really am. And so this is from a sympathetic pastor to people who have asked me to teach on this matter, and I realize that the many that have contacted me are only representative of others who didn't speak. So with that in mind, Ephesians 5 verses 22 through 24. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Well, the best help in thinking about marriage can come, after we've read this text, can come from the simplest of observations. And it's an observation that I don't remember anyone ever making in my hearing, but beloved, this is so simple.

It's so basic. Wives come from the realm of women. A man finds his wife from the realm of women, and that wife belongs to the realm of women that God appointed. A right view of marriage and help for your marriage is informed by a biblical view of women, and the reason that I emphasize that for you is this, is that when you get into the midst of marriage and you're having difficulties, your spouse is grating on you or is unkind to you, your immediate desire is, how do I fix this problem?

How can I make this problem go away so that it won't disturb me in my peace any longer? And that's not really very helpful. It's like having a dam collapse and you go and you put, you know, one clod of grass to stop the flow of water right there, but the whole dam is collapsing because the structure underneath it is not solid. We want to come back and establish some strength and stability to the foundation of marriage itself, and I believe that you will find and agree with me in the end that the simple observation that wives come from the realm of women is going to be far more helpful than you might suspect. A right view of marriage, in other words, needs a biblical view of women.

To help you in a difficult marriage, we need a biblical view of women. And here's our problem. Nothing in the world at all supports that view. Culture has poisoned the waters irretrievably over the course of my lifetime with so many destructive philosophies and ideas and activities. Just think about the way that our culture views women, what it teaches women, the ideas of feminism, striving to be the same as men, the pervasive affirmation of homosexuality and transgenderism, and a more specific but illustrative mark of it over the past many years, and this is not a philosophy so much, but it represents so much, the idea of female combatants in mixed martial arts combat. All of that portrays a view of women and is the environment in which we live. It's the air in which we breathe, and we are drinking from poisoned waters in our culture in ways that I know that we don't even recognize in all of these things. And the church is not independent of the influence that culture brings to these things.

But, beloved, the waters can be polluted much closer to home as well. You and I, without thinking about it, we bring our own personal biases into the institution of marriage. And those of us that have been married for decades, you know, we kind of brought those in into the past and kind of sorted it out piece by piece, a little bit at a time maybe. But we're all products of our family history. We don't often think this way about what it is that has influenced the way that we think and the way that we relate to the person closest to us.

It's difficult to step back and assess the impact of it all because we just assume it. We presuppose it on Father's Day. That's about all I'm going to say about this day. Many of you had good parents, and praise the Lord for that if you did. With thanks to God for blessing us with godly parents, whatever their individual faults may have been.

We're grateful for that. Some of us had fathers who did not treat our mothers well. They were unkind and not at all the representative of the love of Christ to our mothers. Many of you lived through divorce in your childhood.

That affected you. I know people who never knew their fathers. Father met the mom, baby was conceived, and the father was gone. And the incredible ache and emptiness and void that the resultant daughters have in light of that just cannot be measured decades into their lives. They didn't know their fathers. Others wish they hadn't known their fathers.

I get that. And so that makes it difficult for us to think rightly about women. If our fathers didn't model very well how to love and treat a woman, then that shapes us.

But let's go a little bit further. How will we process the biblical role of wives if our own mothers were ungodly, temperamental, or manipulative in their approach to life? And they had none of that tenderness that Scripture describes as being the mark of a godly woman.

How will we ever measure that? And I know some of you have suffered greatly and struggled with great difficulty as you moved into your adult lives and tried to sort out, what do I do with this woman and the way that she lives and the way that she poisons everything around her? But even within the walls of the evangelical church, it's been 12 years now, I can say this without identifying anybody, over the years, even within the walls of Truth Community Church, we've seen the reality of controlling husbands who intimidate their wives into silence, breaks my heart thinking about these dear, sweet ladies, afraid to say a word for fear of crossing their husbands and what he might do. It's just etched on their face, the combination of fear and wondering what's going to come next, flinching at the gaze of her husband. We've seen it in this way, young men, unmarried men, trying to lord themselves over their girlfriends. This is not healthy.

This is not good. I remember one conversation in particular. Remember, we've been around for years, so there's no reason for you to think you know who I'm talking about. Having a conversation with a young man describing the way that he was interacting with his girlfriend and the things that he was trying to teach her and train her to do, I didn't say it at the time. I didn't have the heart to say it. But as I was listening to him, I was thinking, man, you are a creep.

I hope for her sake that she breaks up with you. And soon after she did, the Lord blessed her by protecting her from that young man. Others, perhaps even more young men, have conditioned themselves to see women through the dirty lens of pornography and shaping their view of women in that most sinful, dreadful, distorted ways. And going a step further, what are we to say about the realm of women when young women— I don't want to say our young women and make you think I'm making a comprehensive statement here.

I'm not. But when young women, even within the outward church, embrace a worldview that is full of vanity, competition, and ambition in life, how can they ever live a biblical life? How can they ever be a biblical wife in light of what we just read in Scripture, submit to your husbands, submit to them in everything as to the Lord? Nothing about that mindset of self-seeking, proud vanity, either in appearance or in position in life, how can they ever live a biblical life and have a biblical marriage if that is the controlling worldview by which they are operating? You can see, beloved, that our task is very great as we seek to consider marriage in this time to come.

All we can do is turn to the Word of God and pray that the Spirit of God would help us along the way. Now, let me pause there after that introduction and simply say this. As I look back on teaching that I've done on marriage over the years, I affirm everything that I've ever taught.

Nothing about my view has changed. You get further and further into ministry and you just start to realize that one or two messages just aren't sufficient to address worldview issues like what I've just described to you. And so we just step back and we consider Scripture broadly. We let it inform our thinking, and if the Word of God starts to inflect the way that you think about things and the trajectory is changed, then a lot of good things can follow without specific instruction on individual problems that you may have. We need today, beloved, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we need Scripture to wash our minds and to cleanse our hearts from all of that pollution that I just described and to set us in the right direction. And there's no better way than to consider what our good Lord has given to us in the Word of God. And that's what we're going to look at today. This is background for coming to Ephesians chapter 5. I'm going to give you three sections to this message.

I'm very, very excited to do this. We're going to consider, first of all, Scripture and the dignity of women, and then Jesus and the dignity of women, and then thirdly, the church and the dignity of women. The title of today's message is The High Dignity of True Women. The High Dignity of True Women. And it's in today's culture that you have to say true women for reasons that I don't need to expand on any more than just highlighting that, that I'm talking about the real thing, not the real realm of women, not that artificial where women try to be men or men pretend to be women.

They're not part of the discussion here. It's what God created a person to be in the mother's womb and set forth in Scripture what they are to aspire to. So let's look, first of all, at Scripture and the dignity of women. After we've gone through these things, Scripture, Jesus, the church, and the dignity of women, I will just give you a very brief two-minute summary of how it changes everything about your married life. But number one, Scripture and the dignity of women.

What I'm going to do today, I'm just going... A big part of the time, I'm just going to allude to Scripture without having you turn there just for the sake of time. Scripture and the dignity of women. Here's the fundamental statement that I want you to hear, and this changes everything, is that a woman is noble. It is noble to be a woman. Scripture ennobles women.

They are created in the image of God, for one thing, and I'll get to that in a moment. But I'm going to give you, as we talk about Scripture and the dignity of women, I'm going to give you very briefly three sub-points about women in light of Scripture that should affect the way that every one of us looks at women as men and the way that women should think about themselves in light of Scripture. There is, at the risk of overstatement, you could easily make a case that there is nothing more noble in the creative plan of God and what He has done than to create a woman and to establish a biblical view of what a woman can be, should be, and what God calls them to be.

So first of all, we consider Scripture and the dignity of women. First of all, women are created in the image of God. It says in Genesis 1, verse 27, God created man in His own image. In the image of God, He created him. Male and female, He created them. And that idea is repeated in Genesis chapter 5 also. And so a woman is equally created in the image of God just as a man is, created with a mind and relational capacities and able to reflect the communicable attributes of God. A woman has a high dignity simply from the fact that she is created in the image of God.

We start there. And so as husbands consider their wives, as young men, unmarried men consider women, we need to realize that in the entire realm of women, in the class of women, everyone that we see is someone that is created in the image of God. Part of the problem, I'm glad I remembered to say this, part of the problem that creates a difficult marriage, and this goes both ways, but I'm just going to state it on the one side of the equation, is that men come to think about their wives simply in relationship to themselves.

They think about their wives in terms of what the wives' responsibilities are to them, what the wife can do for them, and what they want from the wife, from the kitchen and from other places in the house. And do not start with a right view of their wife in seeing the wife in relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ. Simply seeing the wife as someone connected intimately to Christ, someone intimately shaped by God, and that changes things. All of a sudden you can't look at a woman when you know that she's created in the image of God, you can't look at her separate and apart from that and isolate her for the objects of the fulfillment of whatever you want from her. This woman is created in the image of God.

We start there. Secondly, Scripture and the dignity of women, number one, they're created in the image of God. Secondly, women share equally in the gift of salvation for those that are saved. Women share equally in the pardon of sin and the gift of eternal life. In Galatians 3.28, it says, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And all that statement is saying is, is that men and women share equally in the gift of God in Christ in salvation. A woman who is in Christ, her sins are pardoned as fully and equally as a man's are. The gift and the promise of eternal life belongs to her in fullest measure, just as it does to a man. And so if you are in a Christian marriage, a Christian man and a Christian woman, we men need to look upon our wives saying they share equally in that which is most precious to me.

I cannot abuse that, I can't violate that any more than I could try to abuse or violate Christ himself. Christ has laid his love and goodness upon her, then she is, watch this, watch this closely. If Christ has set that woman apart for himself and she belongs to him for all of eternity, then there should be a sense of reverence and respect with which you treat that woman in your life because she is in union with Christ herself. She belongs to him. He chose her from eternity past. He thought of her on the cross. He's going to bring her to be with him throughout all of eternity. And so, I'm speaking metaphorically here, not in reality, you can't slap that woman without slapping Christ himself.

And so there should be a healthy sense of respect, reverence, and even fear in the way that you deal with the woman in your marriage because Christ has laid his hand upon her in a way that you should begin with respect and deference. She's not your property. She belongs to him. She's on loan to you. But she came from him.

She'll return to him. And you need to keep that in mind. We need to keep that in mind, men.

So much so, if you think I'm overstating it. Thirdly, we're saying Scripture and the dignity of women. First of all, they're created in the image of God. Secondly, they share equally in biblical salvation. Thirdly, in the realm of marriage itself, husbands are commanded to honor their wives in marriage.

First Peter chapter three, verse seven. Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel since they are heirs with you of the grace of life. And many commentators, if not most, think grace of life is referring to the institution of marriage there. Husbands, wives, they share in the grace of life. Marriage is a grace that God gives in this earthly life for joy and contentment and all of that. And the command of God to husbands is, you look at that woman and you respect her, you honor her, you protect her. This is God's command to you in that marriage relationship. Scripture calls you to recognize, honor, protect, and defend the dignity of that woman. And just so you know, and the way that I'm thinking about this as I stand here, I'm not talking so much about external threats from the world or anything like that, but just in the context of your own relationship, the intimacy of the marriage relationship, there's a sense of honor and a fear of God in the way that you treat your wife because she's created in the image of God, she's an equal sharer in salvation, and you are commanded directly to honor her in your life. Now, I've been going for 20 minutes or so.

That'd be quite a lot to just stop on right there, wouldn't it? But we can go a little bit further as we think about women in the realm of the home. Children are commanded to respect their father and their mother on equal terms. The fifth commandment, honor your father and mother. Ephesians 6, 1, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. And so we see the unique realm and the high dignity of women even in the way that children are commanded to honor their mother.

And so there's a lot here, isn't there? Just in what we said already, Scripture assigns a place of high dignity to women. Creation, salvation, marriage, family structure are all designed for us to recognize the high dignity of women.

Period, full stop. And so let's step back for a moment and just recognize a very basic principle. A divine dignity covers those who are born as women and those who live as women according to God's created design. A divine dignity, a high dignity, is attached and woven into the existence of a woman that male and female, husband and wife, that everyone ought to recognize. Now, beloved, just circling back to my introduction for just a moment, you realize this high, lofty, sanctified position that women hold in the created order of God, you realize, you realize just how awful things like pornography are.

You realize how awful female combatants in mixed martial art events are. This is so contrary. This is so contrary to it all. You recognize that these things of trying to get women to be men and all of those things that I alluded to earlier, just how much of a violation and an attack it is upon the design of God in marriage and on the design of God in women.

And so we have to come and look at that and step back and say, that's not right. I'm going to think about women differently in light of what Scripture says about the dignity that God has placed upon them. And so this is obviously not a statement that women are perfect.

No, all women have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But we're saying that the divine design is something that we are all to respect and acknowledge and to respond to, this order that He's given. My friend, I want to let you know of a special ministry that we have at thetruthpulpit.com that's very near to my heart. We have a ministry to those who are in prison.

And in the nature of life, sometimes we have loved ones that go astray and find themselves behind bars and spending significant time in incarceration. Well, we have a ministry to them. We send them transcripts of messages that I've preached from the pulpit of Truth Community Church. We do it on a weekly basis.

They get mail every week. If you have a loved one in prison that you would like to have us reach out to in that way, do me a favor. Go to our website, thetruthpulpit.com. That's thetruthpulpit.com. Click on the link that says About, and you'll see a drop-down menu that will take you to our prison ministry. You can fill out the form, and we'll be happy to respond and then join in with you in ministering to that one who is outside the normal course of society. So that's thetruthpulpit.com, the About link for our prison ministry. That will do it for today. We'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit.