Read the first part of this series here.

Amazing Mom

Grace is an amazing mom to our five children. She works incredibly hard, never complains, and has sacrificed a great deal over the years for me, our children, and our ministry. She feels the pain of my critics and gets furious when people assume they know me but have no idea since they see me for an hour a week on the stage and have no clue who I am or what I am like the rest of my life with her and the kids. She’s had people pretend to be her friend just to try and get into our life because they want power, influence, and/or employment. She’s been cussed out by complete strangers for decisions the elders made that she had nothing to do with. She’s had to deal with people showing up at our home demanding our time and even threatening our family. She’s had to share me with the world and weep many times when I catch a flight. She’s had to serve ungrateful people who took so much of her time and energy that I became frustrated only to then receive even more demands and threats of anger or manipulative guilt if she did not continue to do what they wanted when they wanted how they wanted.
Through it all she’s learned to be my friend. Grace is the one person I know will be with me in forty years. And I will still close my eyes every day and think about holding her hand then too.

Grace is not like me.

I can be brash, intense, overbearing, ill-worded, and the like. She is patient, loves to counsel people, has hope for everyone, and serves anyone. I learn a lot from her example, and praise God I have gotten to grow up with her through high school, conversion, and college, all the way from our teens to our thirties.

This Sunday I will share her with Mars Hill Church and those who tune in online. When I preach the story of the Peasant Princess from the Song of Songs, I will be teaching from a series of love letters between a husband and wife. As we do often at Mars Hill, we will open up some time for live text-message questions from our campuses and, following the sermon, Grace and I will try our best to answer them so as to be of service. To be honest, I’m a bit anxious. I’ve preached live to crowds of ten thousand people without even getting a bit nervous and could literally take a nap before getting up to preach. But the thought of having the person I love, cherish, and care for the most with me makes me anxious. I am Grace’s defender and protector and friend. I know that her role will be misunderstood by some, and her answers picked through by critics who have made it their life mission to act like Judas in the name of Jesus. So, before I share my Grace with you, I wanted you to pray for a few things, if you would.

Prayers

1. Pray that people understand that she’s not preaching but rather practicing Titus 2 by coming in to answer women’s questions about marriage and sexuality that frankly I have no wisdom on as a man.
2. Pray that she and I do a good job threading the needle when answering the questions.
3. Pray that we can help the people in our church because we love them and have given our entire life to them.
4. Pray that people will understand that she is not an employee of the church, does not lead anything at the church, and as a mom with five young children is focused on her family in this season of life and cannot meet with all the women and deal with all the issues that some will want her to.
5. Pray that she and I will see more of our future through this process. Grace wants to work alongside of me in ministry for the rest of our lives and we’re wondering if, one day when our kids are grown and we’re in a different season of life, she should be teaching women and encouraging pastors’ wives, as that is her heart.
6. Pray that I honor her well publicly as I should.
7. Pray that I can get her to laugh loudly a few times from the stage because it’s awesome.

Any recovery of an authentically biblical understanding of men and women must begin in the Garden of Eden. It is there that we learn about the special creation of Adam and Eve. It is there that we read God's mandate to the first male and female. And, perhaps more importantly for this article's purpose, it is there in the garden that we are able to see the effects of sin and grace on the relationship between Adam and Eve. Of these lessons on the relationship between the sexes, it might be the case that the effect of grace on Adam and Eve's sin-broken relationship receives less attention than some other equally valuable biblical truths recorded in the first chapters of Genesis. This article will explore this perhaps neglected lesson on grace in the garden. It will do so by posing two questions: (1) Why does Adam call his wife Eve; and (2) What lessons does this surprise ending to the narrative of the fall teach us? Although this article will focus on Adam's role in acting in accord with the grace that he has received, other equally important considerations regarding Eve's transformation by grace could be developed as well.

The Apostle Paul prohibits the exercise of authority over men by women when he says, "I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, for Adam was created first, then Eve" (1 Tim. 2:12-13, NAS95).

With this simple statement Paul explicitly affirms what is implicit throughout God's Word, that the order of creation establishes patriarchy as God's pattern for leadership in human relationships. Addressing the matter of propriety in prayer, the Apostle Paul again emphasizes this order:

For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; for indeed man was not created for the woman's sake, but woman for the man's sake.
1 Cor. 11:8-9, NAS95.

Imagine a new believer, thoroughly confused by the sexual anarchy of today's culture, discovering the truth inherent in passages such as 1 Corinthians 11:3-16, 14:34-35, Ephesians 5:22-33, 1 Timothy 2:9-15, and 1 Peter 3:1-7. What a deep sense of relief to discover that the order of creation establishes timeless principles for the relationships between men and women.

One of the year's high holidays in towns across America is opening day of deer season. Like all holidays, preparations begin long before the actual day arrives. In September hunting paraphernalia appears on the shelves of the local True Value: rifles, shells, scent, jumpsuits and caps in brilliant hunter's orange. The big day is usually a Saturday in November.

A young farmer warned me my first year in ministry: "Might not be too many men here next week, but don't take it personal. We'll all be out looking for our buck." Sure enough, there weren't many men in church that next week.

Voddie Baucham wrote a great book on the importance and purpose of the family. A Family Driven Faith: Doing What it Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk with God was released this summer 2007. He takes a great approach for Christians to rethink and relive what the family is all about. Taking principles from Deuteronomy 6 Dr. Baucham addresses the crisis of losing Christian kids to secular humanism as it starts with the family. This is not a book on fixing the program or how to start a program for the family. This book is about shifting paradigms from clinical psychology to what the Bible calls Dads and Moms to do in raising their children. The byproduct of this will be God glorifying as well as evangelistically being light and salt in a confused world.

Covenant Promises
The basic context in which we bring children into the world and do all our work in caring for children is the covenant God has made with all who love him and who seek to walk in his ways. He has promised to love not only us, but also our children (Gen 22:15-18; Ex. 20:5-6; Acts 2:37-39). But do these wonderful promises mean that our children will not go through difficulties and even times of turning away, rebellion, and dissolute living? Consider the reality that we are not perfect ourselves — our own lives are damaged deeply by sin in every area. We do not pray as we should for our children. We do not live before them in full obedience to the Lord in everything we do. We do not teach them perfectly the glorious truth that we know touches every area of life. In addition we do not bring perfect children into this world. They bear the stain of Adam and Eve's sin etched right through them —though they also bear God's glorious image. C. S. Lewis captured this double reality with the words of the centaur in Prince Caspian. Our children also bear the inheritance of our particular brokenness.

Judges 2:6-14

When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work which the Lord had done for Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of one hundred and ten years. And they buried him within the bounds of his inheritance in Timnathheres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, who did not know the Lord or the work which he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals; and they forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt; they went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were round about them, and bowed down to them; and they provoked the Lord to anger. They forsook the Lord, and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them; and sold them into the power of their enemies round about, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies.

Psalm 10 beings with the words, "Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you always hide yourself in times of trouble?" It beings with a complaint, with a doubt or question. There are many such doubts expressed in this psalm and in other passages of Scripture. As we read these words we should consider, for our own lives if it is appropriate to express doubt oneself or to allow one's children and teenagers to express their doubts.

I have three sons who are all in their twenties now. They began expressing questions and doubts about all sorts of things before they were five years old. All children express questions and doubts and at times these doubts are about the Lord and about Biblical faith. This is an issue with which anyone who has ever been involved with young people needs to wrestle.

We live in a culture filled with boredom and cynicism—even among our children.

It is a tragic commentary on our culture that you can meet 16- and 17-year-old kids who are apathetic about their own existence and bored much of the time. And it is not only teenagers for whom this is a problem. I meet many young children whose natural curiosity and excite¬ment has already been turned to boredom. How has the insatiable curiosity which occurs so naturally in little children been quenched? Why are there so many bored children and young people in our contemporary society? I do not claim to be a parenting expert, but I would like to propose three causes which I believe foster this boredom in our children.

Jumping Right In
We live in an interesting time of twisted confusion regarding the nature of gender. Men and women wonder how to relate to one another in the home, the workplace, and in the churches of Jesus Christ. In many ways our world is more just, more equitable, and more open than any society in history. Great strides have been made to afford freedom in the workplace, political participation, and education for women in our culture. Yet our understanding of ourselves has also greatly eroded with many social struggles and aches. What began in western culture to bring equality has led to a world that despises our differences, sees gender as a mere social construction, with both biblical masculinity and femininity cast aside. To be honest, it is simply an affront to the modern mind that God created us uniquely and distinctly as male and female, both biologically and psychologically. Though modern research is showing that down to our very brains, we are different, many persist in believing that men and women should occupy the same roles and spaces in the home and culture. We live in a time when men are thought to be capable of being as good a mother as a mother and fatherhood is quickly becoming an endangered art. Take all this into the dating world and many just scratch their heads. In this paper my goals are not ambitious. I want to look briefly at our struggles with being a man or a woman in our society. Second, I want to look at some of the confusion which is displayed both in pop culture and in academia regarding gender. In doing so I will look at the word Feminism and strike fear into the hearts of the men – just kidding, but we will look at the strengths and weaknesses of feminism. Finally, I will close with a very brief treatment of gender according to the Bible with application to the family and the church. This will not be an in-depth research paper; just some analysis which I hope will assist us forward in our discussions of being men and women. So let us begin with our struggles…with each other, with ourselves.