Younger Women - Titus 2:3-5
Undiscerning Christians falling victim to these hellish heresies, the destruction is not restrained by the church, the church has joined it.
There is no doubt about what a woman’s role is, there’s no doubt what a man’s role is. Look at our text again. What has God designed for a woman? Verse 4, “To love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands that the Word of God may not be dishonored.” That’s very clear.
You can get in a lot of trouble by suggesting that kind of stuff. Try standing up in this culture and saying, “Women, you’re commanded to love your husband and to love your children and to work at home and to be subject to your husband.” You’ll get screamed down. I mean, you can be in deep trouble just reading that let alone commenting on it.
It’s been amazing since people knew I was approaching this text, they’ve been telling me, “What are you going to say about this? This is going to be very controversial. Boy, we can’t wait till these tapes come out. What’s going to happen then?” Well just to mitigate that a little bit, I’ve said what I’ve said, this morning, so that if you get upset you know whose side you’re on. (Applause) God has laid out His standards. They’re not negotiable. And I’ll tell you this, if the church doesn’t wake up soon and obey the Word of God, all is lost. We don’t need to fall victim to this stuff. You don’t need a Master’s Degree to figure out what it means to love your husband, love your children, and work at home. How hard is that? By the way, there are no qualifiers there, no caveats, no footnotes. It’s just what it says. Go home, submit to your husband, have children, raise them in godliness, take care of your house. And that’s what older women are to teach younger women, they’re to teach it not only with their mouth, they’re to teach it with their life.
I’m telling you, what I said a few weeks ago now is becoming so vividly true. We are living in Romans 1, aren’t we? What’s wrong with America? God’s wrath is wrong with America. God’s let us go and we’re plunging down the path and the evidence of it is this reversal of sexual roles that Paul talked about in Romans chapter 1 verse 26.
In our culture what is being said in these verses to young women is the very opposite of what young women are being taught. Young women today are being taught to love whoever they want, farm their children out to somebody else, don’t worry about being sensible, do whatever pleases you. Don’t worry about being pure, fulfill your physical and lustful desires. Don’t work at home, work outside the home. Don’t worry about being kind, you do whatever you want. You grab your moment in the sun. Take care of you, not somebody else. And by all means, don’t be subject to your own husband.
When this comes into the church it therefore dishonors the Word of God. I mean, even an unbeliever can read those verses. The most unschooled non-believer can read that the Word of God says young women are to love their husbands, love their children, be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, and subject to their own husbands. And if he can read the Bible and look at the church, he can make a very simple conclusion…you Christians say you believe the Bible, why don’t your women live like this? You see, it brings discredit on the Scripture to say we affirm the Scripture but we live however we like. Or worse, we live however the culture being basically controlled by Satan, the prince of the power of the air, dictates us to live.
But young women have always needed instruction, just like young men and older women and older men do. And so here the Word of God is at stake…the honor of the Scripture and the glory of God and the silencing of the opponents of the gospel. In other words, this simple set of commands has immense implications, has far-reaching ramifications for the Kingdom. If you love Christ, if you seek to honor God, if you want to lift up and exalt the Word, if you want to silence the critics, you will be eager to obey these commands. If you want to do what the society says, if you want to fulfill your own fleshly desire, you will disobey them. Jesus said it simply and concisely in the summary statement, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” And here are some of His commandments given to us by the Holy Spirit through the pen of the Apostle Paul.
And then he says, “Workers at home.” And here’s the one that gets all the heat nowadays because women don’t want to work at home. Frankly, they’re not at all interested in working at home if they can help it. Forty-five percent of the American work force is women. Megatrends 2000 says in the past 20 years US women have taken two-thirds of the millions of new jobs and that will continue. By the way, that directly contributes to continued male unemployment in the inner city, according to Harvard University report done by a man named Harris because people will hire a woman before they’ll hire a male black, sometimes even a Hispanic black male, a Hispanic male rather, or a black male. And so what happens is two our three new jobs are taken by women because they’d rather deal with women than men and that contributes to a rise in unemployment of the men. Fifty-six percent, says Megatrends, fifty-six percent of mothers with children under six work outside the home. Seventy-three percent of mothers with children six to 17 work outside the home. By the year 2000, that’s in six years or so, seven years, ninety percent of women between 16 and 65 will be at work outside the home. Nobody will be home…nobody.
Women don’t want to be workers at home. Why? Because Satan sells the system on that. Why? Because it’s anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Bible and it devastates the testimony of the church. The word “workers at home,” one word in the Greek, oikourgos, from two root words, ergon, which means work, and oikos which means house. It’s simply the sphere of a woman’s life is her home, that’s her domain. It doesn’t mean she has to be there 24 hours a day and can never leave. What…I’m not saying that because you don’t want to lock her up with soap operas either, but what it does mean is that is the sphere of her life. That is her domain. It is not that she is simply to be home, but that the home is her sphere. The woman in Proverbs 31 left home when she needed to to buy a field, she left home to prepare that field, she left home and went afar to find things that would help the family. The woman did what she needed to do but the focus of everything was the home. And that’s where she poured her life and she got up early and she went to bed late for the sake of the home. She is to be a home keeper, that’s the sphere of her responsibility, that’s her place of employment, that’s where she should pour her life. For a mother to get a job outside the home and send the children to some kind of daycare place is to shirk her God-given responsibility. It also is failure to understand that her husband is to be the provider, as Ephesians 5 makes very clear. Even if you wanted to work outside the home to pay for your children to go to a Christian school, you made a big mistake. Better that you should stay in the home and raise your own children to be godly then to pass it on to somebody else.
Why do they [feminist] care? You tell me, why does some feminist woman care whether you’re a homemaker? Why does she care? I’ll tell you why, because her agenda isn’t her agenda. It’s the agenda of the enemy, it is an anti-God agenda intended to destroy the credibility of the church because if you can get women who claim to be Christians to abandon the home, then you can pick up a Bible and stick it in their face and say, “You say you believe this? I don’t think so. And therefore it must not be believable because you know what it says and you’re not interested in believing it and you claim to be a Christian.” The agenda is…they don’t care…they don’t know what they’re doing but they don’t care really whether you work, Satan cares to discredit the Bible, that’s the issue. That’s the level of the attack. See it for what it is and don’t become victimized.
Did you notice how feminism is encouraging women to blaspheme God’s Word?
It’s the agenda of the enemy, it is an anti-God agenda intended to destroy the credibility of the church because if you can get women who claim to be Christians to abandon the home, then you can pick up a Bible and stick it in their face and say, “You say you believe this? I don’t think so. And therefore it must not be believable because you know what it says and you’re not interested in believing it and you claim to be a Christian.”
From A Sermon by John MacArthur 25 years ago in March 1993
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