True Woman 101 - Week 5: Battle of the Sexes

Nancy: Now, when I say “battle of the sexes,” what comes to your mind?

Carolyn McCulley: I think of that song, “Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.”

Erin Davis: “No you can’t. Yes I can.” You know that song—they’re duking it out. It's men vs. women.

Mary Kassian: Men vs. women. “Let’s duke it out.”

Danna Gresh: It happens in my house sometimes (gasp).

Nancy: Tell us how.

Dannah: Do I have to?

Nancy: Yes.

Dannah: I don’t know, I feel like the culture has just created this competition, sometimes. “That’s a guy job; that’s a girl job.” We feel that tension sometimes in our relationship when we’re not anchored in God. This happens in the best of marriages, and it shows up in the smallest of things—who’s going to take out the trash and who’s going to do the dishes. It’s every day in my house. It’s an everyday battle against the flesh for us to submit to God’s plan.

Nancy: But I think it’s really popular—and okay—in the culture for women to tell men-bashing jokes. (But men can’t tell women jokes, at least when women are around.) Don’t you find that’s pretty common? “Oh yeah, he’s a guy.” “That’s just the way men are.”

Dannah: “Men don’t have feelings.”

Carolyn: We’ve talked often how every single commercial shows a man who deserves to be mocked—just the way that it’s cast. So it’s being played out. It’s being piped into our living rooms in every single reality show. It’s guy versus girl, or a bunch of girls versus one guy . . .

Mary: . . . or she shows him up. She’ll just get in there and show that girls can do it better.

Dannah: It’s a sad thing, because it actually shows up in the way that girls and boys are growing up. One of the pieces of research that I came across recently was, the great difference in the number of the boys that are in college in relation to the number of boys that exist.

Mary: It’s astonishing. The population is predominantly male. It’s not a huge difference, but statistically there are more males in North America. But there are exponentially more females entering college right now, because for years we’ve been telling boys that they’re dumb, they’re the reason for all our problems.

You can actually trace that back to about the eighties—and the seventies—when they really started to sink into that almost self-fulfilling prophecy of the feminist movement. The prophecy that everything good is created by women, and every problem is created by men.

You can see that in the educational systems.

Dannah: You can see it, too, in our view of teen boys. Do you remember back in the nineties when we were all afraid of the super-predator, because there was this little bulge of teen boys who were coming out that hadn’t been domesticated. So the violence was spiking and people were really afraid of these boys that were running in gangs.

There were big predictions about what would happen, and then the population kind of dropped off a little, and then we didn’t have the super-predator crime that they were expecting. But we were so afraid of teen boys.

This reminds me of a story. My son is a young adult now, but he was maybe in ninth grade—in fact, I know it was ninth grade . . . His assignment in his Christian high school was to do a random act of kindness. So he got together with three of his friends in his class—three guys—and they baked cookies at my house.

I got the boxes, they put the cookies in boxes, and they were just going to knock on doors, give these boxes of cookies and rake leaves for whoever was home. The first woman where they went opened the door and completely distrusted that four teenage boys were standing outside wanting to do a good purpose.

She had this alarmed look on her face and said, “There’s a mouse in the box, isn’t there? I know there’s a mouse in that box. Get that mouse out of here—I don’t want that mouse here.” They finally opened the box, and she said, “Eat one of those cookies.”

So they ate one of the cookies. Here, you have these four teenage boys that did a good act—they did end up staying and raking her leaves, but it was so sad that she distrusted them.

Mary: With my kids, my sons, it’s really something to be a man and to pass by a woman on the sidewalk and have her kind of cringe and expect something bad from you. “You’re not going to be for me, you’re going to be against me because you’re a guy and I’m a girl.” This battle, it just rages on so many fronts.

Carolyn: Even the disparaging remarks that are made: “Oh, boys’ eyes! You couldn’t find the socks! They’re right there on the floor!” There is just that sense that, “We girls can do things better.” All of us can make these jokes and not think about the implications of them.

Nancy: So what are some other ways we see that battle of the sexes playing out in women’s lives today, in their relationships. You just gave one example, Carolyn. What are some others?

Mary: There’s such a tug-of-war for control, really. I think there’s always just this pulling that goes on over who’s going to control. That often happens in relationships on a small level, but I think also on in terms of on a larger cultural level. We see this pull that there can’t be any disparity between how men and women are treated, because otherwise it’s not fair.

So we see, even in sports programs, they’re putting down a lot of men’s sports programs now because there needs to be an equal number of women . . . Or they’re taking women into courses when there are guys are more qualified—but we need to treat the sexes equally. There’s this battle and everything needs to be equalized so more women will be accepted in.

That’s been a frustration for a lot of the men that I know. 

Carolyn: I think it’s not just that women be treated equally, but there’s this feeling that women need to be treated better. So women have been winning the battle of the sexes, but in reality we’ve been losing.

Erin: I don’t think that the battle cry of women in recent years has been “separate but equal.” I think it’s been “separate but superior.” We’ve been trying to prove that we’re superior at every turn of the race. Now, we are the CEOs, and we are the biggest group of college students, and we are running our own homes—and it’s not the fantasy that we thought it might be.

Carolyn: When I became a believer, after investing a decade in feminism and the women’s movement, the thing that was revealed to me right away was in my speech. My words could undermine so quickly—and I wasn’t even trying to do that.

But I remember talking about a guy I was dating to some friends of mine who were a married couple. The man heard it and said, “I’m glad I’m not single, because you scare me, the way you speak about these guys.” And I thought, I was just telling the truth.

That was my first wake-up call that this ingrained attitude was so present. I was discussing somebody I was dating—I didn’t even think I was angry. I didn’t even understand then that it would probably fall into the category of gossip. But just to hear his feedback on my critique, the overflow of my heart. It stunned me to hear that because I wasn’t even trying to be mean.

Nancy: And you’re thinking, I really could be mean. . . I think sometimes there’s really not an awareness of how we’re coming across, how we’re communicating, because it’s become the norm. And then, where there’s conflict between men and women, invariably we’ve got to find someone, something, to blame.

What are some of the factors we—our culture—blames for the conflict between men and women?

Erin: Men. It’s pretty much just men.

Nancy: Men, men, men, men, and men.

Erin: Men get the blame for everything. Did we say “men”?

Carolyn: It’s not totally unjustified, though. You go back and look at—especially in the history of what’s happened to women in the Western world—there were some real injustices and some real crimes against women, some real sin in a large group setting.

Now we can see this root repeating itself in developing nations. You see this pattern where there’s inequality and there’s really bad treatment of women. Will we offer the same solution? Or will we come in with a gospel-based solution that will bring real repentance, reconciliation? That’s dear to my heart.

At the True Woman events we've met women who are literally being harmed by men. They’re not healthy relationships. Men are taking their role of leadership to a place of harshness and unkindness and cruelty and power and control and domination. It’s still happening today.

I’d like to say that we’ve grown as a culture in that, but it’s still happening.

Nancy: We’re going to talk more about that in this discussion. I want to roll back just a minute and say that if we go back to the first few chapters of Genesis—the creation—this battle between the sexes, this not being on the same side, this not pulling together, this blaming all goes back to the very first man and woman.

It wasn’t that there had been some awful, evil oppression in that case (though sin is oppressive and destructive). But here you have the man blaming the woman and the woman blaming the man, just blaming each other. She blames the serpent. There’s anything except personal responsibility.

We have this tension here. There are real injustices. There are things that need to be corrected and addressed. But from the time sin entered into the world, there was this brokenness in relationships. Let’s get back to what causes these conflicts, ultimately.

James talks about it, in the Bible: “Why do you have wars among you, why do you have battles?” It’s women and men against each other, women against women, men and against men—whatever. It’s something that’s going on in our hearts.

That’s why we go back to the Genesis account, to look at how all this got started. Here we have Eve who disobeys God, who makes a sinful choice. She goes her own independent way. And let’s just remind ourselves—what was Adam doing?

Carolyn: He was not doing anything. He wasn’t leading, he wasn’t informing, he wasn’t protecting. He was being passive.

Mary: He was passive. You know what’s really interesting to me? We’ve looked at the story of what man and woman were created to be. I think it’s interesting that Satan played to the weaknesses of male and female—not weaknesses in a bad sense, but vulnerabilities is a better word. With every strength comes a vulnerability.

The vulnerability for men is passivity; the vulnerability for women is stepping outside of that that God would have for us, and directing our own lives and responding to the wrong thing. I think Eve was such a responsive, relational creature. The serpent, when he approached her, engaged her in relationship, and she responded to Satan instead of responding to God.

So what she did, she did out of who she was as a woman. She was a responder, a relater—“Yeah, let’s connect, make relationship.”

Nancy: It's hard to imagine relating to a snake, however.

Mary: There was something engaging there, something very engaging.

Nancy: Have you ever questioned, why did Satan approach Eve first rather than Adam?

Erin: Because he was more crafty than any of the other animals in the garden, I think he understood, maybe, her desire to please or her desire to gain control ultimately.

Carolyn: And she wasn’t there to get the word. God told that to Adam and Adam told her. Now it was an opportunity to come and undermine that, and see. She thought, Maybe God is holding out on me, and that could have contributed to Adam standing by passively and thinking, Yeah, maybe God is holding out. Let’s just see what’s happening here. There was that lack of teamwork—checking in with each other when there’s spiritual opposition. And it led to this downfall.

I think the serpent came at her because she didn’t hear it first, she heard it from Adam. This is a very easy way to contort it and say, “Hmmm, are you sure you got that right?”

Dannah: I think Satan knew, inherently, some of their weaknesses. He had observed them. Scripture says in Ephesians that men are called to love and women are called to submit and respect. I’ve heard a pastor say—and this really resonates with my heart—that one of the reasons God issues those commands is because what’s difficult for a woman is to submit and respect.

You go see an office full of men or an army of soldiers of men, and they have no trouble with the hierarchy of authority. But you put women in that same setting, and you have some play for power, right? Certainly!

Erin: That’s a nice way of saying what would happen in that room of women.

Dannah: There are many office environments with this scenario. So, I think Satan had observed her, perhaps, and realized, “I know where I can mess with this hierarchy of authority and submission.” It wasn’t just Adam she wasn’t submitting to—it was God.

Mary: What’s so interesting about that is I think sin targets us sex-specifically, but also, when God gave judgment against sin, it was sex-specific. He didn’t just come in and give this blanket judgment. To Adam He said this . . . to Eve He said this . . . There are some differences in the way we’re impacted by the presence of sin.

Nancy: Let’s talk about what those judgments were. I think it helps us understand our calling, as women, and our fallen-ness as women.  Genesis chapter 3 is where you have the temptation and the sin. Satan did tempt them sex-specifically, and then you get to verse 16. Mary, why don’t you read that passage, Genesis 3:16–19, and see how this plays out differently to the sexes.

Mary: Sure.

To the woman He said [that’s the Lord talking], "I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you."

And to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree that I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Nancy: What are the differences between these two consequences?

Mary: Well, you see the consequences of sin, the impact of sin, really touching male and female at the foundation core of who they are. Women are impacted relationally, meaning pain in childbearing, relationship with the man—male/female relationship with the husband. So women are impacted because of their ability to relate and bond.

Erin: And emotions, don’t you think? Can we talk about PMS?

Mary: And all the things that go along with being a woman . . .

Nancy: . . . at different seasons of life—not just when you’re having children.

Mary: And guys are affected in terms of their capability or their ability to be initiators or to affect the desired result. So everything they try and do, their work, their labor is going to be frustrated for them.

Nancy: Their calling to provide . . .

Mary: Yes, their calling to provide. So in a sense, it affects a woman’s relationality. It affects a man’s capability. It affects them at the core. Sin affects me. It affects who I am as a woman, and it affects a man at the core of who he is. I think we see this all the time.

Dannah: I have a note in my Bible for the verse, “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.” My note says that the Hebrew language denotes a desire bordering on disease. It’s kind of like a violent craving. I look at the state of little girls, teen girls, single women, and see this violent craving that “I must have a man. I will not be complete.”

We saw it when we wrote Lies Young Women Believe. They felt they didn’t have value if they didn’t have a boyfriend. A lot of times these were girls who had never had a boyfriend. Single women struggle sometimes to the point where they lose their focus on their own value because they’re seeking this out—this violent craving.

Carolyn: Not only a craving for, but a craving to control.

Dannah: Yes.

Nancy: So once they get the man, there’s this powerful desire to be in charge of the man.

Dannah: The way the male responds to the female is also under the curse of sin—what was supposed to be so good and valuable and beneficial gets twisted into a domination and a rule that is very harsh and very, very hurtful. I can’t believe how much this passage talks about pain. It’s so painful. It’s pain for the woman, and it’s pain for the guy.

Pain in different ways, but we see that all the time.

Nancy: We need to remember that it’s not men who cause the pain, or women who cause the pain to men—it’s sin that causes pain. It damages—as we saw in this lesson—woman’s inherent softness and man’s inherent strength. So when we see this conflict, our tendency is to blame the other person for causing the pain, but we go back to Genesis and see, no, it’s our sinful choices that end up causing pain.

Erin: I think, as women, it’s important for us to remember we’re not the only gender in pain. Men are suffering as well. They may not be articulating it as freely or as often, because they’re not getting together and talking about the opposite sex as much as we are, but they’re suffering from the results of sin just as much as we are.

The battle is different than it’s been cast to be.

Carolyn: And you can’t talk about the roles in marriage without understanding this background, because if you just read Ephesians, it sounds weird and archaic. If you don’t see that it’s a redemptive quality of God restoring that broken lack of fellowship and teamwork, and saying to the woman to encourage and follow and support—it’s a redemptive picture of your independence.

Loving sacrificially for men is a redemptive picture of your passivity. If you don’t know that, then this does sound very oppressive and really weird, like a throwback. Whenever we talk about roles, we need to take it back to the gospel or it makes no sense.

Nancy: You know, Carolyn, when you were a new believer as a thirty-year-old women, the book of Genesis and this teaching on roles was one of the first things you encountered. You didn’t exactly have a positive response to that.

Carolyn: No, because I actually entered in at Ephesians. Our church was going through Ephesians, and I was reading along with them. I had never read this before, and I thought, What?Submission! It took some time and understand, “Here’s the gospel, and this is what makes sense.”

But I first reacted like everybody else: “You’ve got to be kidding me! No way!” I think that temptation is always present, and if you don’t see (as you all have so capably written in the book) it’s not about us, it’s about the Lord’s glory. If you don’t see that, it doesn’t make any sense.

Mary: If you don’t see that, it’s hopeless. If there was not an answer to this consequence of sin—I’d be a feminist. I’d be something, because there wouldn’t be an A plan. They don’t see the A plan, so they try to create their own B plan, their own C plan, and craft their own fig leaves.

And ultimately, it’s the same goal. What we want is to experience that mutuality and that harmony and the unity and the communion.

Nancy: That’s what God intended, that’s the way it started out.

Mary: You just don’t want to have a battle. You want it to be peaceable and harmonious, and that’s really the wonder of the gospel—is that Christ made a way to get back there, but it’s not the way that we think. It’s not by clamoring for the way we think it should be, but it’s by submitting ourselves to God’s plan that we actually begin to accomplish that.

I just think of the pain in the lives of women. We need to acknowledge that, because we cannot take that lightly. I do not take that lightly. I cannot tell you the number of girlfriends who I have ministered to who have been so broken at the point of their relationship with men. They have been abused, and just the atrocities and the brokenness and the pain of sin is so ugly. It’s just so ugly.

Nancy: We get thousands and thousands of emails at Revive Our Hearts and Mary you do, too, at different ministries that we’re involved in. Most emails are from women because we’re ministering to women, and so many of them are telling about the pain of an unfaithful husband, of abusive relationships, language, making them feel worthless, being demeaning. I’m not saying every relationship is that way. Thank God there are some healthy marriages and loving men and women who feel cherished and nourished. But some of the ones who are really hurting will write to a ministry like ours and pour out their heart. And your heart does break.

But we also get a few emails from men. We’re not really targeting them in our ministry. But they hear what we’re saying about women and God’s call on womanhood. Some of these men have been very wounded by mean women. In fact, I had a woman whose marriage has broken up tell me recently . . . She’s married to a non-believer, was married to a non-believer. She was the Christian, but she had become in the course of the years a shrew.

She broke down and wept when she told me of the time when her husband looked at her and said, “You Christians are so mean.” That was a point at which she began to realize that not only had she been harmed through this man. I mean, this man had done some really vile things, and there was so much hurt. I won’t go into the whole story but just on many fronts she had just been really wronged by not only this man but perhaps other men.

But then, when it hit her that her nasty, sharp, harsh tongue and spirit had decimated her husband, that was a point at which she stopped throwing darts and began just taking responsibility for her own sin. She can’t take responsibility for his, but that was the point at which repentance kicked in.

Now to see this woman. The marriage blew up. He’s now married to the other woman, and she’s not going to have that husband back again. But she is one transformed woman because this whole conflict, the battle of the sexes, she began to see how sin had caused the pain. Her husband wasn’t the issue. Sin was the issue. She was not only sinned against, but she was a sinner.

Mary Kassian: That’s such an important point, Nancy, that sin is the issue. We always need to remember that we need to look at things through the lens of sin. We are affected by sin, and God calls us to righteousness and to step out of that sin. That even impacts the choices that we make in those situations, the choices that women make in those situations, when they’re in a situation where they’re being harmed by sin.

Dannah  Gresh: I’m married twenty-three years as we’re taping this to a godly guy that I just can’t wait to get home to. I mean, we just took this summer and just poured ourselves into our relationship, and we’re like nineteen year olds. We just can’t stop hugging and touching and cuddling and talking. What a sweet relationship the Lord has given us.

But if I backed up to our early marriage, my husband struggled with pornography before we were married. He was a virgin that loved the Lord and really just believed that this horrible problem would go away when we got married, and he could enjoy a relationship with his wife. But it didn’t. We endured about three years of just pain and hurt.

I have been very public in my writing and in my books about my healing from being sexually active as a teenager and really just the heartache of my life. The Lord had to really bring me to a place of believing that His death and His blood was big enough for me because even though I was a Christian when I was sinful, I just didn’t believe it was enough.

So here you have this relationship that is a Christian relationship, but it’s become unhealthy and unholy. I’m trying to heal from my sin, and he is trying to stop his sin. There are times, I believe, through godly counsel, through pastoral counsel, through Christian intervention that a woman can draw a line in the sand, and that’s what I did.

I said, “Honey, I love you. I love you dearly. But I’m not going to live in a home where there’s pornography. That is abusive to our relationship. I am going home to spend some time with my family. I’m not inviting you to come with me. But when you’re serious about fighting this and winning it, I’ll be back.”

And in five weeks, my husband was radically transformed. It was only a couple of weeks until he said, “You know what? I can win this. I’ve been given everything in Christ to win this.” There are cases when you draw the line in the sand when you don’t have a husband that responds to that. But in my case, I was blessed with one who did. He rose up to be the godly man that God designed him to be in this book. We’ve lived twenty-three years now in a beautiful relationship. I just think that some women need to know that through godly counsel—not on your own—that you can draw a line in the sand and say, “I know my value in Christ, and I expect you to treat me accordingly.”

Mary: I’ve watched through situations with girlfriends of mine who were being abused by their husbands. This one girlfriend had her husband telling her, “Well, you need to submit to me, and that includes submitting to the way that I treat you.” And he started physically abusing her. I was walking that through with her because that’s not what the Bible teaches.

We do not submit to sin. We do not submit to unrighteousness. If your husband asks you to watch porn with him, your higher calling is to respond to the right thing which is responding to God. See, Eve responded to the wrong thing. We’re responders. We need to have that response of soft spirit. We want to respond to the right thing, and we want to be that helper that challenges our men to a higher standard of godliness.

I know that in my marriage there is no one in my husband’s life that can gently and with as much impact challenge him to be the man he needs to be in a gentle and loving and godly way at the right time. When I speak a word, he listens because of the power, I think, that God has given us to be influencers in that way.

Carolyn McCulley: We see a great example of that in Scripture with Abigail. When her husband is foolish in 1 Samuel 25, he doesn’t want to respect David and the cultural customs of looking out after the sheep. He disses David. And the servants go to Abigail, obviously knowing she’s a wise woman. They say, “You’ve got to do something here because now the armies of David are going to descend on us.”

She gets prepared and goes out to meet him, and she humbles herself. The Scripture says she was beautiful, but that’s not what David comments on later on. She humbles herself before him, and then she calls him to a higher standard. She says, first, and this is my paraphrase, “I know what God’s going to do, and I know how He’s anointed you.” She expresses that faith. And then she says, “When you enter into your kingship, don’t enter with blood on your hands.” She calls him to be a godly man. She says, “This is who you can be. Be that man.” And she used every bit of her initiative and her planning and her creativity and her words and her personality. Everything.

And David saw it and relented. To me that's a wonderful picture of what a real helper looks like. There’s nothing fainthearted about that. There’s some bold initiative. It’s a belief in “I know what God’s going to do, and I’m going to call you to believe what God’s going to do” and with the right standard.

Nancy: It’s also not a woman just cowering in fear in being overcome by evil but a woman overcoming evil with good.

Mary: I do not think that this is a path that women who are not believers can walk. Because of the battle of the sexes, because of the conflict of sin, because there’s so much brokenness, I think that we need to know Christ. We need to have the power of God’s Holy Spirit in order for us to navigate this path of what it means to live out a godly life and how to make those decisions, because we can’t be simplistic about it. We really need to take the whole counsel of God into mind when we deal with those types of issues.

Dannah: And you’ve got to have the Spirit of God guiding you when you take those stands, when you take those strong stands, when you verbalize, “Be this man.” If God’s Spirit is not in you empowering those words, they can be done through the flesh. THen it becomes a battle. It escalates the battle.

Mary: Yes. It escalates the battle.

Carolyn: That’s usually because you’re pointing to your own standard. “Be this man. This man I expect you to be rather than be this man that God wants you to be.” That’s very different. Jump through my hoops versus meet God.

Mary: Or, you deal with your sin before I’m going to deal with mine.

Carolyn: Right.

Mary: Instead of examining our own hearts and our own sin and looking where God wants us to change.

Carolyn: That’s why it grieves me every time I hear a criticism that this position is making allowances for women to be abused. But if you say, “I want every bit of your intelligent submission as unto the Lord in order to show this redemptive picture of the gospel in marriage” is that allowing for abuse? No way. No it doesn’t because the Lord doesn’t allow that. He shed His blood because of this cycle of abuse and anger and anger in response to being abused. And there is no room for that.

What we have to do is help each other by taking seriously the potential for this in marriage and asking good, loving questions. And where we have questions, being the body of Christ to each other, so what is hidden is pulled into the light and has a chance to be redeemed. But in no way, in no way does it condone abuse.

Nancy: And when you think about those issues, it’s really no wonder. The women’s lib issue is really no surprise.

Carolyn: Right.

Nancy: Because it was addressing real issues that women saw in real women’s lives that they experienced themselves.

Mary: I mean, bigger cultural issues even. Carolyn, you travel around the world. We’ve all seen these bigger cultural issues where you have women being sold into prostitution. You have the young brides, these twelve-year-old brides that these businessmen come in and use and abuse and take off. They buy them. Or in Thailand, the sex trade.

Dannah: And Indianapolis and Texas. I mean, it’s here. It’s happening here.

Carolyn: My concern is there’s this big push now for what they call “The Girl Effect” to invest in women and girls around the world which on the surface is a good idea. But what’s lurking underneath it is this idea in certain cultures like, “We’ve given money to the men, and we can document this aid money goes to prostitutes and candy and alcohol. It doesn’t go to the family. But if we give money to women, then they use it to feed their families and build up their communities.” So they’re all rushing to fix this problem by throwing money at women.

Now, I’m not saying women shouldn’t be educated and women shouldn’t have an opportunity to use their skills in the market place. But what I’m saying is, I look at that and say, “Yes, that’s a big problem. But now we’re going to recreate the same issues here, and we’re not going to actually bring these men to repentance and reconciliation apart from the gospel.”

So my heart is that Christians are on the frontlines of this—especially those of us who embrace biblical womanhood. Where women who are made in the image of God are put down simply for being female, we should be on the front lines of making a difference there, making a difference with the gospel of repentance. Because it will do no good to say to all those men, “You’re bad. You get no more from us. We’ve put everything in the girls.”

Mary: That’s exactly feminist’s solution, right? They identified a problem. Feminism identified a very valid problem. The battle of the sexes is real. It exists. I’m sure you hear of stories from the young girls that you deal with.

Erin Davis: They are very much struggling. “Identity” pretty much sums up every issue in young women culture. But this is a huge tenant of it. They don’t have great relationships with their dads. We’re talking about a generation now where the minority of them have relationships with their dads or have dads at all. There’s definitely not a granddad in the picture and a dad in the picture. So we have no context for how to even relate to men.

The mom’s been carrying the whole burden of the family because of that situation. So the mom is strong, is swinging the hammer, is paying the bills, is doing everything she has to do. And then these women, young women, have no idea how to relate to young men their same age, younger than them, older than them. It’s not a marriage situation for teenage girls. That’s not what’s happening at all. It’s happening because they don’t know how to relate to their fathers, their brothers, their peers, and so it’s very much happening.

Mary: The message is that men are responsible for women’s pain and hardship.

Erin: Absolutely.

Mary: So we need to become independent, take care of ourselves. It really fosters a bitterness and an anger against males.

Nancy: Which is how the feminist movement really developed. They’d all been through anger and bitterness in response to some real problems.

Erin: Real issues.

Mary: Well, I think the whole problem is they turn to themselves. We, and I don’t even want to use the term “they” because it’s my tendency as well. I turn to myself for solutions instead of turning to the Word of God. And I say that I have the capability to clean up this mess, or I have a better idea of how things should work to get it cleaned up, instead of looking to God’s Word first and foremost and trusting that if we do things His way, we’re going to see the redemption come into the relationships.

Nancy: The fact is, that we’re all sinners. Genesis makes that clear. Romans 1 makes that clear. When we pass judgment on others, we’re really passing judgment on ourselves because we’re all fallen. We’re all sinful. I think what we have to realize is that there is no hope for solving male issues, female issues, male/female issues apart from God’s solution, turning to the Word, turning to Christ and the redemption that is in Christ.

That’s why the gospel is good news because it delivers us from ourselves. We have watched God redeem fallen women’s lives, each of our lives. I sometimes think about where any one of us would be on the anger scale, the bitterness scale, the violence scale.

Mary: Double A personality anger.

Carolyn: Triple A bitterness will not be pretty.

Erin: That is true. That is certainly true.

Nancy: Just let me hear some stories out of your experience, your own or others that you know about how the gospel and God’s ways have redeemed women’s lives and relationships. Because we’ve talked about the pain and the sin and the brokenness but Psalms tells us that with Him is plenteous redemption. I love that word. Plenteous redemption. There’s hope through Christ. Talk about some of the women’s lives and relationships that we’re seeing, we’ve seen changed by the gospel. Even if all the problems don’t go away, how do you get hope through the gospel?

Dannah: Well, I immediately just think that it is just so merciful and gracious of God that He would take someone like me who grew up knowing the gospel, who loved Him with all of my heart but then departed into sexual sin as a teenager. And then He would say, “You are the one I want to carry my message of purity.” And I would look back at Him and say, “I’m sure You’re pointing at the person behind me because do You know what I’ve done? Do You know where I’ve been?”

For me, in my heart and my sin, you can talk statistics and science and understand it all from that standpoint, but until you understand God’s redemption through the gospel and the beauty of sexuality through the gospel, for me that was what was like, “Oh. This is why it hurts so much. And this is why I’m so healed.” It always comes back to the gospel and that He uses women like that every day.

I have a dear friend that was marred by abortion. She is counseling women in an abortion clinic every day to wholeness and healing and sometimes rescuing babies that would otherwise not been rescued. He takes our greatest weaknesses and He stamps His strength in that place.

Mary: I think of a girlfriend of mine, and she had so much in her life. She was dealing with anorexia. She had had sexual revolving-door relationships. She had been abused as a child, sexually abused as a child. She came to the point really of deep, deep depression and almost suicide. She had all of this sin and all of this pain and all of this brokenness. I prayed with her and walked through the road with her. At the end, it wasn’t the end of her journey because she is still on the path.

At one point I asked her, “Where was God? How do you process all of this pain and suffering?” She looked at me, and I’ll never forget it. She just beamed. She said, “At the time I thought that He’d abandoned me. I thought I’d gone through it because He didn’t love me. But now when I look back, I see that He loved me enough to walk every step of the way through healing with me.” And she said, “My experience was literally like walking through hell. I would never want to go back there. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world for what God has brought out of it.”

Carolyn: You said she was radiant and that fulfills Psalm 34, verse 5, “Those who look to the Lord are radiant, and they have no need to be ashamed.” Even in your worst circumstances, if you believe, you’re looking at them with gospel eyes. God can change this. He’s in the business of changing people. He’s about recreating the whole order. When you believe that, there is radiance even in the midst of your suffering.

Mary: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that story. Not those same details, but the terrible darkness and pain and someone saying, “Jesus has brought me out of it, and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything because it proved to me how big He is and how wonderful He is and how good He is.”

Nancy: And that’s where the grace of God is such an amazing thing. We have to cling to that even on the side where you can’t quite see the outcomel; where you can’t see the glory that it’s bringing. I was with a couple last week who she just two weeks ago found out that a few weeks before that her husband fell morally. (She thought they’d had this great faithful marriage all these years, and they had had.) A woman just wormed her way into that family, became friends with the wife to get to the husband, and pulled him down. It was a Proverbs 7 picture. I mean, he’s taking full responsibility. But I was listening to this thinking, This is so awful on every front.

Okay, so here’s this wife just in deep, deep pain, and she can’t see the outcome. But it was such a sweet thing to see her. Instead of turning against her husband out of her pain, instead of lashing out of him . . . I mean, what he did was horrible, and she’s deeply hurt. She’s sobbing, but she’s turning to the Lord. She’s crying out to God for grace and believing that God has grace for her, for her husband, for their marriage.

I read to her that beautiful passage in Isaiah 61. I read to them together because he came into the room and the two of them were just sobbing. I just thought, If people who are thinking of going their own way instead of God’s way, could just see how painful this is, maybe it would make them stop.

Well, they didn’t stop. Now, it's gut wrenching. But to read to them that passage from Isaiah 61 where it talks about God turning ashes into beauty and mourning into joy . . . Thank God, they’re both turning to the Lord for hope, redemption, for grace. They’re going to find hope. They’re going to find restoration. They can’t undo the sin of the past, but they can move forward.

And I just said, “The day will come when out of your life message, both of you, individually, wife, husband, couple, and your children perhaps someday (the kids are little), but for generations to come there will be a life message of the power of God’s grace to transform pain, to restore fallenness, to take what the enemy intended for evil and to turn it to good.”  

So we don’t glorify sin, but in the midst of great, great, sin—where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. That’s why we’ve got to keep in our pain—whether we’ve been the one sinned against or the one sinning or both—we’ve got to keep turning our heart toward God and His grace and saying, “With You is plenteous redemption. With You is hope because of Jesus Christ.”

Dannah: If I could just say that I think the power in the story you just told is that they drug it out into the light. They came to you, and they probably went to their pastor or others that were in spiritual authority to them. I don’t know the specific story. I don’t know those people. But I really believe that though God gives us the gospel for our forgiveness and the cleansing and the grace, He gives us the body of Christ as the process to aid in the process of healing.

James 5:16 says, “Confess your sins one to another and then you will be healed.” So my prayer is that any woman out there struggling today would hear that and would go find a true woman to tell her story to and to drag it into the light.

Nancy: And together get to the cross. Get to Christ. Get to grace.

Dannah: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Erin: All of this is such a reminder of how many of us have just been fighting the wrong battle. The battle of the sexes is absolutely fighting the war on the wrong front. When we understand what’s really at stake, that it’s about the gospel and what’s really on the line here, then we can turn the weapons that we have at our disposal toward the right front and start doing some winning. So instead of fighting each other, we start fighting for truth and find some victory.

Carolyn: That eternal perspective is about the only thing I know with a couple that I know. Unlike some of the illustrations you all have brought, it's not a case of sexual immorality but financial immorality. He ended up making the national news. It was such a punch in the gut to her to find out her husband had been engaging in this kind of impropriety and then to have all the news crews and everybody else camping out on your front lawn. It’s like, “How do I deal with this?”

I’ll never forget hearing a very wise older couple who are counselors. They said, “You know what we’re praying for?” (speaking to the wife). “We’re praying that you will live in light of eternity; that you will live in light of knowing what the Lord is about in your husband, and that in this life you will think of your marriage twenty years down the line. Don’t respond to this right here. Instead of seeing it as being traumatic, see this merciful intervention from the Lord.”

He exposed a sin, and it eas painful. It was painful for everybody. It was so painful. But the transformation that happened in her husband over the next two years was just incredible. I’m so glad for the counsel of this other couple—for her to live in light of eternity and thinking of her marriage twenty years down the line. Otherwise, she could have just turned with such recrimination forgetting that God was mercifully exposing hidden sin.

Erin: And she could punish that man for the next thirty years with her words if she wanted to, and feel justified in doing so and be encouraged to do so by the culture. But instead, in realizing the truth of the gospel and applying it to the relationship in her marriage, it ended very, very differently.