What Is “Strong Feminine Womanhood?”
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.640 | I love strong women.
00:00:08.560 | That's a classic Piper quote from T4G 2008 in a panel discussion, and it was
00:00:13.120 | not the only famous Piper quote from the conference either.
00:00:15.920 | In your message there you said, "Bethlehem is a church
00:00:19.040 | teeming with strong women," and something about polygamy or something, I forget all
00:00:22.560 | the details now. Okay, so explain this, Pastor John,
00:00:25.200 | because strength is often considered to be a masculine
00:00:28.720 | trait. Of course, the Proverbs 31 woman has strong arms, verse 17. So how would
00:00:34.400 | you define strong feminine womanhood?
00:00:38.240 | Yes, good question, and if I were a polygamist,
00:00:42.080 | that's the kind of woman I'd want, or the kind of women I'd want. I've got one,
00:00:46.320 | she's great, she's strong, and she's... I don't want any more. She's just perfect.
00:00:52.080 | Now here's what I mean, and I really do mean it. I feel very strong,
00:00:56.240 | strongly, about the strength of women. In Proverbs 31, it's not just her
00:01:02.240 | arms that are strong. Verse 25, "Strength
00:01:07.360 | and dignity are her clothing. She laughs at the time to come." That's got to be one
00:01:13.440 | of my favorite verses in all the Bible. A woman laughing at the time to come is
00:01:19.280 | not a woman who is looking at her biceps and getting
00:01:23.440 | encouragement. She's looking at her God and getting
00:01:27.280 | encouragement, because the time to come is a time of
00:01:31.440 | trouble. It's a time of unknown. Her biceps are not going to help her,
00:01:35.840 | you know, she may be carrying kindling or carrying the pots or doing whatever they
00:01:39.680 | did in that culture, but she knows that if the the Amorites
00:01:44.000 | sweep across, or if a flood comes,
00:01:48.640 | or if a horrible plague comes, it's only her great God laid hold on by
00:01:56.800 | faith and becoming strong in Him that's going to make the difference.
00:02:00.880 | In the New Testament, the text that says that
00:02:03.920 | so powerfully for me, and is one of my favorite ones, if I were going to preach
00:02:08.000 | on the strong woman in a conference, I'd go
00:02:11.280 | to 1 Peter 3, where it says that this
00:02:17.120 | woman who's got this unbelieving husband, who wants
00:02:20.960 | so much, and rightly so, for her husband to be converted,
00:02:24.320 | and Peter's trying to help her know how she might be used of God to bring that
00:02:28.720 | about, and he talks about the imperishable
00:02:32.240 | beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. Now if you read
00:02:36.960 | those phrases, the beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit,
00:02:41.120 | and you didn't know better, you might start to think weak,
00:02:44.800 | especially since in verse 7 she's called the weaker vessel. I don't think
00:02:48.000 | weaker vessel in any way implies spiritually weak, or mentally weak, or
00:02:53.200 | psychologically weak. It's talking about we have
00:02:57.040 | different teams for NBA men and basketball for women.
00:03:02.240 | Right across the board, everybody recognizes
00:03:05.280 | that there are physical traits about men and women that put men in a category
00:03:08.880 | that shouldn't compete with women. But here
00:03:12.880 | in chapter 3, verse 5 or so, the strength of that gentle
00:03:20.000 | and quiet spirit is described this way, "Holy women who hoped in
00:03:25.920 | God used to adorn themselves that way, and you are her children,
00:03:33.760 | you women, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening."
00:03:40.800 | That takes you back to laughing at the future, right? You got the woman in
00:03:44.400 | Proverbs who's laughing at the time to come, and here in
00:03:48.080 | verse 6 of 1 Peter 3, you've got the woman who is
00:03:51.120 | not fearing anything that is frightening. Now that is
00:03:54.240 | what I mean by a strong woman. I mean a woman who can lose a child,
00:03:59.280 | lose a husband, lose her health, face a family crisis,
00:04:03.920 | see the world becoming anti-christian all around her, and
00:04:07.120 | wonder about raising children in this world.
00:04:10.560 | Women who go to a dangerous place on the mission field, women who return
00:04:14.320 | good for evil over and over again, women who get up a thousand times with a
00:04:19.600 | sick or disabled child at night, all of it in the strength that God
00:04:24.240 | supplies because God is her hope, God is her rock.
00:04:28.960 | That's what I mean. And frankly, I should make clear, Tony,
00:04:34.320 | you know this, there's a difference between a strong
00:04:39.200 | woman, strong in her womanhood, and a woman who's trying to be a man,
00:04:45.040 | and thus trying to be strong. And the movies, I hardly go to any movies
00:04:49.360 | because of all kinds of reasons, but I see enough clips on the internet
00:04:54.400 | and it looks to me like women are constantly being portrayed,
00:04:59.760 | not as strong women, but as imitation men.
00:05:03.200 | And it's absolutely hopeless. They're killing as many as men,
00:05:06.960 | they're fighting, they're kicking as many as men, they're punching
00:05:10.800 | and doing everything to show that there is no difference in that kind of
00:05:16.960 | strength. Frankly, I think that's hopeless for
00:05:19.680 | women. It's going to backfire in the long run.
00:05:22.160 | They do not want to tango. A wife and a husband don't want to get into a
00:05:26.000 | sparring match. It should never, ever, ever come to that. So a truly strong woman
00:05:32.960 | is not a desperate want-to-be-a-man woman. She is a woman who is assured of her
00:05:39.360 | feminine identity in such a deep and powerful
00:05:44.640 | way that she knows she's a man's equal in the kingdom of God. She knows she's a
00:05:50.000 | man's equal in the sight of God. She knows she's a man's equal in the
00:05:53.520 | inheritance of joy, and she is poised and free
00:05:58.560 | to affirm the manhood of the men around her and come alongside them
00:06:03.440 | and help them in every way they can in their unique
00:06:06.640 | calling so that the dance and the rhythm and the choreography of male and female
00:06:12.000 | becomes a beautiful partnership. Beautiful picture.
00:06:15.280 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email
00:06:18.080 | your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:06:21.440 | You will find thousands of other free resources from John Piper online
00:06:24.880 | at desiringgod.org. I'm your host Tony Yourenke, and for those of you still
00:06:28.880 | listening, here's that clip from his T4G 2008 message.
00:06:33.600 | Where is the joab today? Where are the women?
00:06:38.720 | The single women and the married women and the pastor's
00:06:42.480 | wives who say with Esther when Mordecai came to her and said, "You gotta do this
00:06:48.640 | because your people are perishing." And she says,
00:06:54.720 | "Tell them to fast and I will go into the king, though it is against the law.
00:07:01.200 | And if I perish, I perish." Where are those women?
00:07:06.720 | Our church is crawling with them. I love them.
00:07:09.680 | I'd like to marry all of them.
00:07:13.200 | I'm too old.
00:07:20.720 | And I'm married. And I married one of them.
00:07:30.080 | you
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