I love strong women. That's a classic Piper quote from T4G 2008 in a panel discussion, and it was not the only famous Piper quote from the conference either. In your message there you said, "Bethlehem is a church teeming with strong women," and something about polygamy or something, I forget all the details now.

Okay, so explain this, Pastor John, because strength is often considered to be a masculine trait. Of course, the Proverbs 31 woman has strong arms, verse 17. So how would you define strong feminine womanhood? Yes, good question, and if I were a polygamist, that's the kind of woman I'd want, or the kind of women I'd want.

I've got one, she's great, she's strong, and she's... I don't want any more. She's just perfect. Now here's what I mean, and I really do mean it. I feel very strong, strongly, about the strength of women. In Proverbs 31, it's not just her arms that are strong. Verse 25, "Strength and dignity are her clothing.

She laughs at the time to come." That's got to be one of my favorite verses in all the Bible. A woman laughing at the time to come is not a woman who is looking at her biceps and getting encouragement. She's looking at her God and getting encouragement, because the time to come is a time of trouble.

It's a time of unknown. Her biceps are not going to help her, you know, she may be carrying kindling or carrying the pots or doing whatever they did in that culture, but she knows that if the the Amorites sweep across, or if a flood comes, or if a horrible plague comes, it's only her great God laid hold on by faith and becoming strong in Him that's going to make the difference.

In the New Testament, the text that says that so powerfully for me, and is one of my favorite ones, if I were going to preach on the strong woman in a conference, I'd go to 1 Peter 3, where it says that this woman who's got this unbelieving husband, who wants so much, and rightly so, for her husband to be converted, and Peter's trying to help her know how she might be used of God to bring that about, and he talks about the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.

Now if you read those phrases, the beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, and you didn't know better, you might start to think weak, especially since in verse 7 she's called the weaker vessel. I don't think weaker vessel in any way implies spiritually weak, or mentally weak, or psychologically weak.

It's talking about we have different teams for NBA men and basketball for women. Right across the board, everybody recognizes that there are physical traits about men and women that put men in a category that shouldn't compete with women. But here in chapter 3, verse 5 or so, the strength of that gentle and quiet spirit is described this way, "Holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves that way, and you are her children, you women, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening." That takes you back to laughing at the future, right?

You got the woman in Proverbs who's laughing at the time to come, and here in verse 6 of 1 Peter 3, you've got the woman who is not fearing anything that is frightening. Now that is what I mean by a strong woman. I mean a woman who can lose a child, lose a husband, lose her health, face a family crisis, see the world becoming anti-christian all around her, and wonder about raising children in this world.

Women who go to a dangerous place on the mission field, women who return good for evil over and over again, women who get up a thousand times with a sick or disabled child at night, all of it in the strength that God supplies because God is her hope, God is her rock.

That's what I mean. And frankly, I should make clear, Tony, you know this, there's a difference between a strong woman, strong in her womanhood, and a woman who's trying to be a man, and thus trying to be strong. And the movies, I hardly go to any movies because of all kinds of reasons, but I see enough clips on the internet and it looks to me like women are constantly being portrayed, not as strong women, but as imitation men.

And it's absolutely hopeless. They're killing as many as men, they're fighting, they're kicking as many as men, they're punching and doing everything to show that there is no difference in that kind of strength. Frankly, I think that's hopeless for women. It's going to backfire in the long run. They do not want to tango.

A wife and a husband don't want to get into a sparring match. It should never, ever, ever come to that. So a truly strong woman is not a desperate want-to-be-a-man woman. She is a woman who is assured of her feminine identity in such a deep and powerful way that she knows she's a man's equal in the kingdom of God.

She knows she's a man's equal in the sight of God. She knows she's a man's equal in the inheritance of joy, and she is poised and free to affirm the manhood of the men around her and come alongside them and help them in every way they can in their unique calling so that the dance and the rhythm and the choreography of male and female becomes a beautiful partnership.

Beautiful picture. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. You will find thousands of other free resources from John Piper online at desiringgod.org. I'm your host Tony Yourenke, and for those of you still listening, here's that clip from his T4G 2008 message.

Where is the joab today? Where are the women? The single women and the married women and the pastor's wives who say with Esther when Mordecai came to her and said, "You gotta do this because your people are perishing." And she says, "Tell them to fast and I will go into the king, though it is against the law.

And if I perish, I perish." Where are those women? Our church is crawling with them. I love them. I'd like to marry all of them. I'm too old. And I'm married. And I married one of them. you