Underestimated Potential

Hi, this is Dave Olson. I'm the senior leader of

Heartland Church located in Ankeny, IA.

I hope the following message challenges, encourages, and

ultimately changes you. Thanks for joining us.

In light of Mother's Day, I was, I was well, this, I wasn't

listening to it because of Mother's Day, but I stumbled

across a podcast with some conservative scholars discussing

some passages in scripture that really intrigued me.

They were talking about Exodus one through 4 and they were

talking about women that in that passage and it just really

intrigued me. I thought, I'm going to take an

opportunity to meditate on that. And they preach on that on

Mother's Day. And then I've also been doing

some more, more pre marriage counseling than normal.

I just did a wedding yesterday out in the open air.

It was a beautiful wedding. And so in marriage counselling,

I'm always, I'm always pulled into talking about how God made

men and women differently. You know, the shocking thing is

that is shocking to some people that that is, that is news to

some people. I remember years ago, I matter

of fact, I kept it. I have a Time magazine that said

the cover story was men and women are different.

And I'm thinking, I'm trusting you for the news.

You know, this, this, these people, that was a big deal to

them. But they were talking about, you

know, studies that have have borne that out.

And of course, we know that. But here, here's the thing.

So yesterday, during the I was marrying this couple and we were

talking about how in creation God created man and woman.

It says God says let us create man in our own image, in the

image of God. He created him, male and female.

He created them. So God created this being in his

image and then took something out of him and presented it back

to him to for him to become one with this being that he created.

And so both male and female are created in God's image.

God took the female out of man and presented it back to him.

Which is it? It's a that's a fascinating

study in and of itself. So what I'm saying is this God

wanted a representative on earth and so he created this being in

his image. Then he took the feminine

portion out of man and presented it back to him and said become

one with it. But together they are the image

of God. It's very important we

understand that because we can tend to think, Oh yeah, men are

made in God's image, in women. You know, God's a man.

And God is neither male nor female.

Now he is masculine in his, his, his function, his initiation.

CS Lewis, I love CS Lewis. He had this statement in one of

his books. He said God is so masculine that

all of creation is feminine in response to him.

What he was talking about is that he, he was trying to get to

the essence of masculinity. Masculinity is initiation,

Femininity is response. And all we can do is respond to

his initiation. But male and female are both

expressions of his nature. And so we need to understand

this because this, this is a very important thing.

So what we're going to do is we're going to look at, we're

going to, we're going to get into some stuff this morning.

Let's pray, Father, Father, we ask that you would grace us,

Lord, to learn this morning. Father, help me to articulate

what you've placed upon my heart.

And Lord, I ask that you would speak to us and that you would

stir our hearts, Lord, that we would fully embrace what you

made us to be in Jesus name. Amen.

All right, I've got a little bit of something going on with my

mic guys. OK, let's go to go to, let's go

to Exodus chapter one through 4. Exodus chapter one through 4.

It's, it's fascinating. So I want to kind of use this as

a springboard. Like I said, I, I, I came across

this podcast, There were three conservative biblical scholars

discussing this passage and they began to talk about the

prominent role that women play in this passage, which was

fascinating to me. I never saw it.

There were three Hebrew scholars and they were, they were even

saying the words correctly. I know they're pronouncing the

Hebrew words and, and now they were talking about this, but

they were talking about how in the Hebrew text, it's very clear

the role that women played in this scenario.

And so if you you know anything about Exodus, Exodus is the

story of the children of Israel exiting slavery out of Egypt.

And so the beginning of the book kind of sets up what happened,

how they ended up in slavery. And then God raises up a

deliverer in the form of Moses and how all that plays out, the

miraculous, you know, circumstances and so forth.

But what we often overlook is the key role that women played

early on in this scenario. And they pointed out that there

were seven key women in this passage, which is very

interesting to me. So let's look at verse 8.

And there arose a new king in Egypt.

So where we're left off in the book of Genesis is that Joseph,

he is sold into slavery, goes from the prison to the palace,

rises in prominence. God's hand is upon him.

He's a prophetic voice to the most powerful man in the world

at that time, the Pharaoh of Egypt.

And he finds great favor. And So what happens is his

entire family is saved and they come and they settle into this,

this fertile ground of Egypt. And they and that's where it

ends up. It's a beautiful story.

Now we enter into Exodus and it's not so beautiful anymore

because it says now there are. There was a new king over Egypt

who did not know Joseph, and he said to his people, behold, the

people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us.

Now that alone in and of itself is very interesting because the

children of Israel already did not view himself that themselves

that way, or they would have never tolerated what's coming

next. The enemy knew something about

them they didn't know about themselves, and that's not an

isolated situation. That is often the case in

believers lives that the enemy knows your identity better than

you do. And if that's the case, if you

allow that to continue, he can enslave you and and keep you

down and keep you from what God has for you.

And so he says, come, let us deal shrewdly with them.

So what the enemy always does is he will he, he understands who

you are often more than you do in the beginning, and he'll deal

shrewdly with you to keep you under his thumb.

And so he says, lest, and this is what he's trying to keep from

happening, lest they multiply. And if war breaks out, they join

our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.

And so he is afraid of war on the horizon against the

Israelites, that the Israelites will turn on him.

And so he says, let us deal shrewdly.

And how does that play out? Verse 11.

Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with

heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store

cities, Pitham and Ramses. But the more they were

oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they

spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread

of the people of Israel. It's fascinating.

So as they the more they were oppressed, the more they grew.

And there was this dread in the hearts of the Egyptians towards

the Israelites, but the Israelites did not perceive it.

And so they put up with this bondage.

And even although they were more, and they were more mighty,

they put up with this slavery. And again, all you know, all

down through history the Church has used this, and rightly so,

as a foreshadowing or as a symbolic picture and

illustration of Rams or a Pharaoh being Satan, a picture

of Satan or a symbol of Satan. Israel being a symbol of the

church, Moses as the deliverer. All this symbolic imagery in the

Old Testament that gives us a picture of what we go through as

believers. So much so that Paul picks up on

this and it is book to the Corinthians, his first book.

He says all these things happen to them as an example for us so

that we can learn from it. And the first take away is that

in general that the Jewish people did not realize who they

really were, and Pharaoh the enemy did.

But here's the catch there was he, he, he understood the danger

of the people of God, but he really only attributed that to 1

group of the children of God. And we're going to see that

here. So let's read on.

He says verse 12. But the more they were

oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they

spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread

of the people. So they ruthlessly made the

people of Israel work as slaves and made them their lives bitter

with hard service in mortar and brick and all kinds of work in

the field and all their work. They ruthlessly made them work

as slaves. Then the king of Egypt said the

Hebrew, the Hebrew midwives. So here we have introduced these

two first ladies that were part of God's great plan, his

deliverance. These two Hebrew midwives, one

of them was named Cifra and the other was Puah.

And when they served as a midwife to the Hebrew women and

see them give, this is what Pharaoh says to them.

When you serve as a midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on

the birth stool, if it is a son, you shall kill him.

But if it is a daughter, she shall live.

And so even though we know that the Egyptian people and Pharaoh

himself feared the the Jews, really their fear was only of

the men. And So what Pharaoh did is

Pharaoh said, if it's going to be a boy, you're going to take

them out. If it's a girl, you shall let

her live. So what we understand is that

the enemy himself underestimated the potential of these ladies.

He thought, if I just kill the boys, we're going to we're going

to solve this thing. And here's the irony of this

whole thing is that it was the women who set up the deliverer,

these two gals, these two midwives, they refuse to do it

because it says the very next verse, they feared the Lord more

than they feared Pharaoh. So here we have some heroic

women behind the scenes. And they would not kill these

male children. And so Pharaoh calls them back

in and said, hey, what's the deal?

I told you what you're supposed to do.

And they said, well, these these Hebrew women, they're very

vigorous. They just, they give birth

before we can even get there. And Pharaoh's kind of puzzled.

And he said, OK, then what we're going to do after they're born,

you're to throw them in the river and the river Nile.

You're supposed to kill the male children.

And again, we have a couple of women show up.

First of all, we have Moses's mother who fears the Lord, and

she sees the destiny in her child.

It says that she saw he was a beautiful child.

The Hebrew really means it was a child of great destiny, of great

value. She recognized that.

So she threw them in the river after three months, but she did

it in an ark a little, a little really.

It's it's the word is an arc, but it's a little bassinet kind

of covered thing, you know. So he's floating and his sister

follows. And here's the really amazing

thing is that Pharaoh's own daughter sees him along with her

servants and, and spots it opens up the lid of this thing and

there's a baby crying and her heart is stirred.

So here's the catch. And, and according to these

Hebrew scholars, I don't, I'm not a Hebrew scholar.

I don't, I don't speak Hebrew. I know a little Hebrew.

He runs a sandwich shop. No, I'm just kidding.

So this, you know, this, these Hebrews I know that was bad in

the Hebrew. It's very prominent, the way

this is thrust to the forefront, this repetition of these ladies.

And Pharaoh underestimated the potential, the power and the

danger of these Hebrew women and even underestimated the women in

his own family. And so when he said, we're going

to kill the sons, it was a woman within his own family that

preserved the one son that would matter most.

Isn't that amazing? It's a great story.

And so within his own household, this woman arises and and puts

her covering over him and says, we're going to preserve, we're

going to preserve this life. And he ends.

She ends up paying the mother to nurse her own son.

It's an amazing story. And then Moses is raised in the

House of Pharaoh, becomes the deliverer.

And there's these these women that are very significant in the

life of Moses. Another one was his sister.

And she inserts herself. And some scholars believe that

Miriam, his sister, was as young as 6-7 years old.

So for her to kind of insert herself in this conversation,

we're not sure how old she was, but she wasn't that much older

than Moses. And she walks up and says, hey,

I know a woman who will nurse it.

Of course, it's her mother, and that's her brother.

And Farrell's wife said that's a great idea.

And in fact, though we are exacting servitude out of the

rest of the Israelites and refusing to pay them, I'm going

to now use some of Egypt's money to pay this woman to nurse her

own son and to preserve this life.

It's amazing story. And so his life is preserved and

that's the way of God. But here's the thing we need to

catch this morning is the key role that women played in this

story. And that is not an insignificant

thing because all down through history, women's role has been

diminished. And contrary to what you'll be

told from some sectors of society, that Christianity is

the oppressor of women. In fact, Christianity is the

Liberator of women. And everywhere that Christianity

is gone, women have taken an elevated role in their culture

because Christianity is the true Liberator of women.

And so when Paul writes things about women and submission to

husbands and all of that, you've got to understand that there is

a divine order. But there's also a cultural

perspective that Paul is living within.

Same as you know, there's criticism of there.

Some people will say, well, the Bible endorses slavery.

No, it does not. What Paul did, when Paul, Paul

didn't try to overthrow the system within Rome, what he did

is he made it irrelevant. And the way he did that is when

he'd speak to slaves, he'd say, make sure that you serve your

master well. And then he said to the masters,

he's talking to the believers within the church.

He said masters and remember, you both serve the same master.

So you're going to give an answer to both of your master on

how you treated your fellow man. And so literally what Paul did

is Paul reduced or, or shifted slavery into employment and he

began to liberate people by forcing this Christian ethic on

the Christians. And he did the same with

marriage. Because in that culture and some

of the cultures that Paul was moving through, some women had

more respect and honor than others.

But Paul was elevating women and men back to equality.

So here's here's the big question.

I had someone come and see me the other day.

They're they're fairly new in the church.

And they were saying, Pastor, I have a question for you.

Are you egalitarian or complimentarian?

Anybody know what we're talking about?

Anybody ever heard that, that debate?

Raise your hand if you know that debate.

OK, I, I want to take a poll of those who are listening.

You know, which one are you? So here, here's the here's the

big debate. There's egalitarianism says that

men and women are equal. There is there is neither male

nor female in Christ. That's Scripture.

And so there is no distinction between the gender roles that we

are equal and leadership and all of that is open to both.

And we need to, you know, and all this, all the other

trappings of trying to assign roles is cultural constructs and

it's even even within the church.

The other view, complementarianism says that men

and women are different but complementary and that there are

distinct roles. And when you get into, because

there's extremes of both of these, this you get over to the

far side and this becomes Christian feminism.

And even that you got to define your terms because in one sense,

I'm a feminist. I believe that women need to be

brought to a place of honor and in the role that God gave to

them. OK, but then there's some

trappings of feminism. Some of you are looking at me

like, Pastor, you really going to go there?

Yes, I am the the there. There's a form of feminism that

actually agrees with the accuser, the serpent, with

Pharaoh himself that actually says the male child shall die.

And the, and this, this radical feminism, this that goes way

over to the side. And it's, there's a reason I'm

on the left side right now of the platform, my left the so

there is an expression of this that literally there's, it's

there's a hatred towards masculinity.

And so we have as the people of God, we can't be those who

oppress women nor agree with the hatred of man.

And so we need to guard the, the value of both and the liberty of

both and in the encouragement of both to become all that God

created you to be. We need women to be all that God

has called them to be and men to be called or to be all that God

has called them to be. And so I'm going to just clarify

my position this morning because someone, someone asked me and I

just like, hey, this it's Mother's Day.

I'll just clarify my position. Here's the deal.

I am, I, I, of course, I think I'm in the middle.

I'm, I'm balanced and everyone else is extreme.

No, I believe that there is, there is truth to both of these

perspectives, but I think largely it's, it's arguing

apples and oranges because you're dealing with different

arenas and different contexts. So in order to kind of go back

and look at it from a biblical perspective, some of you have

heard me talk about this before, but it's it's a helpful lens

through which we study any subject and that is the three

lenses of redemptive history. Now, the reason I call them

lenses is because lenses are something you look through.

Lenses are meant to grant clarity, give you greater

clarity as opposed to blurring lines.

OK. And so, but you've got there are

three lenses which through which we have to study any subject and

if you. Pick up the wrong lens and look

through that, that the wrong lens.

You will end up blurring the subject rather than gaining

clarity. What am I talking about?

So let me give you the three lenses real quick.

Number one, what was God's original intention?

We just talked about it when God made men and women.

We're going to we're going to dig down a little deeper there.

So God had original intention in creation.

God created man and woman, male and female.

That was not the result of the fall, that was before the fall.

This was part of God's divine intention, His great idea.

It's beautiful, it's good. Matter of fact, the first time

you hear God say something was not good when he looked at man

after he created a dude, he looked and he said, that ain't

good, he said. And then he defined why?

Because it ain't good for man to be alone.

And So what did he do? He took something out of man,

formed it into something he'd be attracted to and presented it

back to man. And then he said, become one

with this thing. And Adam, that dude was all

excited. This is awesome until he had his

first argument. And then he's thinking, whoa,

wait a minute. God, I, I, I, I have to think

that Adam was wondering, Lord, what were you thinking?

I was already one with my rib. You took it out of me.

You, you made it beautiful. You, you, you kind of cornered

me into being attracted to this creation.

But you gave her her own will, her own desires, her own dreams,

her own aspirations, her own argument, mentiveness.

You know, Adam got along with his rib until she became a

separate entity and all of a sudden God's saying become one

with this. And Adam's got to be thinking,

Lord, I already was. Now you gave me a problem.

And the only conclusion I can come to in looking at that

scenario is that God was after something deeper than mere

oneness because Adam was already one with it.

God said, I want oneness through mutual sacrifice now in order to

be 1. Now, you know, you ever heard

someone say every man's looking for his rib and every woman's

looking for a rib cage? Not, not, not every man and

woman. Because there is the gift of

celibacy. There's a, there is a gift of

grace to live the single life. It's one of those not a lot of

people pray for. You know, it's like the gift of

martyrdom. People aren't praying.

God give me the gift of martyrdom.

But there is a grace. But most people were made for

human relationship in that way. And so God is saying, I want you

to become one and it's going to take mutual sacrifice.

You're going to have to deny yourself to find what you need

in a relationship. God took something out of Adam

that made that was part of him and then made it into a separate

entity and said, now if you're going to find what you need

because it's not good what you got going here, buddy, it's not

good. So if you want something good,

then you've got to find those relationship.

And this is true of all relationships, but it's

especially true of marriage, male and female relationship.

And then, you know, we're on Mother's Day, so let's go there.

That oneness will literally produce another oneness.

And I still, I freak out when I look at my kids and they'll do

things. I'll think, oh man, that's my

wife. That is so much their mother.

And then they'll do things that oh, oh, that's me.

And it's just so crazy that there's this humanoid walking

around that's the product of both of us.

We literally became one. And they're a separate entity

doing life. It's amazing, but it's because

we became one. We learned to make that thing

work. And so that was God's original

intention. This was before the fall.

This is the system God set up. So we need to understand that

God, God created something good. He had this intention, He

designed it. And so that's the first lens,

and we'll come back to that, the second lenses.

How did the fall affect this thing?

And this male and female relationship really was affected

by the fall. It made it really, really

complicated. God made man and woman they were

it says I will I will make a I will find a helper suitable for

him. And just just as a side note, if

you ever read that in that context, it says God says it's

not good that man be alone the very next thing.

So God had all the animal Kingdom walk before him and see

so Adam could name it. You think like, what is this

squirrel? You know, where, where, where

did that come from? What does this have to do?

It has everything to do because what was happening is God was

awakening within Adam and awareness said, hey, I'm alone.

Everybody else has a spouse. Everybody else is a counterpart.

Everybody else has someone to hang out with and do life with

and I'm alone. And so this is a, it's really a

picture right at the beginning of creation on how God works.

You have a need you're not even aware of.

So God will work circumstances to make you aware of that need.

And then you'll look and you'll look and it says no helper

suitable for him was found. It's like Adam's looking and

he's realizing, well, there's Mr. and Missus Gorilla, Mr. and

Missus Zebra, There's Mr. and Missus and there's no one for

me. And so then it says, and he was,

he went into a deep sleep. The Hebrew is a languid

passivity. It's almost the idea that there

was this need awakened to its enemy, looked and looked and

looked, couldn't find his own need.

And out of his rest God brought the need forth.

And it's a picture of salvation, that God's going to bring that

thing that we need out of our rest.

And so he presents the woman to him.

So that's creation. It is good.

And he made man and woman to fit together perfectly, body, soul

and spirit. It's a beautiful, beautiful

thing. Because women have things that

men don't and vice versa. And that is not merely physical.

There is, I'm telling you it is psychological and I'm telling

you it is spiritual. There are, there is a

perspective that both bring to the table that we do not have

the fullness of God without both showing up.

We really don't. And we're at, we're at great

disadvantage if we believe we are.

And the, the, the, the movements within the streams of

Christianity that have a tendency to minimize the

feminine, it is not a coincidence that they are also

the ones that divorce themselves from spiritual gifts.

There is a intellectual or a logical consistency to those two

things because there's there's this intuitive thing about women

and spiritual gifts are largely intuitive and men tend to be

more cerebral. And I know I'm painting with a

wide brush and you know, there's there are we as men, we need to

learn to be intuitive and women need.

Well, I'm not going there. This is Mother's Day.

We'll leave that for another day.

Whoo man, how about stepped in that OK, so you know what you

know what I'm saying OK. And so the movements that I was

talking to a gal one time and I made an observation that this

particular movement, I had been around quite, quite a lot.

I said it was we got in this conversation.

I don't even know how we got there.

I can't believe I said this to her, but I did.

And now I'm going to say it publicly.

I was talking about how I noticed that the women within

that denomination aren't very feminine.

They just don't they don't dress real feminine.

They, they don't carry themselves.

They were very sweet ladies, godly women.

I, I really enjoyed being around them.

But it was just an observation. And her jaw dropped.

And what I didn't know is that as a little girl, her father was

a elder in that particular denomination.

And the reason she was so surprised is because she said,

when I was a young teenage girl, I went off to camp for the whole

summer. And I came home and the elders

pulled my dad aside and said, yours, your daughter needs to

cut her hair. It's getting too long.

And it's like, how do you justify that biblically?

But there was something within their theology that was

uncomfortable with a feminine perspective.

They did not believe in the gifts of the Spirit.

It was a very, very intellectual branch of Christianity that was

cerebral and not a movement of the heart.

And I would, I would argue we need both.

We need the male and the female. We need both perspectives.

So anyway, I hope I'm making sense.

So we have this creation that was God's great idea.

But then the fall really did create a mix up in man's makeup

and in the relationship. And in a very real sense, there

has been a swapping of the gender roles that sin manifests

itself different within the masculine soul than it does in

the feminine soul and it sabotages us at the root.

And I would propose to you that the reason that God gives

different marching orders to the men, married men in the New

Testament, he, he says things to husbands, he doesn't say to

wives and he says things to wives that he doesn't say to the

husband. And I would propose the reason

for that is that each of these, what the marching orders to a

man are striking at the root of the fall within the masculine

soul. And that is, husbands, love your

wives and lay your life down for her.

The New Testament never tells a wife to love her husband.

I know bums you out, doesn't it guys?

Never tells your wife to love you.

What it does is it tells her to honor you and to submit to your

leadership. But to the man it says to lay

your life down for her, love her as Christ loved the church.

And remember he went to the cross.

And you have no right to tell your wife to pick up her cross

until you first gone there. So we're to lay our life down

for our wives and I, I would propose to you the reason is

because there is an innate selfishness in the the male soul

when we get into sin that it becomes all about us.

And the what God is doing is he's using this beautiful

relationship of marriage to disciple us and call us out of

ourselves. He's calling us out of orbit

around our own desires and calling us to begin to invest

ourself and other people. And that's why as I, I remember

my my little brother Christopher, my bald headed

brother, He, he wasn't bald headed at the time, but he was

working for me at Teen Challenge.

And I said, listen, you need to resign and you need to go get

married because you are as far in life as you're going to go

without a wife. So we did and he found Beth and

she is perfect for him. She is custom made for my

brother. I mean it, it's amazing.

And my brother began to grow in ways he would have never grown

without his wife. Because men need the imposition

of a wife and children upon them to harness their potential.

I need to be needed. Not in this Oh, I need me.

I'm not talking. I mean, I need, I need someone

to be counting on me to get me up and keep me going.

I need that. That disciplines me and causes

me to be a better man than I would have been before.

It's a very rare man that can become all that he's called to

be without a wife and children, without somebody counting on

him. And This is why married men tend

to make more money, tend to be promoted with it vocationally

and so forth. It's not some conspiracy, you

know, out there. It's the fact that men that have

a wife and children counting on them tend to become more mature

and more dependable. So men are called you lay your

life down what women are. It says honor your husband and

submit to his leadership. And I would propose to you

ladies, the reason that the New Testament says that to women

'cause it's striking at the root of that feminine fear that Pop

Peter's talking about when he says of that Sarah called

Abraham her Master. Try that one gentleman anyway,

but that's another day. Don't try it on Mother's Day, he

says Abraham call Sarah called her Master, and he says you are

her daughters if you do what is right and you do not give way to

fear. I used to wonder what in the

world is that about? But it's that feminine fear

that's rooted in the fall that is afraid to trust a fallen man

to lead the home. And So what a lot of ladies do

is they pick up the slack and they move into the role that God

called the man to occupy and it rescues him from becoming what

he was called to be. And let me just meddle a little

bit more here. What happens is, is that that

the patterns for that is is established in the pre marriage

relationship. And so there is this leadership

thing that God has called men to not because man is better, but

because man needs that and God is growing up and for a lady, if

you will respect. Here's the beautiful thing.

Let's put it this way. You as a husbands and wives can

be the greatest blessing and be a catalyst to push one another

into all gods called you to be or you can be the greatest

tenders. You can be the the bungee cord

on each other's belt loop. You try to become all that and

we get pulled back. Because if I love my wife, it

makes it easy for her to follow. It makes it easy for her to

honor me. And if my wife honors me, I want

it. I'll walk through walls for that

woman because the one who knows me best, if she's going to honor

me, then man, I'll do anything I can.

Now I need to do that anyway. It just makes it easier.

And wives need to do that. And here's the thing, there's

there's, we don't have time to get into it this morning, but

there are tracks in the New Testament that show that if the

man will do that, it will make it will.

It'll pave the way for the woman to become all that she used to

be in marriage and vice versa. It says of women that you will

convert him without words. It's an amazing thing.

And so we can, as we become all that we're called to be, we pave

the way. And so we have this original

intention. God created man and woman.

He pulled something out of Adam that Adam no longer had outside

of a relationship with her. He pulled the feminine out.

It was already in there. It was the masculine, the

feminine. He pulled it out.

He made him in his image. He created him male and female

created them. So he divided it and he took the

her out of the hymn and then he put them together and then they

are expression of God's character.

But sin frustrated that so much so that the curse of the fall

says to the woman your your desire will be for him, but he

shall rule over you. So all of a sudden this mandate

that was given in the garden to the man and the woman be

fruitful, multiply and exercise dominion over the earth

governing the earth. It was given to them as a

couple. Now in the fall, the husband

rules over the woman and her desire is for him.

And there's reason to believe that that word desire for him

means that desire for that position.

There's this struggle within. It's not, oh, I really desire

you because all of us got to be. Oh, yeah.

No, it's, it's there's a struggle with it, that

leadership in the home. And a lot of it is rooted in the

fear of Adam. This the echoes of Eden within

the female psyche that Adam didn't cover her way back at the

garden. He was there because she turned

to him and said, hey, you want some?

And he should have inserted himself and said, no, we ain't

doing this, baby. God already told us.

But she she decided and Adam remained silent.

And the New Testament is clear that although Eve was deceived,

Adam, there's reason to believe he knew exactly what he was

doing, but his desire for his wife took precedence over his

desire for the Lord. And that's why through the sin

of one man or the disobedience of one man, sin came into the

world. What should have happened is

Adam should have went and said, Lord, I got to take, you know,

when he heard God coming through.

Remember, it says they heard the Lord coming at the cool of the

day and they used to walk with the Lord.

I don't know what that looked like, but is that amazing or

what can you? Oh, the Lord's coming and every

day that the creator's coming. Let's go, Lord, you wouldn't

believe what we oh, I guess you would believe.

But wow, we discovered today it was amazing, Lord.

And now they would, they would hang out.

But this day they hear I'm coming and they hide and they're

ashamed and they've, they've covered themselves with fig

leaves and the Lord says, where are you?

Where are you? And they come out and they said

we were hiding because we were naked.

Which is weird because they weren't, because they'd already

covered themselves. So what's going on?

There was something laid bare in the human psyche that couldn't

be remedied by mere leaves and clothing.

There was something that happened within them.

They were ashamed of who they were.

Wasn't just guilt. Guilt is feeling bad about what

you've done. They felt bad about who they

were. There was this shame.

And so they said, God, we, we, we did it.

We ate of the fruit. And they started the blame game.

Remember years ago hearing Jack Hayford speak on this and, and

he said, oh, that Adam would have said, Lord, God, I've been

waiting for you, my bride. Eve ate the fruit.

Lord, is there anything we could do?

And the Lord would say, Adam, you know, the day that you eat

of it, you shall surely die. But Lord, she's my bride.

And the Lord would have said, but there's another way, a life

for a life. And Adam offered his life on

behalf of his bride. And Jack Hayford said, of

course, that's not what happened.

And then he said, or is it? Because that is exactly what

happened. Jesus as the bridegroom, the

second or the last, Adam stepped forward and he said, Father, my

bride, she ate of the fruit. Lord, is there anything else we

can do? And he gave his life for.

And that was the remedy to all of sin.

And it continues to be the remedy in marriage, where we

take responsibility for the failures of each other and lift

and serve. And it's this beautiful picture

of redemption. And so now in the cross, the

curse has been lifted. And so here's the question.

Do we view women through the 3rd lens of redemption?

Do we view women through the 1st lens of original intention or do

we simply view women through the 2nd lens of sin?

And I would propose to you that there are a lot of people, their

view of women biblically is solely through the lens of the

fall. And that is the reason that

there's a whole lot of just pushing women down in the body

of Christ and that you sit and listen and you just, you're,

you're a recipient and you just, you know it.

This thing of male leadership and female submission.

The fact is, a woman is to submit to her husband, yes, but

not to every man in the room. Where, where do we get that?

And so this thing of the woman is redeemed.

And So what do we really believe happened at the cross?

Did the cross solve the problem, lift the curse to get us back to

and even beyond original intention?

And I would propose that is the case.

That's why even in the Old Testament, Joel said upon my

servants and my handmaidens, I will pour out of my spirit your

sons and your daughters shall prophecy.

And in the New Testament we see women, we see female apostles.

Junior was a female apostle. It's very clear in the Greek let

you know some translation. Try to say, well, it could you

know, maybe there's a misspelling or there was, you

know, this it was a guy that had a girl's name and no, it was a

woman. Priscilla and Aquila the Greek.

It's it's very specific that she's mentioned first.

There were an Apostolic teaching team and there are some problem

passages where you know what about the woman being silent in

the church and we don't have time to get into it.

But I would say that there are there are contextual that that's

a contextually specific situation and Paul was all for

women being used of God in any way.

And so the cross remedies this thing and the Pentecostal

charismatic and holiness movements have always been

champions of women in ministry. Why is it because they don't

value the word? They're just all about feelings.

Like some would say no speak precisely because they do value

the word, but they don't use this lens of the fall.

They don't say I'm going to view everything through the fall.

And if your, your perspective on anything, and especially your

wife, your mother, the sisters in the room is and even you

ladies, if you view yourself through the lens of the fall,

you are forfeiting all that God has for you.

And men, we can't afford to do that because there is a

perspective and a facet of the nature of God that resides

within them when they speak and when they minister that we we

need. It's vital for the the church.

Amen. So let's stand.

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