Matt Chandler - Woman's Purpose

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them—Genesis chapter 2. A true story: I was in California earlier this week doing some teaching, and then I flew back in. I only had Thursday in the office, so I came in on Thursday, and dudes were literally coming by my office just to make sure I was all right and ready for this weekend. I’m like, «I’m not going into battle; I’m preaching the Bible. I think we’ll be fine.» One dude hugged me like it was the last time he was going to see me. I was like, «I’ll be fine; we’ll talk about it afterward.»

So, if you’re a guest with us this morning, we are on the back end of our series that we’ve entitled «A Beautiful Design.» What we’ve been talking about is God’s purpose and God’s design for men and women and how we interact with one another. Up until this point, we have almost exclusively talked about the Imago Dei, or us being made in the image of God, the difference between men and women, and every other living thing regarding us having an increased value above and over them—not to be cruel, but to steward appropriately for human flourishing.

Then we got into manhood. We’ve talked about manhood right up until last week; the majority of the sermon focused on manhood as we read the very text that we’ll read today in order to move us toward the purpose of the woman. We said this is the purpose of the man; this is what makes a man a man because biology makes one a male but does not make one a man. Correct? So, biology means that my 8-year-old son is male, but his biology does not dictate that he is a man. In fact, he’s male but not a man. I’ll lay it down: I’ve watched him; he’s not a man. All right? He’s a male. And in the same way, biology makes my daughters female, but it does not make them women. There’s this other component, this other piece that makes biological males men and biological females women. We dove into that regarding the man, and here’s what we said about the man: that God’s role for the man is something that we defined as headship.

Here’s how we defined it: male headship is the unique leadership of the man in the work of establishing order for human flourishing. We were unapologetic about that definition and have not backed down from it in any way because there’s no way to argue against that sentence in any domain. All right? You want to look at it sociologically? You want to look at it economically? No one could say with any intellectual credibility that the home is a better place when there aren’t men there. All right? What’s best for children is not fatherless environments; what’s best for daughters is not to have a man anywhere near them; what’s best for women is for men to have no interest. No one would argue that—you couldn’t argue it sociologically. In fact, the numbers indicate that the very opposite is true: where men refuse to be men, things crumble. They fall apart; they turn to dust. You can look at it sociologically, you can look at it economically; you get into the poorest communities imaginable, and what you’ll find is fatherlessness, broken marriages, absentee dads.

Now, with all of that said, I’ll never say that sentence without following it up with this one: single moms, widows, where the ideal is lacking, grace always abounds. Don’t lose heart. In fact, I’ve said, and I need to do it—I need to preach a sermon on how God responds to the prayers of mamas. All throughout the Bible, moms cling to the feet of God and plead for the lives of their sons and plead for the lives of their daughters, and God responds. Now, sometimes, He takes quite a bit of time before He responds, but He responds. It’s a beautiful reality that where the ideal is lacking—where maybe, God help you, you got involved with a boy who could shave, or you got caught up with a guy who looked like a man, and he just ended up not being one—and now you have a child or you have a life, God’s going to enter that space, and He’s going to be merciful and gracious. So, don’t lose heart.

Now, how is a man to exercise this headship, this unique responsibility to order things for human flourishing? Well, we saw from the Bible that he is to do this with sacrificial love. One of the first things we have to talk about when we’re discussing masculinity is that men give, and boys take. Men give; boys take. Right? Like my eight-year-old, what marks him as a boy right now is that he’s still a taker. He’s not a giver; he’s a taker. «That’s mine! What about me? How about mine?» Right? That’s taking. That’s how little boys act. It’s not how biblical, godly men act. Godly men are self-sacrificing for the good of their wives, for the good of the child, for the good of the church, for the good of the community. Self-sacrificing love is a mark of biblical masculinity, and it is the only way that true headship is ever exercised or practiced. Where men are takers and try to operate in headship, they tend to be oppressive; they tend to rule with an iron fist. They exhibit this false bravado, an insecure masculinity that reeks of the stench of death. No, no, no! Men aren’t takers; boys are.