Are You A Feminist? (Part 2)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.

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My name is Mike Abendroth, and we are continuing our series entitled,

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Are You a Feminist? Have you been influenced by the feminist movement?

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And here's my guess. I'll admit right up front, I think I've been influenced. I think

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I have ingested some of their poisonous morsels.

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What are we doing? Who talks like that? It's like creative writing class where you just try to think of words, and you just pick a word that you'll use, you know, youthful, and then you just quick look at your thesaurus and say, hmm, in this treasury here of words, can

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I think of something else? Juvenile, and then off you go. So, are you a feminist?

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Why did I pick this topic? Well, it's biblical. I think it's provocative, and it's in that order, right?

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That's the way the show goes. We get 95 emailers that say, thank you for your show.

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Keep it up. Praying for you. If we had money, we'd give it, but we don't. And five, we don't like you.

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That's the percentage right now. So, anyway, why mess with a good thing?

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If you want preaching, verse -by -verse sequential preaching, that's the Monday show.

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That's just basically to give me some time off so I don't have to do shows on Monday or shows for Monday because I record most of them a couple weeks in advance.

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And if you'd like some world -class exposition, I don't know why you'd listen to me. I mean,

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I do know why in one sense. If I'm your pastor, right, and you live around here, but you can listen to MacArthur and Lloyd -Jones and Ness Lewis Johnson and Sinclair Ferguson and a variety of other men that are just wonderful expositors.

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And so if you only have an hour per week to listen to sermons outside of Sunday morning and Sunday night, and if you're a fundamentalist,

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Wednesday night, just kidding. Nobody can take a joke anymore. You know,

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I used to get those phone calls. Do you have a Wednesday night service? That was like the true test of your orthodoxy if you have a Wednesday night service.

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I wish our building was bigger. We would have a Wednesday night service, but right now Awana takes over.

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So we're talking about feminism, and I was discussing this because Malachi 2 talks about divorce and marrying pagan wives.

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There may be some relation to the two between a man back in the day that Malachi was addressing in Israel, and that person would say,

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I'm going to divorce my spouse so I can marry this pagan woman. So some overlap there.

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Probably some isolated instances as well where you do one and not the other. Well, I want the marriages at Bethlehem Bible Church and out there in NoCoVille from Alberta, Canada to Ireland to reflect the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Your marriage preaches. It's preaching about Jesus and the church, whether you like it or not, and their responsibilities for the husband.

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Those will address on No Compromise Radio as well, and there are responsibilities for the wife.

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And I want to say right up from the get -go, this isn't moralism. These are what you have to do.

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Four prescriptions for your healthy marriage. These are, if you look at Ephesians, and we're going to get there today,

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I think. Chapter 1, the triune God saves, the father elects, the son redeems, and the spirit he seals.

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We're in Christ, and so these commands come from that very position.

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With our union with Christ and in Christ, we receive those commands.

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And the motivation for obedience happens to be that we are in awe of how such a

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God could love such a person. How God could love me. And since he has loved me, what's my response?

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My response is I want to obey. Not to keep my position, not to keep my union with Christ, but because he's so gracious and so wonderful.

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And when you look at the text in Ephesians 5, if there were strictly commands, husbands love your wives, verse 25 of chapter 5, and verse 22 of chapter 5, wives submit to your husbands, that would be enough, because it's in the context of a

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Christian epistle, of a gospel -oriented letter called

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Ephesians. There's enough in chapter 1 and 2 about who we are in Christ. But even in chapter 5, for clarity

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I'm sure, Paul ties in the husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

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And there's a tie -in. And the whole thing's a tie -in with the gospel. And in a similar fashion, wives submit to your own husbands as to the

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Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church, his body, and is himself its

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Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to everything, or in everything, to their husbands.

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So both of those, the women's role and the men's role in marriage, are tied to the gospel.

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So when it comes to this, I want you to know ahead of time, this is just not some moralism that I'm throwing out.

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Just, you know, love your wives and wives submit to your husbands. What do you do if your marriage is a great marriage?

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Well, my problem is if I forget, I don't do any preventative stuff.

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I'm thinking things are going well now and then I forget to keep investing, keep loving my wife sacrificially.

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So if you've got a great marriage, this is a good message for you. If you're not married, this is also a good message for you because you can pray for the marriages at your church.

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If you're a widow or a widower, you can remember the wonderful spouse that the

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Lord gave you. You can say to yourself, I'd like to get married, and when I do, this is what

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I need to do. My wife and I were talking yesterday, training our girls.

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Listen, let's not marry a guy strictly on emotions because you're going to have to submit to him for your whole life.

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And so let's choose wisely. And even if your marriage is in bad shape, I have a question for you.

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Here's the question. Do you believe in the resurrection? Because that's the kind of power, Philippians 3, the power of the resurrection that can change a marriage, no matter how bad it is.

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I preached a sermon about husbands loving your wives and how God can restore marriages, and a dear couple, a sweet couple, said to me afterwards, we know what

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God can do in a marriage. They, giving testimony of the Lord's goodness in their life to help them.

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So these prescriptions, these commands, fall in line with who we are in Christ Jesus.

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And when you, like Elizabeth Elliot would say, you thought you got the prize of your life, ladies, when you married your husband, but instead you got the surprise.

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Surprise. That is a classic line. That's like the three rings, right, in the marriage.

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You've got the engagement ring, and you've got the wedding ring, and you've got the suffer ring.

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Yeah. So we're glad that doesn't have to be the case. And here we're after obedience.

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And there is, there are rather, imperatives in the Christian life. I think today we've probably forgot more about the indicatives, but there are imperatives.

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And so if your sanctification is only preach the gospel to yourself, then you've got a one -sided sanctification.

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Similarly, if your sanctification is I just need something to do, then you're lopsided as well.

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So if you just teach through the Bible verse by verse, you're going to get both indicative imperative. You're going to get law and gospel, whatever wonderful paradigm you'd like to use.

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So in our series here on No Compromise Radio for the wife's role, we're going to look at three of those and three commands found in Scripture for every godly wife.

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So you don't know my husband. I know I don't. You don't know my situation. I know

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I don't. He's an unbeliever. I understand. And the list goes on.

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You're going to see that these three commands are, there's no wiggle room to get out of them.

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You just don't understand. How can I submit? You don't understand. And so I'm just going to tell you ahead of time that let's just see what the text teaches first.

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And I will say to you upfront, these are impossible. Humanly speaking, it's impossible to do these things.

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And so that's why you have the Holy Spirit. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Maybe we're so anti -charismatic and so anti -continuationist that we forget that we have the

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Holy Spirit. He dwells in us. And you can read Romans 8 to find that out.

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So the first command for the ladies, this is kind of maybe three strands of rebar to help support your marriage and make sure you honor the

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Lord, right? You want to honor the Lord in your marriage. Pastor, how could I honor the

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Lord in my marriage? My husband's difficult. My husband's lazy. My husband's not the spiritual head.

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My husband doesn't know much about theology. He doesn't know much about history or biology.

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My husband, my husband, my husband, my husband. Okay. We'll do the shows for the husbands. Scouts honor.

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Just raised up my hand and put three fingers in the air. Is that the scouts? We bellows. We be low bows.

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What's the low? What's a wee below again? We, we boys.

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Oh, low blows. We be wolves. I have no idea.

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I used to remember what we bellows. We be Los Angeles.

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Yikes. Number one, wives submit to your husbands. See, I told you you were influenced by feminism.

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I told you. I mean, it just sounds weird. Wives submit to your husbands, your own husbands, your particular husbands as to the

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Lord. Boy, this is important.

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So important that God has included it in the Canon. Now, think about commands in the

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Bible and instruction on how to have a good marriage. Now, when it comes to raising children, not hardly anything in the

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New Testament. The right kind of parent is going to know how to, how to parent, right?

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The right kind of elder, choose the right, you know, see the, see the qualifications of an elder in a man and he'll make the right decision.

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So that we see the qualifications there. In Proverbs, there's plenty of Solomonic wisdom for parenting.

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But when it comes to marriage, there's hardly anything. There's an absence, it seems, of a lot of instructions for a marriage.

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Wouldn't you think there'd be a lot more? This represents Christ loving the church. Don't you think we'd have a lot more?

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Well, here's my point. What is there is really important. And what is there is, wives, be subject to your own husbands.

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So submit in NAS, excuse me, submit in ESV and be subject to your own husbands in NAS.

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Now, there's not a real verb in the sentence, it's implied. And it's taken from the previous verse, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

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And so we have to supply the verb and it's a command here. And it's very important.

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But right from the get -go, I can feel the bristles. I can feel the pushback. I can feel like when my mother was going to get slain in the spirit and the guy took his hand and pushed her forehead trying to push her over and she was pushing back.

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She never went over. When guys do that and you don't fall over, you don't fall down like a tire iron in a swimming pool.

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Then you, if you're the pastor, you move on to the next one and give them just kind of a special. I was watching that preacher, the women preachers deal, the commercial.

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And then one lady was doing the Benny Hinn thing times five and blowing on people's faces. I don't know. That was the – what's it called when you have bad breath again?

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Heliotosis, halitosis. Blowing people over with bad breath.

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I mean, this word submit. Okay. Let's go to preaching mode for a second. If you're married, wives, do you submit to your own husband?

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Should you have to? Don't you feel like there's something in you that wants to say, now, wait a second. Hold on.

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A few qualifications here. He's not the spiritual head. He's not really doing the right thing. He's not where I am theologically.

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You don't see him behind the scenes. He's messed up before. I can't trust him. I mean, the list can go on and on.

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But I feel your pain. Well, I'm not a lady. I know what it's like to submit to people who are less than perfect.

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I do know that. But when people hear this word submission, I mean, they think a caveman kind of language.

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This is not submission. This is subjugation, people say. You can hear the pushback, dominance, me

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Tarzan, you know, you Jane kind of language. They think this is a dirty word.

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It's a six -letter word. It's abhorrent. There is an aversion, a cultural aversion to this word.

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It is – you need a spiritual claritin for this because it gives you allergies. But it is in the text.

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It's in the text. Husbands, yes, they're going to get theirs later.

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But here it says, wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. So, well, this is kind of out of date.

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It's out of fashion. You don't know where we are, where we've been. Virginia Slims, you've come a long way, baby.

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Is this passage the theological equivalent of bell -bottom jeans?

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I mean every time I see bell -bottom jeans, I say to myself, that's the reason I don't get a tattoo. As you know on No Compromise Radio, I'm not a fundamentalist.

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And if you have good motives for things, you want to get a tattoo or if I see a tattoo on you,

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I care less. If you're my kids in my own house, I tell them while you're under my authority and you want money for – cash money for college, don't get one.

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Can't get one. But the reason why I don't get one, I mean maybe I'd get one in some discreet place or something that said

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Kim. I mean – but if I did, I wouldn't tell you. Kim is my wife by the way.

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How do we get here with submission? I only get one and my wife tells me

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I can't. And again,

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I'm just sitting here by myself in this room. There's not a person in this building. I'm just laughing away. This is like my therapy.

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I was spanked when I was a child. I was whacked is what I was. Hair pulled. Oh man.

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So the issue isn't for tattoos. I'm not going to argue legalistic things and use

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Leviticus out of context at all. Sometimes I wonder with people's motives, why are they doing things?

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And we have to look at – you'll have to pull up my old shows on tattoos because I'm deviating. But I personally say, well, look at the bell bottoms.

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They look funny. They're out of style now. And if I picked – I mean if I would have picked a tattoo to get when I was younger, it would have been the

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Rolling Stones tongue is what it would have been. And so that's probably best that I didn't have that on my shoulder now.

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But digressing here. E .B. White, people have recut their clothes to follow the fashion.

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People have remodeled their ideas too. Taken in their convictions a little at the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve and fitted themselves out in a new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design out of the very latest page of history.

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But the text remains. Husbands, to love your wives. Yes, I know we'll get there.

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But wives, submit to your own husbands. A voluntary subordination to be subject to, to subject yourself.

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This is used in Greek language outside of the New Testament for submitting to an officer who has a higher rank than you do.

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It has nothing to do with who's better. The general isn't better than the sergeant. But there's functional rank to subordinate yourself, to place yourself under.

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So I ask the preaching question. Women who are married, have you placed yourself under your husband's authority?

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Do you submit to your husbands? Do you go along with his leadership even when you disagree?

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If you agree, that's not submission. That's agreement. But you disagree. You've talked about it.

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You've thought about it. You've prayed through it. And then he says, honey, I've made my decision.

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We've got to go in this direction. Are you behind him? Do you withhold with affection?

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Do you make him pay for it? I don't usually recommend movies on No Compromise Radio.

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I don't think I've ever done that. But we went and saw McFarlane USA the other day. There was some show we were going to go watch.

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And it looked interesting to me. And I pulled up the international movie database, IMDB. And I used to look up Christian reviews.

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And they would give me kind of like, oh, this is a story of redemption, you know. But it only had 10 curse words in it.

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Just only mild nudity. So I didn't really want the Christian review. So I used the international movie database.

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And you can get the app too. And you go to Little Parents Advisory. And then it will tell you. And it said of the movie that I thought, oh, the premise looks good.

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And it said 100 of the worst words. And I just thought, well, let's see, 90 -minute show, 100.

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That's one a minute. I'm going to take my two girls and my wife to that? I can't do that. So what about this

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McFarlane USA? About the running team back in the 80s and 90s in McFarlane, California.

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You know, Fresno -ish. And here's this coach that got kicked out of his other job.

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And he goes there and takes over the team. And it's a Disney movie, a feel -good movie. I don't know if there's even one curse word.

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I don't think there's any bad scenes. And I love the show. I loved everything about the show.

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It was really, you know, made me want to go home and study the team. And that it was real and true.

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And I like that. But anyway, the team is having some success, the running team, cross -country team.

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And the coach is getting recruited from Palo Alto with a bigger salary, a nicer home.

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He wouldn't have to live in this very poor farming community. And he and his wife are there at night and they're talking.

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And I don't mean they're in bed doing anything wrong. They're just talking as a couple. And he doesn't know what to do.

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Does he stay and invest in these kids or does he go to Palo Alto? And the wife said something like, I'm behind you.

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Whatever you choose, I'll go along with. I know it's a hard decision, but you're the boss kind of thing.

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I'll do whatever you decide, you know, but you need to make the decision. The decision is yours. I'll follow along.

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I basically couldn't believe it because I've been studying submission. I've been studying husbands love your wives. And I couldn't believe that they actually showed it, that she would say, you know,

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I've told you everything I thought. Here's my input. I'm glad you value my input. I'm glad you love me and just didn't force these things, you know, upon me.

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But at the end of the day, whatever you decide, I'll go along with. I'll place myself under your authority.

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And see, everything with this, ladies, begs the question, who's sovereign over your husband?

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Who's sovereign over who he is, what he does, how he does it? Is God sovereign?

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So to the extent that you can submit to your husband is the extent that you can submit to the Lord. Because the

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Lord is the sovereign over your husband. And so back to the point at hand here, since it's now turned into movie reviews.

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Order in the court. Order in the marriage. And this is a word.

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Submission is not a dirty word. It's not a me Tarzan, you Jane word. It's not anything like that.

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It's a word that has order to it. There's a pecking order that God's sovereign hand has disclosed.

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This pleases God. Now, two times in the Bible, you'll see the submission of women addressed.

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And one is here in the family, and the other is in the church. Let a woman quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness, 1

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Peter 2 .11. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.

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So in the context of corporate worship, we see submission in the New Testament and in the context of marriage.

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Putting yourself under your husband. You say, yes, but there's a strict mutual submission.

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Chapter 5, verse 21, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Well, there is some mutual submission in the sense that I think the husband and the wife can work through issues and there's a difference there.

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But here's the, there's a fallacy of strictly mutual submission because it goes on to say, husband, submit to your wives.

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And here it tells us the truth about submission. You say, well, it's not only that big a deal.

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Well, it's a command of God, number one, and you don't want your life to dishonor the word, do you, ladies?

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Older women, likewise, Titus 2, to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips, nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good.

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That they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands.

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Older women, you teach the young women that. So that the word of God may not be dishonored or blasphemed.

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To speak in a disrespectful way that demeans, denigrates, maligns something.

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When a woman doesn't submit to her husband, that's what happens to the word. It's important.

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This has nothing to do with, well, we have a different culture. And you say, well, what about my husband?

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You haven't met him yet. Well, we'll talk about that next week. My name is Mike Cavendroth, this is No Compromise Radio. I told you you were influenced by feminism.

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Because wives, every wife, if you've got a believing husband or unbelieving, we'll look at 1 Peter 3 next time.

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Submit to your husbands. Now here's the good news. Honey, I've asked the Lord to forgive me for not submitting to you.

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Do you think you could forgive me? That's a good way to start the day. God bless you. Mike Cavendroth, No Compromise Radio.

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No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Cavendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.