Different by Design (Part 2)

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

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

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio. My name's Steve Cooley. I'm sitting in for the vacationing, Pastor Mike Abendroth, and it is a privilege and a blessing to be with you on No Compromise Radio, or www .nocompromiseradio .com.

We're heard on WVNE 760 AM in Worcester, and it is a privilege to be with you. Well, I started talking yesterday, on Wednesday, about the differences between men and women, and I call the series Different by Design.

Women Should Not Preach

That's a title that I stole from Pastor John MacArthur from his book, but I started talking about the differences between men and women and specifically why women cannot be pastors or preachers, and I'm going to develop that somewhat and kind of go into some of what the Bible says about the family and just some real practical wisdom, I think, about the family.

But I began reading something by Pastor Keith Smith yesterday on the radio and just talking about his theory with regard to 1 Timothy 2 and why it was somehow negated by Galatians chapter 3, and that's just wrong, you know?

You cannot look at one verse in one context and somehow cancel it out by using another verse in another context. Either the two passages are in conflict, in which case you've got an issue with your understanding of the Bible or the Bible is not fully inspired and inerrant, or you've got some other issue, but what you need to do is understand each verse in context.

In 1 Timothy 2, I don't think it could be any clearer that Paul ties women not being able to teach to the fall. That doesn't change. In Galatians 3, there's nothing there about teaching. So, you know, that's just a red herring, as we would say.

He has another one here, and he says, it is an undeniable fact, undeniable fact, that God has called and anointed thousands of women to preach the gospel. Well, I don't know whether he's called them and anointed them or not, but thousands of women do share the gospel.

Now, preaching the gospel, to me, preaching, heralding, maybe a difference there, but here's what I know. The Great Commission, does it cover women? Yes. Can women share the gospel with unbelievers? Yes.

Can people get saved through that? Yes. But does God ever call women to be preachers? And the answer is no. It's clear that women are not to be preachers. In fact, I would go so far as to say, listen, when a woman is sharing the gospel with someone and she, with a man, and she believes that he has been converted, then perhaps it would be wise, I think it would be wise in any case, for her to find a man to kind of say, could you shepherd this guy?

Could you disciple him rather than me? I just don't, I don't think it's biblical and I think it could be problematic. But he says it is an undeniable fact that God has called and anointed thousands of women to preach the gospel.

Well, let's say for a moment that that were true in the sense that I would not say that God has called them, but let's say that there are women who are certified ministers of the gospel. Does that mean, does that somehow negate First Timothy chapter two, verse 12?

And again, no, experience can never trump scripture. I don't care how many times you've seen whatever. Is the Bible true or is your experience true? And if they contradict, which one are you going to believe?

Your experience needs to submit to the Bible. And why do I say that? Well, let's just look at what Peter says. Second Peter chapter one, verses 16 to 21. For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord.

And he goes on to say what? But we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was born to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.

We ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have something more sure, the prophetic word to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place.

What's he saying? He's saying, listen, I was on that mountain. I heard that voice. I saw the glory of Christ revealed. Can I tell you something better? Something more reliable than the best experience in history?

The word of God. You listen to that Bible. It's more reliable than the greatest experience in history. So anytime someone says, look, I've had an experience, I felt this, I sense that, I know this, I've seen this hundreds of times.

If it's not in the Bible or if it contradicts the Bible, let's put it this way. If experience contradicts the Bible, I'm gonna take the Bible every single time. The Bible says, well, you know what? Or experience says, well, gays can be married.

The Bible says they can't be. Homosexuality is a sin. Experience says, well, women can teach as well as men. Okay, the Bible says women cannot teach a man, cannot teach a man. Now a woman could teach me, as I said, I think on Sunday, a woman could teach me Japanese.

I don't know any Japanese. But when it comes to scripture, when it comes to the things of God, a woman cannot, shall not, is not permitted by the apostle Paul to teach a man. A woman may not teach a man.

Nothing could be clearer than that. And experience can never trump that. Now, moving on to these roles, and again, I would just stress, there is nothing inferior about women. Men and women just have different roles, different obligations before God.

When in Ephesians 5, it says, women submit to your husbands. You know, I like to preach that at weddings, and I think it shocks a lot of women to even consider that, and their faces contort. But listen, if you have a husband who, in Ephesians 5, loves his wife like Christ loves the church, in other words, he's laying his life down for her, when he loves her so much that he would do anything to make her pure, anything to lead her in the right way, when we think of Christ going to the cross for the church, if we have that kind of love for our wives, do you think wives will think, oh, I can never submit to that man?

No, they will. Because you will be keeping the word of God, and it will make it easier for them to keep the word of God. Husbands have a great responsibility. It's not some kind of authoritarian dictatorship.

It is a loving leadership, where a woman is enabled to submit to her husband because of the way her husband loves her. Now, there are other things the Bible says about men. Did you know, for example, in 1 Timothy 5 .8, it says that if a man will not care for members of his own household, he's worse than an unbeliever, and you say, well, that's pretty harsh.

It doesn't say that about women. Well, it goes back to Genesis 3. When Adam fell, part of the curse was that he was gonna have to work, and he was gonna have to earn food by sweating. The earth was gonna be cursed.

It was gonna be hard to produce food. We've seen that throughout history. We've had famines. We've had droughts. We've had all manner of things because sin has entered the world. So men are to be out there working, sweating, toiling, to earn money for their families.

Bible also says, if a man will not work, he shall not eat. I mean, we have all kinds of men not working, and sometimes that's for things beyond their control. Maybe it's physical. Maybe they just got laid off.

That's fine, but here's what I would say to you today. If you're at home, maybe you're even this new fad being a house husband because your wife can make more, there's something wrong with that. There's something wrong that when you say, well, you don't understand.

My wife's a doctor. My wife's a lawyer. My wife can pull down $200 ,000. I can only make 50. And my advice to you would be follow the Bible. Pay down your bills. Learn to live on the 50. Get a second job so you can make 60.

God blesses obedience. We are ordained for different roles, and when we get outside those roles, all I can tell you is difficulty is going to come your way. Bible would also tell us that women are weaker.

Peter writes that husbands need to treat wives as the weaker vessel. What does he mean? Well, certainly women are, generally speaking, weaker physically, but they're weaker in other ways. We just talked a little bit about Eve falling first.

She was deceived. Eve, she fell, it says in 1 Timothy 2, that she was deceived first. We would also see that in Genesis. I think women are a little bit weaker when it comes to, in a lot of cases, discernment, but definitely weaker emotionally.

Let me ask you this, guys, men who are listening to NoCompromiseRadio .com. Who tends to get their feelings hurt for longer periods of time, men or women? I would submit to you that, generally speaking, it's the wives.

Do men get their feelings hurt? Yes. Can they become emotionally distraught? Absolutely, but it is harder for them to hold a grudge, for them to hang onto things, to remember things. I mean, look, if you get in an argument today with your wife, who's going to remember the details of it two months from now?

It probably isn't going to be you, but men need to be out in the workplace. They need to be working. They need to be supporting their families. Wives, we're told, in Titus 2, are to be workers at home.

They're to love their husbands, to love their children. Well, you say, well, that's just so old-fashioned. That's right, it goes all the way back to creation. That's how old it is. You say, well, you don't understand the culture today.

You don't understand the modern realities of the two-income family. Well, here's what I do understand. That the family unit is under assault. And people want to blame it on Satan, and certainly that's true of the world system, but it's under assault by our kind of society that says you have to have everything and you have to have it now, and you have to put everything on credit, and you have to look down years from now to the day where you finally might maybe pay off your debts, but you never will.

The truth is you never will, because you're going to keep using those credit cards, you're going to keep piling up debt, and you're going to continue to further this cycle where you need two incomes. Have to have them.

You have to have them or little Johnny's not going to be able to have a computer in his room. Everybody in the family is not going to be able to have an iPhone. Well, that'll be a real shame. Do with less and your family will be blessed for it.

I promise you that. I promise you that. When we obey God's design for the family, we will be blessed. Now, here's what else I would say. We talk about two income families and how we need this and we need that.

I think you do yourselves a favor to pick up a book about finances, excuse me, a book about finances, and to read how to organize things in your life so that you actually can get by on less, to postpone things, to save for things, to not use credit cards, to really be wise about what we do.

The ideal situation is for the wife to be home with the kids, to be waiting for her husband, to be doing things while he's gone to kind of make things nice for him when he gets home. That's what it means to be a helper.

And when both are working, you know, I see this on TV, this kind of, you know, both are working, they're both making a lot of money, and nannies are raising the kids, and you just go, well, of course the kids don't respect the parents.

The parents are never home. They don't, they've got no connection, no affinity for the parents. Well, why is that? Because the parents aren't around. They don't even know their parents. So why would they obey them?

That whole idea is just kind of out the window. I would encourage every wife here to read Proverbs 31 and to think, you know what? I want to be that kind of woman. I want to be a woman under authority of my husband who glorifies my husband, who makes my husband look good because of how I deal with things.

I want to be a wife who saves my husband money, who takes the burdens off of my husband. I want to be a helper for him because I know that glorifies God. I know just in my own life, the blessing of having my wife home, even though it meant, you know, a lot of times I worked overtime.

We rented instead of buying a house for years and years and years, we rented. Why? So the kids could go to a nicer school. We could live in a nicer area. And so we couldn't afford a house. My wife could have gone to work.

We could have made that happen. We could have bought a house there, but our decision was it was more important for her to be home. And I can't even tell you, I just look at my kids now, now that they're grown up, and I could say, and I'm not bragging about this because it really is the grace of God and just the hard work of my wife, but we not only love our kids, we actually like them.

We actually like them to be around. What a blessing that is. How different that is than so much of what we see portrayed in the world today. And I want to just address this whole idea because I want to talk about, just for a few minutes, about parenting and just some, maybe some insights.

I mean, this is kind of a broad brush of a lot of things, but I just think we, because I deal with so much of this in the church, and I just want people to understand this. Ephesians chapter six, children, obey your parents and the Lord for this is right.

Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise that it may go well with you, that you may live long in the land. Now listen to verse four. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

What does that mean, provoke them to anger? Don't do that. What does that mean? How am I supposed to discipline them? And that sometimes might involve what we euphemistically call corporal punishment or using the rod.

How do I do that without making them angry? Well, that's not the point. It's not that you never make them angry because sometimes they're going to rebel against what you want for them, even though father does know best.

But you just don't make it, you're aimed to make them angry. I mean, I would always talk to my kids about different things. I would explain to them why I was doing what I was doing all the time, because I wanted them to understand that I wasn't mad with them.

I wasn't angry with them. I just was not going to have the current behavior continue. Their behavior was going to be modified and I was going to take whatever steps it took to modify that behavior. And sometimes it just involved kind of raising the stakes as it were until they were satisfied that they weren't going to have their way.

And I recall one time even saying to one of my kids, look, I'm going to transfer you from the high school you're in into another one, into the crosstown rival. And that child saying to me, you wouldn't really do that.

And looking them straight in the eye and saying, oh yes, I would. I would do anything to stop you from doing what you're doing. And I don't care how much it embarrasses you. I'm going to do what it takes.

Your children need to know that you love them, but you're not going to brook foolishness. You're not going to allow them to be sinful. And especially men, you cannot allow them to be disrespectful to your wives.

Mom, they need to understand that when mom speaks, she speaks for you. There is no difference. There's no kind of break between the two of you. Let me just give you this little practical advice too. Never argue in front of your kids.

Just never do it. I don't care if you just have to say, hey kids, hold on for a minute. We need to go in the other room. You and your wife, actually what you should do probably is talk about things later or just agree with whatever your wife's saying or whatever until you can talk it over or get her to kind of catch your signal so that you both put on the same face and then talk about it later.

But there cannot be any daylight between the two of you. And speaking as someone who still remembers his childhood, I know the daylight between the two of them means that I can get away with something.

And that's how I used to view it. There just can't be that. And you know, in a kind of parallel passage in Colossians, it talks about, in talking about how fathers need to be with their kids, it just talks about, again, this idea that fathers cannot, let me find this, do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged.

You can put so many rules and so many restrictions on your kids that they never have any fun. Your home ought to be the best place your kids know to be. You know, it ought to be like you almost have to take a crowbar to get them outside.

I mean, you want them to go outside, certainly you want them to have friends and all that. But your home ought to be the best place they know. And again, I just know so many kids in so many situations where that isn't the case, where it's never gonna be the case.

But your home can be different. Men, if you love your wives, if your kids see you loving your wives, if they know that there's no other woman on the face of the planet for you but your wife, if they see you hold her and kiss her and tell her how much you love her, and then they also get to experience fun of being with dad, fun of all of you being together, I don't care whether it's dinner time and Bible study around the dinner table, whether it's games, whether it's sitting around and laughing at silly movies, whether it's telling jokes to one another, whether it's going out in the front yard and throwing the baseball around, whatever it is that you do as a family to have fun, and some folks even think that camping is fun.

I don't happen to be one of those. Whatever you do, your kids should just think your family is the best. They should think, you know what, as much fun as my family was, I'm even gonna have my family someday even be more fun, but the things that we experienced in our home as kids, I want that to be present in my home too.

That's how you know you've made it. I mean, it's so, so many people, I'm sure, go into marriage thinking, well, some people won't get married because they think marriage is a disaster, I mean, because of just what they've seen as a child, but so many people, I think, are almost afraid to get married because of their own childhood experiences, and for you, husband, father, leader of your home, for you, wife, helper, leader of the children, submissive to her husband, I say to you, I just urge you both to just covenant with one another, to promise one another that your home will be just the best place that your kids could possibly hope for, and that doesn't mean having all the stuff, again, it's not about stuff, it's about having mom who loves the kids, it's about mom who teaches the kids, it's about dad who loves the kids and teaches the kids, about dad who even spends daddy and daughter time, takes his daughters out individually on dates, especially on birthdays and special times like that, you wanna just focus on the one child, you know, takes the boy out to a baseball game for his birthday, whatever it is your kids love to do with dad, you just need to do that, they just need to think there's no cooler person on the face of the planet than dad, even when he has to discipline me, he maybe gets upset sometimes, but not when he disciplines me, he always takes a deep breath, and he comes in and he just talks to me, explains to me what I've done wrong, what he expects from me, and how things need to be different, and again, on NoCompromiseRadio .com, what I'm really talking about is, we need to understand that, you know, what people see as old fashioned, they talk about it, you know, this kind of no, or father knows best, you know, 1950s kind of world, listen, you bring the Bible into that, you kind of impose the Bible and what it says on that, and you will have a great family life, brothers, sisters, loving one another, respecting the parents, honoring the parents, parents not exasperating, that is not stacking up rules that are just designed to frustrate the kids and make sure that they never have any fun, but actually teaching them, our goal as parents is to teach our kids, and you know what, teaching, if you're, let's just put it this way, if you're a teacher in an algebra class, do you think you're ever gonna teach anybody by just yelling at them?

Do you think you're just gonna, you know, teach them? I had a teacher once, and he'll never know who I am, he was the worst teacher I ever had, it was a college algebra class, and he would just take instructions out of the book and put them up on the board as if he were helping us, that's not the point at all, you know, kids learn sometimes by failing, they don't learn just by rules, sometimes we have to come alongside them and help them understand what they did wrong, sometimes, like I said, maybe the rod is applicable, but we are teachers as parents, we need to be encouragers as parents, yes, we need to be disciplinarians too, but it's a balance, but above all, our home should be a place where God is honored, where the family is upheld as a good thing, where it's a great place to be, where our kids just think, I want all the kids in the neighborhood to be here, because it is a fun place to be, it is a cool place to be, and my parents love me, and honor the Lord in all that they do and say, this is No Compromise Radio.

No Compromise Radio, with Pastor Mike Abendroth, is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, 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, please come and join us, our service times are Sunday morning at 1015, and in the evening at six, we're right on route 110 in West Boylston, you can check us out online at bbchurch .org, or by phone at 508 -835 -3400, the thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio, do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.