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”Marriage is a call to die [to self], and a man who does not die for his wife does not come close to the love to which he is called” —R. Kent Hughes as quoted in The Shepherd Leader at Home
When a man loves his wife like Christ loves the church, the home becomes a foretaste of heaven. When a man lives for himself, his ambitions, his desires and goals and uses his wife like an appliance to facilitate this, he creates a foretaste of hell on earth. A normal woman will respond to loving headship, and an atmosphere of love and respect is created.
Children will carry these images of husband and wife into their own marriages. What kind of a picture are we giving our children? A picture of constant suffering and mental anguish, unforgiveness and pain? Or are we giving them the beauty of forgiveness, reconciliation, love and tenderness?
All of the correct doctrine of the Christian faith taught as theory will not counterbalance a wrong marital picture in the minds of children. They know at a deep level what they see. The old saying is true. “What we are screams so loud that nobody hears what we’re saying.” Something to remember as parents.
Only God can help any of us love as He loves. We will fail at times, but God help us if we fail and feel no qualms of conscience about it. We will sin, but God help us if we refuse to repent when we do. The hallmark of a man or woman of God is not sinless perfection. It is the presence of a living and active conscience that cannot rest until things are made right. Those who sleep well when things are shattered cannot know the Christ of Calvary, no matter what their lips profess.
Explaining modesty, as the report says, as being ‘no longer a virtue in contemporary society’ the annual Romance Report by publisher Harlequin showed a clear focus on technology’s involvement in romance today in both the survey’s themed questions and results. From the article, New Study Reveals Increasing Number of Women ‘Sexting’
What`s love got to do, got to do with it
What`s love but a sweet old fashioned notion
What`s love got to do, got to do with it
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken…~Tina Turner, pop song from the 80′s
The continuing collapse of Western culture is nowhere more evident than in the shambolic state of women today. There is a UK newspaper that reports continually on the new breed of female teacher/predators who target young boys for sexual thrills, leaving damaged and ruined lives in their wake. There are so many stories like this that it feels surreal to scan headlines anymore. It’s like a tidal wave of debauchery has swept over our country, with women at the leading edge.
Women are now, according to a new study, sending naked photos of themselves, over their cell phones at a startling rate. We’re not talking about 15-year-olds here, we’re talking about grown women. (Perhaps that’s where the teen girls got the idea?) Whether you are 60 or 6, the mantra of the New Millennium Woman is “work it, baby!”
As a member of Generation X, I stare around in bewilderment sometimes. The Baby Boomer females were the women who were declaring their total liberation from male “oppression”, getting abortions when they conceived children in their newly liberated state, burning their female undergarments and claiming the ultimate triumph of women over men. They were women, they said, and everyone was supposed to hear them roar.They were no longer just going to be toys for boys, no more staying at home to rear children, it was all going to be a new world with she-warriors über alles.
I once babysit for a very strange household of liberal academics. There were 3 adults in the house, and only later did my innocent teen mind slowly realize that the dynamics were not normal, to put it kindly. One night I was browsing the bookshelves of the house for reading material when I pulled out a black book of feminist poetry.
“Eve stands for evil,
God stands for good,
So much for male, patriarchal authority…”
The poetry went downhill from there. The hippies I was babysitting for were the archetypal feminists, shunning make-up, with long stringy hair, the radical UK magazine Prime Rib on the burlap covered coffee table. There wouldn’t have been any sexting in that household.
My generation of females seemed to have lost that feminist vision somewhere in the 80′s. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was on the radio, pink hair and florescent gel wrist bands were in. Madonna showed up on the scene, and flaunted sexuality became the norm in teen music and film. The Prime Rib crowd seemed a long ways away.
Fast forward to today’s young girls who are sending naked photos of themselves in middle school, while their 40 and 50-something mothers are getting injected with toxins and having surgery to maintain their “hot” looks, Their mothers have, after all, their own provocative photos to send to their latest “boyfriends.”
The term “cougar” was coined to describe older women going after young men in movies. The idea has now been applied at a very local level like the Christian school rocked by the pervert female charged with sex abuse of her young male student. Cougars. Real progress, women.
It isn’t hard to diagnose the problem. Erase God and His laws from the homes of America, deny His image stamped on humanity, take His gift of sexuality and tear it away from the marriage covenant, descend to the level of beasts of the field in living by your glands, and you will achieve the smoking ruins around us.
I don’t care if I offend any feminist reading this post. What has happened to womanhood is a tragedy and an outrage. I admire men and the masculine traits that set them apart. But I love being female, because I believe that we bring something unique and equally special to the world. By nature, God made us more nurturing, more gentle, and those emotions females are often criticized for are what make the world a habitable place. We have the “feel” of a situation that men often lack. That’s because God gave that intuitive gift to women. The world would be a bleak, utilitarian place without it.
The protective instincts, the tenderness and love of a woman is something that make a home what God intended. Whether or not you have children or a husband, a woman brings beauty and love and care to others that men simply cannot duplicate. Because they are men.
To see a nation of girls and grown women turn themselves into sleazy p-rno pin-ups, aborting the children of their wombs for convenience, surgically altering their bodies to suit some fake celebrity ideal, spending hours texting and tweeting sexy pics and behaving like empty-headed bimbos is sickening. It’s a perversion of God’s design, and our society is paying an enormous and unaffordable price for it–because our daughters are watching and emulating what we do. And one glance at the headlines will show how well they are doing with this brave new world.
Girls are led to believe being loved, the word so cheaply thrown around by teens today, is provoking a lustful response in males. They are being lied to by every aspect of our culture, and often in their own homes by parents who fail to truly love each other. Girls are used up and discarded like trash, many arriving at Tina Turner’s jaded conclusion by the time they are in high school. (“What’s love got to do with it?) Being a sexual provocateur is considered arriving at your female destiny, and God help the girl who isn’t considered “hot” enough to be “loved.”
I tremble to be raising daughters in this climate. We mothers and also fathers need to do whatever we can to protect our girls from the mindset of the age. One of the best ways to do that is to model for our children true love in our marriages that allows us to find the full and healthy expression of our gender according to God’s perfect plan.
I intend to write more on this in the near future.
“The most important example that parents possess is their marriage. Our marriages preach. They preach a message that either attracts or repels our children. Parents who joyfully pursue God are contagious. Joyful sacrifice for the gospel is contagious. A gospel that makes parents stable, sincere, joyful, loving, affectionate, and humble is contagious. Children will want a God that produces these qualities.
On the other hand, parents going through the motions of church, enslaved to rules, serving God to gain his acceptance, tolerating their spouses, or worse, engaging in open warfare, chase their children away from God and his church. When Mom and Dad preach one thing but do the opposite, and don’t repent to their children, it makes the world attractive and the gospel irrelevant.
Kids also internalize their parents’ passions. They alone see what or who you “really” love, and not what you merely pretend to love.”
-William Farley, Gospel-Powered Parenting
This song below, based on I Corinthians 13, the Love Chapter from the Bible, is in honor of my husband on our 16th Anniversary today. Here is the passage of Scripture first.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
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