In your Bible, go ahead and find Ephesians chapter 5. Tonight we're going to spend our time hopefully completing and expanding on what we learned from the Bible this morning in Genesis 2. From Genesis 2, we learned about God's creation of men and women as separate but equal people, and about His expectations and intentions regarding gender that He indicated and displayed to us by His creation of Adam and then Eve. And the word we used, our $10 word, to sum up 45 minutes worth of this was complementarianism. And complementarianism is the biblical understanding that God made men and women different on purpose fitted and corresponding to each other, both alike in dignity and worth, equals before each other and before God, that each person is either male or female as defined by the body God created for them, And because of that, we understand that gender is not a social construct, but it's one of God's good and immutable gifts. And we arrived at that definition by looking carefully at the creation account in Genesis, where God makes Eve different from and for Adam, so as to correspond to him. And then God addresses the two of them jointly as equals, before him mutually tasked together with the dominion of the earth, ruling over life in the animal kingdom as peers and as equals together. But we also noted that their equality does not mean that they were interchangeable. Their equality did not mean sameness, meaning that Eve was different from Adam and it was intentional on God's part. that she was made to correspond to him, and they were made to fit each other. That was this morning. Tonight, and I told you this morning, if you were here, that that was only the first part, that was the first half. Tonight, our task is twofold. One, to explain the what and the why of how these things get worked out in life. specifically why there are different roles assigned by God to men and women at home and at church, and two, we can do a little bit of compare and contrast of biblical thought in terms of complementarianism with the spirit of our age that we live in and how a non-biblical worldview would see these things. This should be simple enough, right? We got an hour, we can do this. I don't have any good way to get started other than what we did this morning, and that is to just jump right in, go ahead and start reading in God's Word, and then we'll go with that. I'm going to start reading in Ephesians 5, starting in verse 22. It says, Wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church. He himself being the savior of the body, but as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her, so that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of his body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the Church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife, even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband." Ephesians 5 is one of the the clearest or most clear, whichever is right to say, most clear, but also most controversial passages of scripture in terms of understanding gender and gender roles and complementarian thought. On the one hand, there isn't hardly any murkiness here. Paul is writing from an obvious complementarian point of view, and he plainly gives the leadership structure of a family at home. And he really doesn't mince any words, he doesn't waste any time in beating around the bush. Now you look at verse 22, and he says, wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. In the Christian home, Paul says, God has placed the burden and responsibility of leadership onto the shoulders of the husband. I mean, we'll get to more on the husband in a minute, but for right now, what this means is that God's expectation for a wife then is that she submit herself to that leadership of her husband. And that relational dynamic in the home is a direct byproduct of God's complementarian design for men and for women and for marriage. I mean, God made men and women distinct in order to fulfill distinct roles. And in order for one to be effective in the roles and responsibilities they have and that they have been given, the other must be effective in their own. We see in the first part of Ephesians 5 that we read that to the wife it is given to submit, which has come to be regarded as even worse than a curse word. I mean, to our 21st century ears, it even sounds like you're spitting when you say it. is largely because we have a very different cultural understanding of what it means to submit. People in our cultural context rarely, if ever, use this word with any sort of positive connotations. but that is contrary to the biblical understanding of it. I had a couple of friends that I will go back and forth with on biblical things, and if I have study problems, and I even tried to find a different word. I'm like, you guys are all smarter than me. These guys are smart and they have advanced degrees and things like that. I said, is there a better word that could be picked? And there just doesn't seem to be. But to submit means to voluntarily place yourself under the leadership of another person. And so when a wife submits to her husband, and by the way, let's be clear and point out here that Paul says, wives submit to your own husbands. It doesn't say two husbands. It doesn't say wives, women submit to men. It doesn't say that at all. It says, submit to your own husbands, and it means that she voluntarily acknowledges her husband as her leader. We sometimes in our sinfulness and our cynicism, we understand submission in marriage as something of a power play, but it's not. And if it ever becomes that, that will be an indication to you and to us that things have gone dangerously wrong in your home and in your marriage. We can know this is true by reading the rest of what Paul has to say in his commands to husbands, starting in verse 25. He says, husbands love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her. Run your finger down the page and stop at verse 31. If this sounds familiar, it should, because Paul is riffing off of Moses and Genesis 2 when he quotes and he says, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, but I'm speaking with reference to Christ and the church. What Paul is writing about here is both at the same time simple and profound. It is simple because it's a very straightforward thing. Marriage, he says, is more than just an official piece of paper. It's more than a nice meal in a pretty place with all of your family and friends to give you gifts. Although that's cool and it happens and good for you. But marriage and the complementarian roles that God has set up in marriage is much more than that. It's more profound than that because Paul communicates to us here in Ephesians 5 that it is a symbol, it is an illustration, like an object lesson, and it's a witness. When God set up marriage, Paul teaches us, he did so with the intentional purpose of giving a witness to himself and to his redeeming love for humanity. This is essentially God looking at us and saying to us, you are all sinners who have rebelled against me, but I love you. I will always love you. And just so you will understand that I will always love you. Here's an example of how that might work. And then Paul says, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife. And so in a marriage, God sets up husbands as a figure to represent himself, to act as he would act and to love as he would love and to sacrifice as he would sacrifice. And he sets up wives as a figure to represent the church of people that he would redeem, to submit and follow and respect as the church would. That's why we just read, this is a profound mystery, but I'm speaking with reference to Christ and the church. See, marriage and the distinct complementary roles of husband and wives in marriage is to be a witness to the goodness of God, to the love of God. Husbands have been tasked by God to represent Jesus in their home and in their marriage by loving their wife as Christ loves the church. And Jesus loved the church by giving himself up for her. So husbands, you will love your wife as you give yourself up for her, as you sacrifice for your wife by placing her needs and her good and her protection and her comfort above your own. To unconditionally love your wife and sacrifice yourself on her behalf as Jesus does for the church. This came up with a young man I was speaking to, I don't know, a couple months ago, and he was asking my advice on what to do in a particular situation and a decision that needed to be made. He was leaning one way, she was leaning another, and there didn't appear to be I mean, it wasn't like an issue of sin or obedience. It was going to come down to a matter of preference, a matter of convenience in what they decided to do. He knew that the decision was ultimately going to fall and rest with him, and he wanted to know, what do you think? How can you help me here? And I talked it through with him, I asked some good questions, and in the end, I stressed with him that yes, it will be your wife's responsibility to follow his lead in the matter, but that generally speaking, all other things being equal, the Bible expects a husband to sacrifice for his wife, not the other way around, because that is how Jesus loves his people. But on the flip side of that, God has tasked wives to represent the church in this picture being painted by a marriage, to acknowledge your husband as your leader and to submit to him and follow him as the church submits to and follows Jesus. not as a servant, not as some sort of inferior person, but rather as we submit and follow Christ, knowing that He has given Himself up for us. And so wives will submit to leadership of their husbands, knowing that He is serving you and sacrificing for you and loving you the best that He can in every way He knows how. And in this way, what we see in Ephesians 5 is the natural outworking of the complementarian that is complementing roles and creation of men and women from Genesis 2. This teaches us that the arena of the home and the family is the first place where God has ordained that these complementary and distinct roles of men and women are put on display for the whole world to see. not arbitrarily, not just for fun and kicks, but because he's portraying something about himself and his people, himself and his church. And he wants to put his love and his forgiveness and his own leadership on display as a witness. That we, if we're married, can be a witness to the redeeming love of God and the sacrificial leadership of Jesus simply by being married according to biblical roles. But there's only one. That's the first place that we see in the New Testament that the complementing roles of husband and wife come into play. The second is in 1 Timothy. So if you flip, I don't know, like six pages or something in my Bible and find 1 Timothy 2. 1 Timothy 2, I'm gonna start reading in verse eight. We'll go verses eight through 14. Paul writes, therefore, I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands without wrath and dissension. Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly, discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works as is proper for women making a claim to godliness. A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness, but I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression." If the family at home is the first place we see God working out His complementarian design for men and women, the church is the other. And the whole book of 1 Timothy is an older pastor, Paul, writing to a younger pastor, Timothy, instructing him on how to conduct affairs in the life of God's church. And the passage we just read deals with the public services of the church when all the people in the congregation would gather to worship God and for instruction in the Bible and His word. And like Ephesians 5, this passage manages the remarkable feat of being both entirely clear in its obvious meaning and entirely controversial in its application. Paul minces no words and even though our modern sensibilities might cause us to kind of, you know, we wince a little bit, we cannot escape the plain reading of what he says in verse 12. I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man but to remain quiet. One thing we need to make perfectly clear here is that Paul is speaking to Timothy about the exclusive domain of the public teaching of God's Word in the church. Don't read this to your wife or your daughter and then expect her to be silent in the lobby. It's not going to go well for you. Additionally, even considering the realm of teaching, Paul wasn't talking about books or blogs or talks around the water cooler or discussions in the lobby. He was talking about teaching God's Word at church during the services. And he says that the teaching of God's Word in the situations at church to a group of the assembled church should be done by men. to which, I hope, your mind immediately says, why? An engaged and inquiring mind is gonna wanna know why. And I can hardly blame them for that, particularly when you think about all of the bad preaching that you've heard in your life. I have suffered through, I mean, I'm even up here most of the time, and I've still suffered through enough bad preaching in my life that I've got to think, there was a lady somewhere in the congregation thinking, seriously? Step aside, sir, I've got this. And wishing that you'd get on with it. Paul's answer to the question of why comes in verse 13. For it was Adam who was first created and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived fell into transgression. There's a lady, her name is Claire Smith. Claire Smith is a Bible teacher. She's a writer. She's the author of the book, God's Good Design, what the Bible really teaches about men and women. And I found her thoughts to be particularly on point when it comes to the question of answering the question of why. This is what she says. The reasons, the only reasons, are found in the next two verses. They are the temporal priority of the man, he was formed first, and the events of the fall, the woman was deceived, not the man. Once again, Paul goes right back to God's purposes for man and woman in creation and what happened when those good purposes were rejected. Paul's instructions are not based on first century Greco-Roman cultural or localized problems. His reasons span human history and God's purposes for men and women. They therefore apply to us today. They are why the authoritative teaching, leadership, and discipline of God's household are responsibilities for men, and not just any men, but suitably gifted and duly appointed men. The New Testament says that believers have a great many spiritual gifts and ministry opportunities in common. and that we should be keen to see all these ministries flourish and to build Christ's church together. It also says that we are to do so in ways that reflect God's order. Just as God's creation activity brought order from chaos, so now, as His household, we are to conduct ourselves in an orderly way and relate according to His order. God's order for the world means he created men and women to be intentionally different and thus differently assigned when it comes to roles and tasks in marriage, family life, and at church. Because it is in those two realms, and only those two, in which God has chosen to make himself and his character and his relationship with his people manifest. It is in those two realms, at home and at church, that God is putting on display before the world an object lesson. And men and women, husbands and wives, get to be the objects in the lesson. I say get, you don't really get a choice in the matter. But it's at home and at church that we as believers, simply in the normal course of our relationships and interactions, are able to be a witness to the world about the character and the love of God and the relationship that He has with His people. But our world today is such that these twin realities of male headship at home and male leadership at the church, they seem, I don't know, shocking to many of us, right? Perhaps. I'm guessing very few people believe that gender itself, maleness and femaleness, to be a social construct. But at the same time, a lot of us, we've grown up breathing the cultural air of anything a man can do, a woman can do better, and vice versa, and this interchangeability of things, that much of this just doesn't sit well with us when we hear it. we have learned to resist gender-based distinctions. And so this kind of talk makes us uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable right now explaining it to you out loud. Some of you are uncomfortable sitting here listening to it. Generally speaking, I don't think we, at least the people in this particular church, and really I don't, I care the most about you people. I mean, I love all people in the world, but this is where our concern lies. We have no problems at all in accepting that God made men and women different, right? That's obvious to many of us. I heard Jeff Myers say one time, Jeff Myers runs Summit Ministries in Colorado, and Jeff Myers was giving a speech one time, and he said, if you wanna understand the differences between men and women, he said, just look at the difference in decorations from the ladies' luncheon to the men's breakfast. And then he says, I mean, he was giving a speech, he says, all around the room right now, the men are looking at each other and thinking, what decorations, right? We got a big pile of sausages. He said, that's decoration enough and let's eat. And so it was funny and we laughed and everyone chuckles and it's good times, you know, until somebody wants to read 2 Timothy 2.12 out loud. And then all of a sudden the laughing stops. and the squirming starts. But like everything else, the Bible tells us why this is. We're given the reasons why God ordained it this way, the order of creation and the events of the fall. But God goes beyond that. And God tells us why it is that we're uncomfortable with it. This morning we left off in Genesis 2. So flip back to Genesis 2. Let's see the why. The beautiful thing about the Bible is that God not only tells us what reality is and why He made it that way, but He exposes our own hearts and He tells us why we don't like it. That's the dangerous thing about reading scriptures. I get convicted all the time. I think we left off at verse 25. I want to back up just a little bit. I want to read starting in Genesis 2.22, and I'm gonna read into chapter three a little bit as well, like halfway through. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib that he had taken from the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and they were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, indeed has God said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden? The woman said to the serpent, from the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat from it or touch it or you will die. The serpent said to the woman, you surely will not die, for God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate, and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself. And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, What is this you have done? And the woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate. The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you will go and dust you will eat all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel. To the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you will bring forth children, yet your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. Then to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you saying you shall not eat from it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat bread till you return to the ground because from it you were taken. For you are dust and to dust you shall return. So that bit of reading really kind of spans the dividing point between two different realities. the way things were for Adam and Eve before sin, and the way they became after sin. Before sin, at the end of chapter two, we have the remarkable statement that the man and the woman, the man and his wife were both naked and they were not ashamed. No shame, no sin. We have absolutely no prior experience that we can compare that state of things to. But as closely as you can approximate things, Imagine a world without sin and thus without shame. That was the state that Adam and Eve, we left them in this morning. No sin, no shame, harmonious marital interactions. That's how chapter two ends. We don't need, I don't know, Paul Harvey to come tell us the rest of the story because we have chapter three. And in what we just read, sin and Satan soon enough come on the scene and ruin things. I mean, of course we know what happens. Eve listens to the serpent. She doubts God, eats the fruit and gives some to Adam. And Adam, because apparently it's what was for supper, eats it too. And that brings us to verse seven. where God, the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and they showed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. Sin. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Adam and Eve have now gone from being completely open with each other and with God. No cause for shame whatsoever. At the end of chapter 2, to hear in verse 7, in chapter 3, where they're ashamed and they're hiding. Hiding from each other? Hiding from God? This is the point where sin hits home for Adam and Eve. Satan promised to Eve a God-like ability to know more. What they got instead was the ruin of their perfect, sinless, shameless relationship. And what we see here is that as soon as Adam and Eve sinned, something between them changed. Something between them broke. They changed as individuals because of sin. And so their relationship as a married couple changed because of sin. And not for the better either. The corruption and the shame that sin brought into the world had an immediate effect on Adam and Eve and their relationship and marriage such that they were no longer free and open no longer sinless and shameless as they previously had been. Sin has come between them and sin is now in the process of wrecking their relationship. And it is that presence of sin in the world and sin in our own relationships and in our own understanding of men and women and gender that makes us kind of recoil and become indignant at the thought that God would dictate to us, in Ephesians 5 and 1 Timothy 2, the terms of our relationships, as in who will lead and who will follow, who will teach and who will not. We read what we read in Ephesians 5 and 1 Timothy 2, and even on our best days, there's something in our spirits that kind of gets a little hackles up, kind of gets a little indignant. What we are seeing here in Genesis 3 is the reason why that is. Let's keep reading and see how all this is explained for us in the Bible. Pick up our reading in verse 9. Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? He said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree and I ate. The Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. It's not that we don't care about the devil, we just, we don't care about the devil. Go to verse 16. We're gonna skip everything about him. To the woman, God said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth and pain you will bring forth children. Yet your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. Then to Adam, he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you saying, you shall not eat from it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you. and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return from the ground. Because from it you were taken, for you are dust and to dust you shall return." There's a whole lot in there that we just read. But for our purposes tonight, in considering how sin wrecks and ruins God's good design of complementarianism, we talked about this morning, I want to key in on verse 16. This is God speaking to Eve. I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bring forth children, yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. This is a part of the curse that comes on the world and everything in it because of sin. Verse 16 is God speaking directly to Eve and explaining for her exactly how she would be affected by the sin that she herself introduced into the world. And it has two aspects. One, the roles that her and Adam will fill in their marriage, and two, the experience of childbirth. I'm not about to touch any discussion about childbirth other than to note that apparently it would have been painless in a pre-sin world. That's all I'm going there. As for the rest of it, the other two aspects of the curse Eve suffered have direct consequences for a complementarian understanding of relationships. God tells Eve that her, quote, desire shall be for your husband, but he shall rule over you. And with this, God is pointing out, God is making clear to warn Eve that sin has brought about a break, a distortion in the relationship dynamics of her marriage. Specifically, that now, as a result of sin, she will no longer be content with the dynamics and the relationship that God has placed her in. She would be unhappy in her own place, and she would instead desire the place of her husband, the place of leadership and headship. At this point, sin has now turned the harmonious dynamics of what used to be a mutually loving and submitting relationship between Adam and Eve into a power struggle of self-will. Once again, I think that Claire Smith puts things well, and this is how she explains the verses this way. Every aspect of their existence will now involve struggle, showing the results of sin. Filling the earth and subduing it will be hard. Producing food and offspring will be hard. Instead of a joyous, ordered partnership of equals, the relationship of the man and the woman will now be a hard, disrupted partnership of equals. They are both falling. Her willing help will instead be desire, and his loving leadership will instead be rule. For the woman and her husband, this battle will arise from their respective self-interested responses of desire and rule. These post-fall distortions of God's original plan and purpose have then played out in myriad expressions in all gendered relationships, but especially marriage, ever since. See, we've already seen tonight that Paul teaches in Ephesians 5, that within the relational dynamics of marriage, the husband acts as leader with headship in the marriage, and that this was established by God so as to illustrate and put on display for the world the leadership and the headship of Jesus with the church. What Genesis 3 is teaching us is that in those days prior to the fall, prior to sin, everyone was totally okay with that. That Eve was fine letting Adam assume leadership in their marriage, and she had no qualms about submitting herself to him as her head. But when sin came in, it changed all of that. And in verse 16, God is preparing Eve for the new reality of sin in her marriage in which she is no longer going to be content in the role that God has placed her. Instead, it says, she will desire to assume a place over Adam. That's how sin's curse would affect Eve. But the second half of the sentence in verse 16 is descriptive of the curse's effect on men. He will rule over you. And that phrase, that sentence, that has obviously negative overtones, negative connotations, on purpose, I think, because a husband is not supposed to rule over his wife. A husband and a wife are supposed to peacefully coexist in a harmonious relationship of mutual trust and mutual selflessness, such that at the end of chapter two, they can be naked and not ashamed. But the reason The very reason why there is a verse 16 in the first place is because of sin, and that makes it no longer perfectly possible to do that, to be that on every day of our marriages. It isn't perfectly possible because sin has ruined things. It ruined things for Eve and the women who have followed her. It ruined things for Adam and the men who have followed him. What this teaches us is that ladies, Sin is creeping into your heart. Sin might make you want to assume a place of leadership and responsibility you were never intended by God to have. You may find that these words ring true in your own heart. Your desire shall be for your husband. And for men, sin creeps into our hearts. And it wants, it tempts us to rule over your wife instead of lovingly leading her in righteousness. It becomes a selfish rule over. When I say that, I naturally think in my head of this, you know, a domineering man towering over his poor little wifey. Equally possible though, and equally sinful, is the passive or the lazy man. who rules over his wife by foisting all of the responsibility at home in the relationship on her, while still laying claim to the title head of the family. The one, the first, is a tyrant. The other, the second, is a sluggard. Both are improperly ruling over their wives, as God warned Eve might happen. What we are seeing in Genesis 3 are the various ways in which sin distorts and damages marriage and the relationship that was supposed to perfectly complement one another between husband and wife. This is not the only place we see the debilitating effects of sin on gender roles and relationships. Our churches have been affected as well. The setting may be different, it may not always be as obvious, but the effects of the sin and the curse are the same. Sin creeps into the heart of women and makes them unsatisfied with the role and responsibility God ordains. Instead, they may desire to usurp that role of leadership that God has reserved for men. But sin also creeps into the hearts of men, and it makes us susceptible to abusing that role, abusing that responsibility that God has given to us. The female preaching pastor and the male domineering pastor are both distortions of God's good gift of complementing roles at church. And I think it needs to be said, it's not too much of a rabbit trail here, but I think it needs to be said that sometimes, men, sometimes ladies feel the need to take that place because there are men who won't. That doesn't make it right, but come on, man. Sometimes a woman wears the pants in a family because her husband won't get up off the couch and put them on. So let's make certain that we step up and fill the role that God expects of us. Don't be someone else's temptation to sin by leaving a leadership vacuum unfilled where God expects you to be. Because the net effect of sin on what should be harmonious and naturally complementing relationships is that roles get mixed up. Is that relational dynamics become fuzzy and unclear or even reversed. But maybe even more dangerous than that is the fact that we may want them to be mixed up. That in our selfish hearts, we may like what sin has done, we may desire it, and we may go along with it. We need to not. The sermon title for the bulletin, I don't know, is there a bulletin tonight? Probably not. If you look it up online on the CD thing, it'll be What in the World is Egalitarianism? and why should I care? That's my $10 word for tonight. Egalitarianism. And egalitarianism is the idea that because the Bible teaches all people, men and women, are equal before God, which is true, therefore, egalitarian thought is, positions of responsibility and authority and leadership at home and at church should be equally open to both men and women. And egalitarian thought in churches has developed for several reasons, not least of which is something we already mentioned, and that's the sin of men. Oftentimes, it is a reaction against the failings of complementarianism as lived out by sinful people. There's just no getting around that. It's a reactionary thing. But then the question becomes, is that right? We do what's expedient. And even though it makes us uncomfortable, even though it throws a glaring spotlight on our own lives and our own conduct, we have to affirm, no, that's not right. We don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and we don't reject God's plan just because we or others have done a lousy job of putting it into practice. I mean, let's be honest and admit that living according to the complementarian rules given to us by God at home and at church, that it's hard. And a lot of times we're not very good at it. This shouldn't surprise us, though. I mean, after all, Genesis 3, God warned Adam and Eve from day one of the curse that this would be the case. And so the temptation might to be to throw in the complementarian towel and just do what's expedient. Right, you got a lazy husband? Take control. Run that house like a sergeant. You got a lousy preacher? You probably know a woman who can do better. You wish your wife listened more? You don't think that's enough? Why be patient and loving when you can just be ruling and demanding? I don't make things happen. But all of that falls squarely into the category of short-term gain, long-term loss. It's a sin. We may gain something in the near term, but oftentimes we don't see what we've lost until it's too late. Sometime back, Mark Dever wrote an article on the subject, and he wrote for friends of his who were of an egalitarian persuasion. They didn't see the problem with blurring the lines between the roles of men and women at home and blurring the lines of men and women at church. Here's part of what he had to say. Let me read this. Dear reader, you may not agree with me on this, and I don't desire to be right in my fears, but it seems to me and others that this issue of egalitarianism and complementarianism is increasingly acting as the watershed distinguishing those who will accommodate scripture to culture and those who will attempt to shape culture by scripture. You may disagree, but this is our honest concern before God. It is no lack of charity nor honesty. It is no desire for power or tradition for tradition's sake. It is our sober conclusion from observing the last 50 years. Of course, there are issues more central to the gospel than gender issues. However, there may be no way that the authority of scripture is being undermined more quickly or more thoroughly in our day than through the hermeneutics of egalitarian readings of the Bible. And when the authority of scripture is undermined, the gospel will not long be acknowledged. Therefore, love for God, the gospel, and future generations demands the careful presentation and pressing of the complementarian position." Devers pointed out the fact that living, running your home, your marriage, your church, by egalitarian understandings that men and women are interchangeable in their roles and responsibilities may be expedient, but it's not right. That it undermines the Bible by getting around God's obvious and clear commands. And the most important thing he does in that statement is that he grounds a complementarian understanding and opposition to an egalitarian understanding in a plain reading of the Bible. This is what the Bible teaches, he says, about men and women at home and men and women at church. And the Bible study gymnastics that are required to get from, I do not allow a woman to teach, to women may be preachers, or the runaround you have to go through to get from wives submit to your husbands to husbands submit to your wives, Those accommodations, Deborah is pointing out for us, those accommodations in theology and in church life and in biblical thought can only, in the end, undermine the gospel. They can only undermine the authority of Scripture itself. We dare not do that for the sake of expediency or cultural feelings. Also, note carefully, please, that by grounding these things in a reading of the Bible, what is also not stated, what we have not seen from Scripture, right? What have we seen? We have seen that God expects husbands to have headship and leadership at home, for wives to submit themselves voluntarily to that leadership and to follow, and for men to be leaders and teachers and authorities at church. What we have not seen, what is not stated or taught by the Bible, is that any of this applies anywhere else. other than the umbrella of home and church. I mean, the Bible, let's get practical, does not prohibit ladies from running businesses, or if they do, from having male employees, or from running for office, being leaders, giving speeches, writing books about the Bible that could possibly be read by men. You might have noticed two of the three quotes I gave you tonight came from a lady. came from a book on this very topic. It was called Word-Filled Women's Ministry. I have profited greatly from reading that book, and you will too if you read it. Likewise, I mean, I'll tell you one of the best bosses I ever had was a lady. Amy Conrad was the principal of the school where I taught in Indiana, and I couldn't have asked for a better or more capable boss than her. As I understand things, Kathy White worked for many years here at our own Calvary Christian Academy as the principal and administrator. And good for her, she did a fine job. So I'm told, I wasn't here. God has given us a good gift in gender. And He gives to each, male and female, different roles and different responsibilities at home and at church. They are not the same, neither are their functions the same. There is an order in God's design and our responsibilities as men and women are not interchangeable. at home and at church. Let's be careful, though, not to bind where God has not bound. Not to over-command where God has not commanded. But at the same time, let's be careful not to shirk off responsibility where God expects us to be faithful. Whether or not it's easy. Let's be biblical men. Let's be biblical women. But let's not go beyond that. And with the help of God, let's be biblical complementarians, faithful believers who live according to His good design and give that witness to the world that He desires from us.