Last Sunday, I spoke of Paul’s instruction to Timothy about prayer in the church.  Christians pray for everybody.  We pray for everyone not only because everyone stands in need of prayer but also, as Paul reiterates, because God wants everyone to be saved (2:4).  This is a case of what God wanting and what God getting not being the same.  God knows this, and we know this.  God will not force anyone.  God wants many things that He does not get: holiness, obedience, compassion, charity, kindness, patience, faith.  So God does something about that: He sends Jesus Christ.  He sends the Holy Spirit.  Jesus teaches us how to pray; the Spirit emboldens us for prayer.

“Therefore,” Paul continues, “I want the men everywhere to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or disputing” (2:8).  I like that first part: men, let’s pray!  I wonder about that last part, “without anger or disputing.”  It isn’t all anger and dispute out there, beloved, yet I look around outside these doors and see more anger and dispute than I’d like to.  It doesn’t take long for anger and dispute to make their way into the church also, does it?  We take God and God’s Word out into the world; we bring the world and the words of the world in with us here.  Men, our holy hands, these hands called and claimed by God, consecrated by God, are meant by God for holy work, not works of hurt.  Holy work is not angry work.  It is not the work of sore disagreements and bitter disputes.  Ours are peacemaking hands, because Christ lives in us, and these are now his hands, and we are his hands.  His hands were wounded.  We also have wounds; let us decline to wound others.  Let us recommit ourselves to blessing.

So, men, let’s be praying.  But what about the women?  Should they pray, too?  Of course!  The church prays.  The church isn’t only men.  As a matter of fact, as we look around today, as we remember looking around for most of our lives, the church is mostly women!  Every church wonders where the men have gone.  They’ve been wondering a long time.  Canadian clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson believes the church in these times has a striking opportunity to reach men, especially young men.  I hope he’s right!  I’d like to find out.

In what follows, Paul has some pointed, even hard, things to say regarding the women of the church.  John Stott, in his study of 1 Timothy, has written of “rampant heresy” in the church at Ephesus.  Paul is writing to encourage Timothy to stay the course, contend for the faith, and continue to teach sound doctrine for spiritual health, for sanctification.  Godliness and holiness.  Things needed reform in Ephesus.  Matters there were getting beyond tense.  A tense church is a distracted church.  The heart of the message was being lost.  The world continues always to lead our hearts away, coax our hearts back to the world’s thoughts and ways.  God wants us to apply faith to the world.  The world is always with us to apply the world to faith.  There in Ephesus and even today, hands and hearts turn this way and that, every one to its own way, while the simplicity of the message and the holy simplicity of life following Christ goes neglected: how can that be the way?  That can’t be right!

We’re all in recovery.  We will always be in recovery from sin and from the ways of this world that seem to promise freedom only to hand us over to harder servitude.  Have you ever tried something that seemed like it might help but all it did was make the chains heavier?

Paul writes that, in his view, women in worship ought to “dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God” (2:9-10).  Now, he may have written this because he was a misogynistic pig, but I think the stronger reason was that something was happening in Ephesus that prompted him to write this way.  Ephesus was a prosperous, cosmopolitan city: the kind of place where you could see the chic people; chic people like to be seen.  Not many dress up not to be noticed.

In ancient times, women didn’t dress like many of the teenage girls today, so the immodesty about which Paul is writing isn’t about abbreviated clothing and skin on display so much as clothing and hair that was meant to advertise, even flaunt, social status: elaborate, time-consuming, money-consuming, wealth-displaying: look at me!  Just think of all the money I must have spent on me.  Envy is the highest form of praise, et cetera.  James points to a problem he saw in the church: people tend to show deference to the wealthy and relative indifference to the poor.  Jesus came among us poor and has made us rich.  We are all one in Christ and God is no respecter of persons: worldly status is of zero interest to God—you’re poor?  God loves you.  You’re rich?  God loves you.  You’re a man?  God loves you.  You’re a woman?  God loves you.

As Christians, our aim is not to advertise our wealth or status—look at what I can afford!—but to make Christ visible.  We are to be little mirrors to reflect the glory, the light, the love, the grace of God in Christ.  Blessedly, we get this, and we don’t come to church to be the center of attention, adulation, and envy, like Cinderella at the ball—“Did you see her hair?  Did you see her dress?  Did you see her shoes?”  We’re not here to see and be seen.

Women who profess to worship God, just like men, adorn themselves with “good deeds” (2:10).  We strive to make our lives beautiful, lovely, attractive for God: beautiful living is holy living—godliness, holiness—and holy living is rich, abundant, fruitful with good works of love.  Faith lives by works of love.  Only let us always remember that God counts good works differently from us: small things, when done with great love, are just as pleasing to God as great things; indeed, when done with love, small things become great.  The simplest acts of kindness, consideration, and patience can be priceless.

Paul has more to say about women in the church.  How to preach on this is a problem for me; how to hear it is a problem for us all.  Some of us are familiar with and find much blessing in the preaching and writing of Calvinist Baptist John MacArthur out there in California.  He has been asked on several occasions about women and preaching, and his answer is always the same.  In the words of Paul, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man” (2:11).  Some translators want to shift “woman” to “wife,” so that the question becomes a matter of the marital relation.  In Paul’s thinking, the man has spiritual leadership, and Paul believes he has scriptural, indeed, creation warrant for this.  He’s rather blunt about it, not really elegant, pointing to Adam coming first and Eve being the one who was deceived (2:14), though Adam ate, also; indeed, in that matter, Eve took the lead.  Adam—even knowing the clear command of God, and being charged, after a manner, with guarding Eve’s soul—Adam also sinned.

Now, if Paul is cautioning Timothy, there must have been a significant problem of spiritual leadership in Ephesus.  It’s not as if we are unfamiliar with this problem: too often in a Christian marriage, the woman, the wife and mother, pulls all the spiritual weight: she’s the one who comes to church, who brings the children, who’s there for church activities, who actively makes church a meaningful part of her life.  Emily Hipp, of blessed memory!  And that’s a problem.  God created man and woman to help one another, support one another.  I’ve seen research, and believe it, that indicates that when the father is involved in church, the family is involved in church; when the mother is involved in church, even if she brings the children, she’s the only one who ends up being involved, engaged.  The kids get a mixed message, you see.  They pay attention.  When fathers take spiritual leadership, families follow.

Now, is that always true?  Of course not.  But it’s worth thinking about, carefully, prayerfully.  Women, wives, mothers, tell me—would you be glad for your husbands to take more of an interest in church?  Would you be glad for them to take a little more active role in church, even a leadership role?  Would you be glad if he woke up one Sunday morning and said to you, “Hey, let’s go to church”?  Would you be glad nearly to tears if he would just say, “Let’s pray together”?

Is Paul being mean-spirited, bigoted, a woman-hater, or does he maybe understand something about human nature, and men specifically, that we choose to overlook, something that isn’t politically convenient at this time?  The church is blessed by women; women, frankly, are the backbone of the church.  Yet I am bold to suggest that even you women here today would rejoice if your men would also take on that role, if men were also the backbone of the church.  Now, you men here today are just as much a blessing, and you, too, are part of the backbone of this church, but look: you’re outnumbered here, and you know it.  Is that why other men stay away?  When church is little better than the Hallmark Channel, no wonder men aren’t really excited.  Not that Bethel is.

Jesus teaches, argues, works, sacrifices.  His life is characterized by responsibility, love of truth, rejection of falsehood, strength, courage, persistence, and discipline.  He is the victor.  Women and men are drawn to him in part because they see the best of manhood in Jesus Christ.  Over the last hundred and seventy years or so, American mainline Christianity has lost sight of this Jesus.  Over those decades, much of American Christianity made Jesus over into the sweetest, nicest woman you could ever meet: gentle, kind, nurturing, tolerant, supportive, sensitive, and submissive.  He is the victim.  We wonder why so many men sort of sidestep church.  James Brown used to sing that it was a man’s world—though it would be nothing, nothing without a woman.  When’s the last time you heard that song?  Now, we’re not supposed to know what a woman even is.  Let alone a man.  And who benefits from that?

From my perspective, my parents were truly equal in their marriage; I believe they thought so, too.  And their roles were different.  My mother worked outside the home for most of her working years.  During my father’s long periods of unemployment, my mother’s job supported the family.  She would also be the first to tell you that what she had really envisioned for herself, and missed, was to be able to be a full-time homemaker, like her mother and grandmother.  I suppose that makes Betty Friedan roll over in her grave, but not every woman can or even wants to go to Smith and aspire to be a high-powered New York executive.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, working together for the sake of family, for the sake of God, building a marriage, building a family, building faith in God, upbuilding church, bringing the kingdom.  Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, men and women—both have a part, a role; both are hugely important; both are somewhat different.  Paul understood that women already knew this and expected it, and that they also were quite ready and capable of filling in when the men in their lives failed to live up to their part.  Perhaps, perhaps, Paul isn’t so much insisting on misogyny here, let alone some supposed inability of women, so much as he is insisting upon the responsibility of men.

One of the biggest problems facing this society is the irresponsibility of men, a generation of lost boy-men, aimless slackers who don’t build anything, grow anything—except pot—who don’t see much value in any of that old school stuff because they don’t see that society today has much use for them.  For the past fifty-five years, men have been the problem.  If we’re going to believe the sociocultural narrative currently being broadcast from every institutional loudspeaker, including the church, men have always been and will always be the problem.  Now that plays well in some circles and gets the required laugh out of this one and that one, but it does nothing to give young men a vision of who they might be—something noble, good, holy, constructive, needed.  And that’s a problem, and I put it to you that Paul understands that, especially as it pertains to the church.

Paul does not say that women are incapable of teaching or preaching; he’s not even exactly saying that those things are “man’s work.”  What I hear him saying is that a church without men is half a church.  A church where men aren’t taking responsibility is a church that men are leaving undefended.  It’s one thing to be asleep at your post, quite another to be guilty of dereliction of duty.

Paul writes that “women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (2:15).  Does this mean that Paul wants all women to be barefoot and pregnant, with the education of a pre-schooler, no will, hopes, or dreams of her own, just some man’s property?  I don’t think so.  The family.  Husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, both orienting their lives, their life together, towards the family, nurturing, supporting, upbuilding, laboring, loving, sacrificing, thanking, praying.  In Christ, we are family.  We have spiritual fathers here and spiritual mothers, thank God!  It’s bad enough when men abandon the family: look what this has done to the black family in America!  The American family is a mess!  What, then, when the woman follows suit and abandons the family?  Who is left?  It’s bad enough when men have as little to do with church as possible.  But when women also begin to follow the way pioneered by the absentee men?

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.