Where are you women who have been built on the sure and steady foundation of Jesus? Where are you women who have cast aside the false exterior of perfection and show how grace and truth are applied to the real? Where are you ladies who are handling Truth with a steadfast love and using it to show others the next step on the narrow path?
Where are YOU?
The young mother with three small children needs you. The older woman who just lost her husband needs you. The single woman inching toward 30 needs you. I need you.
Do I sound desperate? It's because I am. The desire to find women friends who teach, exhort, rebuke, reprove biblically because they are being taught, exhorted, rebuked, reproved is frustrating. If you express this desire to other women, usually you get a chorus of agreement complete with enthusiastic head bobbing but when you separate, everyone gets back in their personal bubble.
Do not even mention confessing sin to each other. My goodness, do we really need to beat ourselves up??? Let's read a few verses, agree, and smile.
Then everyone goes home and struggles with sin. Or, we err in the other direction, turning dirty laundry into a party to amuse ourselves, exchanging complaints, and telling each other that we are not so bad because God loves us no matter what. Then on the drive home, each woman turns into a pharisee, thanking God that she is not like those other women.
In reality, we are all alike - sinners and besides, their burdens are our burdens...if we are in the Body of Christ. Let's face it most of our sins do not fall far from pride, coveting, or not loving. Who hasn't thought the grass was greener? Or that life was not fair? Or wanted their way? Yet, we pretend and the women around us wonder how come their life isn't perfect, how come they are the only ones struggling. The only thing they end up learning is how to cover up their struggles and sin, too. Fig leaf, anyone?
How about we drop the fig leaf cover-up and stand in the blood of Christ together?
Am I talking about just vomiting out everything? No, we do not want to glorify sin but at the same time we do not want to miss glorifying what God has done or will do when we kill the flesh. God laid out a plan for how we are to interact, just check out the "one another" verses in the New Testament. Here are just 5 reasons to start living the "one anothers":
- Women will grow because they will not continue to be held down by the same sin
- Women will learn and share in the right way with other women
- Women will pray more for themselves and especially others
- Women will desire more of God and His Word
- God said so
My old pastor used to say that we are not to sit, soak, and sour. We need to teach and practice what we learn. Do we not think we will be held accountable for what we do with what we know? Get desperate. Make it your desperate desire to spread the Gospel and how to live in light of it, to see women working through their struggles with the Spirit and the Word, to encourage women to grow closer to God and to start teaching other women. What a glorious desperation that would be.
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