Audio Transcript
You are scrolling Instagram, and you see a stream of perfect shots — perfectly edited, with perfect music overlay, perfect lives, perfect relationships, perfect health, perfect backdrops — and you gradually begin to feel the weight of something build on you. It’s a specific kind of pressure that comes from the internal voice that says, “My life is a failure. I must be doing it all wrong.”
Today, we look at how to resist this pressure you feel and how to find meaning and purpose in life by embracing the shocking idea that God had an intentional, glorious design when he created you — and you probably won’t find it comparing your life to the images others post of themselves online. We get there in this question from a young woman: “Pastor John, what would you say to a young man or woman who feels embarrassed by biblical roles, like submission in marriage or male leadership in the church? I love Jesus, but I also feel a lot of pressure from other Christians in my life to ‘outgrow’ these ideas about roles. But I see them in the Bible. And although I see them, I don’t feel them as good things. Does that make sense? So, how can I learn to not only accept, but happily embrace, the goodness of being made female?”
I see at least three different issues in the way she asked this question. First, I hear the power of peer pressure. She said, “I feel a lot of pressure from other Christians in my life to ‘outgrow’ these ideas.” Second, I hear the issue of the distinct roles that men and women play according to the Bible. And third, I hear a personal — a very individual, personal — hesitancy to happily embrace her own individual female personhood.
So, let me just say a word about each of those issues that I hope might be helpful.
Secure in God’s Approval
The power of peer pressure is not new. Ever since sin entered the world, we have all, in our sinfulness, craved approval from other people. We have avoided saying things and doing things that we ought to have done and ought to have said, but we don’t want to cause other people to think we’re stupid or foolish or weak or cowardly. We all know this temptation. It’s not new.
But there is something new in our time — namely, the ubiquity of social media in which young women especially (men too, but we’re talking about young women here) are daily put in a position of comparing themselves and their bodies with the bodies, fashions, attitudes, and popularity of other women or girls online. That kind of comparison has caused anxiety and depression and suicide to skyrocket in the last decade. All you have to do is Google it and find out what the tragic statistics are.
So, I think my first concern here would be to seek to help all young women and men — but young women in particular — to be so deeply confident and secure and peaceful in who you are, by virtue of God’s creation and Christ’s new creation, that you are utterly impervious to what others think, utterly unshakable by the pressures of other people, and profoundly free from the power of other people’s opinions.
“Why should you care about the opinions of other people who are out of step with the word of the Creator of the universe?”
Consider the example of Jesus and Paul. The Pharisees came to Jesus and said, “Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God” (Mark 12:14). One of the marked features of our Lord Jesus was that he did not adjust his words or his actions in order to curry the favor of powerful people. It says he just didn’t care. That’s the kind of freedom I want for young women. Why should you care? Why should you care about the opinions of other people who are out of step with the word of the Creator of the universe? God has spoken — what more needs to be said?
Or consider the apostle Paul, following in the train of Jesus. While Peter, in a terrible lapse of judgment, was abandoning his godly behavior to avoid the criticism of the Jerusalem party at Antioch, Paul, on the other hand, said this: “Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10).
So, I would like to stir you up as a young woman to take your cues from Jesus and Paul and the Bible and simply not care about the criticism or the ostracism or the rolling of the eyes or the tsk-tsking behind your back. Just don’t care. You don’t need it. You have the approval of Almighty God in Jesus Christ.
God Made It So
With regard to the second issue — namely, what the Bible teaches about distinct roles for men and women — let it sink in that we’re talking here about the very revelation of the Creator of the universe. We’re not talking here about the opinions of old versus young or educated versus uneducated or modern versus premodern. We’re talking about the difference between the infinite, eternal, all-knowing, all-wise, all-good, all-powerful God versus puny women and men. We have become so accustomed to hearing some things that we’ve lost our capacity to feel the cataclysmic force of the implications that they have.
For example, Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The infinitely wise, all-good Creator of the universe brought humanity into existence as male and female, and he blessed them and told them to have lots of babies and fill the earth with his glory through their families. He made them male and female, each with its unique glory — not the same, not interchangeable, but with wonderful differences that are so complementary of each other as to make a new thing when they are united.
In the second chapter of the Bible, he establishes that new thing; he calls it, or we call it, marriage (so does the Bible later on): “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Then he raises that distinction and that union of male and female to an incredible height when he reveals that this design from the beginning was that male and female represent Christ and the church in an everlasting marriage of joy.
I pray that you will let it sink in that this whole dimension of maleness and femaleness is God’s idea. It’s God’s idea. It’s not man’s idea. It’s a beautiful thing. It is one of the most wonderful spillovers of God’s kindness and wisdom. So, when puny little human beings — male or female — huff and puff contrary to the Bible, just settle it in your mind. It is smart to side with God and not man.
You Are Wonderfully Made
With regard to that third issue — namely, your own personal hesitancy to happily embrace your own individual female personhood — I would encourage you to make all of this that we’ve been talking about here very personal, not just abstract. Bring it right down to you and God — not just male and female in general, but you in particular, you and God. And then go to Psalm 139:13–14, and read this as your own personal, heartfelt, faithful testimony:
You [O God] formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
That is God’s word about you, a female in particular, not just women in general. God knit you and your female body and your female soul. He knit you — individually, personally — together in your mother’s womb. He did it with a smile on his face, with love in his heart. He loved you. He made you, and he did not make you badly. He made you gloriously.
So, be done with other people’s opinions; don’t care about what other people think. Embrace God’s big picture of male and female biblically. And then say to him very personally, “Thank you for making me the way you did. You are a good God, and I embrace you and what you have made me.”
