Audio Transcript

Mother’s Day was yesterday. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. I hope you got breakfast in bed and flowers and a day full of love and all that to celebrate the immense selflessness you have shown to your family. Today we’re talking about women and theology in a question that comes to us from Audrey.

“Dear Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast! I’m a Gen-Z listener and I greatly appreciate the teachings you share each week. After listening to you and John MacArthur messages over the years, and living in the times we are now, I’ve started to realize how twisted the world has become. People today identify as ‘non-binary,’ glorify themselves on social media, and ‘hate what is good and love what is evil.’ The darkness seems to grow by the hour, and I’m struggling to navigate a world that feels so countercultural. As a young woman, it’s difficult to discern right from wrong, especially when many churches are endorsing practices like women preaching and teaching in mixed contexts. I want to understand my biblical role as a woman, especially as I’m considering pursuing ministry in the future. What advice would you give to a generation living in such challenging times, particularly young women trying to find their place in God’s will? Thank you!”

Theology for Strength

I preached a message years ago in which the main point was this: “Wimpy theology makes wimpy women.” And of course, wimpy theology makes wimpy men too, but it was a woman’s conference. And Audrey is a woman, and she’s asking the question. So, let me say it again: Wimpy theology makes wimpy women.

So, the first and most important thing to say to Audrey is that she will be made strong and able to stand against the wiles of the devil and against the cultural pressures of this age if, instead of wimpy theology, she has a big-God, Bible-saturated, Christ-exalting theology — with deep roots that go down into sovereign grace, and high branches that reach up into the sky to absorb the brightness of the glories of God, and thick bark on her tree so that she’s not easily offended or has her feelings easily hurt or her ego easily wounded by those who try to manipulate her by playing the victim or making her a victim.

And if she has a solid, healthy biblical church where she can exult week in and week out in the expository heralding of God’s word. And if she has a few good, strong, crazy Christian friends who are utterly out of step with the world. And if she has a vital prayer life that keeps her personally in touch with the Creator of the universe as her omnipotent caring Father. And if she’s suited up with the whole armor of God so that she has the strength to embrace and exult in a thoroughly biblical, countercultural vision of what it means to be a woman and not a man. That’s my general prescription for Audrey as she tries to navigate this debased and God-ignoring culture.

The World in the Last Days

But there’s a passage of Scripture that I believe the Lord brought to mind as I pondered her question and that relates even more specifically to this kind of world she’s asking about and the specific challenges of women that she’s asking about. And the text is 2 Timothy 3:1–7. The first verses are very familiar; the next three are not so familiar. Let me read them all. This is verses 1–7, addressing these two things that she’s been asking about: the world and her role in it.

“Understand this, that in the last days” — that’s Paul’s day and our day. The last days extend from the coming of Christ to the coming of Christ. It’s not just like those last years just before he comes, although I think it is true that there will be an intensification of this kind of thing nearer to the second coming. But this is true in every age since Jesus. Paul says,

In the last days . . . people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. (2 Timothy 3:1–5)

There it is. That’s the first part. Here’s what he says next: “Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:5–7).

“God gives superior promises that become a sword by which we can stick the crummy promises that the world makes.”

So, you’ve got this devastating description of Paul’s day and our day, with twenty labels of the kind of corruption he sees and we see. And he concludes this list by saying, “Avoid such people.” That’s really what he said in 1 Corinthians 15:33: “Bad company ruins good morals.” So, Audrey, don’t fit in with people whom the world considers edgy and cool. Study this list of twenty forms of sin. Spot them in social media, movies, advertisements, the workplace, the neighborhood. Spot them and be courageous enough not to envy them.

Three Kinds of Weakness

But the most provocative part of this text as it relates to women is the three descriptions that it gives in verses 6–7 of the women whom these sinful people in verses 1–5 are taking advantage of. This is where Audrey can really go to school. Among the people marked by those twenty sins, there are some who “creep into households” (2 Timothy 3:6). What in the world? “Creep into households”? They creep; they’re sneaky; they’re deceptive. Their targets are a certain kind of woman, and they are trying to take that woman captive, presumably for their own false teaching and recruiting.

They are after a certain kind of woman — gynaikarion is the Greek. It’s the diminutive of gynē, which is just simply woman. Gynaikarion is a little woman, which is translated elsewhere in all kinds of ways, like “little women,” “idle women,” “foolish women,” “weak women,” sort of like the oligopsychous people, the small-souled people of 1 Thessalonians 5:14.

These targeted women are described in three ways that make them vulnerable. So, every woman should have her antenna up and say, “Am I this? Am I vulnerable like this to these creeping guys” — the word is masculine, but it could be women too, I suppose — “these creeping people who come in, trying to take advantage of me?”

Number one, they are burdened with sin. Number two, they are led astray by various passions or desires. Number three, they’re always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. Those are the vulnerable, weak women.

So, Audrey, take note of these three descriptions of weak — you might say wimpy — women. And prioritize the biblical strategies for not being like that.

1. Glory in the gospel.

For example, “burdened with sins” (2 Timothy 3:6). That’s their first characteristic. Oh, how vulnerable we are to quick fixes and false teaching when we live under a crushing burden of guilt. The biblical strategy here is to know the gospel, exult in the gospel, glory in the sufficiency of the blood of Jesus to cover your sin. Get in Satan’s face when he accuses you of guilt and tell him, “There’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. None” (see Romans 8:1). This will make a woman invulnerable to the creeping false teachers and the self-exalting messages of the media. They’re always appealing to our pride, as if we don’t have any guilt to be sorry for at all.

2. Wield God’s promises.

Next, these wimpy women are described as “led astray by various [desires]” or passions (2 Timothy 3:6). Maybe it’s the passion or the desire to be seen as striking and attractive and having sexual power over men to get their eyes. Or maybe it’s the passion to medicate misery with food or the passion to have a boyfriend, whether he’s a believer or not. Or it’s the passion to prove you can make your independent way in the rough and tumble of the marketplace. It’s the passion to read romance novels or to veg out in front of sitcoms.

Over against these destructive passions (and more, of course, Audrey), put Romans 8:13, which says, “If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body” — these passions that are taking over your body and making you do things that you shouldn’t do — “you will live.”

So, take the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, kill those passions. Stick them; stick them with a sword, with a superior promise of God. That’s what we get from the word. God gives a superior promise in his word that becomes a sword by which we can stick those crummy promises that the world makes, which seem so powerful and yet, over against God’s promises, are as nothing. God has something better for you.

3. Embrace the truth.

And finally — this is really interesting to me; at least, I’m going to commend something that I’ve thought about this — these wimpy women are “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). Why would that be? I have a suggestion. And I’ve seen this in real life over and over again in the last fifty, sixty years: Many people do not move from learning to conviction about truth because they are afraid.

They shrink back from the truth because they are afraid of what it would mean to claim to know some truth. They’re afraid. They are afraid of losing the ability to write their own script in life, to make reality what they want it to be, to define their own essence, and to create their own sense of right and wrong. They know intuitively that the truth is going to get in the way of all this freedom and self-determination, self-creation. To arrive at a knowledge of the truth means you can’t be the creator of truth anymore. The inevitable outcome of embracing truth is the introduction of humility. I must now submit to reality instead of creating reality. And as long as people are in the bondage of self-exalting rebellion, they will never come to a knowledge of the truth.

So, Audrey, love the truth. In spite of everything the world says, it’s still true. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).