You are listening to Bible Direction for Life, the sermon podcast of West Side Baptist Church in Bremerton, Washington. We pray that the preaching and teaching you hear on this podcast connects the truth of the Bible to your life, that you would learn more about the triune God who made you and what he made you for. And now here's today's message. Let's go ahead and pray and we will dig in. Father, we come before you tonight. We thank you for the grace you've shown us this far. We pray this grace would continue in the delivery of this message and what is said, what is added, what is left out in the discussion and in the testimonies to follow. Be present with us. Help us not only to hear, but to grasp. And not only to grasp and understand, but to obey. In Christ's name, amen. In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, he created them with a purpose in mind. As we read in Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 45 and verse 18, for thus saith the Lord that created the heavens, God himself that formed the earth and made it, he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited. He formed it to be filled. When God created the heavens and the earth, he did not just throw them together and add humans in as an afterthought. He had humanity in mind from the beginning. That's what this text is telling us, that God made the world because God wanted there to be people in the world. He created humanity as male and female because he wanted there to be men and women, equal in value, different in nature, corresponding in function, working together to reflect his rule and to carry out his mission. And though creation is groaning under the brokenness of human rebellion, there is still a fundamental correspondence between what has been revealed in the word and what can be seen in the world. As humans, our bodies are biologically binary. No one has ever seen a merely human body. There are only male bodies and female bodies. These male or female bodies correspond to our masculine or feminine vocations. Yet though the foundation of this glorious creational pattern is still visible, it's been covered over, as we saw this morning, by landmines and rubbish. As we seek to reclaim the reality, the intended pattern of creation, we face the moral problem of personal depravity, the intellectual problem of false ideologies, and the environmental problem of a broken economy. But we've not gathered here together this weekend to gripe and complain about how hard things have become in our day. We have gathered here together tonight because we have received good news. We do not face these obstacles to our flourishing alone. God has not given up on his broken creation. He did not say, there's rubble on the construction site, I washed my hands of it, I'm done. That's not what God did. God has not given up on his project to fill the earth with a people who would reflect his rule and carry out his mission. No. On the contrary, God has refused to allow the abdication of Adam or the abuse of Cain to be the last word on humanity. God is not thwarted by false ideologies. God is not blocked from working by broken economies. When God saw that there was no man able to restore the ruined pattern of humanity, He Himself took on flesh for us and for our redemption. In the person of His Son, He humbled Himself to be born of a woman. Though Jesus did not participate in our rebellion, He entered fully into our brokenness. He took our sins on His shoulders. Think about it. Isaiah 53. Isaiah does not say that the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of Adam. He does not say the Lord laid on His shoulders the iniquity of Cain. No, Isaiah says the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. The iniquity of God's people, all of them, was laid on Christ's shoulders and He bore it. He bore that cost and He paid that cost. And God will not punish that sin twice. He bore our sins, the sins of His people in His body on the tree. He bore the weight of our failures to be the men we were created to be. What do you think about that? That time you sinfully went along with something destructive to your family for the sake of personal peace and comfort. Your wife, your children, they had a bad idea. You knew it was a bad idea. You knew it would be harmful and you said, you know what? It's not so big a deal. You joined Adam. Jesus took that and he bore that sin on his shoulders. That time you pretended to be sick as a teenager because you wanted to play video games instead. That's sin. And Jesus took it on his shoulders. That time you went along with the guys to a strip show when you were on TDY. And your wife wasn't on the wiser. She thought you were working overtime. Jesus took that sin on his shoulders. The time you shouted at your wife, desperate to control her because you didn't know how to lead her, Jesus took that on his shoulders. You see, as sinful men, we shrink from our responsibilities and we abuse our authority over and over again. This is what we do. But Jesus didn't. Unlike Adam, Jesus did his job. Unlike Cain, Jesus refused to take shortcuts. He paid for our failures in with his blood. Three days later, he rose again victorious over the power of sin and death and hell. But Jesus did not save us on a whim anymore than Jesus created the world on a whim. He did not rescue us in vain any more than he created the world in vain. He rescued us in order to restore us to the pattern for which he created us. Let me say that one more time. He rescued us in order to restore us to the pattern and for the purpose for which he created us. What does Paul tell us in Titus 2.14? Who gave himself for us, speaking of Jesus, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself A random assortment of individuals with no particular aim in mind. Is that what the text says? No. Purify unto himself a peculiar people, a nation, zealous of good works. We must not miss the significance of this. Jesus didn't die simply to save individuals, though he does save us individually. Jesus died to purify unto himself a people. Peoples have structures and organizations, not simply random assortments of individuals. And if we look at the context of Titus 2, it becomes immediately clear that one of the fundamental things that makes Jesus' people peculiar is the fact that they have recovered the goodness and glory of sexual difference. What's Titus 2 all about? What the older men and the younger men and the older women and the younger women should do. Titus 2 is gender specific because it's people specific and peoples are organized. They're specialized according to sex. Obedience is specialized according to sex. Redemption is specialized according to sex. This isn't unique to Titus 2. We see the same pattern in Ephesians. After telling us, how does Ephesians start out? It tells us about the new humanity that God is forming in Christ. And then, what's the result? Paul goes on to tell us about the specific roles of husbands and wives. Redemption leads to a restoration of the pattern of creation. The pattern by which we were created is the pattern for which we are redeemed. We see the same pattern in 1 Peter. After telling us about our redemption, Peter tells us what it looks like to live out that redemption as men and as women. We've heard some great sermons about that from Pastor Josh over the past few months. The pattern by which we were created is the pattern for which we are redeemed. We could keep going with passage after passage of the New Testament, but I think you get the idea. Jesus rescued us in order to restore us to the creational pattern that our rebellion had spoiled. So we have this pattern of creation, and we have all these obstacles in the way, but we have Jesus who is at work right now to enable us to get back to this through this. But not just to get back to this, to get to where this was supposed to head from the beginning. Because it wasn't just this idyllic world where nothing ever happened. No, God created the world because he wanted Adam to glorify that creation, to expand that garden. There was a telos, there was a purpose. It wasn't just supposed to stay the Garden of Eden forever. The Garden of Eden was the prototype of what God wanted Adam and Eve to do in the whole earth. But rebellion has thwarted that. But Jesus hasn't given up on the blueprint. And he hasn't given up on the people through which he wants to build that blueprint and that people, if you are a follower of Jesus, that people is you. This is why, my dear brothers, we do not have to lose heart. Though we may be often perplexed in our struggle, we must never despair. Though we may at times be persecuted, we will never be forsaken. Though we may be struck down, we will not be destroyed. For the world, with all its desires to do away with sexual difference, is even now passing away. Those who do the will of God, men as men, women as women, are going to abide forever. The disciples of Jesus will inherit the earth. And in the remainder of our time tonight, we're going to explore what it looks like for us to grow in our ability to live in the midst of the old creation as the prototypes of the new creation. That's our mission. If we're to do this, we must repent of depravity, reject ideology, and resist the broken economy. Jesus is pushing away the rubble. and he is developing a people that will fill the earth and indeed will fill the heavens with the glory of the pattern for which we were created. Yes, we must reject false ideologies. We must resist our broken economy. We'll get to these things in a moment, but we cannot do any of those things until we have learned to repent of our own depravity, because we will not be saved. and we will not be sanctified until we go back to the Father's house. Personal repentance is always the first step. Because we spent a good bit of time this morning working through the specifics of how we sin as men, we'll be briefer on this point, but I must still once again ask you directly, where in your life right now are you abdicating your masculine responsibilities? What talents have you left hidden in the dirt? What serpents have you refused to fight because you didn't want to deal with the fallout? Your wife thought the serpent was really interesting, and you didn't want her mad at you, so you said, ah, it's only the devil. No big deal. That's what Adam did. Where are you doing that? Because it's something a lot of us have done at one point or another. Where have you given up trying to lead your home? Where in your life right now are you abusing your masculine authority? Where are you taking shortcuts to get what you want? Where are you using the strength and aggression that God gave you to take dominion over the dirt to gain the illusion of control over your wife and children? Leading is hard. So you say, I'll dominate instead. But it's an illusion. It's just as much an illusion as the illusion the pill creates that sex has no consequences. It's not reality. and you think you're in control, but if you don't actually lead, you're taking a shortcut. Where are you sacrificing the long-term well-being of your family for your own personal comfort and convenience in the present? I don't know what sins you're struggling with right now in your life, but I'm convinced that God's grace is greater than your sin, just as God's grace is greater than my sin. We must remember Paul's words to the Corinthians. Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be ye not deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. It's pretty depressing. Most of us can find ourselves on that list. But what does he say? and such were some of you. But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. What is Paul saying? Paul is saying that repentance is possible. Paul is saying that God's grace is greater than your sin. But as long as you're trying to justify and excuse the guilt of your sin, you will never escape the power of your sin. Rescue begins with real repentance, and real repentance begins with full confession. And so, brothers, we must stop hiding with Adam. We must stop making excuses and taking shortcuts with Cain. If we are to recover the goodness and the glory of sexual difference, we need instead to follow the footsteps of our brother David. We must cease being silent about our sins. We must stop covering up our iniquity. We must confess our sins thoroughly and forsake them fully. If you're an angry man in your home, it's easy to pretend when you're with the brothers, but when you're behind closed doors, if your wife knows what you're really like, if you've been snared by pornography, if you're lazy and selfish when the eyes of other men are not upon you, You need to stop minimizing and justifying your sin. You need to stop promising your wife, hey honey, don't tell anybody, I'll do better, this will be the last time, and you cover it up again, and you cover it up again. Just please don't tell anybody, that would be messy, don't tell anybody. You need to hate your sin enough to confess it to a mature brother who can tell you what it would look like to confess and forsake your failure to be the man you were created and redeemed to be. You need to come clean with a brother who is mature enough to tell you what coming clean in every other area and with every other relationship would look like. So I want to take a moment Here's the first practicum. Write down a specific pattern of personal sin that you need to confess and forsake. Something that you haven't confessed and you've been convicted about, perhaps even in the past few minutes or this week. Something specific that you need to confess and forsake. Let's continue. I want to add one word here. We talk about sin and depravity as that which we commit, and that's true. That's the main focus I think we should be focused on at this point, is the things that we need to repent of. But the fact is, sin is not only something that we commit against God and against others, it's also something that others commit against us. We suffer from the sins of others. Some of you suffer because of the sins of your parents. Your parents didn't stay married and their sin has affected you. And we could go on down the line. So many different ways this shows up. Here's what you need to hear. God's grace is not just greater than your sin. God's grace is greater than your parents' sin. God's grace is greater than your grandparents' sin. God's grace goes all the way back to the sin of Adam, by whose sin all of us are affected. And Jesus came to be the second Adam and undo Adam's rebellion and bring us back to where we started from. And that same principle applies to the brokenness that each of us suffer from the sins of others. First Peter 118 in the ESV says, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers. So you inherited these empty ways from your parents. And Jesus came to rescue you from this bad inheritance that was left to you. Not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. God's grace is not only greater than your sin, God's grace is greater than the sins that have been committed against you by others. We are certainly affected by the failures of our parents, otherwise we wouldn't need to be rescued from those failures, but we are not doomed or determined by them. You do not have to turn out like your parents did. And if you have faithful parents, you're not guaranteed to turn out good like they did. You need Jesus, and Jesus is enough. But if we truly desire to live as the new humanity, we must not stop with repenting of our sins. Remember, there's this threefold cord of rebellion that is in the way of the pattern of reality. We must also change how we think. In our time together this morning, we considered three specific false ideologies that deny one or more of the fundamental principles of creational correspondence. But if we are to truly recover the goodness and glory of reality, it isn't enough to simply change the content of our ideology. It's not as though we have these false ideologies, let's replace them with a good ideology, swap out one for another. We need instead to make a more fundamental change in how we think about the world. We need to reject all ideology because ideology is fundamentally a way of thinking that is not thinking. A way of processing information that is not tied to reality. One writer explained it recently this way, ideology is the tendency to take partial truths and make them the whole truth. Or to take a subordinate good and make it ultimate. Ideology is the path of Chesterton's Madman from Orthodoxy. To paraphrase one of the famous passages in that work, the ideological mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle, but though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way, the ideological explanation is quite as complete as the true one, but it is not so large. A marble is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. The ideologue, the person who thinks in ideological terms is so satisfied with his perfect little circle of answers that he no longer cares about any of the things that his circle leaves out. The problem, of course, is that there is only one who sits on the circle of the earth, and that one is God. Any circle small enough for us to control is going to leave a lot of reality out. Any circle large enough to include all of reality is going to be far too big for you to control. Ideology, to use the analogy of another writer, is the willingness to give a hundred answers to a thousand questions. It's an unwillingness to do the hard work of actually seeing the world because you're too busy having all the answers. So here's where the rubber meets the road. We can't reclaim reality by retreating from reality into fragile little ideological systems that we can control, little circles that provide the illusion of easy answers to difficult questions, where anything anyone brings up, we don't have to think about it, we know the answer, we've got the answer, we can pop right out with it. If we're truly to reclaim the goodness and the glory of sexual difference, we're going to have to learn how to think biblically. about the way sexual difference ought to function, not in some ideal, ideological world where a hundred answers are enough, but in the real world that we actually live in with all the brokenness that is present in this world. We must begin, as we want to have functional thinking, thinking about sexual difference that actually works in the brokenness of the real world and takes that into account. So let's begin by giving careful attention to the fundamental pattern of forming and filling that we see in the creation account itself. Scripture doesn't actually give universal rules about how many hours women are, quote, allowed to work outside the home, or who is supposed to do the dishes, or anything else of the sort. It's not there. It instead gives us a fundamental pattern for how men and women are supposed to relate to one another, and we talked about this pattern last night. Men are called to take the lead in guarding the garden and forming the wilderness. Men, even if they never have biological children of their own, are called to function, as fathers, fathers in their households, fathers in their community, and fathers in society. Women are called to help the men by filling the garden with glory. Women, even if they never have biological children of their own, are called to function as mothers. This basic pattern of forming and filling, of structuring and glorifying, of conquering and caring, of fathering and mothering, is baked into our bodies. This is why men have the bodies they do. This is why women have the bodies they do. Men and women, we must remember, are corresponding in function. We can't think about the roles of women apart from the corresponding roles of men, nor can we think about the roles of men apart from the corresponding roles of women. Men and women are not just, as one writer put it, they're not just different from each other, They are different for each other. Not just different from each other, we are different for each other. In other words, the heart of the pattern of creation isn't in one list of certain activities that only men can do and another list of activities that only women can do. Let me check my list. That's not on your list as a woman, you're being rebellious. That's not the way we think about this. The point isn't the specific activities, the point is the relationship between the two of them. The most important thing isn't what specific tasks men and women perform, though that sometimes is important, but rather how men and women relate together in the home, in the community, and in society. The specific tasks that men do and women do are in fact quite subjective, and they change with the circumstances. But the fundamental relationship between the vocation of men and the vocation of women is not subjective, and that does not change. Let me give you two specific examples that have helped me as I've wrestled with how to explain this whole matter. For example, is it distinctively feminine for a woman to put on her overalls, leave her young children with grandma, and put in a 50-hour shift at the Boeing factory? This question can't be answered without asking what the men are doing. In the abstract, building bomber planes in a factory doesn't sound like a very feminine task. And in the abstract, it isn't. But we don't live in an abstract world conjured up by our ideology that is small enough to have a hundred answers. We live in the real world, and the real world is really broken by things like world wars. And in that real world, the men of America were many thousands of miles away from home and they were flying and dying in the planes that their wives and children and daughters were building back home. In that particular circumstance, working in a factory was an absolutely appropriate and completely feminine role for their women to be doing. When you consider what the men were doing and the relationship between the two of them, you find the very same pattern that you have in the garden. And when the war was over, It was time for the men to leave the battlefield and the women to leave the factories. Male and female roles are not determined in the abstract, but in concrete circumstances that are often far from ideal. The circumstances change, the specific activities often change, but what must not change is the relationship between men and women, that there ought to be specialization according to sex, according to the pattern of Genesis. To give another example, Is it a distinctively masculine role for a man to care tenderly for the elderly, changing their diapers, washing their laundry, feeding them their food one bite at a time? This question can't be answered without asking what his wife is doing. Because if the man is doing this because this is what enables him to provide in a way that enables his wife to care for their children in their home, then what he is doing is absolutely and thoroughly a masculine vocation, even if it's a less than ideal fit for his masculine strengths. At great cost to himself, and perhaps his own preferences, he is forming so that his wife can fill. He's creating a place for his wife so she can create a future for him. He is fulfilling his vocation as a man. She is fulfilling her vocation as a woman. And God smiles when he sees their faithfulness in circumstances that are less than ideal. This is how we need to think. We need to actually not just have, I've got an answer right away, but we need to actually think about the fundamental relationships that are at play in circumstances that are less than ideal, and we need to have this vision of a pattern of a dynamic relationship between men and women that can show up even in profoundly broken circumstances. So as we think through how to live in the world as men and women, the fundamental question we should be asking ourselves is not, does this fit within my list of rules of what men are allowed to do or what women are allowed to do? Because scripture has very few such rules. There are really only two. Because pastors represent the authority of Christ, and Christ's authority over the church is distinctively masculine, pastors and anyone else who leads in any way in the context of gathered worship must be men. The reason why we have men who stand on the platform and lead in worship is not because men are necessarily more, it partly is the giftedness of men, but more deeply, it's because those who are leading in worship are representing Christ to the congregation. That's why they must be men. That's why there's a specific rule about that. Because marriage is rooted in the reality of Christ and the Church, and Christ is the head of the Church, men are the heads of their wives and must be submitted to because the man is reflecting Christ in that specific situation. But though these rules are extremely important, they keep us from going off the rails, The mere keeping of a few rules will never be enough to restore the full goodness and the full glory of sexual difference. Rules are like speed limits or guardrails. Speed limits and guardrails are essential if we don't want to get into a wreck. But they are not the engine that moves the car down the road or the map that tells the driver where to go. This was one of the fundamental points of difference between Jesus and the Pharisees of his day. Remember the passage that we mentioned last night? The Pharisees wanted Jesus to parse out the rules for divorce. Who can divorce who, Jesus? Here's what Moses said. What do you say? They wanted to know who could divorce whom and for what cause. They wanted a checklist that left them feeling and looking good. They wanted an ideology that left them in control. But Jesus gave them an entirely different paradigm for reading the Word and for reading the world. Jesus pointed them to the fundamental pattern of creation. Jesus treated Scripture, we saw this over and over again in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus treated Scripture as a compass rather than a checklist. This is the example we must follow as we turn now to wrestle with the distinctive vocations of men and women in the world. Jesus didn't say, check off these things and then go do what you want to do. No, Jesus said, change the fundamental direction that you're heading. And here's a few things to remember as you head out on your journey. That's the way we should read scripture. Men are distinctively called to and equipped for the task of forming. This is not a rule to check off a list. Am I forming? Great, now I can do what I want to do. It's a compass that ought to guide our every step. In other words, when you have a compass and you're orienteering, you need to constantly compare the terrain to the compass. And sometimes you've got to go over a creek, and sometimes you've got to go around a big tree. So you're constantly in this interplay of comparing the terrain that you're on to the direction that you're headed. Adam was formed from the dirt outside the garden because he was formed to take dominion over the dirt. As Clary put it, the creation mandate's focus on establishing a new household implies a natural division of labor. Adam's vocation tended towards the forming task of the creation mandate, taking responsibility, leading, providing, and protecting. His body is optimized for initiative and dominance, which corresponds to the work he would do to subdue the earth. His sex organ testifies that God made him for initiative. Men are made to throw themselves at big challenges and to overcome big obstacles by relentless effort. That's what men are made for. Men are made to work and to work hard. Men are made to pour themselves out for the good of their households, for the good of their community, for the good of their society, and even for the good of humanity as a whole. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. Husbands should not be strangers to their wives. Fathers should not be strangers to their children. You're called to dwell with your wife according to knowledge, which requires, among other things, for you to have a shared life with her. You can't do that if you're never home. You're the one who has specifically been commanded to bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That's a command to fathers, and you can't do that if you're never around. You should never become so busy working that you no longer have time for the worship and rest to which all humans are called. Yes and amen to all of that. But at the same time, and this is very important, while biblical masculinity is always ordered for the garden, it's not ordered toward the garden. Masculinity is for the garden, but it's not pointed toward the garden. It's instead ordered toward the mission of expanding the garden. If you're a married man, your mission in life ought to be big enough and difficult enough to merit a full-time helper. Your work should be worthy of your wife's support. Your mission should be big enough to give her purpose. And this same principle applies to single men. While mission is the foundation for marriage, marriage is not necessary for mission. Adam had a mission before he had a wife. He was already naming the animals, taking dominion, before Eve came along. Indeed, as Paul taught the Corinthians, those who do not have households of their own should use their greater liberty not to please themselves, but to pursue the mission without distraction. So let me ask you directly, as we wrestle with what it looks like to live as men in the world, what is your mission in the world? Where are you expanding the garden? Where are you guarding the garden? Does your family know what your mission is? Do you talk about your work with your children? Do you bring your wife into what you are seeking to accomplish, or do you shut her out? because she's there to be your helpmeet as you carry out the mission. And if you are, and this is a mistake that a lot of men make, if you're pointed towards your home, then you have a circle that your mission is sort of there, but you don't actually have anything you need help with, because you're pointed towards her, and it can become very sour very quickly. But you are called to lead your household on mission in the world. And she's called to help you do that. She doesn't really need to submit to you if you're not leading her in any particular direction, if you have no mission yourself. Young men, you who are not yet married, before you think about a wife, you need to think about your mission. You need to have a mission that needs the help of a wife. Here's what I'm doing with my life. And then you go to a young lady and you say, here's what my life is about. You want to join up? That's how you get a good woman. Do something that needs a good woman's help to do. And she'll notice it. And trust me, she may have to overlook a lot, but if you actually have a mission that's worth her help, she'll be willing to help you actually grow through those things that you need to grow through. But the mission comes first, because men are made for the mission. So this is the practicum. The second, what is your mission in the world? If you're married, does your wife know what it is? If you have children, do they know what the mission of your household is? Probably a little big to do right now, so I'll just give a second if you have a thought that comes right to mind, but that would be one to return to later on as well. Just as men are called to the task of forming, women are called to the task of filling. As Clary explains, Eve's vocation would tend toward the filling task of the creation mandate, childbearing, helping, beautifying, glorifying, nurturing, and establishing their home. God gave her a body and disposition for that kind of work, her body being smaller and weaker than the man's, testifies that God designed her to be gentler, more nurturing, more agreeable, and under his protection. She is optimized for response, reproduction, and cooperation. Her sex organs testify that God designed her for response, receptivity, multiplication, and sustenance. Once again, the scriptures do not give us a list of specific rules for how many hours a woman can work outside the home or what kind of task she can perform. Certainly, there are some rules, like serving in a combat role in the military or commanding a nation's armies as the commander-in-chief, for which women are utterly and obviously unsuited. But the fundamental principle here is not a list of specific tasks a woman should never perform, but rather a fundamental vocation, a fundamental orientation at which women should always aim. As Rebecca Merkel put it well, I would never say, she says, that a wife's place is in the home, but I would absolutely say that a wife's priority should be her home. If a woman is managing her home in such a way that it fills up and overflows and spills out into business endeavors, it should be the kind of thing that is a blessing to her people, giving more to them and not less. Her home should be what she has pointed at, not the thing she is trying to escape. Men are always fathers. Even when they're working outside the home, even when they do not have biological children of their own, they are aiming at the vocation of biological, spiritual, intellectual fatherhood. That's what it means to live as a man in the world. Women are always mothers, even if they do not have biological children of their own. Motherhood as the ideal that shows them the kind of work and relationship to the whole situation, taking all of that into account, as we've said, is what they should be aiming at. We'll dive more into the vocation of women in more detail when I address the women tomorrow, or on Sunday, rather. If we're to live as the new humanity in the midst of the brokenness of the old creation, we must begin by repenting of our own depravity, We must continue by rejecting ideology and learning to think about the real world in a way that is functionally Christian. But if this is actually to work, we must not stop until we have rebuilt an economy that is rooted in the goodness and the glory of specialization according to sex. It is this final task that we now turn to, and we're going to have some discussion. So let's take a five-minute break right now, and then we'll come back. As we saw this morning, our technological economy is broken in many ways. The pill radically distorts the meaning of sex, even for those who are not on it. Even good and useful technologies like the microphone unintentionally mute the messages of creation that used to be clearly audible. Our industrial economy hinders our ability to establish households that benefit from the unique gifts of men and women. The wicked and perverse laws of our nation undercut the integrity of the household at every turn. But what we need to remember is that we're not the first generation of Christians to face challenges as severe as these. Although the economy of the Roman world was broken very differently than ours is broken, it was no less broken in a world in which a very significant percentage of the population was enslaved with no family structure at all, That's a broken economy. And yet the early church moved forward in that economy. And as the early church moved forward, despite the brokenness of that economy, so our church is called to move forward despite the brokenness of our economy. As we consider what it would look like for us to live faithful lives in our modern day Babylon, there are two errors that we must avoid. We might call the first the Amish error. And this is the error of refusing to live in the time that we've actually been given, of retreating and withdrawing from the place and the time in which we have been called to live. As Gandalf reminded Frodo, it's not given for us to decide the times in which we live. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. We may wish that we lived on Main Street in Mayberry, or in the days of the American founding, or as knights in the Middle Ages, or some other time or place entirely. But the fact is that we don't live in any of these times or any of those places. We live in this time and in this place. And faithfulness demands that we wrestle with the challenges that we face in this society. Faithfulness demands that we recognize that we have been placed on earth for such a time as this. Faithfulness demands that we remember that the stone is going to smash the statue through our sowing of the Word of God. Our time is a stage on God's timeline. The challenges that we face are part of God's plan to grow His people to full maturity. We are not a coldy sack in the story of God's people. We are a milestone. The story of God runs through the mess that we live in. I love the way Minnick put it, or the challenges that we face are part of God's plan, this is not Minnick, to grow his children to full maturity. As Minnick put it, rather than seeing the present situation, that is our technological society with all of its brokenness that he has described throughout the course of his book, Rather than seeing the present situation as a bad thing to be overcome by an approximation of the past, it's worth seeing the present as an opportunity to shape a future that could not have been attained without going through this stage. The burden of maturity is to press forward with a keen sense of limits and the approximation of the good in this specific context and situation. God's story. cuts through our world. And God's end of that story would not be able to arrive without this stage of the story. We are facing particular challenges that are intended, in God's providence, to grow God's people to the maturity that God intended all the way back in the beginning. We need to change how we see our world. Yes, there are real challenges and there are real developments of evil that we must address. But the answer isn't, let's go back. If God wanted us to go back, he wouldn't have brought us here. The answer is to go forward. and to recognize that just as we face unique challenges, we also have a unique opportunity to grow to the maturity that is sufficient to meet those challenges. And that's what God is doing. We see what the world is doing, we see their rebellion, but it might just be that this need to articulate The differences between men and women explicitly in ways that wasn't needed before is actually a step in maturity that God intends for us as his people to know what God is up to and why it matters. That we wouldn't have realized if we didn't see it being broken and missed by others. This is what it looks like to be confident that God is in control of history. And God is bringing us and involving us in his plan for history. And God is seeking to grow us in maturity so that we can reach the glorious future that he intends his people for. So the first would be the Amish era, and that would be perhaps a failure. I'm not saying all the Amish fail to hope, but we have this idea of what we're talking about by using that term, that they're retreating and they're going back and they're saying, we're not going to live in this modern world. But the second we might call the Babylonian error, and this is the area of simply assimilating to the ways of the world around us, of saying, well, this is what everyone else is doing, we're just going to go along with it. And the reality is that faithfulness is situation-specific. Yes, we must be faithful in the specific time and place in which we're called to live, but faithfulness requires resisting the time and place in which you're called to live. So if you think about weight training, You're going to put the barbell over your head. You're going to do a military press with the barbell. Right? So the Amish era might be, let's go back. Let's lighten the barbell. If we just had a barbell and no weight plates, wouldn't life be better? Well, no. You're adding the weight plates. It's getting harder because you're trying to get stronger. But the assimilation era would be saying, look at this barbell on the ground. It's great. Look how big it is. So mature we are. The reason you have a heavy barbell is to pick the thing up and do something with it to give it some resistance. That's how you get stronger. You can put weight plates on the barbell all day long and you're not going to get stronger. You got to lift it, you got to push against it. That's how you get strong. This is the error, the Babylonian error, is the error of simply assimilating to the ways of the world around us. The reality is that faithfulness always requires resistance to the ways of the world. That's how we grow in maturity. Though we're in the world, we must not be of the world. There's a reason the Apostle Peter describes Christians as sojourners in exiles. Like the Jews in exile in ancient Babylon, we're called to live as a people within a people, pushing against the world. That's how we're growing in strength, growing in glory, pushing against the pressure. A distinctive community within a broader society that we may live in Babylonian houses, we must not order our households as the Babylonians do. We do not have to imitate the world. We are instead supposed to give the world something to imitate. That's what Christians are for. That's what Jesus means when he calls us to live in the unsavory darkness of this present age as salt and light, as a city sat on a hill. We do not resist the culture through a nostalgic longing for some past time that will never return. We resist the culture through our firm confidence in a future time that will certainly come. That's what resistance looks like. Specialization according to sex is not our plan for humanity, it is God's plan. The God that we serve has promised to accomplish his purposes, and he has promised to use us to do it. And if you belong to Jesus, he has promised to use you to do it. We're not called to burn the weeds, but we are called to be the wheat that feeds the world, the leaven that transforms the world, and the mustard plant that shelters the world. We are called to be the stewards of reality. We also, as Gandalf said to Denethor, get two Gandalf quotes in in one night, we also are stewards. We are stewards of reality. That's Jesus' point in telling us, you, my disciples, are the salt of the world, the light of the world, a city set on a hill, leaven, mustard seed, and all the rest. We're called to live as a city on a hill. We're called to show the world what it looks like to stop running away from the pattern of reality and to start building on that pattern despite all the rubble that has gotten in the way. We're called to shine as lights in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. We cannot do these things if we live like the world around us. And we cannot resist living like the world around us if we simply take the tools and the systems of Babylon for granted. If we say, whatever's on the barbell, I'm not gonna budget. I'm gonna live like the world. Then we're missing the point of what we're here for. If we are to recover the goodness and glory of sexual difference in practice, and not just in theory, then we need to resist the bent of Babylon. And resisting the bent of Babylon is not only an intellectual exercise, it's not only something that takes place in our personal spiritual lives, it is something that shapes the way we actually live in the world. And that means we need to understand the tools that we're using in the world. In our time together this morning, we explored the way in which the tools that we use multiply our capacity in the world, shape our attention to the world, and filter our interactions with the world. We're called to live in Babylon, and we cannot do this if we're unwilling to use any tools made in Babylon. But at the same time, we're called to shine as lights in Babylon, and we cannot do this if we do not resist the way the Babylonian tools distort and obscure the goodness and the glory of sexual difference. We can't just say, where's the Babylonian tool shed? I'm going to use all the tools the Babylonians do in exactly the same way. I'll say no to this bad one and that bad one, and that's it. Not going to think through it. We can't do that. We actually have to wrestle with how the world functions and take this vision, this pattern of reality measure the world, the way it functions against this, and make practical changes to live differently. We must not take our tools for granted. There are three basic practices that we need to engage in. First, we must take the time to examine them, carefully considering the abilities they will atrophy as well as the capacities that they will expand. So you're going to use a tool, you're going to use a technology, you're going to step into a system, recognize it's going to change your capabilities, and ask yourself, what is actually going to happen? Don't just say, well, that's what Apple came up with, so that's what I'm going to do. Think. We have to think about the tools we're using and the way they're shaping us and ask ourselves, do we want to be shaped in that way? And if we don't want to be shaped in that way, what steps do we need to take to provide some resistance? Second, we must put forth the effort to control them. Saying no should not be a knee-jerk reaction that spares us the trouble of thinking. So here's one way, the ideological way. Technology's bad. Bless God, I'm only going to ever use a flip phone. Well, that was a new technology once, too. Right? So just saying no, I've got easy answers, I know exactly what to do, I've got my list. That's not how we do this. But if we're unwilling to ever say no, then we have surrendered. We've stopped resisting Babylon. If whatever the latest and greatest is, if you use it without question and without thought, you will not control your tools, your tools will control you. So we must put forth the effort to examine, take the time to examine them, put forth the effort to control them, and third, we must learn to creatively subvert them, to use them in ways that fulfill our obedient purposes rather than the rebellious intentions of their creators. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is say, no, I am not going to touch that. But that's not the only tool in our tool-examining tool belt, as it were. We should also be willing to say, hey, I've thought about this, and I know that this is pushing us in this direction. We need to use this, but we don't want to go in that direction. So we're going to take this step. Josh and I were talking earlier, and he talked about this idea of look at the shadow. If every technology is casting sort of a shadow, it's lightening some things and obscuring other things. But if we know what it's obscuring, then we can take steps to not have that obscured for us, even as we use that technology. What are we going to have to now be explicit on? We talked about the microphone. The solution is not to never use microphones, or even to say only men should use microphones, but we need to realize the way that microphones cause us to miss something important, and perhaps the solution is simply to say that explicitly. Or perhaps a solution is to design buildings that don't have to have microphones so we can actually have gathered worship without a sound system. Right? Because this affects everything. It used to be buildings were built differently so you could communicate. Now we have buildings that a space like this is great because we don't have to have speakers. But most spaces now, it doesn't work. And so we have all these different effects. And I am going down a rabbit trail. We need to get back to the main point here. We must learn to creatively subvert them, to use them in ways that fulfill our obedient purposes, rather than the rebellious intentions of their creators. Now, I would love to work through in detail how these principles apply to smartphones and cars and other tools that we use every day, how they transform our experience of embodiment, making it harder to hear the message of creation and how we should resist that, but that would take another men's retreat and a half in and of itself to do a theology of technology and how to interact with all of it, and that is not our main topic, so we need to continue on. We need to hasten on to consider how we can resist the way that the systems of Babylon distort the functioning of our household. So we talked about with the technologies, we have to resist the pull of the tools of Babylon by examining and controlling and subverting them. We need to resist the way that the systems of Babylon distort the functioning of our households. In our time together this morning, we considered the way that the systems of our technological economy have fundamentally transformed the function and the status of the household in the modern world. The technological and legal systems of our Babylon obscure the patterns of creation, making it much harder for us to live in reality. If we're going to recover the goodness and the glory of sexual difference, then we must resist these changes with all our might. And if this resistance is to be successful, we must both reject the values of Babylon and recover value in Babylon. Reject the values of Babylon, recover value in Babylon. First of all, we must reject the values of Babylon. Our modern technological society prioritizes prosperity and convenience over absolutely everything else. This is the bowl of pottage for which our birthright as distinctively male and female humans has been traded. And if we are to reclaim the goodness and glory of sexual difference, if we are to get our birthright as humans back, then we must live by a different set of values If we want to undo Esau's bargain, we have to be willing to live without Jacob's lentils. If we want to undo Esau's bargain, we must be willing to live without Jacob's lentils. Here's what this looks like in practice. We must be willing to live in smaller houses if that's what it takes to enable our wives to turn those houses into homes. We must be willing to drive older cars if that's what it costs to fill those cars with new life. We must be willing to vacation in Oregon when our co-workers are hiking a trip to Hawaii if that is the price of reclaiming reality. There's nothing wrong with a large home, a trip to Hawaii, or a nice new car. But the point is, if you prioritize having all those things as quickly as possible, then something's gotta give. And in our society, the something that is giving is our humanity. And the trade isn't worth it. And we can say that all day long, but the fact is that most Christians in America make the same trades and live by the same values as the people around them. They just add a few rules. That's not enough. We need to reject the values of Babylon and actually say that children matter more than wealth because children are the greatest form of wealth. We need to say that living distinctively as a man and allowing your wife to live distinctively as a woman is a good, a good that is a better good than a vacation. A vacation is good. Vacations are great. But our humanity is not worth the price of a vacation. And I don't know exactly where the trade is. The point is, y'all have to drive old cars, live in, you know, rent small old houses, and never take a vacation. That's not the point. We'll all be called to make sacrifices in different places. But rest assured, you try to live faithfully in this Babylon, you will pay a price for it. You will have to value something more than money and convenience. And if you don't, you won't resist the values of Babylon. Our world is adapted increasingly so for machines and those who want to live like them. If we want to live as the creatures of God, men and women created in his image and called to his mission, we must be willing to pay the price. Confident, we are not getting the short end of the stick. Wendell Berry, a number of years said ago that the decision of the future is going to be between those who want to live as machines and those who want to live as creatures. Those who are content to live as machines and adapt themselves to machines and those who insist that actually a human is more than a meaty computer. We, I, as for me and my house, I want us to live as creatures. And that means the decisions that I make are shaped by that end. And so should the decisions that you make, as indeed many of them are. Rejecting the values of Babylon is not enough. While Christian faithfulness often requires sacrifice, sacrifice alone will not make us faithful. Simply saying, I'm doing without all of these things, that is a means to a greater end. Doing without so you can feel like you've really paid the price, is not actually the end. Because doing without is not a good in and of itself, it's a means to a greater good. We must go on to do the work of recovering value in Babylon, and this came up quite a bit in our discussion this morning, and I'm sure it will return more here in a few minutes. This is where, in many ways, the rubber meets the road. Men and women are corresponding in function. Men and women are both called to participate in the mission of humanity, to do so differently, and yet to do so with equal excellence. If we are to recover the goodness and the glory of sexual difference, it isn't enough for us to make a list of things our women don't do and call it good. we must find ways to return activities of real value to our gardens, both in our individual households and in our community as a whole. Here's the thing, if you think of an orchard, and the orchard is a orchard that's producing fruit for export, it's profitable, it's valuable, and you cut all the fruit trees down, and then you send the orchard workers back to the orchard, but it's not an orchard anymore. then you're not actually doing what the orchard was once for. If we're to reclaim reality, we must find ways to restore the household as a center of production rather than merely a hub for consumption. If you read Proverbs 31, and of course, Proverbs 31 is the life accomplishments of a woman, not her weekly schedule. But if you look at Proverbs 31, the household is a center for production not a place of merely consumption. She's doing things that make a difference in the world, and she's doing them because her husband is sitting in the gates, but her husband isn't sitting in the gates. You don't get to sit in the gates by hanging around the gates. You get to hang around the gate, you get to sit in the gate by actually making a big difference in society and then you're treated with that honor. And the reason she's able to buy fields and import stuff and do all of the things that she does is because her husband has created this space for her in which she's able to flourish and through her flourishing enable others to flourish. And the way that the man is able to do these things is by giving heed to all the instructions to young men in Proverbs one through nine. If we're to reclaim reality, we must find ways to restore the household as a center of production rather than merely a hub for consumption. This production can take many different forms. Before the Industrial Revolution, it was normal for economic activity to take place in the home. As Harrington describes it, women might tend to smallholding, make food or craft products for sale, make the household's clothes, and perform countless other tasks along with the care of children that were every bit as vital to the household as earning money. Historian Elizabeth Wayland Barber argues that a number of these jobs became women's work precisely because they were compatible with keeping half an eye on small children. Textile production, for example, was a largely female occupation until the Industrial Revolution. The point here is not just there's economic activity taking place in houses. There are plenty of people today who work corporate jobs from homes in ways that completely ignore the goodness and glory of sexual difference. So the point is not just money is being made from the home. That's not the point. Though that's not a problem, that's just not the point. The point is rather that these activities were adapted to the distinctive strengths and maternal vocation of women. They took sexual difference as a foundation on which to build rather than an obstacle to be overcome. In other words, their humanity came first and their productivity was built on their humanity rather than their humanity being erased to enable greater productivity for some corporation somewhere. That's the point. That's the vision. That's what we need to see restored. And here's the thing, the very popularity of multi-level marketing scams among homemakers testifies to our wives' desire to participate in the productivity for which they were created for. MLM scams target Christian women because they know in their bones they were designed to have a productive household. But we can and we must do better than this. I called them scams for a reason. As men, it is our job to form so that they can fill. It's not their job to create opportunities for their household to be productive. It's our job to create opportunities for them, to create a domain in which they can excel. We shouldn't ask them to go out and break up some more soil so that they can expand the garden, so that they can be productive. We actually need to think with them about what their strengths and their giftings and their responsibilities, which are primary as a wife and a mother are, and what activities would fit together with that and enable productivity to be restored to the home in a way that builds on how God made them, rather than ignoring and even defacing how God made them. It's our job to increase their opportunities for glory. To give another example, we live in a society that places an enormous value on schooling. Now, education, training of children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, has always been and always will be the responsibility of parents, but not every society places the enormous value on formal schooling that ours does. But our society does. That is something that is seen as valuable in our society. And our society spends an enormous amount of money on schooling. We also live in a time and place in which we're blessed with a huge amount of resources for providing an excellent or even a world-class education to our children in our homes. Homeschooling is not the only way to give our children schooling, but it is a wonderful and perhaps the most straightforward way for many of us to begin the process of recovering a truly productive household. But here's the thing. We are able to homeschool with excellence now because our grandparents fought for homeschooling to be legal to begin with. When homeschooling started out, it was not this excellent education. It was for some people, but if you look at the early homeschool curriculum, the homeschool curriculums that my mom was using were not excellent, and they did not provide a world-class education. I'm sorry. But you look at what's available now, and you really can. And you look at what's available as a result of the homeschooling movement. With the homeschooling movement, we have classical Christian schools that are starting, and some of the resources that are available for those as well, and women are also involved in that movement. But someone did the work to make that possible. This is something that enables things of genuine value to be done in the home. Someone pioneered that. Someone put up with it not being very great. And it got better. And what we need is this same activity to happen a hundred times over. There are movements that could start in your living room, that right now, it's really hard and it doesn't work really well. But 20 years from now, all of our daughters could be benefiting from a new paradigm that you were the first one to start. We have to be willing to start somewhere with a vision of restoring value to the household and building on our distinctive strengths as men and women rather than ignoring or erasing them. The economy in which we live is both broken and rebellious. If we want to reclaim reality, if we want to recover the goodness and the glory of sexual difference, We must learn to resist the tools and the systems of Babylon in practical ways. We must learn to be men who are willing to sacrifice, men who are willing to do without things our neighbors take for granted. We must learn to be men of gritty tenacity, men who are willing to do hard things day in and day out, week in and week out, decade in and decade out, because they are the things that need to be done. We must learn to be men who have the mindset of explorers, men who are willing to try new things that they've never done before. Our technological society poses unique challenges. Continuing to live inside reality is going to require learning to think outside the box. This is one of the reasons that God has put us in this time, in this place, in the story of his people. This is part of what it looks like for us to press forward to full maturity. As Clark put it well, in fact, he finished his book this way, Christians do not have to live like the nations around them. In a society that is losing its grasp on some basic human realities, Christians have the opportunity to show that God's revelation allows them to live with greater wisdom. Christians should be able to have a life together that draws the full advantage from the differences God created into men and women. They are called, after all, to be fashioned in God's image and likeness, to be the new Adam, to be human beings who reflect God's purposes for the human race. Here, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. Men and women are equal in value, different in nature, and corresponding in function. This is the pattern of reality. We live in a world that is an open rebellion against this pattern, a world in which it has been obscured by personal depravities, false ideologies, and broken economies. But rebellion will not get the last word. The God who created our world is even now at work to restore it. The pattern by which we were created is the pattern for which we are redeemed. He has invited us to join his family. He has called us to share in his mission to recover the goodness and the glory of sexual difference. He has promised to bless our efforts and to reward our labors. This is what it looks like to reclaim reality. Thank you for listening to this message. If you would like to learn more about the Westside Baptist Church, please visit our website, www.bibledirectionforlife.com. Subscribe to the podcast if you would like to hear new sermons and lessons each week. And remember that a sermon podcast is no substitute for opening up a Bible and reading it for yourself. you