Chapter 2, beginning to read at verse 1. But as for you, speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine, that the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience. The older women, likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things. That they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. Likewise, exhort the young men to be sober-minded in all things, showing yourself to be a pattern of good works, in doctrine showing integrity, reverence, incorruptibility, sound speech that cannot be condemned, that one who is an opponent may be ashamed, having nothing evil to say of you. Exhort bondservants to be obedient to their own masters, to be well-pleasing in all things, not answering back, not pilfering, but showing all good fidelity, that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things. Amen. Father God, I thank you for the scripture. Father, it is a light for our paths, it is for our good, and we delight ourselves in it. I pray that you would bless this your people with illumination of their minds, and that you would enable us to rejoice even in the aspects of your word that are uncomfortable. I pray that you would anoint my lips, you give me my voice strength to preach through the sermon, And, Father, that this would be a time in which we could worship You in our responses to Your Word. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Last week I didn't go through the passage verse by verse because I was trying to set a framework within which we could understand this passage and looking at various sections to show the fundamentals of discipleship. And the first area of fundamentals had to do with avoiding legalism. And there's a lot of discipleship out there that's got itself into legalistic troubles. So there are two forms of legalism. One is adding to the scripture and imposing our own opinions. And the other one was trying to live out God's laws just in our own strength. And then we looked, secondly, at the methodologies that are involved in discipleship, and I grouped the various methods under the speaking methods and the modeling methods. And then thirdly, we looked at the two goals of sound thinking and sound living. And today I want to go back to the beginning of the chapter, and we're just going to start going through phrase by phrase and trying to get a feel for what Paul wants to go on in the churches. And I'm not going to start in verse 1 because we've already spent plenty of time on what the officers are supposed to do. I want to begin at verse 2. that the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience. Now, the first important thing I want you to notice is that the Greek word for older men here is different than the Greek word for elders in chapter one. There are some people in the feminist camp that tried to make this out to be new qualifications for older men and older women. In other words, women pastors and women and male pastures as well, but it is a different word that's there. And I've got a little text box in your notes there that goes into the different Greek words. I don't think I'm going to cover that. Just realize it is a different word. But all through the Old and the New Testaments, God wants the younger people to honor, to respect, and to learn from their elders, those who are older than they are. Now, just because a man and a woman leave their parents and they cleave to each other does not mean that the parents and the grandparents no longer have any role to play in their lives, nor that other older people no longer have a role to play in their lives. They do. And the Old Testament incredibly honored the role of the elderly, and it's, I think, foolish to ignore their advice. But it's not automatic. It's not every older person that can be involved in this discipleship. He gives qualifications here. In the Old Testament, there were fools. who were older in years, but they were not older in terms of maturity. And the scripture does not indicate that they should be involved in discipleship. In fact, we saw in chapter one, he ruled out some older men there whose mouths needed to be stopped. In 1 Timothy 5, he rules out some older women whose mouths need to be stopped. And so it's not, you know, just any person that should be honored. We shouldn't have a sentimental attitude and lump everybody into a stereotype, oh, old people are so sweet. Well, I know some older people that are ornery cusses and they're not very sweet at all. And so Paul's very practical. He says, look, You're not going to just be opening your heart and the hearts of your children to any older person that's out there that wants to influence. There needs to be qualifications. But if they have these qualifications, they are an incredible resource and they ought not to be shuttled off to the irrelevance of a nursing home. Some of the best years of our lives come after age 50. Which means I'm just starting to live, you know. Next year I'll be 50. Now some people say it's actually 60 and they base that on 1 Timothy chapter 5 and the discussion of the older women. And then the younger under 40, Irenaeus says, after you're 50, you're older. Some people say after you're 60. So maybe it's the younger people are under 40, older are after 60, and the middle-aged, well, I guess there isn't anything that scripture talks about them. But no, I think there really is. Anything beyond 50 would be considered at least approaching to that. So let's look at these qualifications. Verse 2 says that they need to be sober. And the Greek word, nephalius, can literally mean sober in the sense that you're not intoxicated with wine. But it can also be metaphorically used. The dictionary says, also figuratively indicating complete clarity of mind. And so there's a moral qualification of not being drunken, and there is a mental qualification of having clear thinking, not being senile. Now, that's a qualification, I think, that was needed because in some ancient cultures, the elderly were so honored that even if it was embarrassing to follow what the senile person was commanding the younger people to do, they went ahead and did it. And Paul says, no, I'm not saying blindly follow unsober advice. The people that you are to be discipled by need to have sober, clear-minded thinking. They can't be so doped up on drugs or they can't be so senile that it's more dangerous, the influence that they have, than good. The next word, semnus, is reverent. Dictionary says serious, grave, dignified, can even mean majestic, respectable. So if you've got a grandfather who's got nothing but foolishness coming out of your mouth, well, sure, you're going to want to respect him, but he's not going to have the same kind of influence on your children that maybe some other person would. The next one, sophron, temperate, means to have a sound mind. Now it can have derivative meanings of prudent, sensible, self-controlled, but basically it means to be sound in mind. And so if I get senile, I hope you guys treat me with dignity, but I need to come out of the teaching, okay? I need to stop my discipleship. Paul's just being practical. He's very practical and these kinds of admonitions I think needed to be in place. And then come three words that are modified with the word sound. that they must be sound in faith, love, and patience. In other words, they need to be sound in their responses to God, their responses to people, and their responses to circumstances. In our response to God, we need to be living by faith, walking by faith. In our response to people, we need to be sound in our love. Not too sentimental, not too cold, but engaging those people in love. In our responses to circumstances, we need to have patience. And when you're discipling other people, you need all three of those qualifications to be in place. There are going to be some people who are so tough to work at that you're going to be tempted to think there's no way even God can change this person's heart, but faith is going to take you through those doubts. Your love may be tempted to wear thin. You may just want to give up on this person, but agape self-sacrificial love will carry you through. You may be tempted to give up on them, but he says you're going to have patience. And so those are necessary qualifications as well. Verse 3, the older women likewise, He throws in the word likewise, I think to conserve on words. And he's got another likewise down in verse six. Both men and women are going to have similar character qualities. But on the first one, it says that they be reverent in their behavior. William Hendrickson says, in their entire bearing, hence not only in their dress, as in 1 Timothy 2.9, but as well as in their deportment, aged women must be reverent, conducting themselves as if they were servants in God's temple, for such indeed they are. So basically he's saying no goofballs. Next, not slanderers. The Greek word diabolos means adversarial or slanderer. A person who likes to pick fights, who's a scandal teller, people aren't going to trust them to, you know, be discipling them because before you know it, all of their problems are going to be spread all over the church. And so there needs to be integrity of speech. Next phrase, not given to much wine. And again, this is not just saying they can't be drunk, but he's saying they can't be drinking too much wine. There needs to be moderation, self-control. And then finally, teachers or disciplers of good things. Now last week we saw that discipleship is the imparting of the life of Christ from your life into some other person's life. It involves the thinking and the speech, but it involves modeling as well. And verses four through five show what kinds of things that the older women will be discipling the younger women into. Now, there are four things I want you to notice about those verses before we go through them phrase by phrase. And the first is that whether you translate the word admonish, as the new King James does, or encourage, New American Standard, or train, NIV, it's clear this is a one-on-one discipleship, not lectures to thousands of women. Second, all of the things that she's training the young women in revolve around the home. She's not training them in biblical doctrine or walk through the Bible or home Bible studies, which is really the responsibility of the men. She's not even teaching groups of men how to do the things that are in this chapter. That would not have been at all countenanced in the early church. would've been unheard of. A Kay Arthur who lectures thousands of women and calls them dearly beloved, that would not have been tolerated in the early church. There is no way. And there's plenty of evidence for that. Now don't get me wrong, I like Kay Arthur. I think she's written some great stuff, very practical, level-headed woman. And my wife uses some of her books in discipleship. But the point is, that's where it should be used. Her wisdom needs to be used in that discipleship, one-on-one, coming alongside of a person, getting involved in their lives, and getting the kind of feedback that's going to give you realistic teaching. So you know where their weaknesses are, where they need to be moving ahead. So it's discipleship, not teaching classes. Third thing I want you to notice is that these older women are teaching the mothers not the children of the mothers. And how in the world they can get age-segregated Sunday school from this passage, I will never fathom. But there are many people who turn to this and say, well, at least there's one scripture that talks about age-segregated Sunday school. They say, it says young women, right? Young. And I say, yeah, but these young women are married and they've got children, okay? They're not kids. That's quite a different story. And so if you wanna justify Sunday school from some other passage, fine, but this passage is talking about older women investing their lives in the lives of younger women so that these women's lives are conformed to what the scriptures say with regard to their own children. In fact, we're going to be seeing this passage upholds the Old Testament concept that the primary role is this mother is being trained how to train her children. And then those children are going to be training their children. That's the goal. The fourth thing I want you to notice is that these older women are training the wives, not the husbands of the wives. And how in the world people, feminists, can look to this passage and say, this teaches that women can be pastors, I will never fathom. it's so clear that it's the women that they are discipling. And so it's informal discipleship, it revolves around the home, it's teaching the mothers, not their children, and it's teaching the wives, not their husbands. Now, if you keep those four caveats in mind, all of the wrong teachings on this passage instantly dissolve, if you keep those four things in mind. Now, having said all of that, the work of these older women teaching younger women is critically important. It's very important. that these revolutionary changes start happening as soon as these young women are safe. And what frequently happens in churches, not in every church, there's some churches out there do a great job of discipleship, but what frequently happens is a young mother will become a Christian And she's immediately instructed in the doctrines of the church, maybe in women's Bible studies, they get a familiarity with the scripture, but they're not trained in the practical things that will help them to transform their family. And so they're continuing on with the old habits that they have developed in their families and they never get corrected. And so he's saying right off the bat, we need to, as soon as people become converted, make sure that these lessons are learned. So let's look at the lessons, verse four. that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children. Now the phrase to love their husbands is one Greek word and it means to be husband lovers. And the phrase to love their children is one Greek word, which means to be children lovers. And so literally it reads to train young women how to be husband lovers, how to be children lovers. And you might think, why in the world would anybody need to do that? I mean, any pagan knows how to love their husband. Don't they just fall in love? And the scripture says, well, I mean, there's maybe one dimension of romance where there is a falling into love and sometimes a falling out of love. But the kind of love that holds marriage together is a sacrificial love that you're working at. And he says, you need to be trained into how to be a husband lover. And there's many dimensions to that. There's even on the romance side, things, and God's given an entire book of the Bible. Song of Solomon to teach husbands how to love their wives and wives how to love their husbands in the romance area. But there's many other aspects of love that require this kind of discipleship into the person's life. There's a great book that deals with these issues, and I always forget the name of it. I always call it the pink book because I can never think of the author. But Kathy knows it, and so you can contact Kathy if you want to. Find out what that is. What about the next phrase? Do new Christians need to be taught how to be children lovers? I mean, surely every mother automatically loves her child. Well, there's a sense in which that is true. But you know, you read through Proverbs and you discover that some of the things that pagans say is loving for their children, Proverbs says, is the exact opposite. It's not the loving thing. Now they think it's the loving thing, but it's not the loving thing. And so our love needs to be characterized and defined by what the scriptures say it should be. But I think there really is more to this phrase than just some of the facets of how to exhibit our love in our children's lives. I think there's more to it than that. Many wealthy pagans in Paul's day did not want to have any children. And the same is true today. A.T. Robertson says, this exhortation is still needed where some married women prefer poodle dogs to children. And it's sad. I think it's really sad when parents only want to have one child or many parents don't want to have any children whatsoever. They think it's going to be a burden. in their lives to have this child when they fail to realize that this is what enables dominion to increase over time. It's what enables us to have division of labor in our dominion. It enables us to shoot arrows out to take the conquest. You know, if you look at Europe and you look at Germany and Spain and some of these other countries where the Muslims are coming in, the Muslims want to have children. And they're having lots of children and the others are having no children. Well, it didn't take very many brides to figure out who's going to be taking the dominion in the not too distant future. And what he is saying here is Christians need to be taught that we need to value children. We need to want to have children. In fact, if you read in first Timothy five, it'll blow your mind away if you're an American, because he says, if you're under 60 and you're a widow, get married and bear children. You know, most people in America say, way to shake. Under 60, you gotta be kidding. But he's saying we need to value children. Children are our heritage. They are our future. And so it's something that pagans are going to need to be taught in, how to be children lovers. Verse five goes on to be discreet. Now the Greek word, sophronos, again, means clear thinking. Sometimes it's translated as self-controlled. In other words, their behavior is being driven by clear thinking rather than by their emotions. And contrary to what some people think, mature women are not driven by their emotions. They are clear thinking. according to Paul. The next word, chaste, is hagnos, which sometimes refers to a ceremonial purity of the body, sometimes to sexual purity, sometimes just moral purity in general. And maybe it's all three that are in view here. You can't assume that pagans who are coming into the Christian faith are automatically gonna know what it means to be pure in body and in spirit. In fact, in our Mercy Ministries class, we were talking about Even hygiene, you know, you can't assume that people know things about that in some places when they're coming in. And so they need to be taught to be pure, as Hendrickson says, in mind, in word, and in action. Now, the next word, homemakers, has a variant in the Greek text, and it's actually a rather significant difference in the text. I hate to get into variants when I'm preaching because it makes people wonder, wow, did God preserve his text? And so the first thing I want to say is God has preserved every jot and tittle of his word in every age and to the end of the age. That's the view of our confession. That's the view of all of the reformers. That's the view of every reformed confession that is out there. And that is the view that the New King James is based upon, but it's not the popular view today. And it is definitely not the view that the translations of NIV, New American Standard, ESV, and other modern translations are based upon. And what they say is that the scriptures got very early corrupted in the second century, partially corrupted, and that the oldest and the best manuscripts were forgotten in the sands of Egypt, only to be discovered in the 1800s. And so the church didn't have it for most of this period of time. And let's just forget about this verse for right now. Let's deal with the issue. How reliable are the Greek manuscripts? And in the New Testament as a whole, how serious is the difference? Well, if you look at all of the differences, including spelling differences, like David versus Dawid for David, it's just a spelling, very inconsequential. And they would say, this verse really is an inconsequential, it's not a doctrinal difference, you know, that hits the whole of scripture. If you just look at all of the differences, 8% of the New Testament is in question. That means if you just take the words out of each verse that is in question between the manuscripts, 8%, that's 48 pages of words are in question. Now granted, most of that's insignificant, wouldn't even show up in the English translation. In fact, half of it, it would be 4% of material differences in the texts of scripture that are out there. That's about 25 pages of material difference. That's a lot of scripture. Now, in the NIV and in the New American Standard, you constantly see in the margin references like, the oldest and the best manuscripts omit this, or the oldest and the best manuscripts say such and such. And actually, one of the things you need to realize, there have been a lot of much older manuscripts that have been found since then. But they're referring to the manuscripts that these versions are based on. And here would be the breakdown of these manuscripts. Keep in mind that there are 5,262 Greek manuscripts. There's tens of thousands of versions, but we're just going to stick with the Greek here. Where there are textual variants, the NIV and other modern versions differ with the King James version, or the New King James, and get the statistics here, 90% of the time they do so right up at the top there, based on one Greek manuscript called Vaticanus. That's their favorite manuscript. 90% of the time, the determinant of reading is because of Vaticanus. Another 7% of the time, their disagreement with majority text is based on the reading of Sinaiticus. It was found in the Sinai Peninsula. and thus the name. It was found in actually a monastery. It was in a wastebasket. It was going to be burned because it had been sitting in the shelves forever. They treated it as an unreliable manuscript, but the scholars found it. They loved it. And they include this as one of the oldest and the best, despite the fact that Sinaiticus differs in thousands of places with Vaticanus. They don't agree with each other. Just in the Gospels alone, there are more than 3,000 disagreements between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. To me, that makes it a false witness. Now, two and a half percent of the time, they disagree with the majority text based on the readings of Alexandrinus, another Greek manuscript. And less than half a percent of the readings are based on the Alexandrian text type. In other words, a number of these manuscripts that are out there, less than half a percent is based on that. But the point is, they're not really appealing. to a number of manuscripts. In 90% of the cases, they are basing their conclusions solely on their favorite manuscript, Vaticanus. The next chart is a helpful chart. Greek manuscripts are divided up into four types. There's papyri fragments. And there's uncials, there's cursives, and then there's the manuscripts that were used in the churches. They're called church lectionaries. And I believe those are the most reliable. And obviously, the churches thought that those were the most reliable because those are the only ones that the church would use down through history. So those are the divisions of the different types of Greek manuscripts. Some of the others were maybe written by scholars or private people had them made. But I want you to notice, In the columns, the second column there is the number of manuscripts that support Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and in the far one is the number that support the majority. Notice that among the papyri, most of which are just fragments of scripture, there aren't whole scriptures and there's only 88 documents there, that 85% of even those manuscripts haven't recently been shown to support the majority text. And they are much older than the oldest and the best, much older. Anchals, amongst them, 97% support the majority text. Amongst the cursives, 99% support it. And amongst the church lectionaries, in other words, the scriptures that were used by the church officially in their church readings down through the centuries, 100% support the majority text. Now, you take all of those manuscripts together, 99% of all Greek manuscripts that are out there support the majority as a text type. Now I got those, there's a number of books that you can look at them, but there's a new book by Floyd Nolan that has brought out some of the newer manuscript evidence. It's a fabulous book. I'm not going to get into all of the details of the debate here, but I just want you to realize when I say majority, I'm not saying 50% or 52% or something like that. We're talking about you know, virtually all of the manuscripts, a vast majority of the manuscripts. And the other thing that I think is important to realize is that the majority text was not just used in one geographic region like their text type was. Their text type can only be found in Egypt. In contrast, the majority text type can be found in Greece, Asia Minor, Constantinople, Syria, Africa, Gaul, Southern Italy, Sicily, England, Ireland. It was found throughout the Roman Empire. And it can be found in every age going all the way back to the first century, whereas theirs was lost, you know, for 1700 years. And one other significant thing is that no book of the New Testament was written to Egypt. They were written to other places of the world, so they would have gotten copies of copies of copies, probably. But the other significant thing as well is that all of the heresies arose from Egypt. And that's probably why these manuscripts were discarded, is they were written by the heretics and they were discarded. And the church fathers say they were very careless with their copying. And so that gives you a little bit of a background as to why we can trust the preservation of God's word. He has preserved his word so that people could obey it. He said that till heaven and earth passes away, not one jot or one tittle of his word would pass away. Now that's really incredible. In contrast, the scholars, and I was trained by these scholars at seminary, they say that 5% of the New Testament is in question and we'll never know for sure what the true reading for that is. God says no. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. If God didn't preserve every word, how in the world are we going to be able to live by every word? And so I just want you to not get bent out of shape when you see variations in the text. Realize You know, the text has been preserved. It's reliable. We can trust it. Just look at what the majority text readings are. And so that's just by way of background as to why there are variants. What about this passage here? Now, certainly the change is not an earth-shaking change, but it is a practical difference. The NIV, Numericum Standard, and NES all translate a Greek word that occurs in only three Greek manuscripts. And the word is oikourgous, oikourgous. All other Greek manuscripts leave out the G and have oikourous. Now, what difference does that make? Well, if you follow the NIV, New American Standard, other translations, which again, were only based on three Greek manuscripts, then the women would have to do all of the housework themselves. Now, I put in my footnote here, because I didn't want to bore you with all of them, but I've got definitions of this Greek word from every Greek tool that I own, and I own quite a few Greek tools, and they all point to this. There's no getting around the meaning of this. The first dictionary definition that I have says, devoted to household chores. Another has busy at home, carrying out household chores. That's the basic meaning of that word. And so it means that a woman would have to be preoccupied with that, could not delegate it, could not hire it out, would have to be involved as a domestic. But if the majority text is correct, and of course you know by now that I believe that the majority text is correct, then women must oversee the housework. They must oversee it. The Greek word is made up of two parts, oikos and uros, a word that means to watch over, house and to watch over. And so the idea is to manage the household duties, to watch over the household duties, to keep on top of them. She's basically responsible to make sure that they get done. And there's a world of difference between the two approaches to life, between being busy in housework and watching over, being responsible for housework. And so the person who pays attention to the admonition to oy kurgus is gonna be so busy doing housework themselves, they're not gonna be able to be involved in all of the things that Proverbs 31 talks about. Whereas the woman who obeys an admonition to oy kurgus will be leveraging her time and her talents to be able to get far, far more accomplished because she's a good delegator, she's a good manager. Now, some women are so busy doing all of the housework themselves, they don't have time to get to the things they want to do. They'd love to be involved in other things, but they don't have the time to be able to do that. And I've asked women from time to time, well, why don't you involve your children in some of this work? There's no reason why they couldn't do that. And more often than not, the response is, oh, I couldn't do that because it would take too long. I can do the job far quicker than my child can do it. Now, you've probably heard that yourself, right? But that is so short-sighted. Of course, when I'm working and Kathy's working with a three-year-old or a four-year-old child, Man, I mean, it's going to take you four or five times as long to do it with that child. But you're thinking for the long distance, you're down the road recognizing you're going to be leveraging your time and involving the household as a whole because of wise delegation in far more things. And you're going to be training your child to be a manager. You're going to be training your child how to leverage his or her time as well. And so what Paul is encouraging us to do here is not just to do, but to watch over. Now, isn't that exactly what Proverbs 31 says that the virtuous woman should do? It says she watches over the ways of her household. Doesn't say she does absolutely everything in that chapter all by herself. I think that'd be a sure recipe for a nervous breakdown, right? I mean, so many women, they look at those things and they just think, I can't do it. Well, by yourself, you cannot do it. But what that woman in Proverbs 31 was doing is she was leveraging her time, her talents by the wise administration of children, servants, money, and property. Isn't this exactly what Paul tells Timothy in 1 Timothy 5.14? He tells the women to, quote, manage the house. Now the phrase manage the house is made up of two words, oikos again, or house, and despoton. Okay, a despoton is a despot, okay? Is a lord, is a manager, is a ruler, okay? But rather than ruling over their home, some women look like they are being ruled by their homes. You know, their homes got the better of them. And so I'm bringing this up because I want you women to realize you do have the liberty to do things outside your home. Proverbs 31 makes it very clear you have that liberty. But Paul says you have that liberty if and only if you're on top of the household duties. That's what Paul is saying. If you have wise management of your household, sure, you can be outside the home. There's all kinds of things that you can do. Now, at the next university fellowship meeting, the young people took a vote on what the next topic would be, which is they wanted me to talk on what are the role duties of the man and of the woman. I tell you, they're trying to get me into trouble. The time before, they voted that I was supposed to be making a presentation on courtship versus dating. But they are, they are practical topics and I can understand why they would want me to go through that. So this is a key verse that we're going to be launching off from. Now the next word means either good or kind. And you'll find translations that take either way. To be a kind wife, a good wife. To be a kind mother and a good mother. Now, in theory, that may seem very easy. It'd be very easy, you know, for me to be kind to my family. But the truth of the matter is, when your family is not doing the things God's called them to be doing, they're maybe taking advantage and they're maybe taking you for granted in all of the work that you're doing. Oh, it's very hard to be kind, isn't it? And to be good. In other words, this is not going to come naturally. This is something you're going to have to work at because your temptation is to be mean because they're being mean to you. And it's interesting in Ephesians 5, Paul tells the men not to become embittered toward their wives. And When the man, when the wife is mean to the man, and the man becomes embittered to the wife, it becomes a vicious circle, doesn't it? Then he wants to reinforce being bitter toward him, her, and because she doesn't sense his love toward her and his sensitivity, she's just all the more being mean. And he says, somebody's got to break this cycle. You know, the woman needs to be kind. and be good to her husband and to her children. And he says to the man in Ephesians, you need to stop being bitter. You need to not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good. He's saying exactly the same thing to the women here. Now, the next phrase, obedient to their own husbands, shows that despite the woman's total spiritual equality with the man, there is a inequality of function. It's not related to the person. This is in terms of role relationships. The family is not a democracy. Now certainly, a wise husband is going to be understanding to the wife, is going to be listening to the wife, communicating clearly, listening to her fears, her concerns, her needs. But the bottom line is that there is a chain of command and the word obedient is hupotasso, which means, here's the dictionary definition, to be in subjection to, to be subordinate to, to submit to, to rank under, to obey. And that needs to be taught. It does not come naturally. Nothing in the Christian life comes naturally. Us men, we men, oops, where's my grammar? Is it we men or us men? We men. We men, yes, we is the subject, not the object, okay. We men have a tendency to want to run away from our responsibilities to be servant leaders and to abandon that, right? We're wanting to do that. And God says, you need to appropriate God's grace and you need to be living out God's blueprints. Well, the women are gonna have that same temptation to run away from their responsibilities. And God says, no, you need God's grace to be able to live as you ought to live. and to live joyfully and to live with a godly testimony. That's where he ends this section. It's the issue of testimony, that a woman's success or failure in all of the things that we've just looked at will either make her a good testimony or a bad testimony. He says, that the word of God may not be blaspheme. Now, we might have felt a lot better if he would have said, you know, if you guys want to really be nice, if you could kind of, you know, do these things, but he doesn't. He pulls out all of the stuff and he says, guys, ladies, these are the bare bones of discipleship. And every younger woman needs to be discipled into how to do these things. And if you're not, the word of God is going to be blasphemy. He is saying that God's order is going to be torn down. Now, next week, we're going to work over the men some. We're going to be getting into their duties, because in verses six through ten, he uses the word likewise there. And he says, OK, there's going to be some similarities here, but there's also going to be some things that are very unique to the men. But Paul's admonition for both men and women, they're practical, therefore are good. And it's my prayer that our lives would conform to that. Let's pray. Father God, thank you for your word. It is so practical. And Paul has caught long before exactly the attitudes and the things that we so easily fall into. And we're thankful, Father, for that. We're thankful that you push us and guide us and show us the way in which we must walk. Help us, Father, to not be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, that we may prove what is that good and perfect and acceptable will of God. and Father I pray that you would help us to walk in the old paths that you have set up and through those old paths to find life and light and joy and holiness and a walk in your spirit that empowers us to make a difference in this world. Help the families of this church to be such a tribute to your grace and to your scriptures that far from being a blasphemy to the world, that the world would become jealous of the gospel, jealous of what we have, and would want to be instructed themselves. Work in and through us to your glory, we pray in Christ's name. Amen.