Exquisite Joy

Hello blog.

It's been awhile.

I know you've missed me.

But I've been busy.

My New Year's goals included walking 45 minutes a day for 4 - 5 days a week and also reading through my Bible in a year. They both eat into my free time (so actually there wasn't that much "free time" to begin with) and you just didn't make it on the priority list.

But last weekend I went to a women's retreat and have some needtoknow information.

So here I am.

At the retreat we watched videos from the True Woman '08 Conference. I must say, they were challenging. Some of them changed my whole view of marriage and my view of feminism. My favorite was the one from John Piper.

You can see it HERE. Go and watch it. It is 45 minutes long and will be worth your time. I promise. He talks about the Ultimate Meaning of True Womanhood.

I must admit, I thought it was a little curious that they were having a MAN talk about true WOMANHOOD.

But he did a more than a complete job. I was challenged, humbled, amazed, and excited once he was done speaking.

His first big statement was "Wimpy theology make wimpy women".

"Wimpy theology does not give a woman a god big enough, strong enough, wise enough, good enough to handle the realities of life in a way that enables her to magnify Him and His Son all the time. He's not big enough. "

"Wimpy theology doesn't have a granite foundation of God's sovereignty underneath. It doesn't have the steel structure of a great God-centered purpose for all of human existence, including the worst of it."

Yeah, just go ahead and chew on those statements for a little bit.

So what was the granite foundation of the purpose of the Universe?

" To display the glory of God's grace in its highest expression as the Son of God dies to make a rebellious people His bride. "

I've had to watch it a couple time and re-read all my notes to fully digest all that John Piper said and all it's implications.

It gets better. He talks about how manhood and womanhood belong at the center of God's ultimate purpose.

"True womanhood is a distinctive calling of God to display the glory of His Son in ways that would not be displayed if there were no womanhood. "

I was a little confused at this point but really curious to know how the glory of God is displayed through womanhood.

He went on to define the roles of men and women in marriage.

"Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility for Christ-like servant leadership, protection, and provision in the home. "

"Submission is the divine calling of a wife to honor and affirm her husband's leadership and help carry it through according to her gifts."

"The point is that these two, headship and submission, correspond to true manhood and true womanhood in marriage. They're not the same, and these differences are absolutely essential, by God's design, so that marriage will display more fully the glory of the sacrificial love of Christ for His bride and the beauty of the lavished reverence and admiration of the bride for her Husband."

At which point I felt like I had been gut-punched. Not that I have ever been gut-punched. But if I had, this is that feeling I would imagine to have had. Ugh. I have never heard marriage defined in this way before. So essentially, my role as a wife is to reflect how the church should love Christ by how I reverence and admire my husband. Eeish!

And then he brought it all home for me with this.

"your true womanhood ultimately means that your distinctive role in marriage is meant to magnify the glory of God's grace supremely expressed in the covenant-keeping love between Christ and His church"

"It's not a small thing to believe that true womanhood is meant to display the glory of God's grace in the sacrifice of the Son of God in the purchase and purification of His bride who then lives her everlasting life in exquisite joy in His presence, standing in awe of Him, and reverencing Him and honoring Him. "

I really feel like I do a decent job (yet again) with my relationship with Christ. But I don't know that I would use these exact words to describe how my relationship with my husband displays that glory of God's grace.

So that statement right there totally restructured my marriage scale. In general I feel like on a scale of 1 to 10 in loving and honoring my husband, I usually am between a 7 to 9. But this statement totally changes that. I can't say that I have been loving and honoring him in exquisite joy.

But that is something that I want to do.

I want to live my everlasting life in exquisite joy honoring and loving and reverencing my husband.

My desire is that my marriage and my realtionship to my husband will reflect what the relationship of the church should be to Christ.

So, I committed last weekend that I was going to do just that. In fact, I came home and told my husband I was going to do just that. He was so curious about what John Piper had to say that we watched it online together on Sunday. We are also going to order the dvd.

I'm telling you, these are life-changing ideas, marriage-changing ideas and I'm excited to see how God is going to work in our lives and our marriages as we strive to submit more fully to his plan for true manhood and womanhood.

Even though you just got the Lori-recap, go ahead and watch it.

It's that good!