How should young ladies channel their energies as they enter adulthood? In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm answer the question, discussing five high value things they should focus on: the value of time, rest, preparation, productivity in general, and a woman’s productivity.  By making the most of their time, seeking refreshment in God’s weekly day of rest, increasing their capabilities and capacity to accomplish more through careful development, embracing the Dominion Mandate and Great Commission, and recognizing that home life is a key engine for kingdom advancement, young women can find peace and be used by God for His glory.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of scripture. And we're here to talk today about daughters and five really high value things that they can focus in on. But before we do that, I want to invite you to our national conference called The Chief End of Man on May 4 through 6. And if you're single to our Singles Conference, it's a pre-conference May 3 and 4.

Hope to see you at Ridgecrest. So Jason, we're gonna talk about something we've talked a lot about. I don't know how many father-daughter retreats have we done in our churches where we're trying to cast a vision for womanhood? One thousand. One thousand.

Okay, we have a lot of messages in the tank. We're not that old. We're not that old. You know, just this morning I was reading in Mark 15 and there was this mention of the women who ministered to Jesus while He was in Galilee. And these were women whose hearts had been moved by the Lord, and a couple of them were married.

We don't know about all of them, but. But all daughters. They are all daughters. What a daughter does with her life, with her time, is so critical for the world. It's just very pivotal.

So you recently preached a message on this about five valuable things. And I just, I thought, I love the way you frame them. So let's just take them one by one. Okay. Okay.

So the value of time, the value of time. Yeah, I think there's a strong argument that can be made that time is the most valuable resource because you can't get more of it. So relationships, love, you can get more of that. Material possessions, money, you can get more of that. Time, you're not going to get one more second or one less second in your time.

So it needs to be treated as the valuable limited resource that it is. Let me just run you through quickly some Bible verses that give us God's perspective of time. The first is James 4.14, for what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. So we often have a micro view of time.

We're looking through the microscope and we haven't been entertained in 15 minutes. And what's the statement that we say? I'm bored. Okay. But if you talk to a 50-year-old, 60-year-old, 70-year-old, they'll actually give you a different view of time.

It's sort of looking through the telescope instead of the microscope, and they say, where has the time gone? It seems like it was just yesterday I was a teenager, and now I'm 52 years old. I'm 52 years old now. And so I can affirm that view of a time. It really is a vapor.

Anytime we feel like we're bored because we haven't been entertained for the last 15 minutes, it's a mirage. It's a wrong view of time. The right view of time is that life is a vapor, it's like a puff of steam, it's here one minute and gone the next. It's the most valuable thing that God gives us because it's the thing in which we glorify Him. And you can spend your life in endless entertainments and amusements.

Is that how you really wanna spend this gift of time? And are you even at liberty to, that brings us to our second verse, 1 Corinthians 6.20, where Paul writes, for you are bought at a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's. And you can really only glorify God in time, in the passing of time, you glorify God with your body and with your spirit. The point is that he bought you, and he bought you with the most precious commodity ever, which is the blood, blood of the Son. For people who have been bought by the blood of the Son of God, to view their time as their own to squander is not right.

Paul tells the Ephesian church that it has to do with walking, and he says, see that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time. And it's interesting, that language, circumspectly, well, when you read the Greek definition, it reminds me of walking through a cow pasture. You know, You better be careful. Walk circumspectly. Be careful where you step, okay?

Circumnavigate. Yeah, watch where you put your feet. It really matters where you put your feet. And of course, that's for all of us, but particularly with young women, so pulled by social media, so pulled by tearjerker movies and all this kind of stuff, that's actually incredibly unprofitable. And so, walk, be careful, be careful how you walk.

Yeah, to redeem the time, that's that text, Ephesians 5, 15 and 16, to redeem the time is to gather, it's just to hoard, hoard the time. I gather it up, protect it, treat it like a limited, valuable, precious resource. Yeah, buy up, buy up the time. I was reading letters, or the journal of William Wilberforce just earlier today. And he was talking about, he's 16 years old, and he's writing about what he did for an hour, what he did for a half an hour.

And he just kind of broke down the day like that. It's called walking circumspect. That's called, did you say buying up the time? Yeah, buying it up. Yeah, buy it up.

Buy the time and fill it with something good. Yeah, Here's one more. It's 1 Peter 4 verses 1 through 3. Peter writes, therefore since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, that he no longer should live as the rest of his time in the flesh for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. For we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles." The Gentiles just being the unbelieving world.

Peter says, think of how you spent your unbelieving years. We've spent enough. We've spent more than we should have on things that either dishonor God or have no value at all. Don't spend the rest of your time that way. This is not some New Testament invention.

Jeremiah said, do not learn the ways of the Gentiles. The prophets are always saying things like, do not walk in the ways of the nations. Don't walk the way they walk. Don't spend your time the way they spend their time. Yeah, don't, yeah.

Don't dress like they dress, don't live like they live. The church is a holy people set apart. We don't live like everybody else. We shouldn't live like everybody else. Yeah, so that's the value of time, and the Bible teaches us to treat it as a precious limited resource that ought to be carefully guarded.

So then the value of rest, the value of time and of rest. These are interconnected, right? Yeah, they're interconnected, and they have an interesting relationship that you wouldn't guess. In this way, God has given His people one day and seven for rest. So you would say, you've just reduced the production by 1 7th.

Because you've given this day of rest, you'd be a lot more productive if there were no day of rest, if you just keep going. I wanna consider two quotes by William Wilberforce where he talks about, he's really examining is that proposition true? You're less productive because God gave you rest. Here's two things William Wilberforce, who labored for the abolition of the slave trade across the British Empire. Here's what he said.

The first thing is this. He said, blessed be God for the day of rest and religious occupations, wherein earthly things assume their true size and ambition is stunted." So his first observation is, in order to shrink the world and have God loom large, you need to take this day. It actually breaks the momentum of the world gaining on our affections. It blunts the momentum, and it actually fixes your eyes on God so that the world can be seen as it ought to be in its own true dimensions, and God can be seen as He ought to be seen in His own true dimensions. If you don't set a day, the world just keeps getting larger and larger and larger and larger and larger, because that's all you're spending your time and your valuable resource of time on.

And God just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks because they're in opposition to each other. When the world shrinks, God looms larger, and when God shrinks, the world looms larger. You know, in the Lord's day, we're brought into a better place. We're brought into the place of visions of God and His word, the people of God. It's good for us, It's helpful to us.

Didn't Bill Gates like 10 or 15 years ago say that going to, he would never go to church because it's not time efficient? Something like that. It sure is time efficient. Yeah, and actually, so here's Wilberforce's second quote, and he's arguing against Bill Gates here, although he didn't know about Bill Gates. Wilberforce says this, with peaceful Sundays, the strings would never have snapped as they did from over tension.

So this one needs context. So William Wilberforce was looking around at men who he thought had more natural strength and vigor than he did and had more natural gifts than he did, but he was watching them break down. Now, why did he think that he was able to outpace them and, in the end, outlast them, even though they had more natural vigor and strength and had more natural gifts than he did? He attributed it to the Lord's Day. He said, "'Bows weren't meant to always be strong.

It's bad for the bow and it's bad for the string. You string the bow, you use the bow, you unstring the bow, and really both are preserved that way. And I think this is incredibly valuable to teach to our daughters because men, of course, can struggle with this too, but I think it's a frequent frailty or problem for women is they never get off the hamster wheel. You know what you've seen, the hamster wheel in there, the hamster gets on there and he's running round and round and round, but he's never actually getting anywhere. Life can become like that.

Life can become so busy that actually productivity isn't gained from the busyness, it's lost. You're running, running, running, but you're not really accomplishing anything. The Lord's Day is a day to rest, and I think the argument is it actually doesn't make you less productive in the long run. It makes you more productive. You rest, you become refreshed in your worship of God, and then the next day you're ready with a level of vigor that the people who didn't rest, they don't have that level of vigor.

Everybody knows a happy worker is a more productive worker. Yeah, yeah. You have to get off the hamster wheel for a day to look at God and enjoy God, and then you're ready to re-engage the battle. Yeah, in Isaiah, it's the day of delight. It's the day to delight yourself in the Lord and to soak it in.

So time is precious, but God has told us how to hold the proportions, six days of labor, one day to come apart and be with Him and rest our minds and our bodies and feed our spirits. So we'd say to daughters, crank up the delight, increase the delight in your life, squeeze everything out of the Lord's day you can, take every moment and fill it with good things that will help you understand how to live for the rest of the week. Yeah, and it won't make you less productive. It'll actually over the long haul make you more productive. Be the bow that is unstrung one day a week.

Okay, next, the value of preparation, preparation. So we're preparing for things all our lives. What do you mean by that one? So the proposition is you don't go from unproductive to productive overnight. That it actually, there's a ramp there.

You're born very unproductive. Babies aren't producing a lot, babies aren't very efficient with their time. And often neither are children. Teenagers sometimes are very unproductive. We have to come up to speed.

I remember when I was working for you right out of college, I thought in my college years I was so busy until it was time to work eight hours a day like you really want me to work? Like the whole eight hours of the day. That was not my college experience, you know. I was used to naps and a lot of basketball, which you didn't want me taking naps and you didn't allow me to play basketball during work hours. And I came up to speed during that time.

So the proposition is we start unproductive. We have to learn to be productive. We have to stretch our capacity for working hard over longer and longer periods of time. And really, as we talk about having lives where our time honors the Lord, we have to grow in our capacity for these things. When you look at the Proverbs 31 woman, you can believe she didn't get there overnight.

I mean, what is said of her is sort of exhausting in Proverbs 31. It's exemplary, but she's the first one out of bed and she's the last one in bed. And you can believe she just didn't wake up one day from a baseline of unproductive and just decide that she was going to do that the next day. This is a woman whose capacity to do that has expanded over time. Solomon uses a metaphor to describe her.

She's like merchant ships, okay? She's bringing value in to her home, and she's making things and buying things, and she's enriching her home. And it starts early and it ends late. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I think we have a generation that is kind of afraid of hard work. You know, hard work is too hard. But God actually calls us to labor because there's productivity in it. Scott, here are the two words, capability and capacity. And you don't acquire either one overnight.

Capability is about skillset, what can you do? You don't start out with very valuable skills. They get more valuable as you learn and hone them over time. So capability requires preparation because skillsets that are valuable are developed over a significant period of time. Unvaluable skillsets, like I can go out and mow the lawn without any training, any like I don't have to develop that, but there are higher value things that I do that actually took a long time to acquire those capabilities.

The other is capacity. What's your ability to stick with it and do it and really get in the harness and labor hard at it. That doesn't come overnight as well. But both of these things demonstrate the value of preparation. Capability, you develop it over time.

Capacity, you stretch it over time. That's great. Yeah. That's great stuff. So let's talk about, well, you sort of break this down to the value of a woman's productivity.

Yeah. So just starting with productivity in general. In general, right. Can we start there? Like all humans were made to be productive.

If you go back right to the beginning of the Bible, you have what is known as the dominion mandate, and it's to fill the earth and subdue it. So that sounds like a small job, subdue the earth, subdue planet earth. We see that we have big work ahead of us, And then the other scripture that we should be thinking of at the same time is the Great Commission, which I think is really just a focusing of the dominion mandate to go to the ends of the world and make disciples of the nation and teach them to obey the things that Jesus has commanded is sort of a focusing and explaining of the dominion mandate. And it's going to take productivity to do that. I mean, this is big work.

This is big, important work. And so the Bible is teaching us to be productive, to really put our shoulder to the wheel, to make progress on the things that matter. You know, Jesus tells his disciples, he chose them that they might bear fruit and that their fruit should remain. So that's what Christianity is about, bearing fruit. Christians don't just sit around.

They figure out how they're gonna bear fruit in the places that God has placed them. You could take that and draw the conclusion that God wants us all to drop everything and become street preachers. That's one conclusion that can be drawn, but if you look around the world, you look into your own heart, you might find, no, I don't actually think God wants me to drop everything else I was doing in order to become a street preacher. There's a good place for ministers of the gospel, but not everyone's meant to do that. And when you look at places like Matthew chapter 10, well, let me just read this.

Matthew chapter 10, verses 40 through 42, Jesus says, He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward, and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward. And whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of water in the name of a disciple, assuredly I say to you, he shall by no means lose his reward. So what's being taught here is that we actually enter into each other's labors. I help you in some of your labors, and you help me in some of mine.

And we share an award for each other's labors when we help each other. And I think we have a sterling example of that in 3 John 5-8. I won't read it, but an example is given where John, the author of 3 John, is praising a man for how he has received ministers of the gospel and sent them out in a way worthy of the Lord. And one of the things that teaches us is that homes are staging places for kingdom resources. And we should be receiving, helping, speeding along the work of the kingdom by entering into one another's labors.

And so there are more ways to be productive than just dropping everything you're doing and going to the nearest street corner to become a street preacher, there are many ways in which we can enter into each other's labors to push on kingdom work. So why do we do this? Why are we talking about this? Hey, we just wanna encourage daughters. Are there areas that you could be more productive?

Are there opportunities that you're missing to strengthen your church, your family, your community, grow intellectually, whatever it might be, Are you missing out on the productivity principle here that we've been talking about? God created us to live and to take ground in the areas that he's put us. That's the dominion mandate, as you mentioned earlier. And so this brings us to the last category, which is just the value of a woman's productivity. When you take the need for all humans to be productive, given to us by God, we're built that way, and you say, okay, for a woman, let's focus that.

Hey, home life is meant to be the engine for kingdom advancement. Healthy homes don't grow on trees. They have to be made. Cultivated. Cultivated, we all play a role in that, but women have a special place in cultivating and creating and building healthy homes that are the engine for kingdom advancement.

And so here, I think, is the picture. So the ultimate groom is Jesus. The ultimate bride are the people of God. And the bride is, the bride of Jesus is engaged in the great commission to make disciples of the nations and to baptize them and to teach them to obey what Jesus has commanded. What's the micro view of that?

Well, the picture of the groom is a human husband, the picture of the bride is a human wife, and so usually when a man and a woman marry, at some point there's children, not always, but often there's children, and so you actually have a microcosm of the Great Commission, making disciples, baptizing, teaching them to obey all things that Jesus commanded, as well as becoming a great commission outpost to speed along other local churches efforts, etc. Okay. Hence the value of time, rest, preparation, productivity, and a woman's productivity. Really great, great stuff. Can I give one application?

Sure. Especially for the young girls who are watching. The capacity, like stretching your ability to go hard and long, and the capabilities, the skill sets that are needed aren't developed overnight. Please believe me. And so you be well served to figure I'm behind.

I'm behind on stretching my capacity to work hard and long and I'm behind in developing the skill sets. Homes are small businesses. They really are. They have their own budgets, they have their own schedules, they have their own objectives. Running a home is running a small business, and it takes a lot of capacity and a lot of capability.

If you figure, I'm behind, I need to really ramp up stretching both of these, you'll be well served. Amen, amen. Okay, so daughters, we hope that's encouraging. We hope it's motivating. And sure glad you joined us on the Church and Family Life podcast and hope to see you next time and hope to see you at our national conference in Ridgecrest May 4 through 6 and the singles conference May 3 and 4.

See you next time. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com.

See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.