There’s never been a better time for women to shine. With feminism’s dark shadow looming large, Christian girls have the opportunity to show what joy-filled femininity looks like in practice. Rather than fall prey to the bondage of “woman’s liberation,” they should embrace the Bible’s beautiful picture of womanhood, which brings fulfillment and lasting hope. 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, encourage ladies to “come out” from the world by swimming against the cultural tide and living out godly womanhood. This means being an active dominion-taker, domestic entrepreneur, submissive and respectful wife, keeper at home, faithful member of a local church, bearer of children, and teacher of the next generation. Instead of being drug down by worldly music and fashion trends, women should claim the moral high ground, shining a bright light for Christ in their homes and communities.  

Welcome to the Church of Family Life podcast. Today we're going to talk about girls coming out, but it's not exactly what you're thinking. Jason, we just finished a weekend talking to daughters, girls, women about biblical femininity and the enormous pressures that are on women today to be conformed. How many consecutive years is that? Do you know?

It's almost two decades. Yeah, it's gotta be. Yeah, it's a long time. My message was, this is the best time ever for womanhood to shine because the contrasts are so dramatic. We built a lot of our thinking on 2 Corinthians 6, 14, do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers for what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness and what communion has light with darkness.

Well, that goes on. We also spoke quite a bit out of 1 Peter 2, 9. You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." It's fun to try to memorize that with 100 people over about a day and a half. Yeah, yeah, that was great. So we, of course, we have used these father-daughter retreats and father-son retreats really to do a reset on biblical womanhood, biblical manhood, because the blurring is just wildly upon us.

The current is so rapid that if you just float with the current, you go at a high speed in the wrong direction. And so the calling of Christians is actually to swim upstream, and you have to swim hard upstream to go in the direction that God wants you to go. Yeah, I started this retreat out giving, you know, 13 manifestations of biblical femininity. And I really, I started with what I think is probably one of the most fundamental issues, and that is a woman is an image bearer. You have this, you know, all around us, you know, the secular culture is telling us that women are plastic, they're flexible.

No, they are actually made in the image of God, and we're contradicting the idea that we're just protoplasm. Mm-hmm. In your message, I loved it when you called these 13 characteristics rebellion. Would you just give that to us? Yeah, this is civil disobedience.

It really is. I said a woman, A woman, not a man. A woman is a dominion taker. She's a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. She's a member of a church.

She's a demonstration of unfading beauty. She's a helper. She's submissive and respectful. She's a keeper at home. She's a domestic entrepreneur.

She's a bearer of children. She's a teacher of the next generation, and she's a godly mentor. There are 13 of them. And what I wanted to say is, like, God has so clearly and beautifully defined biblical femininity. And so that's what we were here to challenge fathers to uphold it.

I mean, you have a lot of fathers who are afraid to tell their daughters no. You know, we somehow think that our daughter's inclinations are all pure and good, but actually God gives daughters fathers to direct them in the ways in which they should go. Yeah. This is fading from memory, but the things that we talked about over the weekend used to be cultural, and now they are countercultural. You actually have to rebel against the spirit of the age in order to do the things that the Bible is calling for.

And so this is actually what we were calling our daughters to rebel against the spirit of the age and to swim upstream and to be countercultural because it's not cultural anymore. Yeah. Yeah, the world wants women to be liberated from womanhood, liberated from inner beauty, liberated from femininity, liberated from submissiveness, liberated from being a helper. The world wants women to be liberated like that, but it actually just puts them into bondage of the devil. Can I read that whole text?

Yeah, go ahead. So it's 2 Corinthians chapter 6, verses 14 through 18, so it's a bit extended, but all of it is really relevant. 2 Corinthians 6 starting in 14, do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness, and what communion has light with darkness, and what accord has Christ with Belial or with Satan? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever and what agreement has the temple of God with idols?

For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said, I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God. They shall be my people. Therefore, come out from them and be separate, says the Lord.

Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty." So I think the two kind of mountain peaks in this text is one, do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. That's just as clear as it gets. And the second is to come out and be separate. Come out from among them and be separate.

And in my talk over the weekend, I tried to apply that in two ways. People, it almost always gets applied that way and exclusively that way. That's appropriate that we apply it that way, but not exclusively that way. Definitely it has to do with practices. Paul makes these five different contrasts and really between light and darkness and things that are that stark in difference, really polar opposites of each other, there are five of them and only one of them is people.

I think the other four, you would have to say, are influences or practices. So when we think of don't be unequally yoked, how is that immediately applied? It's applied to marriage, a believer should never knowingly marry an unbeliever, to that we would say, amen. But marriage is actually not mentioned in the passage, it gets applied that way because marriage is the most... It's kind of the ultimate, most fundamental human relationship.

So... It's cultural practices is what he's driving at. Right. It's getting carried along by the zeitgeist. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Light and darkness, righteousness with lawlessness. This really has nothing to do with people and has more to do with practices. You said we must not entangle ourselves or live at peace with the enemies of God's kingdom. Right, which is quite a trick because we have... We're surrounded by it.

We're surrounded with it. This didn't originate with me. It actually probably originated with you or somebody you heard it from. But one of the things I said was, we're swimming with the pagans. If you live in a neighborhood, if you shop, if you go out of the four walls at all, you're swimming with the pagans.

We're living in a culture that is dominantly influenced not by the scriptural worldview anymore. It's a live fish that can swim against the current, and it's a dead fish that just floats down with the current of culture. You know, Jason, you said something too that really struck me. You said, where have I handed over influence to unbelievers? Where?

So again, it's people and practices. There are people, the close relationships, the relationships with full and free access, the relationships that are trusted relationships. When you have those, you are handing influence to those people. And the proper application of this text is that we shouldn't have those kind of relationships with unbelievers. Does that mean we don't have relationships with unbelievers?

Of course not. Paul's really clear about that in other places. We are going to have relationships with unbelievers, and we should, and the Great Commission exists, and we should be trying to influence them. But when you have these close relationships with full and free access, they're trusted relationships, you are handing them influence and the influence is flowing in the wrong direction. Our buddy, Paul Carrington, on Sunday afternoon, when he was preaching, he said, he said, Are you being catechized by the music of this world?

He said, Are you sitting at a table that Jesus Christ would flip over? Wow. Wow. So our brains aren't what they used to be. Are you finding that?

I'm finding that Memorizing scripture used to be a lot simpler, easier than it is now. It's starting to be more of a chore. It's a struggle to memorize scripture. But man, do I know the lines from the songs of the 1980s when I was listening to the radio all the time. It's the 60s for me.

That is really instructive. That is really instructive. Does it matter what we listen to and does it matter who is producing what we listen to? And could that be a really significant violation of this passage to come out and be separate, to not be yoked together to unbelievers? I don't think it's too controversial to say that if you sing their songs a thousand times, sing their propositions a thousand times, so that 20 years from now you'll be able to recite it perfectly, that you've handed them influence, and that actually you've yoked yourself together with unbelievers.

Yeah, I hear songs in my head, terrible songs, you know, in the 60s and 70s, And it's difficult to get them out of my mind, and I'll say, Lord, please get this stupid song out of my mind. It's so horrific. And you know, this is 50 years later. You know, when you say these things, the pushback is, well, what a killjoy. No, actually, we're trying to preserve our joy.

Yeah, exactly. Our joy is not in those things. Our joy is not embracing propositions that are anti-God, that are against the ways of our king. The ways of our king are actually the ways of joy. Yeah, hey, and that's what we wanted to do.

That's what I want to do in my message, is truly extol the beauty of biblical femininity. God has done a beautiful thing by creating women the way they are, their personalities, the way that they're wired differently, the way they're emotionally constructed differently, the beauty. I think I said men are ugly, women are beautiful. I don't think that's controversial either. Not for men anyway.

But what we wanted to say is, look, this is the best time for biblical femininity to shine because it's being erased in our culture. Now it's not just biblical womanhood that's being erased, it's biblical manhood. Our culture wants the women to look and talk and act and do the things that men do, and the flip side wants men to be feminized. Can we examine a strategy that our daughters might have adopted? So here's the strategy.

I don't want to be like the world. I want to be better than the world. The problem is, pegging the standard to the world is pegging to a standard that is moving more rapidly right now than we've ever seen in our lifetime. Our culture is sprinting away from the biblical worldview. So For our daughters to say, I want to be more modest than the world, I want to be more feminine than the world, you just have to say that could mean that you're still moving in the wrong direction at a rapid speed.

If You want to be 25% better than the world? Well, the world is 75% worse than it was 10 years ago. That actually might be true. So, hey, our strategy cannot be to peg our standards to the world and try to be a little bit better than they are, or even a lot better than they are, because they're moving away from God at a high rate of speed. Yeah, like there's so many ways that women are engaged in this whole drift.

Fashion is one of them. If you follow the fashion industry, you're going to end up where the fashion industry goes. I mean, right now, you can't go to an airport where everybody's not dressed in yoga pants. They might be naked, but really skinny tight jeans are just thick yoga pants. Okay.

How did we get there? How did we legitimize that? So, you know, the flow of culture is really difficult to resist for anybody, but our daughters are particularly susceptible to it because their nature is so alluring, their physical being is so alluring. I think we want to say Jesus owns us. He bought us at a tremendous price.

We're not our own. We don't want to be our own. We don't want to live out of our own thoughts. We want to be pulled up to God's ways and God's thoughts. I think we know in our heart of hearts that our ways and our thoughts are not going to take us where we need to be or even where we want to be.

Yeah. Yeah, we don't want to exchange the truth of God for the lie. We don't want to be caught in the snare, the trap of the devil that 2nd Timothy 2.26 talks about. We don't want to adore the one who transforms himself into an angel of light. We don't want to be there.

And so we were there to try to say, look, daughters, there's a beautiful thing God has called you to sink into it, glorify it, go for it, you know, go to the full extent of biblical femininity because it's disappearing and this is the best time ever to shine as lights, as feminine beings. It's so distinct. Biblical womanhood is so distinct more than ever. Yeah. Lovelier than ever.

Yeah, and we wanted to call our daughters out of that. And you know, frankly, hey, We've seen a lot of daughters come out. It's been a blessing. I've seen it. I've seen it with my own eyes, and I've seen the blessings that flow from it in my own daughters, and I'm really, really thankful for it.

One of the things that you said that I thought was really helpful and really true is that the women who you know who have embraced the Bible's vision for womanhood are the most confident, happy people that you know. They're not shrinking violets, they're not wallflowers just there for ornamentation. They're highly competent. They're highly confident. They're very happy.

And they're what our daughters aspire to be. They know who they are, and they know what's good. And I said this, and I'm going to say it over and over again, and they're not afraid of anybody. They're not even afraid of their husbands. They're not frightened by any fear, because they know that God is God.

That's the kind of woman we wanna see. May God increase their tribe. Yeah, amen. It's very apparent to me that my wife is not afraid of me. That's a good thing.

It's a good thing. It's a good... You want her to fear God. I'm Really glad for that. Okay, so there you have it, preserving biblical femininity in an age where it's being erased.

That's what we wanna do and we're gonna keep doing it. Daughters come out and be separate. Come out, come on out. Amen, thanks. Hey, thanks for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast and we really hope you can join us next time.

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