In this sermon, Scott Brown addresses the challenges faced by single women in their homes and the impact of cultural views on home and church life. He emphasizes the importance of taking dominion and the target that God has painted for women. The fear of the Lord is highlighted as a central aspect of a virtuous woman's life. Through examples from biblical passages, Brown highlights the skills and qualities necessary for women to fulfill their roles and responsibilities.

Please open your Bibles to Proverbs 31. We'll get there soon, but I have some comments I'd like to make before we get there. I'd like to talk about the life of a single woman in her home. What's a girl to do? How can she be productive, you know, when she gets a little bit older and perhaps even, you know, children in her home have left or life has changed in the home?

And how does she be productive? How does she keep her wits about her? It's very difficult because we live in a world that has so minimized the importance of home life. We live in a culture that has so minimized the importance of church life. For many people, church life is kind of going to an entertainment center once a week, and home life is a little bit like a flop house.

Well, that's the environment we live in. We live in an environment where the birth rates are lower than ever, than any time in history, and continue to plummet, which is astounding to me. Home life, children, these kinds of things are despised. You have the rise of feminism, the corporate woman in corporate America, and it's hard times for a girl who wants to try to obey the Lord and the things that he has called her to. And I know every situation is different.

I don't want to paint too broad of strokes here. But I'd like to present some of the challenges. But mainly I want to spend my time talking about what I believe is probably the heart of the matter. But I also want to recognize the difficulty, particularly in a church or a Christian culture, where marriage is highly valued, motherhood is highly valued, children are highly valued, getting married is highly valued. What do you do?

What do you do when you're not married and you don't have children and you don't really have a home of your own? What do you do? Some friends of mine have recounted stories from women over the years. I'm just going to read a story that they've heard many times. I thought marriage was coming, and soon I thought I gave up the worldly approach to womanhood in exchange for a beautiful picture that included husband, children, home to be a homemaker.

And something went wrong. I gave up the world's picture in exchange for nothing. I have nothing to show for it. I spent eight years in a holding pattern. I pushed off education, training, work, so nothing would be in the way of my getting married.

And now I'm wondering if marriage is ever coming at all. Should I keep waiting and preparing or should I go back to my previous plan? I think you'd recognize that as a voice from various people that you've encountered over the years. And I just want to acknowledge that as a real challenge and in a place where you highly value family life and home life. I want to identify a couple of things that I hope are helpful.

And I'm going to try to move fairly quickly through this because I want to open it up for questions. So if you have questions, please feel free to ask them. I believe that part of the problem is that even in the Christian community, you can develop what I'm just going to call a painfully truncated small vision of womanhood that just is isolated to those particular things there. And its distortion is expressed in the girl who ends up thinking, well, my vision for womanhood was just children, diapers, laundry, and a husband and a house. That's it.

And that really, most of the time, In our church, if that is experienced by anyone, it came because they really wanted to value the things that God values. That's how they got there. Now, there are a couple things I want to do to try to explain my almost single point that I want to make. We need to recognize that God tells us what to do. Another way to say it is that God paints targets, and he tells both men and women, go put your energy there.

God paints targets. And of course, this is what leaders do. They paint targets, and they try to get everybody focused on that target so that everybody's headed in the same direction. But God has given his word to us to paint the target for womanhood. The two I would just like to bring up is 1 Timothy 5 14, where in 1 Timothy 5 14, you have a woman who is a ruler of her home, literally a home despot, oikos despoteo.

She's a ruler in her home. And in Titus 2-5, you have a different image, keeper at home. And the target that God has painted for women, primarily, has to do with home life and church life. But I want to set that under even a broader category. And that is the category of taking dominion.

Taking dominion under the Lordship of Jesus Christ is the primary call of a woman. She needs to see everything that she does under that banner. And God gives homes as places to exercise strength in order to take dominion. And that dominion taking also extends to the church, and it also extends to the society around and neighbors and things like that. Now, I want us to look under the hood of what you already know about biblical womanhood.

I think you guys know a lot about biblical womanhood. If you take the pictures of family life and womanhood and the commands that you find in the Bible, you will see the skills that a woman needs to have to take dominion. And I want to give you some examples. Let's first of all take Adam and Eve. In Genesis 1, 26 and 27, both men and women are charged to take dominion.

This is a woman's primary calling her whole life long. And so she needs to understand that there is this greater calling that she has. This calling is repeated in Genesis 9 27. This concept of taking dominion is explained in a Hebrew word, rabah, it means to rule. It means to subdue.

God has given womanhood the calling to subdue. And she is called to exercise diligence in her situation. She's called to use her skills and her talents to build what is beautiful in the culture that God places her in. And God places her first in a home. And I give thanks with all my heart for the homes that are represented in this room, the people who've really wanted to try to recover biblical family life.

And I get the opportunity to travel around the country, and I see it all the time in almost every state of the Union. I'm so thankful for that. But there is this ethic of dominion taking. It's really a matter of exercising diligence in your situation. Exercising diligence in caring for, and in transforming, and improving creation.

That is the call of both a man and a woman. Taking dominion is a stewardship. You take what God has put in your hands, and you diligently tend what God has put in your hands. We tend the garden for the glory of God. We improve everything around us.

This is the calling of a woman. The relationships he's given us, the community he's given us, the church he's given us, the land he's put us on, God has called us to exercise diligence in all these matters. I want to say that the essence of biblical womanhood is the exercise of dominion taking diligence for the glory of God where God has placed you, under the jurisdiction that God has given you, and in the institutions that God has placed you. Institution of the home, institution of the family, and the institution of the state. Now, I want to examine some of the pictures of home life, but I want to extract from those pictures what lies at the bottom of them.

It's easy to get wrapped up in the particular duties, but I want us to look under the hood of manhood and womanhood. What we looked at Adam and Eve, and it looks like taking dominion. The second illustration is Priscilla and Aquila. Priscilla and Aquila, of course, were a married couple in the New Testament era. They ended up in the Church of Ephesus, where the Carrington's, you know, are 25 minutes away from right now.

They had a church in their house. They made tents. They risked their neck for the Apostle Paul. They explained the gospel to one of the most dynamic communicators, Apollos, who is in the New Testament, church. They were involved in church life.

They had a theological life together. And I don't think we should miss the fact that both Priscilla and Aquila were theologically oriented. So we could look at this marriage and say, well, it's all about marriage, is it? There are things that underlie that marriage that were characteristic of Priscilla and Aquila. And I'm just going to say Priscilla.

Priscilla had a vigorous enough life and a spirit of diligence within her to have a church in her house. She was diligent enough to train herself theologically to assist her husband in explaining the gospel to Aquila, to Apollos. They had an economy in the home. They made tents. Well, the Apostle Paul made tents too.

But Priscilla and Aquila were working inside the home. There was an economy happening in that home. And so there, the underlying factor of womanhood in this woman's life was theology, it was economy, it was hospitality, it was organization, it was bringing people together, and I want to sum it all up in one word, diligence. Diligence in the things that God has given you to do. So my first point really is to say, if you want to think about womanhood, think about diligence.

Taking dominion and operating like Priscilla and Aquila had its foundation in diligence. And this is what young girls should concentrate on. They should train themselves for diligence and productivity in the particular realms that God has given them. And I'm not here to tell you what they are for your family. Families are different.

Fathers are different. They have a different calling. They have a different mission. But there is a mission, and there is a calling, and there's activity, and diligence is required for it. Let's take thirdly the Titus II woman, Titus II, III, through V.

Let me just read you some of the things that she's doing. But again, I want you to get under the hood and think about what underlies what she's doing. Well, first of all, they have a particular kind of character. The older women likewise, that they may be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things." I mean, that's an extensive list. I could spend a long time talking about each one of those words there.

Let me keep going. That they admonish the young women to love their husbands, love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, at the word of God, may not be blasphemed. This is a roadmap for womanhood. And frankly, Marriage is just the way that those things are applied in her life. She is a teacher.

She's a teacher of the younger generation. What do you have to do to be a teacher? You must first be a learner. Well, I think this is why the Apostle Paul says, let your women keep silent in the churches, but let them learn. Let them learn.

And if they have a question, ask their husbands at home. God has designed women to be learners so that they would become teachers of other women and the next generation and their children or other people's children. But what underlies all this is the ability to teach. What does it take to learn how to teach? It takes diligence.

It takes focus on a particular skill that is transferable. Let me just say this parenthetically. Diligence is the transferable skill. If you have a diligent person, you can throw them at almost anything. Almost anything.

Diligence is the transferable skill. So if a girl is wondering what she should do in her home, she should think, How can I be more diligent to improve everything that's in my hands? Let's take a fourth illustration. This is the unmarried woman in 1 Corinthians 7. The apostle is making distinctions regarding marriage and singleness.

And of course, the apostle is living in troubled times. He's encouraging people to remain single. He says, the unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy, both in body and in spirit. But Shishu, who is married, cares about the things of the world that she may please her husband, and this I say for your own profit. Now, What I want to draw from this is here you have an unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord.

That's what I want to draw from that. The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord. If you're an unmarried woman in your parents' house, you don't know what to do, you know, be diligent in caring about the things of the Lord. It's so easy for girls to get wrapped up in this posing culture where their life is an Instagram life rather than a life in hot pursuit of godliness. And That phrase, the woman cares about the things of the Lord.

Exercising diligence in that area is so important for every woman and man as well. This is a transferable thing. You don't need marriage and you don't need a husband and you don't need diapers and dishes and a home in order to care about the things of the Lord. This is like this bottom foundation of womanhood, caring about the things of the Lord. Here's a fifth example.

The widows that are spoken of in 1st Timothy 5. This is really a remarkable section of Scripture. There are lots of misunderstandings about how you treat widows. There are places where the single mother becomes a widow, But the Bible actually gives very, very clear instructions about who you regard as a widow in the church anyway. And the apostle, first of all, talks about a person who is really a widow, really a widow.

And she trusts in God, continues in supplications and prayers night and day. And then he says, but she who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. And these things command that they may be blameless. But if anyone does not provide for his own, especially his own household, he's denied the faith. And it's worse than an unbeliever.

And then he says, do not let a widow under 60 years old be taken into the number, and not unless she has been the wife of one man. Well, now, I want to take that and say this is a relationally devoted person. Well reported for good works, in other words, diligence in good works. Then it says, she has brought up children. If she has lodged strangers, if she has washed the saints feet, if she has relieved the afflicted, she has diligently followed every work.

Now notice many of the things in this list don't really have anything to do with marriage and dishes and diapers. It has to do with washing the feet of the saints, lodging strangers, and relieving the afflicted, and diligently following every good work. What I'm trying to say is womanhood is bigger than dishes and diapers and husbands. It's way bigger than that. It has to do with diligence in the caring for people and taking that diligence and expressing it in the realm that God has given her.

Well, now we're at Proverbs 31. So I would like you to turn there if you have a Bible, because I'm gonna bounce through a section of this, and I'd like you to see the various words that we find there. And I wanna talk about the life focus and the work ethic of the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31. I'll be very clear about what the central message of Proverbs 31 is in this woman, it's the fear of the Lord. That's the whole heart of the entire section.

The fear of the Lord sums up everything that drives this woman. It's the fear of the Lord that makes her who she is. She didn't become who she is out of a hat. She became who she was because of her fear of God. That was the focus of her life.

And so you have this picture of very vigorous home life, very clear example of taking dominion. And it really is a list for women to measure themselves by. It's very popular to say, oh no, this is not a list for you to measure yourself by. I'm not sure that's true. I think there are things in the list that teach you.

I think there's something in every point in that list that should teach a woman something. You can't duplicate this woman's life, but you must learn from her. I think also secondly, it really defines conditions that fathers should create in the nurture of their daughters to have this kind of woman, this kind of diligent woman who outputs in the taking of dominion. Now, she's a virtuous wife. In verse 10 we read she's very rare.

She's rare. Who can find a virtuous wife for her worth is far above rubies. Rubies are rare. Rubies are valuable. Rubies are different.

We must train different girls in our culture. With all the assaults against womanhood in this culture, we must do all we can to see that our daughters are different according to the word of God. And then in verse 11, you see the life focus and the earth and the work ethic of this virtuous woman. I'm gonna give you lots of qualities and I'm gonna go very quickly. I want us to see this transferable principle of diligence working through all these things.

And the first is she can be trusted to increase her husband's gain. That's verse 11. The heart of her husband safely trusts her, so he will have no lack of gain. It's just critical that girls growing up in their parents' homes, they are trustworthy and they're bringing gain to the house somehow according to the vision of that household. But here you have a husband that's happy in her, he has confidence in her because she's competent.

You know, this is a woman who's focused on the things that bring gain to the house. They manage, they are responsible, and they are working on different facets of gain. Every young girl should say, what facets of gain should I be diligently applying myself to while I'm in my father's house? She's focused on her household. That's why in Proverbs 14.1, we learned a wise woman builds her house.

Building requires diligence, forethought, and labor, and a lot of hard work. We live in a world where women are afraid to work. You know, I think maybe it's because they see these models, you know, and that's all they do is they sit around doing their nails and chatting. But they're not working, except maybe taking Instagram pictures to pose for the rest of the world. Well, this is not womanhood, according to the word of God.

She does him good, that's verse 12. This is a matter of taking dominion. She is taking dominion in the context of her home. Maybe her husband dies, she's still going to do her household good. She pursues the commodities for her family needs.

That's verse 13. She seeks wool and flax and willingly works with her hands." Oh, we're back to that work thing again. We live in a world where everybody wants to offload their work to somebody else. Frankly, it's a little bit discouraging from time to time. If the single girls in the church, the only thing that they can really do for the church is take care of somebody else's children.

Now, I think it's legitimate to do that, but don't saddle these girls with this all the time, you know? And I'm saying it's happening, but I have seen it happen before, when this is a woman who willingly works with her hands. She's a vigorous worker at home. She's taking raw materials, she's improving them, whatever it might be, She is taking the things that God has given her in her household. Next, verse 14, she creatively exerts energy to find the food her family needs.

She is like the merchant ships, she brings her food from afar. So she's, I mean, she's bringing value into this home. And a single girl in her household should try to figure out how she brings value in her home. Here the Proverbs 31 woman, I mean she's bringing food from afar. Well that's not the only thing a home needs.

It is one thing. But it's an extremely valuable thing to have good food, creatively and beautifully made, and it takes energy to do such a thing. It's really a worthwhile energy. Next, she's early to seize the day, verse 15. She also rises while it is yet night, and provides food for her household, and a portion for her maidservants.

What's that all about? We're back to diligence. We're back to the irreducible transferable character quality, and that is diligence. This speaks to her management of time. Solomon said, do not love sleep lest you become poor.

Open your eyes and you'll be satisfied with bread. Next, she has a vision for the expansion of the family holdings. Verse 16, she considers a field and buys it from her profits. She plants a vineyard. She's thinking in terms of profit.

She understands real estate. She understands farming. She understands how profitability can be created by them. She is involved in a home which is a profit-making enterprise. As a girl considers how she should take dominion, she should understand finance, she should understand money and how it works.

She should understand assets and liabilities and costs and all kinds of things. And when my daughters were growing up, man, we gave them a credit card to help them figure out how all this works so that they could know how to run a household. She does two things. She considers a field and buys it. She ends up understanding what things cost in a particular environment.

And now this doesn't require all godly wives to buy and sell land. Let's be real clear about this. This was a woman who had resources. She was a king's wife. So we're not, what we want to do, we want to duplicate her work ethic, not with exactitude every single thing she does literally or at least in a wooden way.

She's strong not fragile, verse 17, she's not fragile. She girds herself with strength and strengthens her arms. This is a physical stamina. She's not indolent. She's not fragile.

She's a strong person. She's living a vigorous life. Not a life of leisure. Not a life of entertainment. She's not running around looking for me time.

Number six, or next, she finds satisfaction in the good things she brings. Verse 18, she perceives that her merchandise is good, and her lamp does not go out by night. She sees the value of what she's doing. She's diligently applying her skills and she sees the value of it and she's doing what God did when he created the world. He saw that it was good and this is the woman that does the same thing.

And she's confident. She's not depressed, she's not repressed, she's exercising diligence, she's not worried about wasting her life. She knows that her contribution is good. Next she creates items of tangible value, verse 19. She stretches out her hands to the distaff and her hand holds the spindle.

So she's involved in making things, creating things, tangible things that bring value to her family. She sees the opportunity and she goes after it. Next, she is compassionate toward those who are in need. She extends her hand to the poor. Yes, she reaches out her hands to the needy.

You know, This is a very loaded statement. You have poverty and compassion and hands in this sentence here. And her prosperity has not hardened her toward people who really are in need. Another matter of the fear of the Lord in her life is she's proactive in outfitting the family. That's verse 21.

She's not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household is clothed with scarlet. She outfits her family appropriately to fit the situation. Scarlet was a strong cloth, and we don't know, why was it red? I don't know. It absorbs heat, beyond that I don't know.

She's well dressed, verse 22. She makes tapestry for herself. Her clothing is fine linen and purple. She's dressing herself with attention to the quality of her clothing and her family is well dressed. They are not a sloppy, dowdy, clothed family.

Okay, that's her. Next, her husband is available for counseling with the men of the community. Verse 23, her husband is known at the gates when he sits among the elders of the land. Now this is this this condition prevails because this man lives in a home where things are taken care of well. She engages in commerce, verse 24.

She makes linen garments and sells them and supplies sashes for the merchants. Now, I mean, we live in a day today where economy has been taken completely out of the home and leaving it really as a place of consumption, not of economic activity. And there's something that happens to your family when you start working together to produce resources. It binds you together in a way that few other things do. And I realize it's more and less difficult for some people to do such a thing.

The economy that we exist in hardly allows it. You have to really jump through hoops and be really creative and move out of the stream of society to make your family work together. And it's critical that families learn how to work together. Even the word household in the Bible is the word oikonomia. It's composed of two Greek words, oikos, which means house, and namos, which means house law.

The family is a government, it's an administration. It's a place where laws govern the house, and particularly for the purpose of taking dominion. Some versions translate this word economy as administration or arrangement or plan. So there you have it. I'll do a couple more.

She's strong and stately and joyful, verse 25. Strength and honor are her clothing. She shall rejoice in time to come. Next she speaks words of wisdom, verse 26, she opens her mouth with wisdom and on her tongue is the law of kindness. She diligently watches over her household, verse 27, she watches over the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.

Of course, this takes us back to this transferable principle of taking dominion, and that is diligence. Her children and her husband praise her. That's verse 28. Verse 29, she actually does better than her daughters. I'm not sure of all of what that means, but she was an example to her daughters.

She's a woman of substance, charm is deceitful, and beauty is passing. But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised." So she fears the Lord. That's the heart of her life. Out of her fear of God, she seeks to take dominion in the realm that God has given her. And I think that if you look under the hood of the passages about womanhood, what you will find, you'll find a woman who is diligently involved in building things.

She's building the Church of Jesus Christ. She's building her home. She's trafficking in matters of economy. She is building her character. She's learning how to be a teacher.

She understands finance. And if she finds herself married, then she will be having a lot of diapers and dishes and husbands and homes to clean up and care for and bring dominion to that place there. We should never despise the biblical vision of womanhood. It's a beautiful vision of a very effective woman who is taking dominion and she's exercising diligence. Let me bring this all down to one point.

If you're a daughter in your father and mother's household, focus on becoming diligent in these things that are under the hood. And do it with all your heart. And if God brings you a husband, he will. He'll bring that husband in his own time. Only God can get you married.

That's actually a good thing. And until that time, don't wait. Don't sit around waiting for a husband. Don't sit around kind of necessarily preparing for marriage. Prepare to be a Christian who's taking dominion in the world.

Focus on that with all of your heart and seek the Lord.