Gender and the Gospel

[0:00] Good evening, everybody. Last night, I heard word, the people who live in our basement let us know that there was a leak.

[0:12] It was a minor leak, plumbing issue of some kind. And so my wife said, well, it sounds like there's a leak in the basement, should I call a plumber? I kind of thought for a minute and said, I can fix it.

[0:25] And so I grabbed my tools, you know, out of this kind of Home Depot kit that I have, and I grabbed my laptop so that I could watch YouTube videos. And armed with those two things, I went down into the basement and started tinkering around and kind of got my tools out and started trying to go to work on this little leak.

[0:42] And suffice to say, about 10 minutes later, I literally had a geyser of water spraying straight up in the air and filling this room where we have a bunch of boxes stored. And I'm yelling up the stairs for Laura to call an emergency plumber right now, you know, call 911.

[0:58] And it turns out I don't know anything about plumbing. And we realized this, you know, and it was interesting to have that experience and then to be thinking in the aftermath as I'm kind of drying off and cleaning up the mess, that it may sound ridiculous, but there was this tiny little voice in me that said, does this mean that you're less of a man because you couldn't fix the plumbing issue?

[1:23] And sure as day, there was a part of me that said, that's ridiculous, but there was this little voice that said, yeah, does this mean you're less of a man? And it's interesting as we think as Christians, what does it mean to be a man or to be a woman if we're a Christian?

[1:36] Is there some way that Christians think differently about gender? This is a topic along with race and social class that we've been considering together over the last few weeks.

[1:49] We've been allowing God's Word to guide us as we navigate some pretty tricky water. Paul lived in a culture very much like we do where there were a lot of distorted ideas about race and class and gender.

[2:03] And there was a prayer that was very commonly prayed by Jewish men that said, Blessed be God that He did not make me a Gentile. Blessed be God that He did not make me ignorant or a slave.

[2:14] Blessed be God that He did not make me a woman. These are the distortions that were present, a very clear sense of hierarchy and value when it comes to these descriptors of human identity.

[2:26] Now, here's how Paul responds to that in our passage that we're going to focus on tonight, Galatians 3, verses 26, 27, and 28. He says, In Christ Jesus, you all are sons of God through faith.

[2:40] For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There's neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

[2:54] So what Paul is saying is this. The gospel is not just about getting saved from sin. The gospel is God's way of building a worldwide family through Jesus Christ.

[3:08] Where all of our differences remain, race, class, gender, they remain and yet they no longer define us.

[3:18] They're no longer a source of division. They remain only as a testament or a picture, a beautiful tapestry of God's limitless creativity.

[3:31] And so we've already looked at race and we've already looked at class. And so today we're going to focus a bit on this very massive topic of gender. And there's a lot of ways that we could go with this.

[3:44] We're going to specifically focus on the plight of women a lot more than men because the passage is really about the fact that there are no second-class citizens in the kingdom of God.

[3:57] And if anyone throughout history has been treated like a second-class citizen when it comes to gender, it's women. If you look at the history of violence and oppression and injustice, the Me Too movement is raising awareness about that in a very crucial way right now.

[4:13] We have the reality of sex trafficking. We still have upwards of 5,000 honor killings every year. We have workplace inequality and all of the statistics around that.

[4:25] And so this requires our attention. And so we're going to ask, what does the gospel have to say about this? And a couple of caveats before we dive in. Caveat number one, just as I've said before, this is a massive topic.

[4:38] So I'm going to confine myself to what Paul is saying in Galatians chapter 3. So this is very clearly not about marriage or marriage roles. This is very clearly not about ministry or ministry roles, although it has implications for those things.

[4:52] That's not Paul's focus here. And the second caveat is I realize that I'm a man. And all that that represents for me to stand up here and sort of explain gender.

[5:05] And so that's not my goal. My hope is actually that we all would turn our attention to God's word and that we would all sit under God's word. I want to share a little bit with you about what has come from me trying to sit under these words over the last several weeks.

[5:25] And I think that if it says what I believe it says, it offers us a kind of hope, men and women, that we're not going to find anywhere else. So we're going to break this into three parts. We're going to look at first how the gospel transformed gender in society, did things that nobody had ever seen before.

[5:41] Then we're going to ask what made this transformation possible. And then finally, we're going to look at a few implications for the church here in D.C. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word and we thank you that we're not limited to sit and contemplate this in our own wisdom, but rather your word has power.

[6:04] And your word is the word that created this world out of chaos. And so, Lord, we pray that you would recreate us, that you would use your word to kindle our imagination, to see possibilities that may go beyond what we can imagine without you, that you would give us hope, that you would convict us, that you would do your work in us.

[6:24] We pray this in your son's name. Amen. So we're going to ask first, how did the gospel transform gender in society? In order to do that, I've got to give you a little context about the Greco-Roman world when Paul began to preach this message that he received from Jesus.

[6:40] There were kind of two poles when it came to how people thought about gender, two extremes actually not unlike our culture today. On the one hand, you had the Greco-Roman world, Roman society, and Roman society was very hierarchical.

[6:57] It was intensely patriarchal. Ideas like gender equality or universal human rights simply did not exist in this world. So freeborn women, although they could be citizens, were not allowed to hold political office.

[7:11] They were not allowed to vote. Aristotle's thinking was very influential in this culture, and Aristotle taught that true friendship between men and women was simply not possible because he taught that women were inferior to men, and true friendship is only possible between equals.

[7:32] And so when Aristotle talks about friendship, he specifically means men being friends with men. He also taught that in the household, husbands should rule over their wives.

[7:45] They should rule over their children and over their slaves. And the role of a wife was to be silent and to obey. It's interesting when you think about the kind of caricature of fundamentalist conservative Christianity and the teaching there on marriage, it actually sounds a lot like the Roman Aristotelian approach to marriage rather than the Christian one.

[8:10] Women should be silent and obey. This is Aristotle. When it came to sexual ethics, brace yourselves, there was a double standard. For men, and it's hard to get into this mentality, or maybe not so hard, it may not be as unfamiliar as we like to think, masculine identity was defined and expressed in terms of dominance.

[8:34] So if you were able to show your power, show your ability to dominate others, that made you a man's man. And so sex was a way to dominate others and to show your power.

[8:49] So freeborn men could have sex with their wives, although that is actually downplayed and denigrated by the poets and the philosophers.

[9:00] That was seen as a kind of civic duty, you know, to make sure to repopulate Rome. And so you could do that. It was sort of your civic duty. You could have sex with the high-end courtesans, the heteroi.

[9:14] You could have sex with the brothel prostitutes. You could, of course, have sex with your slaves because slaves were property. They weren't even people. You could do whatever you wanted to your slaves. And it was just assumed that men would be having sex with all of these varieties of people.

[9:28] For women, it was quite different. Female sexual purity was highly guarded, right? So again, not unlike the conservative Christian stereotype, right?

[9:40] A very high purity culture when it comes to women. And these women were thus very sheltered. They grew up freeborn women, very sheltered lives.

[9:51] There was no concept in this world of consent. As we talk a lot about today, no concept of consent in the Roman world. In fact, when a woman was raped, the concern over the rape from the male perspective was not so much the trauma.

[10:09] It was the fact that the woman had been spoiled. She was no longer a virgin and was not desirable for marriage. So this is the kind of culture that we're dealing with.

[10:21] So on the one hand, you have the Roman world, which is intensely hierarchical and patriarchal. On the other end, you have the Gnostic religions. And they're very mysterious.

[10:32] And it's hard to make too many statements about all of the Gnostic religions. It's a variety of the mystery religions. But one of the prominent teachings in Gnosticism was the idea that the ideal for gender would be to flatten it.

[10:46] In other words, to do away with it. To collapse everyone into a kind of androgyny. Right? Or more specifically, the hope was that women, the highest ideal for women is that they could become men.

[10:59] Because women were seen as incomplete. And so a woman's great hope was to become like a man. And again, debatable how similar that is to some of the ways we operate today.

[11:10] But the last line of the Gospel of Thomas, which is a Gnostic text, says this. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

[11:22] Right? So this is the thinking. So the poll on one end, intense patriarchy. On the other end, do away with gender altogether. And in the midst of this, this society begins to emerge.

[11:36] The Christian church that is radically different than anything the world has ever seen before. And the Gospel began to do what the Gospel always does. It challenged people on this side.

[11:48] And it challenged people on this side. It made everybody a bit angry. And it offered something infinitely better. And this is what we began to see. We began to see that on the one hand, Christians challenged the Roman hierarchy.

[12:01] This idea of the inferiority of women. They taught that, as Genesis 127 says, God created men and women as equals. And yet they also challenged the Gnostics.

[12:14] They rejected this idea that women and men should be collapsed into some sort of androgynous, non-gendered form of humanity.

[12:24] They believed that maleness and femaleness were two equal and yet very distinct ways of being human. They taught that women alongside men reflect the glory of God in unique ways.

[12:38] It is an equal and yet overlapping and distinct way of expressing God's glory in the world. And by the way, this teaching, as we said last week, is the foundation for universal human rights.

[12:53] The reason people, even very secular people in the West, believe in human rights for all people is because the Christians taught that God created everyone in His image.

[13:04] And so everyone deserves dignity. Right? So these are some of the changes that we began to see in the Christian community. I'll just give you a few more. Christianity also introduced the entire concept of consent and covenant when it came to male-female relationships.

[13:20] In Roman society, a husband, as I said before, could sleep with whomever he chose, more or less, except for maybe free-born women. A woman, if you were married or unmarried, it didn't matter, couldn't sleep with anybody.

[13:34] And Paul then comes along, realizes this is happening, and he says in 1 Corinthians 7.4, not only do husbands have authority over their wives' bodies, but he says that wives also have authority over their husbands' bodies.

[13:49] So he's saying very clearly to the men, now that you're a follower of Jesus, it's no longer okay for you to sleep with the courtesans. You can't sleep with the prostitutes. You can't sleep with your slaves.

[14:02] You have to be faithful to this covenant that you've made with your wife. And guess what? Whatever you desire to do with your body, your wife has the final word on whether or not you can do that.

[14:14] Now, to us, that sounds like common sense, but we have to understand how radical, how profoundly equalizing this would have been in the world that Paul was writing into. So beyond that, we have, in the following centuries, Christians greatly expanded protection for slaves and women.

[14:33] You know, Rodney Stark, who I like to mention from time to time as a historical sociologist, he says that the church grew explosively in the first few centuries, that in the first century, Christians made up 0.002% of the population.

[14:52] And in 300 years, Christians made up 56% of the population. That is unheard of, that kind of growth. And it is largely explained by the fact that women flocked to the church, as well as slaves and eunuchs, people who didn't have rights, people who were treated with disrespect or disdain in other parts of the world.

[15:17] They flocked to the church because for the first time anywhere, they were treated with dignity and respect, and they were cared for. Also, for the first time, again, very radical, singleness was not only dignified, but it was actually held up as the ideal life.

[15:37] Right? That, you know, and in the Roman world, if you were, say, a widow, and your husband had died in battle or something, the Roman government required that you remarry within two years, lest you become a drag on the common resources of society.

[15:55] And so they would fine you if you didn't remarry within two years of being a widow. The Christians saw all these widows, and they said, you can come into the church, and if you want to remarry, we'll help you do that.

[16:06] If you want to stay single for the rest of your life, you can do that as well. Regardless, we will take care of you. We will be your family. And this is why you see so many instructions in the New Testament about care for widows, because they had a ton of widows who came because of how well they were treated.

[16:22] So see, these are some of the changes that the Christian community began to introduce, and it's all as a result of their faith. And so we want to turn our attention to that. What made this transformation possible?

[16:35] And the answer is the gospel made it possible precisely because the gospel does two things. The gospel shows us what it means to be human, and then it restores to us our humanity.

[16:50] And I want to look a little more into that. The Bible tells us that human beings were created, as I said before, to reflect God's glory in the world. That's what it means to be a human being.

[17:03] You reflect God's glory. But human beings were not content with that role, and human beings gave in to the temptation. We see this in Genesis 3, to seek to become like God.

[17:16] We want our own glory. We want our own definition of right and wrong. We don't want to reflect glory. We want to be the glory. And as a result of that rebellion, there was a brokenness that entered into our relationship with God.

[17:31] We were created to love and to serve God, but as a result of our rebellion, we got locked into a power struggle with God, vying for control, denying God in the world that He made.

[17:46] And that's very important to understand that because it impacts the relationship between people, between men and women. Right? We got locked into a power struggle with God, and then what is the result of that?

[17:58] What's the consequence of that? Well, Genesis 3, 16, God describes the fallout of the fall, and here's what He says to Eve. As a result of this sin, this rebellion, your desire shall be to dominate your husband.

[18:11] That's what the language actually means. Your desire shall be to dominate your husband, but he shall rule over you. Now, what does that language imply?

[18:22] Man, woman, you were created as equals to serve alongside each other, to care for all the world that God had made, but now as a result of your sin, you will be locked in a power struggle with one another, a power struggle for dominance.

[18:41] You'll want to dominate Him. He'll want to rule over you. And so what we need to see is that there is a deep and profound connection between the relationship that we have with God, the vertical relationship, and the relationships that we have with one another.

[18:58] We got locked into a power struggle with God, and as a result, our horizontal relationships themselves have now become power struggles.

[19:09] And this is how the Bible would explain the intense patriarchy of Rome. It's Genesis 3, 16 playing out. This is how the Bible would explain all of the myriad issues regarding gender relationships that we deal with today, not just in marriage, but all of the issues.

[19:27] But I can assure you that those of you here who are married, the language of power struggle is probably familiar. Right? So the problem in our world when it comes to gender is not just toxic masculinity, although that's a major issue.

[19:41] It's not just restrictive, socially constructed gender stereotypes. It's not just biased institutional corruption. All of these are very real issues.

[19:51] We're not denying that. The problem is, all of those are surface level issues. They don't get down to the heart of the problem, the core of the problem. The power struggle between us and one another is the result of the power struggle between human beings and God.

[20:09] And so this is the principle that you see show up again and again and again in Scripture. Before we can deal with the horizontal, before we can experience healing here, we have to experience healing in the vertical relationship with God.

[20:21] It has to begin there. And this is where the gospel becomes such good news. Because the gospel says that God was able to overcome the power struggle with human beings.

[20:33] But how does God do that? Not by force. Not by coercion. He lets us win.

[20:48] He says, no more power struggle. I'm not going to fight you. And Jesus Christ, who had all the privilege, all the power, all the glory, gets all of it away, lays himself out, allows himself to be mocked and tortured, allows himself to be executed.

[21:09] He lets us win. Right? If you're God, and you're trying to love people whom you have made, and they hate you and want to supplant you, and they want you dead, they want you gone, how do you love people who want to kill you?

[21:26] How do you save people who want to kill you? This is the brilliance of the gospel. How do you do that? There's only one way you can do it. You allow them to kill you, and then you make your death the means of their salvation.

[21:43] That's the brilliance of the gospel. That's how God overcomes the power struggle. And so as a result of Jesus' death on the cross, God is able, because of his death, to forgive all of our sin.

[21:56] And this invitation goes out from the resurrected Jesus that anyone who comes to him can receive forgiveness and be restored to God. The power struggle has been overcome.

[22:07] You can be forgiven and reenter the world and the life of love and being loved and serving the God who made you. And so to all of those people who have become followers of Jesus, this is what Paul says.

[22:22] For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There's neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free. There's no male and female, for you're all one in Christ Jesus.

[22:33] The reason that Christians had such a profoundly different view of race and class and gender is because they had a different view of what it means to be human. It's because they had ceased to be defined by their race or their class or their gender.

[22:50] Those things matter. They're important. But they no longer defined them. What defined them was the identity that they gained in Jesus Christ. And that began to transform not just the vertical relationship but all of the horizontal relationships.

[23:07] They began to see one another in a completely different light. Right? No more status hierarchies. No more superior, inferior, one family of equals before God.

[23:20] All one in Christ. And so because God overcame His power struggle with us through sacrificial love, that shows us that there's only one way we can overcome the power struggles that exist between us, between human beings, between men and women as we vie for dominance in the world.

[23:41] The only thing that will overcome it is sacrificial love. And you say, well, how do we know that? And what's interesting is we actually see that laid out in Scripture. There's this great place in Ephesians chapter 5 where Paul is describing the Christian community.

[23:56] He's describing and giving all of the characteristics of a joyful, worshiping community of men and women who belong to Christ. And at the very end of that general section, before he begins to get specific, before he begins to talk about marriage and work and children and all of that, there's this place in Ephesians 5.21 where Paul describes all men and women and how they relate to one another.

[24:18] And he says this, that Christian men and women, instead of the power struggle, should always be submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. You know what Jesus did for you?

[24:29] Now do that for one another. That's what he's saying. It's the reversal of the power struggle. See, submission here means to put your self-interest aside and to seek the flourishing of the other.

[24:40] It's saying, I'm going to put my preferences and my needs aside and I'm going to build you up. So Paul is saying, here's the way Christian men and women relate to one another. Christian men put their self-interest aside and they build women up.

[24:55] All right? Christian women put their self-interest aside and they build men up. And what he's saying is, gender doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all.

[25:08] We build one another up in love. We sacrificially love one another as Christ has loved us. Now, we've got to take this with the time we have left and begin to turn this into implications.

[25:19] What can we draw from this as we think about our life together as this church in D.C.? And I want to say, you know, if you're not a Christian, some of this will probably not apply to you and that's okay.

[25:29] So I'm really going to specifically talk to Christians here for a minute, but I just want to consider a few implications. Number one, we have to talk about the Me Too movement, which has done an enormous amount of good drawing our attention again and again and again to the reality of sexual violence that continues, right?

[25:52] The Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, the latest, two allegations against him, Justin Fairfax, but just a litany, right? One after another.

[26:04] It feels like almost every day. And what this has done is it has made us profoundly aware such that hopefully we can't ever forget that this is happening. And so as Christians, we not only need to recognize that, but we need to recognize that many of these atrocities, many of these sins have been committed not outside the church but inside the church.

[26:27] And so we as the church and we specifically as Christian men in the church, we need to repent. We need to confess. We need to beg God for forgiveness.

[26:39] The church should be, if you're a woman, especially if you're a survivor of sexual abuse, the church should be the safest place there is. Your pastor should be the safest person there is.

[26:55] Often that's not the case. We need to just recognize that. We need to repent of that. We need to do all that we can to get our house in order. And we need to take that seriously.

[27:08] And then beyond that, as we look at the Me Too movement, as crucial as that is, I think that as Christians, we should be on the leading edge of this conversation precisely because we can offer so much more than what Me Too can do.

[27:23] See, if you don't believe in the gospel, if you don't believe in a transcendent God who died to offer forgiveness to the world, if you don't believe in grace, then all you can do when it comes to confronting horrific sin like this, all you can do is name people and shame them and send many of them into a kind of perpetual social exile.

[27:51] But shame doesn't change hearts. And shame can't heal the world. And the only real purpose for shame in the world is to drive people to their knees so that they'll cry out for mercy.

[28:09] And because we believe in the gospel and because we know that we're all sinners and we all are here only because of the grace of Jesus Christ, we know that the way to respond to sin, even the most atrocious sin, is not simply to call people out and to shame them and to exile them, to excommunicate them, but rather to give them an opportunity for true repentance.

[28:34] I'm not talking about surface level, I'm sorry. True repentance. Admitting your sin, crying out for mercy, recognizing the harm that you've caused. And then guess what?

[28:45] God forgives people who come to Him. And He calls us to pray for forgiveness ourselves. And there's even this case study in 1 and 2 Corinthians.

[28:57] There's a man who is excommunicated from the church. You know, we sort of bristle at the idea of the church excommunicating anybody, but in the culture we do it all the time. But in the church, this man is excommunicated.

[29:11] And then we see later, time passes and Paul writes his second letter to the Corinthians. And there we hear about this same man and we realize that this man has been moved to godly sorrow over his sin.

[29:22] He's repented. Paul is concerned that he be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow and he urges the Corinthians to welcome him back and to restore him to the community. This is what will heal the world.

[29:35] Not dividing the world into good guys and bad guys. Only the gospel can bring healing. So I think we have so much more to offer. And I think we should take it seriously and we should lead the conversation.

[29:46] Number two, we need a healthy culture of marriage and dating and singleness where everybody, regardless of their circumstances, is equally supported and equally included in the life of the church.

[30:01] So if you're here and you're married, you can't do it alone. You need support. You need people in your life to help you stay faithful, to remind you that you're here to serve your spouse even though we live in a culture that preaches self-gratification.

[30:17] To remind you that your spouse can never meet all of your needs that only God can. To remind you that the purpose of your marriage is to learn more about His love. You need support.

[30:27] If you have young children, you need people alongside you keeping you sane. Right? Keeping perspective. Right?

[30:38] If you're married, you need support. If you're dating, you need the support of a church. You need people who know who you're dating, who know the ins and outs of your relationship. You need people to help you make good decisions.

[30:50] Godly, healthy decisions. Don't hide your relationship from your friends. Let people in. Let them see the good and the bad and the ugly. Let them have a say.

[31:02] Because sometimes, sometimes, you need somebody to tell you that you need to pursue that relationship. Or you need to initiate that relationship. You need to ask that person out.

[31:14] And you need somebody to just come and give you kind of a swift kick and say, do something. Right? We also sometimes need people to just step in and say, you need to end that relationship today.

[31:25] We need both. You need support if you're dating. If you're single, you need the support of a church family. You need people to be in your life. You need people to be encouraging you and praying for you.

[31:37] Right? All too often, the church is more Roman than Christian when it comes to single people. You know, the Romans said, if you're married, that's the ideal, but everybody else is kind of a second-class citizen.

[31:50] All too often, the church falls into that same way of thinking. But the thing that makes Christianity unique is that singleness is celebrated. These are people who can devote themselves to ministry, devote themselves to the work of the gospel, devote themselves to the care of others, in many ways, living out this ideal that Paul calls us to consider.

[32:07] But you need people, you can't do it alone. And married people and single people need each other. So we need to be doing what we can to make sure that there are lots of different kinds of people around our dinner tables every week.

[32:18] And I know a lot of you do this. But we need to build a healthy culture of singleness, dating, and marriage. Number three, lastly, coming right out of Ephesians 5.21, as men and women, we need to build one another up.

[32:35] We need to build one another up. You know, men in this congregation, you know, we talk about the reality of toxic masculinity, and as it turns out, I've talked to a handful of women just this past week and asked them about this, and they've shared very personal and very chilling stories of their experiences with this in work or school or other places, and so it's a very real thing.

[32:58] So I'm not, I'm not, so for some men, that's the challenge. But I know other men for whom their major challenge is not toxicity, it's passivity. It's passivity.

[33:11] And there are men who are longing to be neither. They don't want to be toxic. They don't want to be passive. And I know that there are actually many men in this congregation who are seriously pursuing and longing to know what it means to be a godly man.

[33:27] And they're trying to resist those pulls and they're trying to resist the lies and they're trying to figure out what does it mean to follow Jesus as a man. And so my word to you, women in the church, is do all that you can to encourage that.

[33:40] Encourage the men. Encourage them to be courageous. Encourage them to sacrifice for their faith. Encourage them to take their faith seriously. Encourage them when you see fruit.

[33:53] Encouragement is so life-giving. And likewise, there are women in our congregation who I think struggle under the tyrannical weight of expectations.

[34:05] You know, and I hear this from my wife and the conversation she has with a lot of the women she's close to, the sense that in our culture, in order to be faithful to what it means to be a woman, you have to be everything.

[34:17] You know, you have to be an amazing wife and you have to be or wife material. You know, you have to be an amazing parent if you have kids and there's a whole school of kind of righteousness around being a good parent in our culture and it's insane and it's overwhelming.

[34:34] But you have to be all of that. You know, you have to have a thriving career that you're leaning into always. You have to be socially aware and savvy and engaged and activist. You have to have very intelligent and thoughtful things to say about whatever the crisis or issue du jour happens to be.

[34:51] You have to be all of these things and you do it all while wearing heels and looking amazing and it's a crushing weight of expectation. And so, many of the women that I talk to, that my wife talks to, struggle because they constantly feel like failures.

[35:06] They constantly feel a sense of guilt. They constantly feel that they're letting people down. And we need to encourage the women in our church. We need to remind one another of the gospel.

[35:19] That my worth and my merit and my value is no longer found in my ability to meet the expectations of the meritocracy that we live in. That Jesus Christ is sufficient.

[35:30] That we can set these things down if we need to. That we can't be all things. It's not sustainable. And you know, for those of you who are married or aspiring to be married and you really want to support, as men, you really want to support your wife in her work, as a parent, as somebody who shares a home, as somebody who shares a life, if you really want to be supportive, you have to be aware.

[35:54] I've just become aware. I've just become aware recently, reading some things and having some really honest conversations with my wife about the mental load of being a wife and a mom.

[36:06] The mental load. I think of myself as a fairly sort of progressive, egalitarian sort of husband. I have a wife who works and we co-parent and I do most of the cooking and we share a lot of the chores in the house and so if you ask me, you know, I feel like I do a lot of stuff and then I realize I'm not even scratching the surface because there's this whole world of tiny little details that my wife is constantly carrying around in her mind.

[36:36] Details like, are there clean sheets on the bed when our guests arrive next week? Details like, have we signed the kids up? It's the last day to sign them up for soccer or, you know, they're getting old enough that we need to be getting them piano lessons or they need their immunization papers because school is starting in a few weeks or we need to make sure that we, you know, change the furnace filter or we need to, you know, and it's just this, you know, we're out of paper towels and that needs to go on the grocery list and what I realize is that my wife has this just enormous, like infinitely complex array of details and responsibilities that she's constantly carrying in addition to parenting and in addition to being my wife and in addition to her job.

[37:15] She has all of this mental weight, this kind of emotional labor that she's carrying around and, you know, I think about this idea of headship, you know, and what does it mean to be a spiritual head and I think of, you know, people, you know, men asking themselves, am I called to be the head of the family and then I think, well, you know, if that's the case, you know, can I imagine being the head of any other institution or organization and being that out of touch with daily operations?

[37:43] And it makes you think, you know, am I a head or am I a figurehead? One of the best ways that we can support the women in our lives, especially if you're married, especially if you have kids, is to be aware of that enormous mental load that most likely our wives are carrying and to be willing to share that load or even maybe take it.

[38:10] I don't even know if that's possible. I think about that and I think, well, God is able to do far more abundantly than we can ask or imagine. But being aware of this has made me confess to my wife and it's made me and we're trying to figure out ways that we can take some of that off of her and I can share that.

[38:29] I think it's a big part of what it means to support and to build women up in our lives. And so all of these things, all of what we're talking about, this is how the gospel transforms gender.

[38:42] God ended the power struggle with humans through sacrificial love and God calls us to end the power struggle between men and women through sacrificial love.

[38:54] And we do this not just for our own benefit, we do this because when we live like this, we are putting the gospel on display, making the love of God visible for all the world to see.

[39:08] Let's pray. Let's pray. Let's pray. Let's pray. Let's pray. Let's pray. Let's pray.