Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 9, 2021 | Uncommon Sense - Behind Every Successful Woman

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May 9, 2021 | Uncommon Sense - Behind Every Successful Woman · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, wasn't that great?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Love those baby dedications.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't do as good a job as the Marshall did of planning out the uh kid thing.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: But uh and in fact, uh, we're in a series called Uncommon Sense this month of May, five weeks.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Last week, uh, Alex uh spoke outside on a Saturday afternoon.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't seen that, you can ring that up on YouTube.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a wonderful 20-minute message about the uncommon sense of a verse that says, don't appear too often in your neighbor's house or he may get sick of you.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um very, very practical.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely loved it.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I decided that since it's uh Mother's Day, uh I I would sort of give a Mother's Day message.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I happen to like a uh I really like a sort of a mad magazine online for Christians called Babylon B.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this week they put out 10 last-minute gift ideas for your wife since we know you forgot.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh share four or five of my favorites are like play golf on Mother's Day so she gets five hours of quality time with the kids.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: She'll be so speechless she may not be able to talk to you for days.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So uh give her permission to take the day off and just do all the chores on Monday.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: The dishes will wait, honey.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The dishes will wait.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So love that.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: A fancy new spatula, nothing says I love you like a new spatula, right?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So so they have ten of these.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I recommend that you take a look at the Babylon B sometime.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I like this one too.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Play Xbox all day and dedicate every War Zone kill to your wife.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every time someone goes down, you put it one finger up in the sky and say, This one's for you, babe.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that'll do it.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh or maybe the one that I planned to use.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't thought of this.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Dim the lights, turn on the TV, and whisper the seven words every woman wants to hear.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Lord of the Rings, extended edition, marathon.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: So uh actually, what I did is since we're speaking from the book of Proverbs, Uncommon Sense, uh, I decided to talk about uh Behind Every Successful Woman.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now you know the famous saying, Behind every successful man, there stands a surprised mother-in-law.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, there there stands, there's a good woman.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, interestingly, in this book, and if you have a Bible, flip it to the last chapter of Proverbs 31, especially in the last chapter in the book of Proverbs, which we know of as the guilt-inducing chapter that always gets preached on Mother's Day, you know, the ideal woman and all that.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are all of these under behind the scenes hints of how a husband, what a husband could be, should be to make his wife successful.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to share with you one, two, three, four, five, six, three pairs of principles from the book of Proverbs, especially from the last chapter of Proverbs today, behind every successful woman.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: But let me just start by telling you that this is not sort of a throwaway message.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a Mother's Day message.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: When you look at the Bible, you start looking closely, if you back off and look at it like you know, a forest, not just individual trees, you see that the Bible begins with a marriage, Adam and Eve, it ends with a marriage, Christ and the church.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: You begin to realize that at the beginning, when God decides to attack the chaos, the darkness that is the earth, the home is his primary institution for doing that.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: The family is his primary institution in this day and age for making his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So this is an absolutely important message, especially in this day when the home and marriage are under attack, right?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let me share with you six principles that I find of uncommon sense in the book of Proverbs, the uncommon sense of a good, wise husband who stands behind every successful woman.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, this book, I think, says very clearly that he cherishes his wife.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: He cherishes her.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Or you could say he prizes her.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes at weddings, I used to say that there are three kinds of husbands: there are prizes, surprises, and consolation prizes.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize they actually put out short shirts that a wife could buy her husband that says consolation prize.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Nice try.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So but in this book, we're told that every wife is considered by God in heaven a prize.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: The interesting thing is that word favor is a special word.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: I spent some time this weekend with a Hebrew, young Hebrew scholar named Arnon Batista down in Dallas Seminary.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we were looking up this word ratzon, which is used primarily for more than just favor, for delight.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in this book, there are only two things that God calls delightful.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the first and main one is wisdom.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Wisdom is a delight from the Lord.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: The other is a wife.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so we find that there's a lot of things, you know, that we cherish our wives for, right, guys?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: We cherish them because they're prettier than we are.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're beautiful.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: We cherish them because they're good mothers, they've given us children, we cherish them because they bring income to the home, perhaps.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: But there are two basic fundamental reasons in this book that every wise husband will cherish or prize his wife.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, he knows that she is defined by heaven as a good thing.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: He who finds a wife finds a good thing.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is supposed to remind us of that verse in Genesis 2 where God tells Adam, it's not good, Tov, T-O-V.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Word used constantly in Israel today.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's not good for a man to be alone.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: A wife is a good thing, and she comes from God, which should perhaps uh um, which I guess leads right into the other thing, which is that she is a special gift from God.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Houses and wealth are inherited from fathers, but from the Lord comes a prudent wife.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sort of a chiastic order here, where you contrast between fathers who can give you earthly things, but the Lord gives you the most important things, he gives you wisdom, and he gives you a prudent wife.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: 1914.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Every good gift and perfect gift comes from above.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when when the Lord came down and he took a rib out of Adam, and then it says he brought Eve to her, he was giving her the giving Adam the most valuable gift that he could give him.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that no matter what conflicts that they had in life, Adam and Eve, and they lived a long time, so I'm sure they had lots of conflicts, two fundamental and basic things that Adam could fall back on, to know that he should cherish or prize his wife, for first of all, that heaven had called her a good thing, and second, that she was a gift.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I confess that the word cherish isn't in the book of Proverbs.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Here I'm going back, in fact, each one of these points reminded me of a song I used to love when I was growing up.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the song here was from an album that every one of us used to own, the Association's greatest hitch, right?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Cherish is the word I used to describe all the feeling that I have hiding here for you inside.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know how many times I've wished that I had told you.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll get to that.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's point number two.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Telling her.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: So uh just two more things.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Adam then turns around, and the only words that Adam speaks in the Bible before darkness falls on the earth, before the fall, as he turns to her and he says, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: She shall be called woman, Isha, for she was taken out of man, Esh.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And those words are not just woman and man, they're like prince and princess.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you are my princess, princess, I am your prince.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: I cherish you, you are part of me.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're a team.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Eli Wiesel, the famous Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, said the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Cherish, prize your wife.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first thing that this book clearly tells us.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, he loves her and he lets her know.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: I wish that I had told you.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he does let her know.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter 30, verse 23 lists four things.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: It says, Under three things, even for the earth trembles, the earth can't handle these things.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And number three is an unloved woman who is married.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a woman who is married, who is not loved, and and and the hint here when you compare it with the other three things, is that she becomes, she becomes sharp-tongued, she becomes feisty, she becomes defensive because she knows she's in a home where her husband doesn't love her.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it's absolutely critical that he loves her, chapter 30, 23.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: But also that he lets her know, and there are three ways in this book that he, yeah, uh would you mind pulling that door shut a little bit?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: I keep looking at the donuts and wishing I'd grabbed one.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So he lets her know, and he lets her know in three ways.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, he lets her know with his fidelity, with his faithfulness, with his loyalty.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: We find this especially in chapters five through seven, and these verses in chapter five, drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well, should your springs overflow in the streets or streams of water in the public squares.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Used to teach, as I was teaching at Care Prayer of El, and we were teaching on love and sex and so forth.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: We get to this, and kids go, what in the world does that mean?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, Well, just be patient, and you get to the next two verses, and you realize it has to do with your wife and with loyalty.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let your springs be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Rejoice in the wife of your youth.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you let her, you let your wife know partly by your loyalty, by your faithfulness, by your fidelity.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: The second way you let her know in this book is with your words.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most interesting verses for me in this book is Proverbs 27, 5.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Better is open rebuke than hidden love.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Some people have taken that verse to some guys, you know, who love to tell people off as sort of a recommendation to use a lot of rebuke, but that's not what it's saying.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's saying that rebuke is sometimes necessary, it's sometimes essential, but it's distasteful, it's unpleasant.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: But there's something that's even worse than and more distasteful than rebuke, and that is hiding your love.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't tell someone that you love, if you don't tell your wife, if, you know, I told her back when we were married, if you don't tell her that you love her, then that's no better than uh winking at her in the dark.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: It does absolutely no good.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Better is open rebuke than hidden love.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sorry, like I said, songs that I grew up with or that I loved in the past went through my mind.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: This song, by the way, was uh my favorite song the year.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I came to Topeka Bible Church, James Taylor, shower the people you love with love, show them the way that you feel.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Know that song?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not a great one.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, good.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: How come you guys are grinning?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: You weren't even born yet.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, he lets her know, he lets her know.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: First with his fidelity, then with his words, and finally with his touch.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: A loving doe, a graceful dear, may her breast satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Why be intoxicated with another chapter 5, verses 19 and 20.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one day, uh, oftentimes I'm the last person, one of the last people to leave the auditorium uh over here at the College Avenue building.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And one time when I was walking out, I saw a folded piece of paper on the floor, right back here in the middle, and I picked it up.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't know who had written it, so I never could get it back to the boy who wrote it.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed as I read it that he was probably a middle schooler, maybe eighth grade.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Or ninth, but the letter started off, my dear daddy.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote, he had given his dad a little gift.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was Father's Day, Mother's Day, or whatever.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: But then the letter got down to these heart, uh, heart-gripping, the heart-gripping final paragraph.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: I love you so very much, Dad, after having said we often haven't gotten along, I know.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's many things I'd like to tell you.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: I can't seem to find the words.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Please try not to be offended or angry about this next part.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Just give it a thought, and if you don't like it, forget it.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you were unable to get mom a present, and yet I know of one that you could give her.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: For a long time, mom has been down because she says you don't hold her, you don't hug her, or tell her that you love her with feeling, or that she's beautiful, or anything like that.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe if you were to do so, it would be much, much better than any gift.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry if I angered you, it's just a thought with love and his name.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: That uh just reminded me that that one of the reasons why you want to show your wife love, not just with your fidelity, but with your words and with your touch, is that you have children who are watching, children who sometimes see things clearer than you do.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Love your wife and let her know with your fidelity, with your words, with your touch.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Shower the people you love with love.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Show them the way that you feel.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And third, out of the six, they they go by pairs.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: The first two are cherish and love.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: The third and fourth are trust and empower.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: He trusts her.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And here we uh especially move into chapter 31.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: The section starts in verse 10, goes to verse 31.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is an acrostic poem.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: That is, there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 10 starts with the Hebrew letter A.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 11 starts with the Hebrew letter B, which is the word Bachtach, which is translated trust.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he'll have no lack of gain.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the modern translations say he has full confidence in her.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the shocking thing really about this is that this is the only time in the Bible, really, that we're told that it's okay to trust in another person.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the whole rest of the Bible, we find that repeatedly we're told a hundred times in the Old Testament to trust in Yahweh, to trust in the Lord, Proverbs 3.5, and lean not on your own understanding, so you can't even trust in yourself.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we're told repeatedly, put not your trust in man, Isaiah 2.22.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Don't put your trust in human beings whose breath is in their nostrils, in other words, who are that unreliable, or in Psalm 146, don't trust in princes, or the verse in Proverbs.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Don't put your trust, trust in man is a snare, it's a trap.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't trust in yourself, you don't trust in man, you only trust in the Lord, and then you get to Proverbs 31, and surprisingly, you suddenly find that the heart of her husband can trust in his wife.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that astounding?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And some of you have found that to be true, that when you when you've needed somebody that you could trust, you found that you could trust your wife.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result of trusting her, you're able to give her freedom.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: You empower her to do incredible things.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was in a discussion about these, some of these ideas uh this weekend, and uh the other person came to the discussion with the idea that somehow Christianity wants all of its women barefoot and pregnant and at home and passive and so forth.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, listen, I used to teach Greek and Roman literature, and it's it's Greek literature, the great Greek poems, Homer and so forth, where all of the women are passive and they are at home.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the Hebrew literature, Proverbs 31, that you find a woman outside the home, running the business and so forth.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the very first term, you know, I know verse 10, you know, and my translation here, Proverbs 31, 10 says, uh, a wife of noble character who can find, but there's no Hebrew commentary that supports that.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a strong woman, it's an eshethaiel.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: That is, it's a word when used of men, is a warrior, strong, valiant.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a woman who is who has the ability to be independent, but she's not independent because for her it's all about the family.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: But she is a strong woman.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in this text, verses 12 through 27, she's hardworking, gets up early, does whatever it takes.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: She has good business sense, she's shrewd, she advantages the home financially.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: She prepares for the future, thinks ahead for her kids and for her husband.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: She fears the Lord, so she's a spiritual woman.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's where this book says everything has to start.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about family.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And she cares about a appearance, her own appearance.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's an elegance about her, how she clothes herself, how she uh uh decorates herself, but also how she clothes her children and decorates the home as well.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: She furnishes everything around her with a beauty and with an elegance and with you check it out, with color.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: She cares about her parents, and she's a wisdom teacher.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So he empowers her to do these things, and it's shh, isn't this when I when you think through your life, you guys will know with me.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the biggest mistakes you made were that you know, were when you didn't consult your wife.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the best things you did was you empowered her.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so um my favorite song when I was 15 years old was uh was one of the few pop songs ever written that has the word God in the title.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's by the it was by uh it was Paul McCartney's favorite song of all time, he said.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's by the Beach Voice called God Only Knows.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you familiar with God only beautiful song.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you should ever leave me, though life would still go on, believe me, the world would show nothing to me.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what good would living do me?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: God only knows what I'd do without you.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: I had no idea as a teenager, if you'd come to me as a 15-year-old and told me that the girl that that song would uh eventually uh be the face of for me was only seven years old at that time.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I would have been shocked, but if you'd have told me she was already more mature than you, I would I I would have believed that.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: So um so I uh I married her.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: When I married her, uh she was she was 18.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: We had an agreement, she just graduated from one year of North Texas State University, that we wouldn't, we'd be very careful, we wouldn't start a family till she graduated from college, brought her up here to Peak Bible Church, enrolled her at Washburn, and uh, you know, three, four years we'd start a home.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: So about 10 months in to the uh wedding, I I drive home to our home on Crest Drive, and and she's sitting there, and she's sitting on the couch, her face a little gray, and she asked me to sit down.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: She says, I've I have something to tell you, and and I don't think you're gonna like it.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I sat down and um held her hands and she said, We're gonna have a baby.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I said, who did it?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, I I didn't say that, but um, but at that moment, you know, you have these thoughts.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is not our plan.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is not, we have our life worked out.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't this is not this is not good.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Your folks are gonna be mad.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: They went to finish school first, and et cetera, et cetera.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, then all of a sudden you had this other thought, which is what you do next, you better you better be careful.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: What you do next is really important.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I I grabbed her, hugged her, jumped up and down.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, that's fantastic.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: I promise you'll eventually finish school.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd told me at that moment that within three years we'd also have two other kids, I'd have said, tell me how we stopped that.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: So but at that moment, you know, then she beamed and she was empowered as a mother.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now then we go through life.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, if you know Melody, you know that it was wise of me to empower her then as a counselor, to run a counseling center, and then to have a home makeover ministry, work as a school administrator, and now she's headmaster of the school, and all of these other things that she does.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps more importantly, I've learned the mistake of not consulting her, you know, or not empowering her.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll just say uh one of the lessons here is that you empower your wife because you trust her.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about trust, Billy Joel song.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about trust and giving her power.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most interesting uh feats of strength across the world is wife carrying championships, started in Finland many years ago, based on apparently wife stealing or something 200 years ago over there, but it's now a spread to Australian American so forth, and it happens in the fall.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh most most of the competitors now uh use the Estonian hold uh rather than the uh uh piggyback hold because this works better.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, it's uh you run about three football fields, you get, you know, if you're fast and you you're gonna win it, then you have to get it done in a little less than a minute.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: But but uh it's different than marriage, but it's like marriage in some ways, okay?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: For one thing, uh the guy, you can't do this alone, right?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: You have you have to have a partner, you have to have a wife.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and for another thing, uh there are all all kinds of obstacles, and sometimes the fact of the matter is you take a tumble, and and every tumble you take adds five seconds to your time.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, but anyway, uh but at the end, the interesting thing is at the end, you realize the most important thing about this was not just the husband, but it was the wife.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because you get paid, the the top three places get paid five times in dollars, five times the amount that the wife weighs.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the heavier the wife, the better.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's good, one good lesson.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing is you get you get you get paid in in you get you also get paid her weight in beer, if that, if that's also uh if that's also good.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: But but but just those as I thought about this, and I thought about the fact that it's a team sport, and that it and that you're going through all kinds of difficulty, and that you work together on this, complete equals, and at the end the reward is as at the end of Proverbs 31, it's all about the woman.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: Just reminded me of the lessons of Proverbs.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, and 4.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Listen in powers number 5 and say number 5.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: He listens to her.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: He listens to her.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter 31, verse 27, because she speaks with wisdom and faithful instruction.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Instruction is on her tongue.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: I know we don't like to get nagged, guys.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we should just ask their advice.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh because there's wisdom on their tongue.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I'll um and they and they teach the children wisely, teach the children well.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, I have found that um that this verse is most important to me uh in social media today.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Email, Facebook, when I'm upset.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I will write something back, which is brilliant.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's brilliant what I write.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'll write back a paragraph, and there's a little steam rising off of it, I admit, you know.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I just know that it will completely win the argument and decimate all opposition, and and it'll but but I mean it well, so therefore I'm sure that.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so fortunately I've learned in the past few years to run it by melody first.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: How often do you think it makes it through that untouched?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: She'll always be very gracious.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like in the book of Acts, and there was silence on the space of the earth for for half an hour.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, but um uh uh but then she'll say, I I'm not sure that that's the best way to put it.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And she'll say, I think maybe she'd put it this way.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or in my worst case, she'd say, I think you ought to just throw that whole thing away, wait a day, and try again.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: But but but he listens to her so critical, because if you don't listen to your wife, and isn't it interesting in the Bible?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: The the person who's spoken of most clearly is not listening to his wife, was Pilate in the New Testament.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: His wife comes out, she says, I've had a dream.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Don't I think you need to be careful with this Jesus guy, you know, before you condemn him and so forth.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: But Pilate ignored her advice.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh looking at, I was looking at John Pollock's biography of Hudson Taylor, famous, famous missionary, 1800s, opened China, great country of China.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: All we have so many Christians in China, and they would look back and trace their ancestry to when Hudson Taylor came over.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And yet in John Pollock's biography, he said he so admired the wisdom of his wife Maria that he did not make one decision without consulting her.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: He listens to her.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh behind every successful woman there stands a wise husband who listens to her.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, of course, and perhaps most importantly, because this is where we end, he praises her.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: Notice these verses that there are three three uh actual uh uh, you could say, people praising her.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, her children arise and call her blessed.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And second, her husband also, and he praises her.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what he says says, Many women do noble things, you surpass them all.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's okay to exaggerate a little bit.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you're talking with your spouse today.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then it closes.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Charm is, this is the close of the book.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Charm is deceptive and beauty is pleading, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised, honor her for all her hands have done, let her works.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is the third thing that praise her, let her works bring her praise at the city gates.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Praise by her children, praise by her husband, praise by her works.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not happening anymore, is it?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because we live in a community, we live in a world that no longer praises the housewife.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: You go, you can shop all day long and go by the magazines there at the counter, and you will never see a housewife or someone who puts her family first on the cover of the magazine.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: You will see models, you will see women athletes, you will see, especially women movie stars.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: But in our day, you never see this kind of a woman praised.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: She's never the hero of any TV show, right?
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because what we need there is a strong, independent woman.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: But this is not an independent woman.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: She's just as dependent, just as much part of a team as her husband is.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And they're together in this.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so he praises her.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: He lifts her up, he speaks about her and to her with words of praise.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: He this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: She's my princess.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: She was taken out of a prince.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: This weekend, uh, some of you uh will remember the couple that we um for my 40th anniversary.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: We set up a fund to bring over uh overseas uh couples who show great promise to become spiritual leaders in their country, but they need advanced training.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: So uh you gave enough money for us to uh uh uh uh bring over two couples at$75,000 apiece to take four at least four years of Dallas Seminary.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the first couple from Northern Brazil was a guy who was a translator for me five years ago, six years ago down there.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Arnon Batista, he and Jessica and Elise lived with us this past summer.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I went down to see uh him walk the stage for his master's, uh getting his master's degree.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: He's been accepted, he's in a doctoral program now.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, Alex and Lindsay, Alex, you spoke the last two weeks, was down there.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: He graduated last year, but there was no walking the stage back then.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: So he's down there this weekend as well.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, the interesting thing about Arnon is he has become uh in, I don't know, he's become a rock star in some ways at Dallas Seminary, school with hundreds, thousands uh uh brilliant young men and women, and yet he won more awards this weekend than anyone else.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: He won the two major awards that Dallas Seminary gives.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: I won this award, the Hebrew Old Testament Award, but he also won the Spiritual Leadership Award that the faculty voted on.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I went down there, and he not only the faculty, but all the other students are cheering for him, and they're so excited about him.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the president, new president, giving him an award and his master's degree and so forth yesterday morning.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: Not a very good picture.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: But but um, so there are people are just running up to him, and he is just he's blown away.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: He's just stunned, but he is this kind of a person, he has this kind of quality, but to his great credit, every time someone would come up, he'd turn and he would look for Jessica, his shy wife, and he'd say, Jessica, come here.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: He says, You need to meet Jessica.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: She's she's the reason that I was able to do any of this.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: She and Elise are why I am here.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it just was this wonderful example of Proverbs chapter 31 in the close of this book, which does not show a man on a pedestal or a man in the limelight on the stage with women at the bottom of the stage cheering for him instead.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: It shows a woman on stage, a woman in the limelight, a woman on the pedestal, and her husband and her children at the bottom of the stage applauding her.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Behind every successful woman, see, there stands a husband and children who know her worth.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let's close our eyes on a word of prayer.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for the women that you have put in our lives who are so gifted and who fear the Lord, and who are so wise.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: Help us, Heavenly Father, help us men to cherish them as we should, to love them and to let them know, to listen to them, to empower them, to trust them.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.