Strachan / Parnell Designed for Joy

How the Gospel Impacts Men and Women, Identity and Practice
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4335-4928-1
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

'Male and female he created them.' -Genesis 1:27 It's one of the most important-and controversial-topics of our time. God created men and women in his image-equal in value and complementary in roles. These distinctive roles are not the vestiges of a bygone era, but integral to God's timeless good design for humanity. Designed for Joy includes fresh contributions from fourteen young leaders, casting a unified vision for Christian manhood and womanhood. Whether discussing the significance of gender, the truth about masculinity and femininity, the blessing of purity, or the challenge of raising children in a confusing world, this practical resource challenges us to embrace God's good design-for his glory and our joy.

Owen Strachan (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is associate professor of Christian theology and director of the Theological and Cultural Engagement at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Strachan, Owen

Parnell, Jonathan

Leseproben

Introduction

How Does the Gospel Shape Manhood and Womanhood?

Owen Strachan

The lips of the young woman quivered. Tears rolled down her face. Her angry father stared at her. “I thought you were the kind of girl who didn’t get into this sort of trouble,” he said. She looked back at him, confused and adrift: “I guess I don’t really know what kind of girl I am.”

This exchange came in Juno, a poignant film made a few years ago. It’s a quick scene, but it has stuck with me ever since. In this young woman’s reply, I heard the confusion of an entire generation. So many young men and young women don’t know who they are. They’ve never been taught what a man or a woman is. They may have seen terrible pain in their home, and they may have grown up without a father, or less commonly, without a mother. Or they might have had a father and a mother, but their home was compromised by sin in some way. The family didn’t eat together. The parents weren’t happy together. The children grew up without discipleship or investment.

This is 2015. Families are struggling. As one would expect, many young men and young women lack a road map—a script—for their lives. When you’re in this confusing and confused state, you don’t have answers to the most basic questions about your life. This is true of your fundamental identity, which includes your manhood or womanhood. What do I mean by this?

You Need to Know Who You Are

Many high schoolers, college students, and twentysomethings know they have a body (this is kind of obvious); further, they know they’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman; and they know they want to follow Jesus. But they have little sense of how these realities intertwine. They don’t know what their gender, their sexuality, is for. So they’re tentative. They’re confused. Quietly, perhaps with some shame, they ask these kinds of questions in their own minds:

• What is my purpose?
• Why do I have this body?
• What does it mean to be a man or a woman?

This book is intended to help you figure out who you were made to be. We want to give you an inspiring vision for your life as a young man or a young woman. We see that our society is training you to think wrongly about gender and sexuality. It’s telling you things like: there are no essential differences between men and women; you can change your gender if you want, and that’s totally fine; you can be attracted to whomever comes most naturally to you—boys can like boys, girls can like girls; and finally, there are no responsibilities or callings that come with being a man or a woman—you do whatever you like.

In this book, we’re going to show that these ideas are false and harmful. We’re going to offer true words and biblical counsel to you so you can know who you are and what you were created for. We will see that we are designed by God, and that his design brings us joy.

We’re not going to simply offer you “Ten Tips to Be the Manly Man’s Man, the Manliest of Them All” or “Five Ways to Make Doilies and Sing Nineteenth-Century Hymns at the Same Time.” We’re coming at all this from a fresh perspective. You can almost hear the can cracking open as you read these words. We want you to see that the gospel, the good news of Jesus’s saving death and life-giving resurrection, is the central fact, the most important part, of your life as a God-loving man or woman. The gospel saves us, remakes us, and helps us understand who we truly are and what we are called to be for God’s glory and our joy.

The gospel is what frees us from our sin. The gospel is what allows us to live to the full, our hearts soaring, our pulses pounding, our lives stretching before us, full of hope, full of meaning. With this in our minds, let’s now consider four ways that the gospel shapes us as men and women.

The Gospel Makes Sense of the Image of God

One of the foundational realities of human beings, men and women alike, is that we are made in the image of God. See Genesis 1:26–27, which reads:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

In other words, we’re created in a special way to display the full-orbed grandeur of our Creator. We do this by creating, by thinking, by taking dominion, and by enjoying relationships with one another.

But even this awe-inspiring theological truth can be a bit abstract, can’t it? What role, we might wonder, do our bodies have to play in being the image of God?

Before we’re converted, we understand that we are either male or female. That’s well and good. But it’s only when we’re saved by the grace of almighty God that we truly begin to grasp the meaning of our bodies, our sexuality. We are created as men or as women to inhabit our manhood and womanhood to the glory of our Maker. He did not make us all the same. He loves diversity. He revels in it. He created a world that pulses with difference, that explodes with color, that includes roaring waterfalls and self-inflating lizards and rapt, at-attention meerkats. But humankind, man and woman, is the pinnacle of his creation.

In Christ, we understand that our manhood or womanhood is not incidental. It’s not unimportant. It is the channel through which we will give God glory all our days. We have been put here to “image” God. After conversion, we understand that we’re here to give evidence of his greatness. We do that in substantial part by receiving our God-given sexuality as a gift. God created us as “male and female,” not as something else. The passage above states three separate times that God “created” the man and woman, stressing God’s role in making the man and woman his image bearers. There is intentionality, wisdom, and purpose in the creation of Adam and Eve, as the gospel frees us to see.

Simply receiving and reveling in this reality is a matter of worship. It’s not complicated, but it is profound. I am a man or a woman designed in just this way by God, we should think to ourselves as we consider the body given us from above. In the same way that the Grand Canyon was created to show God’s power, and the skies his handiwork, as a man or a woman I was formed to display the beauty of his brilliant design. In our fallenness, we’re tempted to think that we have no greater reason to live, and that we’re only “dust in the wind,” as the famous song says. In truth, we are diamonds in the wilderness. We’re no genetic accident, no freakish outcome of history. We’re the special creation of God.

You could sum these thoughts up like this: as believers, we’re not Christian Teletubbies. We’re not gospel blobs. We’re not the redeemed androgynous. We are gospel-captivated men and gospel-captivated women. When converted, we come to understand that our bodies are given us as vessels by which to put God’s wisdom and intelligence and love on display.

Whether single or married, whether young or old, we have been given our manhood or womanhood as a blessing. Our bodies, with their distinctive designs, tell us that there is an exhilarating intelligence, and a grander story, behind our frame and form.

The Gospel Gives Us Power over Our Natural Weaknesses

The gospel is our fundamental marker of identity. The work of Christ applied to our hearts is such an unstoppable, unopposable force that it refigures us entirely. It’s as if our old boundary markers have completely fallen away, as Paul says: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27–28). This text doesn’t mean that the gospel wipes out manhood and womanhood. It does mean that our fundamental reality in life is our identity in Jesus Christ.

This has immense practical value for us. As men and women, we might be tempted toward certain stereotypes. Some young men might think that being a man means bench-pressing 250 pounds, dunking a basketball, or fighting off bears with their bare hands in their spare time. (Actually, if you do that, you are pretty manly.) Some young women might think that being a woman means being sexually desirable, a lover of literature, and having a certain image. Both groups can know that we are easily tempted to find our manly and womanly identity in stereotypes. The gospel is bad news for our stereotypes. It tells us that men are self-sacrificial leaders, and that women are fearless followers of Christ.

We’re going to be pulled as men and women toward certain ungodly behaviors. Men today are told that they are idiots, little boys who never grow up. We see such immaturity in Adam’s initial failure to protect the woman God gave him. We also see his selfishness in his move to blame Eve for eating the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:1–7, 12). Men are tempted by an array of...