As discussion about women in the church lingers online and in the minds of congregants, I wonder if some sisters today feel that their churches debate their proper callings more than they delight in them as one of God’s best gifts. The conversations about what women can and cannot do in the context of the church are poignant in this particular moment. Can they preach, teach, or lead a co-ed Bible study? These conversations matter because the Scriptures speak to them. Yet the church’s public discourse about women, when healthy, is marked most of all by celebrations of women as faithful saints.

Women across continents and denominations report their local-church participation often leaves them feeling overlooked and undervalued. What a sad reality that our mothers and daughters often feel that Christ’s very own bride holds them at arm’s length, even if unintentionally.

We are right to aim for theological precision in all matters, including the callings of men and women in the church. But we would also do well to ask, Does the way we talk about women reflect the way the Scriptures celebrate them?

Introducing Eve

Recall man’s first words in Scripture. After God created the world and everything in it, the narrative sings with the rhythm, “And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). But then suddenly, God declares, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). And so, God makes the woman — the helper fit for the man. And as a father would usher the bride to her expectant husband, so God “brought [the woman] to the man” (Genesis 2:22).

“Remarkably, the first words a woman heard from a man announced the joy he took in her being.”

What follows are the first recorded sentences from human lips in Scripture. Upon seeing the woman, Adam explodes with delight: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man” (Genesis 2:23). Remarkably, the first words a woman heard from a man announced the joy he took in her being.

At that moment, the woman hadn’t yet done anything except exist by the power of God. Yet her very existence leads Adam to rejoice. Without any further instruction, he understands that the woman is an extraordinary gift to him. He had known life in God’s world apart from her, and, once with her, he immediately loves her and knows how essential she is to God’s mandate that humans should take dominion and multiply (Genesis 1:28).

Without Eve, Adam cannot fulfill God’s calling. Without the woman, the story stops. In the very good beginning, God puts his wisdom on magnificent display in her creation. And as the story of the world progresses, God puts front and center the essential part women will play in his redemptive plan.

Book of Heroines

The Scriptures brim with narratives that underscore the essential and exalted place women hold in God’s economy. From Rebekah, whose Abraham-like faith compelled her to leave her home for a place and people she did not know (Genesis 24), to Ruth the Moabite widow, whose conversion to Yahweh led her to become part of the Messianic line, the Bible’s story cannot be told apart from the lives of faithful women.

In the ancient world, women were far more vulnerable than today, in part because they did not enjoy the same legal rights as men. Yet in that very context, Scripture celebrates women by repeatedly placing them in the stream of God’s redemptive plan, where their fidelity to God often throws into relief the disobedience of fallen men. We know many of their names: Sarah, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Esther, Elizabeth, and Priscilla. Four women even appear in Christ’s genealogy, including Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary (Matthew 1:5–16).

“The Bible’s story cannot be told apart from the lives of faithful women.”

Yet there are many others whose names are known only to God: women who received back their dead by resurrection (Hebrews 11:35); the widow of Zarepath, whose son was raised (1 Kings 17:17–24); the industrious godly woman extolled in Proverbs 31; the widow who offered everything (Mark 12:41–44); the sinful woman whose lavish care for Jesus in washing his feet with tears exposed the hypocrisy of the religious elite (Luke 7:36–50); and the Canaanite woman whose faith was answered with her daughter’s healing (Matthew 15:21–28).

Great Commission Women

Unbridled faith in God marks all of these accounts, and continues to encourage believers today. You can’t read your Bible without discerning the honored role God assigns women at every point in his story. Just as God gave Adam a mandate to multiply on the earth, so God gave the church a mission to multiply disciples. And so, just as Adam marveled at God’s creation of the woman, so the Bible teaches us to glorify God for the incredible gift of women who are in Christ.

Our sisters have been wonderfully indispensable to the church’s work of bearing witness to Christ and making disciples. God used Priscilla to sharpen and instruct the preacher Apollos in the way of God (Acts 18:24–26). Apart from the fervent prayers and godly life of Monica, the church may not enjoy the treasures of her son, Augustine.

Who can know how much eternal fruit the sacrificial labors of Lottie Moon and Gladys Aylward bore through their long ministries in China? Or through Amy Carmichael’s lifelong ministry in India?

Of course, we don’t just praise the Christian sisters whom we know by name. There are countless names we have not yet heard whom we will honor in the age to come. They are steadfast mothers and wives who pray down heaven while giving themselves to their family from dawn to dusk and even through the darkest nights. They are single women who joyfully content themselves in God while the world constantly tempts them to believe their faith is folly. My own experience living overseas testifies to the truth that far more young unmarried women cross oceans and borders for the sake of the gospel than men.

Honoring the Women Among Us

In the church, as in the garden, it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). In a day in which popular culture has muddled the lines between men and women, Christian men today have an opportunity to give fresh evidence for how much we admire women and value womanhood. Created in God’s wisdom and by his power, the church’s mothers and daughters are not second-class citizens in the church.

God presented the first woman to the first man as a gift, and he continues giving women as blessings to his church today. And just as the woman knew the man’s joy in her immediately, so too it would be fitting for Christian women to regularly hear how much of an asset they are to the church, both locally and globally. Adam could not multiply and take dominion without the woman (Genesis 1:28). And without Christian women, we the church will not be able to fulfill our mission to bear witness and make disciples (Matthew 28:18–20). The whole of the Scriptures and church history bear witness to this fact.

Every day, women advance the mission of the church by demonstrating the matchless worth of Christ. We cannot afford to overlook these sisters in Christ — neither the God of history nor God-in-the-flesh overlooks them.

Audio Transcript

On Monday, we celebrated the glorious depths of Hebrews 10:19–20. We now have “confidence to enter the holy places” — we go right into the presence of God — “by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.” And that means, according to verse 22, we should now “draw near [to God] with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” It’s an incredible invitation.

And as Pastor John said on Monday’s episode, we cannot repeat these claims too often — that all our communion with God is done by direct access to him, an access that Christ purchased for us through his torn body, torn like the temple curtain from top to bottom. Thus, we pray directly to God. Christ is our mediator, our only mediator. Our prayers don’t require angels, or priests, or saints, or even Mary or Hail Marys. For your prayers to be heard, you don’t have to be on your knees or inside a cathedral or at a temple or near a holy shrine or even standing at a holy place in the Holy Land. We need none of that to draw near to God.

The entire book of Hebrews is given to us to celebrate this new access that we have been given to God through Christ. There, the phrase “draw near” is used over and over. “Draw near” is actually one Greek word — proserchomai — and that word appears seven times throughout the book of Hebrews (4:16; 7:19, 25; 10:1, 22, 25; 11:6). It’s a profound word, as Pastor John explains in this 1997 sermon clip.

This word “draw near” is a favorite word in Hebrews. In fact, I would argue that almost (maybe not quite) the main point of the writing of the book of Hebrews is this word, to help you draw near to God without being consumed by his wrath as a sinner, and without being hindered by an evil conscience and a sense of unworthiness.

Draw Near to What?

So to answer the question “Draw near to what?” he uses the word seven times. Let’s just look at one or two of the others. One is Hebrews 4:16, where he says, “Let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace.” So that’s what he’s talking about here — the throne of grace, God’s throne. Or go to Hebrews 7:25, where he says, “He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him.” So we’re drawing near to God, drawing near to the throne of grace, and if you go to Hebrews 11:6, it says, “He who draws near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” You have three ways of saying it now: (1) Draw near to a throne of grace. (2) Draw near to God. (3) Draw near to a rewarder.

“We have access to, and we’re to come boldly into, that holy place to meet with God.”

If you come back to the text then and say, “Yes, but is that what is meant here?” wouldn’t it be confirmed by looking at Hebrews 10:19, where it says that “we have confidence to enter the holy places”? You know the image if you’ve been here for a few weeks. You know that the image of the tabernacle in the Old Testament — with its court and then its inner sanctuary and then its most holy place, where God met once a year with the high priest and the glory came down — that’s the word here. We have access to, and we’re to come boldly into, that holy place to meet with God. So the answer to the first question, “Draw near to whom?” is God. God, the gracious king on his throne. God, the bountiful rewarder with his hands full of blessing. “Draw near — draw near to me,” he says.

How We Draw Near

Here’s the second question: Which direction do you head when you’re doing this? Do you go west, east, north, south, altar, knees, to an enemy to get reconciled? The answer is you don’t move a muscle. You don’t move the muscle of your tongue. This is a spiritual act, not a physical one. When he says, “Draw near to God, draw near to the throne, draw near to the rewarder,” it is something you can do standing rock solid. It is something you can do flat on your back in a hospital bed, and it is something that you can do sitting in a church on a Sunday morning at 11:12 listening to a sermon. And I plead with you right now, in the name of Jesus, to do it. You do not have to wait until this sermon is over — to go home and get on your knees, or to get in a quiet place somewhere after this church service — to do this. This is something that I commend for the doing of right now.

By saying in your heart, mind, will, with eyes open or eyes closed, “God, I come. I draw near. I want to listen to the rest of this sermon in your presence. I want a hand on my shoulder. I want a hand of blessing on my head. I want support under my back. I want the priest at your right hand cleansing my heart. I don’t want to go through the rest of this service right now distant from you like I felt when I walked into this room.” You don’t need to bow one millimeter to do that. Beware, lest you think coming to God is coming to church. Beware, lest you think coming to God is coming to an altar. Beware, lest you think it’s going to small group tonight. It might be all of those and it might not be. It is a spiritual act of the heart, without a motion of a muscle.

Heart of Christianity

When I think about this and meditate on this central command in Hebrews, repeated seven times, I was struck this week how this is the center of the gospel. This is the New Testament. This is Christianity. Just think about this for a moment. What is the heart of Christianity? What’s the essential message? So if somebody at work this week says, “You’re one of those born-again-type, Baptist-type, Christian-type, evangelical-type people. What’s that?” If you wanted to start at the center, what would you say? Take a few verses.

Take 1 Peter 2:24; 3:18: “[Christ] bore our sins in his body on the tree . . . that he might bring us to God.” Is that drawing near? That’s the gospel. Or take Ephesians 2:18: “Through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” That’s the gospel. Or take Romans 5:11: “We rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” — home with God, no longer estranged or enemies.

Or take the prodigal son. Almost everybody knows the story of the prodigal son, but not everybody remembers the context of the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15, which begins with Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners (the bad people) and the Pharisees saying, “Why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

“Draw near to God by the blood. Draw near to God through the flesh. Draw near to me.”

Jesus says, “Let me tell you a story. There was a woman who lost a coin. There was a man, a shepherd, who lost a sheep. There was a father who lost a son. And when he took his inheritance and became dissolute and got tired of eating pig food in the world, he remembered there was food. ‘Ho, everyone who thirsts, come.’ And he headed home. And this father, old and dignified, pulled up his robes between his legs when he saw this dirty, rascally, no good, inheritance-wasting son coming home, and ran into his arms and kissed him and put a robe on him and a ring on his finger and killed the fatted calf and threw a party and said, ‘My son who was dead is alive.’ That’s why I’m eating with tax collectors and sinners. That’s the meaning of my ministry. That’s why I came, to open a way home to the Father. Draw near.”

Would you agree with me, I wonder? Are we at the center of the gospel here? Draw near to God by the blood. Draw near to God through the flesh. Draw near to me. The whole point of Christianity is to look upon a lost world moving in the opposite direction, toward destruction, and to stop them and say, “God has made a way home.”

Several months into a new executive administration, how might we describe the state of affairs when it comes to abortion in America?

Grievous would not be too strong a word. Distressing and outrageous also describe my response to the renewed efforts to enshrine abortion as health care, turn it into a super-spreader event worldwide, and purge dissenters working within the U.S. government who think it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. But though God can, without sin, “let loose . . . his burning anger, wrath, indignation, and distress” (Psalm 78:49), I cannot. So, what follows is a brief state of the union for abortion that should fuel our first and best response: prayer.

For thirty years, from Boston to Beijing, I’ve done my best to respond to the shedding of innocent blood with prayerful actions. I’ve now worked in seventeen countries where abortion is most concentrated, prayerfully training pastors in pro-life ethics and their churches in pregnancy crisis intervention. But I also set aside time every week to pray with others for the end of abortion.

Why? Because some evils are so profoundly demonic in their power structure that they will not be cast out without prayer. Child-killing is one of those evils. It’s not merely a failure to maintain the human rights of the defenseless (Psalm 82:3–4). Nor is it simply an exercise in personal autonomy. It’s unrealized demonic servitude. The psalmist says, “They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters . . . and the land was polluted with blood” (Psalm 106:37–38). Certainly we must do more than pray. But let us not delude ourselves about what we are truly up against.

Affordable ‘Health Care’

According to the White House Fact Sheet of June 30, 2021, “The Biden Administration is committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in the U.S. and around the world. Everyone should have access to quality, affordable health care.”

“Affordable health care” is government-speak for “easy abortion.” Through executive memorandums and policy directives, Biden is removing the restrictions on U.S. and globalist organizations promoting abortion worldwide.

Biden has committed to “remove, as part of the President’s first budget, the Hyde Amendment restriction from government spending bills, reflecting the President’s support for expanding access to health care, including reproductive health care, through Medicaid and other federally-funded programs.”

The Hyde Amendment, implemented in 1980, has for forty years been the one point of conciliation between abortion advocates and pro-life taxpayers — that which is justified as a private choice, let’s agree, ought not to be paid for with public dollars.

Ending the Hyde Amendment forces all of us to pay for anyone’s abortion. It will not only lead to more abortion; it will further delegitimize dissent, religious liberty, and conscience clauses, along with emboldening the de-platforming and de-monetizing of those who dare to disagree.

Abortion by Mail

Besides removing abortion restrictions, this administration is increasing abortion funding. Domestically, its budget calls for a massive infusion of tax dollars into the Title X family planning, providing $340 million for Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. Internationally, he proposes a 72 percent increase in funding, or $583.7 million for the United Nations Population Fund.

“‘Affordable health care’ is government-speak for ‘easy abortion.’”

The United Nations Population Fund euphemistically calls itself a “sexual and reproductive health agency.” What they are is a missions organization. Within their worldview, population is the sin problem. Poor countries like Uganda, Ghana, El Salvador, and Guatemala, which still legally protect their unborn children, are the mission field. Abortion, contraception, and sterilization is the plan of salvation.

Relaxing enforcement of safety protocols is the opposite of “health care for women.” Yet this spring, the Food and Drug Administration officially suspended enforcement of the in-person requirement for chemical abortion pills. Abortion by mail is now permitted. Multiple studies, including that of Dr. Donna Harrison, covering a twenty-year-long period, report that complications are four times more frequent in chemical abortions compared to surgical abortions. Adverse events include hemorrhage, infections, and trauma from a woman’s seeing her own unborn child expelled.

In April, the National Institutes of Health removed the restrictions imposed on research using fetal stem cells under the previous administration. In May, the International Society for Stem Cell Research ended its long-standing rule that limited experimentation on human embryos to the first fourteen days of creation. This makes human embryos akin to lab rats. As the Lozier Institute writes, “The removal of the 14-day limit shows their real goal: unlimited human experimentation, making human embryos into disposable laboratory supplies.” In June, Democratic lawmakers introduced the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which, if passed and signed by the president, would nullify all state abortion regulations.

Some Light in the Darkness

At the same time, American citizens at the state level are rushing to the defense of the unborn. In the first five months of 2021, 48 U.S. state legislatures advanced approximately 489 pro-life bills. As of the end of May, 89 new pro-life bills from 26 states had been enacted. Some, like the Arkansas bill signed this spring, ban almost all abortions. Other states have banned abortion after twelve weeks gestation, sex-selective abortion, and abortion due to prenatal disability diagnosis.

At the local level, Lubbock, Texas, is now one of 36 cities that have outlawed abortion within their city limits and declared themselves a Sanctuary City for the Unborn. Their local Planned Parenthood was forced to stop aborting babies on June 1 when this local law went into effect.

Hanging over all of this, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) agreed this spring to take up the biggest abortion case in thirty years. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court will answer “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”

Judicial analyst Bruce Hausknecht writes,

The 1973 Roe decision, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, created artificial “trimester” rules for regulating abortion based on the concept of “viability,” the time at which a preborn baby was generally thought to be able to survive, with medical help, outside the womb. . . . Advances in medical technology have lowered the age of viability. By the time of the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, for example, the age of viability had decreased from 28 weeks to around 23 to 24 weeks. Recently, a Wisconsin child celebrated his first birthday after a premature birth at 21 weeks, 2 days gestation.

What Can We Do?

How then should we respond to the new administration unleashing its power to promote mass child-killing at home and abroad? We pray that God would grant our president a spirit of repentance, as he did to us. And we pray God would restrain him and frustrate his plans.

“Some evils are so profoundly demonic in their power structure that they will not be cast out without prayer.”

I pray for our nation as a grieving patriot. I don’t put much stock in SCOTUS having the moral courage to follow the Constitution as written. As Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch wrote to the Court last month, “Nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion.” The stronghold of abortion is not in the text. It’s in the human heart and in the fear of man. That’s what drives me to pray.

In 1896, SCOTUS ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial discrimination laws were constitutional. It was a cowardly decision that played to the powerful forces within the culture of the time, not to the text of the constitution. It took 58 years for SCOTUS to find the courage in Brown v. Board of Education to say, “No more! The 14th amendment calls for equal protection of all persons.” I pray we can witness such a declaration in our time.

As the church, we must not be afraid to suffer the hostility that would come if we lived out our faith like the midwives of Egypt. To those dear sisters, suffering many injustices themselves, child-killing was the hill to die on. They “feared God” (Exodus 1:17) and so protected their babies from slaughter. When pressured by Pharoah himself, they still refused to conform (Exodus 1:18–19).

In return, God favored them (Exodus 1:20). Why? For rescuing the babies from slaughter? Not exactly. Rather, “because the midwives feared God, he gave them families” (Exodus 1:21). In other words, God rewarded their faith in him, which was expressed in their bold, pro-life actions.