(This sermon was preached on Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 11, 2008 at Boone’s Creek Baptist Church, Lexington, KY. To listen to the entire sermon, click here. To listen to other sermons, click on http://www.matt-perry.net/sermons.)
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled (Titus 2:3-5).
Those of you who are around me anytime at all realize my love for the country of Trinidad & Tobago. My heart aches especially for the pastors down there who have very little training on how to minister to their people and what training they do have comes from some very problematic sources.
What I noticed at the church at Mt. Beulah where we ministered previously was a row of elderly women who sat in very special seats up front. At first, I just thought it was how they were arranged, but then I noticed that for each of those women, Roddie Taylor addressed them as “Mother.” “Mother Jones, Mother Taylor, etc.” At the church in Siparia, these women sat in more prominent seats: right up next to the stairs. These women were the seasoned saints of the church who had poured their lives into that church for decades. They held a place of honor and influence for the things of God.
Although it’s been 18 months since I’ve been there, this fact ran across my mind given that Mother’s Day was approaching. I confess that I really debated on what to preach. While many may look on this day with much affection, for some this day is more difficult that one could realize for many different reasons.
I would like to use this day as an opportunity to address another difficulty that many churches deal with: what role do women play in the church? In a country where women have only been able to vote only since 1920, in a country where many TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s portrayed women as bubbleheaded ditzes, in a culture where the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s moved the long-established cultural lines of role of men and women— the churches came along and reacted one of two ways. One way was to go along with the culture and move the lines of the role of genders where the culture did. Another way was to overreact and move the lines even further than what was before. As a result, whether the churches were liberal or fundamentalist, the lines were ones that suited them but weren’t necessarily what the Bible spoke on.
My desire is that every single woman in this church would be a Titus 2 Woman. A Titus 2 Woman embraces the role God has established that complements other areas of life and ministry in the church. Also, a Titus 2 Woman takes time to invest not just in its own generation but in the generations that have gone before as well as the ones coming up. A Titus 2 Woman is not ashamed of God nor His Word. So let’s see what God has in store for us this morning.
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