Women Energized by Grace ...Continued from page 7

So the older-in-the-faith, godly women of the church were:
• to behave like holy priestesses of the Almighty God,
• showing restraint and discipline of appetites and words,
• living what they speak so that the younger women want to learn from them how to live and please God in their lives and families.

So what was their very first lesson? Training younger women in loving their own husbands!

Godly women Living as a Priest for God; with Guarded Tongues; and No Excesses; with Visible Integrity; as Earnest Mentors of--

v. 4b “the young women to love their husbands” (6) Wives who are their Husbands Best Friend

A Christian home in a pagan culture was a radically new thing.

Young women saved out of paganism needed to get accustomed to a whole new set of priorities and privileges; and those who had unsaved husbands would need special encouragement.

The Titus Two Models had the responsibility of training the younger women how to be successful wives, mothers, and housekeepers; and the younger women had the responsibility of listening and obeying.

Among the Bible believing women of the first century there was a big challenge in “loving” their husbands. For various reasons and in various degrees those women found themselves with either minimal or no “feelings of love” for their husbands. Believing wives almost always want to obey the Lord, thus they submit and fulfill their responsibilities to their husbands?but often only dutifully and not lovingly. It’s not just that loving your husband is a virtue, Paul says that not loving him in a way that he can feel?is a sin!

In Paul’s day, men and women were saved out of a culture where romantic love usually did not exist in marriages. Wives were only seen as the trusted keepers of the home and bearers of the children. Emotional love, psychological needs, and sexual desires were satisfied outside of marriage by most husbands. The opportunities for illicit sex in the Roman world were endless. For most women this was in some ways a relief as they did not have to “perform” sexually on a regular basis for their husbands. But the emotional super-glue that the marital relationship produces was thus absent. Salvation stopped the immorality in most believing men’s lives back then?but salvation did not make them or their wives instantly close, intimate, and life-sharing friends and lovers.

Just as modern pre-marital moral laxity has scarred many young couples into a troubled, often superficial marital relationship, so were most of the marriages of the New Testament church. What was Paul’s Spirit prompted answer? What was to be the way to solve the distant, detached, and constantly tempted husband daily buffeted with the overpowering allurements of the flagrantly immoral Roman culture?

Christ led Paul to deploy a legion of older-in-the-faith, godly women to go from house to house, become a close and trusted friend of those young wives?and train them in how to become their husbands best, closest, dearest, and most-intimate friends.