Cheryl

Thatmom,

Thanks for the link to your blog and your audio files. I would encourage those who post here to interact over there as well. I will have to carve out some time to listen to the audio myself.

The link you gave for kinism was alarming. I won’t delete the link because I believe in allowing people to check things out for themselves. I just hope that they don’t somehow find their way to this blog ;-] I don’t think they would like us very much.

Yes, you are right in that the church took a while to deal with the Jew and Greek part and then a great deal of time to deal with the slavery issue (slave and free). It appears that the hardest of all is the male and female part. I have often pondered why this is. In one of my bible study groups where I taught scripture to ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses, I asked this one question of the group and one young man piped up that the reason is because inside the male is the drive to dominate everything in sight. When we given women freedom in Christ, many men will see this as a threat because women have been seen as an easy target, ones that they can dominate and rule. When you try to take away a man’s kingdom, he will fight you rather than lose control. Now I can’t say that all men have this inside them or even that all men have the potential to be despots, but there are enough of them defending their kingdom to know that this is a problem area. For many of them there is a payout in feeling like they are the king of the castle. They are not about to share. Sometimes I also wonder if these Christian men only knew how much better it would be for them to have the load shared and to have someone they can trust working alongside them, they would not fight their sisters to stop them from using their God-given gifts for the benefit of men.

The other thing I think about is, how much of this struggle between men and women is not of human origin? After sin happened in the world God said that he would initiate an emnity between the serpent and the woman and between his seed and her seed. Is this struggle between men and women part of the struggle between the woman and the serpent? If I look at it this way, then I can have a more compassionate view of my brothers in Christ. They are not the enemy at all. They have been influenced by the enemy to hold back part of the body of Christ, but they are not the enemy. I think it is much more helpful for me to pray for these men and ask God to remove the blinders off their eyes, then for me to be hurt and insulted by those who are deceived. I need to be mad at the deceiver and love my brothers in Christ with a true love and true passion because they too belong to the Lord Jesus. I just so wish that we were at the end of the journey of the Church so that we were without spot and wrinkle and without shame so that we are all ready for Christ’s return. The more we work shoulder to shoulder with the entire church, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, the more we are in the very image of Christ who died for all of us and knit us together into only one body.