Reformed SHEology

Today's daily devotional from Elisabeth Elliot, simply titled, "Femininity," reads as follows: M y late philosopher-theologian husband used to tell his students that the importance of a thing was in direct ratio to the difficulty of defining it. Last year I asked my students in seminary to write a paper defining masculinity and femininity. They were allowed a maximum of two pages in which to do it, but I told them it would be fine with me if they could manage it in two sentences. (None did.) All of them testified that it was the most difficult assignment of the course. The difficulty has been exacerbated, I am convinced, by the so-called liberation movement, which starts from the premise that there are no distinctions between the sexes other than the purely biological. It seems a strangely naive and cramped view of the fundamental differentiation of our human existence, especially in this day when most physicians acknowledge that illnesses involve more than the body, wh

A Panel Discussion I f you're a married man, don't go anywhere. And ladies, stay where you are. This message applies to you as well. The title refers to perhaps one of the most eye-opening discussions on purity I've ever heard in my life: Sex and the Single Man , which took place at the 2004 Desiring God National Conference. No, I was not in attendance, but I listened to it online. And before reading any further, I highly encourage you to listen to this message now by clicking here . This was a panel discussion/lecture hosted by Mark Dever and it features some skilled marksmanship in being able to pinpoint our tendencies to be unholy with the opposite sex. While the message starts out talking about the obvious, ("Don't have sex until you are married,") it concludes by slaying the not-so-obvious sins, and I must confess, I was convicted. Some of the discussion in the not-so-obvious section includes how we have a tendency to put off marriage because for self-

I originally began this blog as a resource for women, but I've discovered I have a slight problem: women don't read my blog. After two months it appears that most of my readers are men. I sent my blog to all my female friends. I even sent the link to the list of women in a women's Bible study I belong to. None of these women have read my blog. In fact, I only know of one woman who reads my blog regularly, and actually enjoys it too. (At least, that's what she tells me.) So it leads me to wonder, where are all the women? First, I just want to say that I think it's really nice that so many men read this blog. It shows that men are concerned, or at least curious, about what goes on inside the mind of a woman. It shows that men are interested in what women think, in what they have to say, or how they perceive things. (Quite a contrast from what the feminist movement says about men, eh?) But what does it say about the women? I think it says that women are not intere

W hen I was growing up, several of my friends had favorite songs that were very special to them for various reasons. Some of these songs brought back fond memories. Others communicated how one was feeling when ordinary words would not suffice. But above and beyond all our favorite songs was the song we singled out as being our "theme song." A person's theme song captured the very essence of who that person was. Like my friends, I too had a "theme song," but I never admitted to it. The reason was my theme song was such an accurate description of what was going on inside my heart, to expose it to someone else would be far too intimate - and a betrayal to the song itself. There was one song that stood out to me above all others in its ability to perfectly diagnose the condition of my own humanity. Go ahead -- have a listen ( click here for the lyrics ): This is a song about willful isolation. And I would go so far as to say it is a song about sin. Some may sa