What God Wants for Women ~ Chapter Two

Chapter Two: What Does God Want for Women?

"Many women have done wonderful things,
   but you've outclassed them all!"
Charm can mislead and beauty soon fades.
   The woman to be admired and praised
   is the woman who lives in the Fear-of-God.
Give her everything she deserves!
   Festoon her life with praises!

Proverbs 31:30 – 31MSG

~ Visioneering WINGS

“With vision there is no room to be frightened. No reason for intimidation. It's time to march forward!”  Charles Swindoll

          Our culture asks “What do women want?”  Movies, magazines, designers, and men spend billions of dollars annually on researching, advertising, manufacturing, and buying every product imaginable to satisfy the needs of women.  WINGS, as a women’s mentoring ministry, wants to satisfy the true need of women.  We ask the question differently.  “What does God want for women?”

          Originally, WINGS meant only “Women In Need Growing Strong.”  However, as God has continued to develop the vision for this ministry, the emphasis has moved from need to potential.  Instead of developing a service to women, starting at the point of their self-esteem and their felt needs, based on a culture that has shaped them, WINGS looks at women through God-esteem: His view of and benchmarks for them.  WINGS is now - WINGS: Walk. Run. Soar!  It’s more about equipping and empowering women to rise to the expectations of the One who understands them best, loves them most and created them with unlimited potential.

          The Scriptural foundation-verse for the WINGS vision is Malachi 4:2 KJV:

“To you who fear My name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in His wings.                            And you will go forth and grow up...."

WINGS envisions every woman embracing hope, help, healing and habits for holy living, become a model, mentor and minister in the Kingdom of God.

In our brokenness, we worship our fears.  Not that we would admit to it, but a fear can become an idol, a god.  Think about how we obsess: the time, energy and emotion that is offered at the sacrificial altar of our fears. They are addictive - ruthless cycles of defeat.  Fear paralyzes.  The only way any woman will be able to embrace all that God has for her (hope, help, healing, and habits for holy living) and all that God want to do through her (model, mentor, and minister), is to have only the fear of One.  C.S. Lewis said, "He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other."

All other fears must be released to the only One for whom she need have a healthy and proper, respect, reverence, awe, or fear.  It’s like teaching a child the right fear of electricity.  Utilized, channeled, appropriated in correct ways and proportions, electricity can be a friend, a comfort, even a life-saver.  So it is with “the fear of the Lord.” (Apdx. FOTL)

          The sun rises and sets on those who chose One God, One fear.  Malachi 4:2 is a beautiful picture of God rescuing, restoring, and releasing us through His healing power, when we choose to worship Him above all.  Again we see the power of this Graceful Deliverer swooping down, scooping up, then gently nudging us to go when it’s the right time.

~Raising The Bar

“Treat a woman as she is, she will remain so. Treat a woman the way she can be and ought to be, and she will become as she can be and should be." Goethe

          The last part of Malachi 4:2, the WINGS vision verse: “And you will go forth and grow up,” is where God sets the bar.  GO and GROW.  Simple to see and say.  Harder to do.  What keeps a woman from going and growing?  The “lid” that has prevented her from “going forth and growing up” is fear.

Once that lid is raised, by fearing only His name, healing from “the Sun of Righteousness” will shine upon  her.  Going and growing be an automatic outflow.

          So how do we know when we get there - where we’re supposed to be “going?”  How do know when we’ve “grown” enough?  It’s a life-long process, but it does not just happen, by default.  God wants our lives to grow by His design.

Ephesians 4:11-16, NLT, says:

“Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people:

to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.

Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth.

Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.”

Again, these are lofty standards, high requirements, to be a “GOing and GROWing” woman of God. Raise the bar because God is calling us to forge the way upward.  In Ephesians 4:11 – 16, God put the weight of the responsibility of growing believing women on the shoulders of the leaders.  If a ministry, such as WINGS, fulfills its’ calling, God can use it to produce fruit, in the individual women who receive lifecoaching, and in women’s ministry groups, that are equipped to grow women God’s way.

The vision God has given, for the WINGS is to show how hope, help, healing, and habits for holy living, are do-able, within the reach of any woman.  Why would God ask something of us that is impossible?  The answer is, “He doesn’t!”  He doesn’t dangle the carrot out in front of us and then yank it back further when we’re almost there, so that we’re always discouraged and never succeeding.  However, God does want us to be progressing forward in our journey of faith.  He wants us moving toward Christ-likeness in greater measures every day, month and year.                                             

·         “God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.” Ephesians 3:20 MSG

·         “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.” 2 Corinthians 9:8NIV

·         “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good  things he planned for us long ago.” Ephesians 2:10NLT

~A Mentoring Culture

“The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.”     Denis Waitley

Jesus created His Body or The Church to be a mentoring culture, where there is vulnerability and trust, where the truth is spoken in love(Eph. 4:15).  Later, the Apostle Paul, in the second chapter of his letter to Titus, gave an explicit directive to grow believers in a mentoring culture:

“Older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience; the older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things— that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.” Titus 2:2 – 4

We all learn better or more easily if we can hear someone say it, see someone do it, and then try it ourselves.  Our “growing” spiritually and emotionally may happen in a professional lifecoaching partnership or within a trained volunteer mentor and mentee relationship. However, the most effective mentoring culture is established in the life-on-life, hands-on method of Titus chapter two.  Whether,  within a small group, or one-on-one, God intends His family to be an incubator.

 

After asking a friend if she and her husband had some goals for their life together, she said, “Yes, we have some goals.  We want to go to _________ for our next wedding anniversary.  Then we want to go to ____________ in another five years.”  I ask if they had any strategies or an action plan to achieve these goals.  “No,” she said.  I felt like the bearer of bad news, but I had to tell her what she was calling goals, were really only dreams.  She humbly agreed.

Dreams are a wonderful thing to have and one may get there by default.  However, God has provided numerous resources for women to partner with Him.   Every day can be an incremental victory that brings them closer to Christ-likeness and their God-given potential. 

WINGS: Walk. Run. Soar! is about LifeByDesign.  The masterpiece (Eph. 2:10), that God is making out of every woman’s life, is fleshed out in daily themes to guide her.  LifeCore, LifePlan, LifeRythym, and LifeSkill are each a piece to the puzzle that will equip and empower a woman to define, believe, and achieve.

LifeByDesign: Tranformational living that fulfills a woman’s God-given potential.

LifeCore: Foundational beliefs that direct a woman’s choices, thinking, and actions.

LifePlan: Biblical purposes that form God’s will for a woman’s life.

LifeRythym: Intentional practices that create an ebb and flow in a woman’s daily journey.

LifeSkill: Practical tools that assist the development of a woman’s outcome.

"The Author of nature appears deliberate through His operations, accomplishing His natural ends by slow successive steps." Bishop Joseph Bulter