Women Rise: The World Is Waiting for Your Voice

Relevant Magazine yesterday posted, male authors are read more often than women..even by women themselves.  Another article talks about a group of abortion advocates pushing to “have the right” to a late term injection into the hearts of their pre-born, nine-month-old infants. Yet, our God given purpose was to reproduce.  Still, sex-slave trade permeates the internet. How do we free these children?  How possibly do we rescue these girls from such horrific victimization?

And don’t we all get that there are justice issues in the world today, needing a remedy?  Yet. more and more I am finding an oppression and silencing of women in our society.

For a year we cared for a girl in our home who had been literally caged and handcuffed by her perpetrator.  In case your wondering, I live in sub-urban, middle class America.

Crime happens every day all around us.  Injustices, abuse, oppression, and intolerable offenses.  Just because we choose not to see them, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

And I want to do something about it, don’t you?

But still, as Christian women, somewhere along the way we can have a kind of learned helplessness, a victimization mentality, a barely-getting-by thought process, hindering us from doing all God has prompted us to pursue in this life.

We may point to society, men, government, or our lack of opportunity.  We may even blame other women…which is the saddest of all accusations.  But they are often not our problem.

If we are honest with ourselves and other people, it is often ourselves and our view of us as women that keep us standing in the gate and never running the race called out for us…

Mistakenly letting passions, well-intended compassion, spirituality, intuition, or our unpredictable fluctuating emotions lead us…instead of Christ.

Our voices, the works of our hands, humanitarian efforts, and even religious “works” will die, with time.  But God’s fruit built on the foundation of relationship with Him never ends.  What He establishes will carry on, even after we have passed.  And I want a legacy, not just a feel good, try hard, self-promoting “be somebody” mentality…don’t you!

So, let’s get our theology straight. The women remembered in the Bible are not those who bowed low for others to walk on them.  Women of the Bible were strong, confident, not flighty, emotion-led, fickle, or irresponsible.

• Rahab was a prostitute (much like those trapped in the sex industry today), yet she didn’t sit like a victim in her situation…waiting for the police to bust down and take her from her situation.  She empowered herself by clinging to God’s truth.  She believed and had faith, when everything she saw around her told her not to.  She trusted God, after learning no one else in the world could be fully trusted.  She used wisdom and opportunity to flea the oppression when opportunity gave her hope to win her own freedom.
• Bethsheba was a sinner. An adulterous who flaunted herself on the rooftop, using her body like an ornament. However, although she could have been scarred and marked for eternity by her sins…God redeemed her as she humbly repented, letting God change the course of her history eventually through her son, King Solomon.
• Ruth was a women scorn.  Her husband and all the resources she had, died and were gone.  Yet, Ruth didn’t give up, weeping and mourning her life away.  She rose and turned her eyes to care for Naomi.  And out of faithfulness and selflessness, God redeemed all that had been stolen.
• Esther was an orphan.  She had no great lineage, or wonderful heritage to justify any self-importance.  She had no prestige or influence…just an uncle named Mordeci to care for her. Yet, she was given opportunity, and took it.  Even more important, when she could have saved herself by being silent about her Jewish heritage, she didn’t. Live or die, she humbly admitted who she was, and committed herself to being a voice of influence to her people. She clearly loved others and God above herself.  She was brave and fearless, confronting the king on her peoples behalf.
• Deborah was “just a women” as many might say in her time. Yet she was filled with wisdom and used it to sit under a tree giving counsel to God’s people. In a day where men might have questioned her, she was esteemed as “The Fourth Judge” of pre-monarch Israel.  More amazingly, she willingly went to physical battle. A women warrior…imagine that in the Old Testament. She could have hid from the challenge, or claimed “I can’t, I am only a women”…but she didn’t.  Instead, she choose to walk in her God-given destiny instead of cowering to society, culture, or her community that might have limited her from doing what God created her for.
• Photini, or the woman living in sin at the well, went from nearly a half of dozen divorces (as we might call them today) to being an on-fire evangelist. In a day where we still see women’s voices quietly submitting to male-dominance…nothing seemed to hold Photini back.  She saw God, and she wanted nothing more than to share Him with those all around her. Imagine going from shame to preacher.  Lost, broken, isolated, rejected….to beautiful, glowing, the one chosen out of her entire city of “good people” by God to preach His goodness.

I could go on and on, but please, pick up your Bible and read about these women for yourself.  Don’t trust the world around you to tell you how to behave or what you are or aren’t capable of doing.  God’s word is right before us, giving us accurate models of what God-women really look like.

As we finish up #riskrejection from Amy this week. (Find more about it here), here are some women who I respect greatly for not only talking about what they want to do, but pursuing their God-given callings and convictions.

• Naghmeh Abedini. He husband, an American Christian pastor, has been illegally imprisoned in Iran for over a year. Yet, she didn’t sit at home and weep and mourn for the sadness of it all. Instead she humbly asked God what he wanted her to do.  She is now a world recognized mouthpiece, speaking to the U.N., Iran, and the American Congress to advocate for her husband and other persecuted prisoners. (Naghmeh on Twitter)
• Meet Alene –  She is a lady with a mission to help stop the sex slave trade.  She could have sat back, had sympathy, or simply thrown money at the problem (which never hurts).  But instead she chose to go into the streets and literally touch and help to redeem the women lost in a world of darkness. How can you not admire her bravery?
• Jen is not your average, every-day kind of girl.  She is not content to be silent, or passive, or apathetic.  Her life has been wrecked by her husbands pornography addiction.  And now, she is refusing to tuck this ever-increasing problem in our society away.  Jen is standing brave and writing a book with her husband to help other families struggling with this very real and rampant addiction.  
• Amy Sullivan is a modern day power-house.  She not only called all us women to stand up, risk rejection, doing whatever is crying to be birthed inside of us….she is also modeling it in her own life as well.  Amy let the cause of the orphan move her until she had to do something.  She is getting licensed and in now on her way to being a foster parent.  (So glad you are joining the “help the orphan movement” Amy!)
• Lastly, meet Andrea. In a society screaming…Women need dictatorship and power, world-distributed authority and a rough exterior to “win”…she sought God and recognized that His authority is the only voice that really matters in the end.  Contradicting influence, worldly esteem, or even the ever-pervasive lure of money; Andrea decided to quit her job, stay home with her children, and focus more on doing the most influential job we ever have as a

  parent.

Women please get this…Brave is not just having a stage presence, being a well-known author, or being a God-sent voice for the persecuted church. (Though those are esteemed by God and ever so needed in today’s day and age)

Brave is about fearlessly pursuing the fullness of who God created you to be…whatever that is. 

Living as a Christian Woman in today’s society means that we lay all we are and all we aren’t at the feet of Jesus.

And as we grow strong in Biblical truth, humility, and wisdom, we carefully and continue to admit that we are and will never be anything without Him, like Bathsheba, Photini, and all the other women of the Bible did.

For it’s only by our confession of weakness, He gives us His power to unlock prisons, be a voice for the voiceless, confront sin directly, or be an advocate for the orphan.

As you still yourself and pray today, will you join the movement? Will you ask God how He wants you to rise up as a woman in today’s society…..not just in words, but in action?

How can you be a women who changes lives, lives bold, alive, and fearless in a day where the world might still be whispering the lie,

“Don’t. You can’t do anything. You are just a women.”  

For isn’t it time; the humble, Christ-centered, bold and biblically grounded women of God rise?

I think so.

(Linking with Barbie,Ann,On,In&Around, Michelle,Laura)