daughters of eve

chapter one

you can’t tell a woman anything

Here is something the world says about us, and I will not pretend it is never true. There is a joke, in a hundred forms, that you cannot tell a woman anything, that the moment you cross her with a hard word she will not hear it but will turn cold, or pout, or withhold, or punish, or sulk her way through the next three days until you are sorry you ever opened your mouth. We bristle at the joke. We are offended by it. And the offense at the joke is, very often, the very thing the joke was about.

Now I will be fair, for fairness is the whole business of this kind of writing, and the failing here is not ours alone. No one likes to be told they are wrong; it is a human thing and not only a woman’s thing, and a man has his own ugly version of it. Tell a man he is wrong and he will often flare into anger, or grow hard, or argue past all reason to keep from admitting it. So I am not saying the men have this mastered and the women have not. I am saying we tend to fail at it differently, and the way a woman fails at it is its own thing and worth naming. We do not usually shout. We withdraw. We go quiet and cold. We give the silent treatment and the wounded look and the punishing distance, and we call it being hurt when often it is simply being crossed.

We call it being hurt when often it is simply being crossed.

And here is the part that ought to sober us most, because it would be easy to read all this as a word about the women out there in the world. It is not. The women of the church do this every bit as much, in the Bible study and the small group and the pew, and when we do it we are, in that moment, acting far more like the daughters of Babylon than the daughters of Christ. For the world has trained women to treat their own offense as a trump card, to believe that having had their feelings wounded is the end of every argument, that no truth which stings can possibly be a truth they need. And a great many women in the church have swallowed that training whole and never once questioned it.

A woman who cannot be told anything has shut the door on the one thing she needs most in all the world.

So I will say it plainly: a woman who cannot be told anything has shut the door on the one thing she needs most in all the world. And we are going to spend these pages prying that door back open, not to shame you, but because there is a great deal of good waiting on the other side of it that you cannot have while it stays shut.

chapter two

feelings were never truth

To get to the root of why a hard word stings so badly that we cannot bear it, we have to dig down to a lie that has been laid in the foundations of nearly every modern woman: the lie that feelings are truth. That what I feel is, by the very fact that I feel it, true and weighty and not to be questioned. That if a thing hurt my feelings, the hurt itself has settled the matter, and the thing must therefore have been wrong.

This is one of the great lies of our age, and it is everywhere, and it is poison. For feelings are real, but a feeling is not a truth. The two are not the same thing at all. A thing may feel true and be a lie; a thing may feel cruel and be the kindest word anyone ever spoke to you. Your feelings are weather; the truth is the mountain, and the weather does not move the mountain however hard it blows. To live by the rule that what I feel is what is so is to be blown about by every wind, and to mistake my own shifting moods for the fixed and solid reality of God.

Your feelings are weather. The truth is the mountain, and the weather does not move the mountain however hard it blows.

“Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.”

– John 17:17

There is the anchor. The Word is truth, fixed and outside of us, and our feelings are to be measured against it, not the other way around. The world has it exactly backward; it tells you to look inward, to consult your feelings, to speak your truth as though you each had one of your own. But there are not many truths, one for you and one for me; there is the truth, God’s, one and the same for all of us, and we do not get to vote on it with our feelings.²

And I must draw one careful line here, lest I be misunderstood. There is a right kind of learning that changes your mind, when you simply did not know a thing and then you come to know it, and you say, ah, so that is how it really is. That is not what I am condemning; that is growth in the knowledge of the one real truth. What I am condemning is the notion that the feeling itself makes the reality, that because I felt wounded, a wrong must have been done to me. Those are two entirely different things, and until you can tell them apart, every hard word will land on you as an attack when it was meant to come as a gift. But once you have settled it, something wonderful happens: the hard word loses its power to devastate you, because it is no longer a verdict on your worth. It is only information, to be taken to the Word and weighed there. That is a far freer way to live than the one you were sold.

chapter three

the chastening of a good father

Correction is not what you have been taught to think it is, and once you see it rightly you will stop running from it as though it were your enemy, when in truth it is one of the surest signs that you are loved. We have been taught to hear every rebuke as rejection, every hard word as an assault on our worth. But the Scripture teaches us to hear it altogether differently.

“For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth… no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness.”

– Hebrews 12:6, 11

Read that and let it undo you a little. The chastening of the Lord is not the mark of His anger but of His love; He corrects the ones He receives as His own, as a good father corrects the child he delights in and would not leave to ruin. And notice that the Scripture freely admits the thing we are always trying to deny: that it does not feel good. No chastening seems joyous at the time, but grievous. It was never supposed to feel pleasant. The good of it is not in the feeling of the moment but in the fruit it yields afterward, the peaceable fruit of righteousness in those who have let themselves be trained by it. The wise have always known this; it is the fool, the book of Proverbs says, who hates reproof, and the wise who love it, who can be rebuked and grow rather than rebuked and rage.³

Think of how gold is refined, for the Scripture itself reaches for the picture. The gold is put into the fire, and the fire is not gentle, and the dross rises to the surface and is scraped away, and then it goes back into the fire again, and again, until the refiner can see his face in it. If the gold could feel, I do not think it would tell you the fire felt good; I think you would hear it cry out in the flames. Or think of the clay on the potter’s wheel, pressed and pushed and pummeled into a shape it did not choose; if the clay could feel, it would not call the potter’s hands a comfort. And yet the fire is making gold, and the hands are making a vessel, and neither the gold nor the clay is being harmed; they are being made into something glorious, by a process that does not feel like glory while it is happening.

The correction that stings is the fire and the wheel. It is not your Father’s cruelty. It is His love.

So it is with you under the hand of God. The correction that stings is the fire and the wheel, and it is not your Father’s cruelty; it is His love, refining a daughter He means to make beautiful. And here is the sweetness hidden in it: a man does not put worthless metal in the fire. He does not spend hours at the wheel over clay he means to throw away. The very fact that you are being worked on is the proof that you are His and that He has something in mind for you.

chapter four

strong enough to be told

So here is what I most want you to hear, and I want you to hear it as the strong word it is meant to be and not as a scolding: you are strong enough to handle this. You are. If you belong to Christ, then you are His child, and the Lord chastens every child He has, His daughters no less than His sons, which means He has already counted you strong enough to bear the correction He sends, or He would not send it. You were not handed a lesser, frailer version of the Christian life because you are a woman. You were given the same Father, the same Spirit, the same Word, and the same call to grow.

When a hard truth cuts against the grain in you, understand what it is cutting against. It is cutting against the old nature, the flesh, the sinful self that recoils from every correction because it wants to remain its own master. But you, if you are in Christ, have been given a new nature, and it is the new nature that can receive the hard word and grow by it. So the very fact that it cuts is not a sign that you cannot do this; it is only the old self resisting, and the new self in you is fully able to bear what the old self hates. The strength is not something you must manufacture out of your own willpower. It is the strength of the new nature God Himself has placed in you.

The very fact that it cuts is not a sign that you cannot do this. It is only the old self resisting.

And I want to take direct aim at a lie you have been fed your whole life, because it is sitting right in the middle of this. You have been told that woman is the soft and fragile sex, the delicate creature of feeling who must be handled gently and shielded from anything hard. That is a costume that was sewn for you only in the last few centuries, and it is not the truth of what a woman is. The Scripture’s own picture of the godly woman is not a wilting flower.

“Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.”

– Proverbs 31:10

That word translated virtuous is the Hebrew chayil, and you should know what it means, because it will change how you see her. It is a word of strength and might and valour, a war word, the very word used all through the Old Testament for mighty men of valour, for soldiers, for armies, for force. It is the language of the battlefield, not the parlour. The woman God holds up as the pattern is an eshet chayil, a woman of valour, and the verses that follow show it: she works and builds and provides and laughs at the days to come.⁴

It is the language of the battlefield, not the parlour.

She is no faint and trembling thing to be kept on a shelf. She is strong. And so are you, if you are hers in Christ, strong enough to be told the truth and to grow by it.

chapter five

a woman of valour

That woman of valour is worth staying with a moment longer, because she is one of the most misread passages in all the Bible, and the misreading of her does real harm to women, and I want to set it right. Here is how she is nearly always handled. The mothers claim her as the great mother, and point to her children rising up to call her blessed. The wives claim her as the great wife, and point to her husband who trusts in her. The working women claim her as the businesswoman, and point to how she considers a field and buys it and makes her merchandise and trades. And every one of them has grabbed a thread and missed the cloth. For her motherhood and her marriage and her industry are not the point of the passage; they are the details, the things she happened to do. They are where the real point showed itself, but they are not the point.

“Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.”

– Proverbs 31:30

Every one of those verses is fruit. The fear of the LORD is the tree.

There is the point, sitting right at the end where the whole portrait has been heading all along. She is, before she is anything else, a woman who fears the Lord, a woman surrendered to God. That is the root, and everything else, the considered field, the well-kept house, the trusting husband, the blessing children, flowed up out of that one root. She did all that she did well because she began from the right place, submitted to her God. Take away that root and you have only a checklist to measure yourself against and despair; keep the foundation, and you see that the whole secret of her was not her doing but her fearing the Lord, from which her doing came.⁵

And do not make her into an idol of perfection either, for she was never meant to be a burden laid on your back. There is an old question whether she was a real woman who lived and breathed or an inspired portrait of godly womanhood drawn in poetry, and the truth is we do not know, and it does not matter in the least. For whether she was one woman who lived, or a picture painted by the Spirit of what a God-fearing woman looks like, either way it is Scripture, breathed out by God and profitable for our growth, and the lesson is exactly the same.

So do not look at her and despair that you could never be so accomplished. Look at her and see the one thing that made her what she was, that she feared the Lord and gave herself to Him first, and know that this, the foundation, is a thing fully within your reach today, and that everything good in your own life will grow from the very same root or from none at all.

chapter six

take it to the word, not the room

Now to be very practical, for it is one thing to say we must receive correction and another to know what to do when it actually comes. And here is the rule, and it is a simple one: when a hard word comes to you, you do not simply swallow it whole, and you do not simply throw it off. You take it somewhere. You let the Word be the judge of it.

So when someone admonishes you, do not give them the cold shoulder and the wounded silence and the three days of punishment. Take it instead to the Lord. Pray over it honestly: Lord, am I wrong here? Is this a sin in me I have not seen? Is this an area You would have me grow? And then go to the Word and look, really look, with a heart willing to be shown. If the Word shows you that the correction was true, then receive it with thanks, however much it stings, and ask the Lord to grow you there, for you have just been handed a gift. But if you have prayed it through and searched the Scriptures and find that on this you are in fact following the Word, that there is nothing in it against what you are doing, then you may let it go, in one ear and out the other, not with a toss of the head but with a quiet and settled peace, because you have taken it to the only judge that matters and it did not hold.

And this is the cure for the thing that enslaves so many women, the endless anxious management of what everyone around them thinks. For you are not to measure yourself by the room you are standing in. Not by the women in your Bible study, not by the famous teachers with the conferences and the book tables, not by the women all around you in the church. They are not the standard. Christ is the standard, and the Word is the standard, and we are called to be like Him, not like one another.

“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.”

– Acts 17:11

Be one of those noble Bereans, who did not take even the apostle Paul’s word for it but went and searched the Scriptures themselves to see whether the things were so. Go to the Word yourself. And do not think you have ever come to the bottom of it; if you are right with the Lord, His Spirit will keep drawing things out of it for you as long as you live. You could read it a thousand times over and still not have seen all that is there, because the God who breathed it is infinite and we shall never come to the end of Him. That is not a discouragement; it is the very reason to be always in the Word, where the living Spirit teaches the willing heart what no woman in any room could ever teach you.⁶

chapter seven

secure, but not always right

I must guard all of this from an abuse, because there is a danger that you could take what I have said and turn it into a hardness, a way of dismissing every correction by saying you have taken it to the Word and you are fine. So hear me carefully: being secure in Christ does not mean you are always right. It does not. Pride is a subtle thing, and it can creep into the very act of searching the Scriptures, so that you read into the Word the answer you wanted to find and call it the leading of the Spirit. None of us is past that, and the woman who thinks she is, is the one in the most danger of all.

So we hold two things at once: we stand secure, and we stay humble. We do not flinch at every word, and we do not harden against every word either. We genuinely take each one to the Lord, willing to be wrong, willing to be shown, and that willingness is the very thing that keeps the searching honest.

And here is the encouragement: this gets truer in you as you grow. When you are a young believer you are on the milk of the Word, and your discernment is thin; but as you go on, to the bread and then to the meat, the Spirit sharpens your ear, and you begin to know His leading better. It is a quiet thing, that leading, and hard to put into words. It is not usually a voice. It is more like a thought that settles into your mind, a gentle pressure, a check, sometimes an uncomfortable sense that is genuinely different from ordinary anxiety, though I could not fully explain the difference to you; you come to know it by living with it. That is the still small voice, the way the Lord has always led His children, and He will lead you so, if you let Him, and always, always it agrees with the Word and never overrides it.⁷

And do be wise about whose admonishments you weigh most heavily. Even a person who is wrong about a great deal may still, now and then, land on something true, the way even a broken clock is right twice a day, so do not dismiss a word merely because of who spoke it. But do consider the source: their walk with the Lord, whether their counsel has proven good and biblical before, whether they are in the Word themselves. Weigh the speaker, and test the words, and let the Scripture have the final say in both.

chapter eight

the house on the rock

And so we come to where all of this has been going, to the foundation under the foundation, the thing that makes a woman able to be told the truth, able to stand when she is right and bend when she is wrong, able to walk through a whole life of correction and grow lovelier for it instead of harder. It is this: that your identity, who you are, rests on Christ alone, and on nothing and no one else.

Not on your family. Not on your friends. Not on the women around you and their approval. Not on your husband, if you have one, nor on your children, nor on your work, nor on your beauty, nor on anyone’s good opinion of you. On Christ only. For if your sense of who you are rests on any of those things, then every one of them becomes a threat, because any of them can be taken, and a hard word against any of them will shake you to the ground. But if it rests on Christ, who cannot be taken from you, then you are free, and no correction can topple you, because the thing being corrected was never the thing you were standing on.

“Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock.”

– Matthew 7:24

The teachable woman and the unshakable woman are the same woman.

And here is the last gift of it, the one you might not expect. When your identity is wholly secure in Christ, you are finally free to love everyone else the way you were meant to. For when you no longer need their approval to survive, you can love them freely, enjoy them truly, even disagree with them deeply and go against the grain of nearly all of them, without it shaking you, because you are no longer asking them to be the foundation that only Christ can be. The security does not isolate you; it heals all your other loves, by taking off of them a weight they were never meant to bear.

Yes, this road may make your life down here harder rather than easier, for the world was never kind to those who would not bend to it, and why should we expect otherwise, who are not of here. But you will be strong, and free, and unshakable, and more yourself in Christ than the lie ever let you be. The teachable woman and the unshakable woman turn out, in the end, to be the very same woman, and she is a daughter of valour, and she is you.