a word before we begin

If you have read my other writing, this series will sound different to you, and I want to say why before we start. The tone is sharper here, closer and more direct and less measured, because these booklets are written woman to woman about the things that are doing quiet damage to the women of Christ, and that subject calls for plainer speaking than my usual. So I will be blunter here than you may be used to. Not to wound, but because there are things that actually need saying, and the soft and flattering version you can get from a hundred other places will not do you any good.

Our mother Eve was deceived. The Scripture says it plainly, that Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression, and her daughters are being deceived still, by the world and, far more painfully, by the church. This series exists to drag those lies into the light and test them against the Word of God.1

But this first booklet is not yet about any one of those lies. It is about something that has to come before all of them, because without it none of the rest can do you any good. It is about whether you can bear to be told a hard thing. Everything I have to say to you will, at some point, cut against what you have been told and what you would prefer to hear, and if your heart cannot receive correction, if it flinches and shuts the moment it is crossed, then there is no reason to write another word. So before we take up a single lie, we have to talk about the teachable heart, and about the strength it takes to have one.

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.

feelings were never truth

is waiting for you

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sources & notes

  1. 1 Timothy 2:14 (“Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression”), with Genesis 3:1–6. The point drawn here is not that women are more culpable but that the pattern of deception is worth naming honestly. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vols. 1 and 6.
  2. John 17:17 (“thy word is truth”), with 2 Timothy 3:16 on Scripture as the fixed standard against which feeling is measured. On the modern elevation of feeling over objective truth, A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, on God’s self-existent reality as the measure of all things, over against the shifting self.
  3. Hebrews 12:5–11, the Lord’s chastening as evidence of sonship and love, yielding “the peaceable fruit of righteousness”; with Proverbs 12:1 (“whoso hateth reproof is brutish”) and Proverbs 9:8–9 on the wise loving reproof. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Confident (Hebrews).
  4. The Hebrew chayil (חַיִל) means strength, might, valour, force; it is used of armies and mighty men of war (e.g. Joshua 1:14; 1 Samuel 16:18) and of the “virtuous” woman of Proverbs 31:10, literally an eshet chayil, a woman of valour. The same word describes Ruth (Ruth 3:11). W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, and the standard Hebrew lexicons.
  5. Proverbs 31:30 (“a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised”), the interpretive key to the whole acrostic poem of Proverbs 31:10–31, with Proverbs 1:7 and 9:10 on the fear of the LORD as the beginning of wisdom. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, reads verse 30 as the crown of the portrait.
  6. Acts 17:11, the Bereans who “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so,” commended as “more noble” for testing even apostolic preaching against the Word. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. 6.
  7. 1 Kings 19:12, the “still small voice” by which the Lord led Elijah; with John 16:13 (the Spirit guiding into all truth) and the principle that genuine leading never contradicts Scripture (Isaiah 8:20). On growth from milk to meat, 1 Corinthians 3:1–2 and Hebrews 5:12–14.
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