Wild vs. Wise

Series: Girls Gone Wild with Mary Kassian

Mary Kassian: So many of our young women today are idle for the kingdom. They are wasting kingdom time. Just their whole purpose is to be out there catching a guy because they think that’s what will fulfill them. There is no guy on the face of the earth that will fulfill your needs—not a one.

Leslie: This if Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Wednesday, August 26.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Women have always faced temptation, and that goes back to Genesis chapter 3, the Garden of Eden. In many ways, I think the temptations that women face today are different than those faced by their mothers or their grandmothers.

Today, my friend Mary Kassian is going to describe some of the challenges young women face. She’s going to point us to a timeless solution. Mary’s been a guest with us before on Revive Our Hearts. She’s the author of the Feminist Mistake. She was a speaker at True Woman ’08, which was the conference that Revive Our Hearts hosted in Chicago last fall.

In fact, at the end of today’s program, I’ll be sharing some exciting news about upcoming True Woman conferences, but first let’s get to Mary who was speaking at one of the break-out sessions at True Woman ’08.

Mary Kassian: So we’re going to going to be talking about some passages of Scripture. I’m going to be doing a contrast between what the Lord teaches us what we should be as women, because He wants us to be feminine, and He wants us to be women. His Word gives us some directions about what that means for our behavior.

Okay, I told you we were going to do some work. We’re going to have a look at several passages. A few of them I will just let you write down the references so you can read through them later. Nancy loves to teach from this passage as well. I do it a little bit differently, but it is a very telling, revealing passage in Proverbs chapter 7 that I would like you to turn to right now.

Now in this passage there is a father talking to his son about how to be smart and how to live wisely. He gives a warning about a certain kind of woman. This passage paints a picture of the wild woman, of the type of woman that the father wants the son to be wary of, the son to avoid this type of woman.

I think as you’ll see, as we unpack this passage, this is the type of woman that our society says we should be. Let’s begin. We’ve got 21 points. I hope your writing hands are healthy and strong.

The first point of difference between a wild woman and a wise woman is perspective—perspective.

Number 1: A wild woman is preoccupied with outward appearance. So either what she looks like, her physical appearance—dressing in a way that’s alluring; dressing in a way that’s attractive, whatever. She spends a lot of time, as Sex in the City girls do, on those designer shoes. Now, I like shoes. We’re girls; we like shoes. But this is just a preoccupation with externals, with external things, with appearances.

Sometimes that can be physical appearances and sometimes that can just be appearances, keeping up appearances, being regarded in the right light. “I want people to think right about me. I want people to think I’m cool, or I’m great. I want people to like me.” Just the preoccupation with that stuff.

When you contrast that in the other passages, and I didn’t read them, I’m just going to pull out words from them, and you can go and read them later. I may decide to read them as we go along, but these are phrases—all of these phrases in these contrasts are pulled from Scripture.

The wise woman knows that physical appearance is secondary to spiritual heart condition, that man looks at the outward appearance, but God really looks at the heart. She concerns herself with her heart. The phrases and those passages that I pulled from those passages are that she’s concerned about the beauty of her “inner self.” She has “noble character.” She is “clothed with strength and dignity” instead of just the latest product fashion. So that’s point number one—perspective.

Number 2: Modesty factor. We see that this woman, the wild woman, is one who flaunts her body like a prostitute, it says, in verse 10. She flaunts her body like a prostitute. Modesty has gone out the window, hasn’t it? Young women are taught, and sometimes older women also . . . You see them dressing, and you’re going, “What are you thinking?”

It’s really interesting. I was telling some people at lunch time that my husband, Brent, and I were asked to go into a local Christian high school and talk to the grade 10-12 students. We gave them a survey. Brent took the guys; I took the girls, and we gave them a survey. We asked them three questions, and these were open-ended questions that they were able to respond to.

• The first question was, “What bugs you the most about girls?”
• The second question was, “What bugs you the most about guys?”
• The third question was, “What do you think could be done to improve male/female relationships?”

So we took the answers of all these grade 10-12 students and compiled them and compared them and looked at them. Do you know what the number one thing that these Christian guys said (and they weren’t all Christians it was a Christian school, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that much always)? The number one thing that bothered them about girls—anybody care to gander a guess? They dressed like sluts.

Now this particular school had a dress code, and so the girls at this particular school were probably dressed a whole lot better than the girls in society at large, and overall these girls were probably dressed more modestly. But the guys, it bothered them to have to fight this battle of their eyes. They didn’t like having to fight it all the time, and the girls who were dressed modestly were the ones that they respected.

I have three sons. Now my sons are almost . . . some of them are grown men; some of them are just on the cusp of being grown. My oldest son is 24; he just married the most beautiful girl in the world. My middle son is ready to turn 22, and my youngest is 19. So I have these three boys in my house, and I remember one day being out with one of my sons, and there was a woman who walked past.

A young girl walked past, and she was dressed very, very seductively. She was spilling out everywhere. She walked past, and it wasn’t just what she was wearing, it was the way she was walking. She kind of gave my son the eye. So I asked him, “What do you think, and what do you feel? Like, what do you think when you see a woman like that?” That’s a pretty daring question. I thought he might avoid it. And he said to me, “Mom, to be perfectly honest, she arouses the male in me, but she does not appeal to the man in me.” “That’s a good answer, sweetheart.”

But it’s true, and we need to watch how we dress. Women now are taught to use their sexuality as power, that if you dress in a way where you can seduce a man, where you can be sexual, it’s powerful. It’s the sexual women who have the power. That’s a lie from the pit of hell. It is.

A woman who is wise dresses modestly. The words in the passages . . . “modest,” “temperate,” “decency.” How about this: the femininity factor. This is almost the opposite.

Now I need to tell you, I was raised in a family; I had five brothers. I was the only girl. As the story goes, my mom was praying and praying for a girl, and after four boys, she was praying and praying for a girl. One night she woke up and an angel whispered in her ear, “If you want a girl, tonight’s the night,” so she woke up my dad . . . and nine months later I was born on Remembrance Day. What’s the point of that?

The point of that is that I grew up in an all-male environment. I was the only girl. My mom wanted desperately to have me be a girlie-girl, and that was the last thing I was going to be. I was not a girlie-girl. These ruffles almost give me palpitations to put these on. Pink is not a word in my wardrobe, and I would just be happy not to wear the makeup and do the cute girlie . . . I never understood it. Girls were scary to me. They scared me.

But the Lord convicted me that He made women, and He made women beautiful, and He wants us to enjoy our femininity (number 3). So many of us run around sloppy, and we don’t care, and we don’t wear makeup, and I’m that way half the time. I need to be very intentional often about being feminine. I have to think, “Okay, my husband has looked at ugly enough days in a row.”

Let me read a verse for you that may startle you. It startled me when I found it. It’s in Deuteronomy 22, verse 5. It says this:

A woman must not wear men’s clothing nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.

Wow! That’s kind of startling, isn’t it? That’s very interesting to me, and I think the point of it is not so much, “Oh, women shouldn’t wear pants.” We can’t make hard and fast rules because I think it will look different from culture to culture. But I think the point of it is this: God created us, men and women, and He wants His men to be men and His women to be women. So for some of us who have grown up in this culture, that’s going to take a little bit of work, and a little bit of intentionality. Some are drawn to dress immodestly and to dress in a way that’s just sexual, and others just love that sweatshirt and sweatpants and will not part with it. Right?

So the Lord has to challenge our hearts to correct us and bring us into balance one way or the other—the femininity factor. To begin saying, “Yes, there’s something that is important about femininity.” I’m not a girlie-girl. My dad was a carpenter, and I learned all those skills. I singlehandedly wired our basement, and I can swing a hammer lots better than Brent can, but I’m still a girl. I’m very competent in a lot of things, very independent, but there’s something that God values about femininity, about that softness that He has made a woman to be—femininity factor.

Number 4: Body language. We see here that the wild woman is flirtatious; she’s physically forward and suggestive;she’s shameless. In the passage it uses the word “brazen,” so she’s the one that comes up, grabs the guy, and kisses him. Body language—she’s very flirtatious and suggestive.

The wise woman guards her dignity; she doesn’t resort to deceptive charm. We see words in the passages of Scripture like “purity,” “decency,” “worthy of respect,” “doesn’t use deceptive charm.” Women do have power, just in terms of alluring men. We all know what that’s like to try and do that—to try and be brazen, to try and be forward, to be the one that stands oh so close.

Number 5: Time and energy. The wild woman hangs out in places where she might attract men. She lurks. We’re told in the passage that she’s out in the streets squares; she hangs out at every corner—the public places, the places where she’s going to hang herself out like bait to look and to pursue and to catch men.

The wise woman, on the other hand, is busy with personal mission, not with catching men. She’s busy with good deeds. She does not eat the bread of idleness. Her arms are to the poor, hands to the needy.

I was talking to one of my sons about the woman that he would find and marry. I said, “When you find this woman, she’s there with nothing to do and putting herself in places to find you. This woman is going to be a woman of mission. She will have mission and purpose for the kingdom.”

So many of our young women today are idle for the kingdom; they are wasting kingdom time. Just their whole purpose is being out there is to catch a guy, because they think that’s what’s going to fulfill them. But as we talked about this morning, there is no guy on the face of the earth that is going to fulfill your needs. Not a one. Now if the Lord gifts you with a great relationship, that’s a wonderful and beautiful thing. Brent and I will be married 25 years, and it’s the richest, most beautiful relationship I could dream of from an earthly perspective. But still, he is not the one who ultimately meets my needs. It’s the Lord Jesus Christ who gives me my identity, my surety, my confidence in who I am. I need to be about the Lord’s business, as do all of us.

Women who spend inordinate amounts of time, and I’m just going to talk to you young unmarried women at this point in time, and also women who are single or unattached. What is it with Christian women going out to bars? I don’t get that. You might call me old fashioned; you might say I’m out of touch, but in my mind, you are having that lurking street corner, every corner, out there, hanging out the sign, trolling the waters trying to catch your male kind of mentality that Scripture says you shouldn’t have.

Number 6: Pursuit. I need to make a confession. There was a girl calling my youngest son. This was the day before cell phones, thank God, and she was calling and calling and calling and calling, and I just exercised my parental authority, phoned the phone company and had her number blocked. Before I did that, I tried another tactic. I said, “I will take a message. Yes, he’s sitting right there on the couch, but I will take a message, and he will phone you back.” But girls today are taught that they can be the initiators in a relationship, that it really doesn’t matter. “You should go for what you want. If you see a guy you want, go for him, pursue him, chase him, propose.”

Let me tell you what that does. I have seen it time and time again where women have done that; they’ve gotten the guy; they are the ones who initiated. They phone him; they pursue him; they chase him; they get the wedding running and going; they are in control of the relationship. Five, ten years down the road, they hate him because he’s a couch potato, and because they’re tired of doing everything and running the house and having a man who’s passive or passive aggressive.

The way that you date turns into the way that you relate when you get married. The way you relate to men overall sets patterns for your marriage. It’s important the patterns you establish and how you relate, and we are told in Scripture that the woman, the wild woman, is the woman who comes out, who takes hold of him, the woman who looks for him and preys upon him.

Whereas, the wise woman is the woman who wins him over with pure, holy behavior; she won over her husband. Sarah regarded Abraham as master. In other words, there’s a reverence and a purity, and a “I’m not going to go out and get, I’m going to be a prize worth getting. I’m going to be a woman of God, and I am worth pursuing,” because God says so, not because I say so.

The holiness and the relationship and the whole picture of Christ pursuing His church, remember? If we’re talking about male and female as being a paradigm, as being a mini-picture for us of the relationship between Christ and the church, and furthermore, an inter-Trinitarian relationship, we learn a lot about God because male and female were created in His image.

If that’s the case, then this stuff matters. It matters, and some of you women are pursuers of your husband in the sense that you are naggers of your husband. It’s like Chinese water torture you are: drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. No wonder he doesn’t hear you anymore.

Godly women know how to have that sweet, gentle, spirit, that purity and that holiness that says, “I trust God. I don’t have to go and pursue and be in charge. God is in charge, and I can trust myself to Him.”

Nancy: We’ve been listening to the first part of a message that Mary Kassian delivered at True Woman ’08. That’s the conference that Revive Our Hearts hosted in Chicago last fall. It was an amazing thing to see thousands of women come to that conference from 48 different states and 6 different countries drawn by one common thing. That wanted to see God cultivate in their lives the kinds of qualities that Mary just described: gentleness, purity, and holiness.

If you want those words to describe you, then I’d like to encourage you to get a copy of the book called, Becoming God’s True Woman. Mary Kassian and I both contributed chapters in that book, along with other speakers like: Carolyn Mahaney, Susan Hunt, Dorothy Patterson, and my friend, Bunny Wilson. This book will show you how to become the woman God created you to be—a woman of true beauty and godly influence.

Today we want to make this book available to you. We’ll send it as our way of saying thank you when you send a donation of any amount to Revive Our Hearts. Just call us at 1-800-569-5959, or donate at our website, ReviveOurHearts.com, and be sure to ask for a copy of Becoming God’s True Woman when you send your donation.

Now, that web address, ReviveOurHearts.com, is where you’ll also find information about True Woman ’10. At the beginning of the program I said I had information about upcoming True Woman conferences. I want to let you know that Revive Our Hearts is bringing the True Woman conference to three cities next year. That will be: Chattanooga, Indianapolis, and Fort Worth. Registration has just opened this month.

The first True Woman conference sold out months in advance, so I want to encourage you to check your calendar and plan ahead to attend one of these three conferences next year. To get more information about the True Woman ’10 conferences, or to learn how you can be a part of the True Woman Movement, just go to ReviveOurHearts.com.

The Bible says that as women we are to cultivate a gentle and quiet spirit. You might wonder, is that really possible today? Mary Kassian is going to address that question when she returns tomorrow, right here on Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

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