Transcript

Nancy: Mary, I've never been through childbirth. You have three sons. I have no biological children, but I feel like we've just been through a different kind of childbirth with this book. In fact, I've come to call it "the eternal book" because we've been working on it for two years!

Mary Kassian: It's been way overdue! It's been like being pregnant for a long, long time! Two years.

Nancy: It's great to see this come to be and to look at what God has given birth to—the second in a two-part series on biblical womanhood. So 101 released a few years ago, and it starts with the Genesis record.

Mary: It talks about Genesis, Creation, the Fall, why we were created, how manhood and womanhood were destroyed by the Fall.

Nancy: That's our Divine Design (the subtitle of True Woman 101).

Mary: And then 201 talks about Interior Design. So we flip over to the New Testament, to the book of Titus, and it talks about how redeemed womanhood ought to look in the life of a believer.

Nancy: So let's turn to Titus 2. We're going to spend quite a bit of time camped in that passage. That's where we have this portrait of a counter-cultural woman, and a curriculum for training and developing women who look like Jesus, women who are godly, biblical women.

So let's start by reading the first paragraph of Titus chapter 2, and then we'll talk about a little of the context for this whole series. Why don't you read, beginning in verse 1. . .

Mary:

But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

Nancy: Wow, that's kind of a mouthful. It's an apostle Paul sentence that goes on and on, and lots of phrases in there, but so much rich meat. I don't know about you, but for me, as I've been working on this study now for the past couple of years, it's really penetrated my own heart.

It's been like a mirror to show me things in my life that aren't like Jesus, things that God wants to mature and change, and areas where I need to be sanctified. So this is a journey we've been on together, through the elements you see in Titus 2 here.

Mary: It is a journey, and we've picked out ten elements that are evident in the passage that pertain to godly, biblical womanhood.

Nancy: And that concept of elements goes back to the idea of interior design. I'm not much of a designer at all.

Mary: Your house looks beautiful!

Nancy: I can't take any credit for that, though. I rely on people like you who are good at it. You know that when you're doing a design (like you came in and spruced up this set yesterday), there are certain elements that have to be part of every interior design.

Mary: There are elements that are common, even though we have different styles. And I think that pertains well to our theme of interior design and how the Lord changes us from the inside, out. And the elements that we see here in Titus may look different in different women's lives . . .

Nancy: . . . and in different seasons of our lives . . .

Mary: . . . and depending on your personality, may look a little bit different. Yet …