Transcript

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Well, for those who have been listening to this conversation we've been having, Mary, by the radio or podcast, they need to know we've also been doing a video shoot at the same time. And nobody can imagine, except us, all that we've been through to pull together this shoot. It's been days here of wardrobe issues, challenges, matching our clothes (we have very different styles), hair, and makeup and the set and . . .

Mary: I've brought mostly red clothes; you've brought mostly pink, so trying to put those two together.

Nancy: That did not work very well. So I'm saying: The next series we do should be called "Authentic Womanhood." We have no makeup. We wear the same outfit the whole time. What do you think?

Mary: Drink hot chocolate in front of the fireplace.

Nancy: Yes, right.

Mary: In house robes or something?

Nancy: Right, right, right.

Mary: We'll get just as many complaints, I'm sure.

Nancy: Probably. But it is amazing how we all want to be beautiful and the lengths that we will go to in order to make ourselves presentable, and we've experienced a little bit of that over these last days.

Mary: I think that God has wired us as women to have a desire for beauty. And that's not a bad thing. It perhaps can be misguided when it's all put on, external beauty.

Nancy: Sure.

Mary: But I think that part of our wiring is to love beauty.

Nancy: As we come to the end of this series, that's a really important word, because we want to see that the true woman displays the attractiveness of the gospel. In fact, Titus says, "She adorns the gospel."

We've been looking at this passage in Titus 2, and it gives us three "so that" clauses in these instructions to men and women and different demographics in the church. After talking about older women training younger women, it says, "So that the Word of God may not be reviled" (v. 5).

And then it says in verse 8, "So that an opponent may be put to shame having nothing evil to say about us."

And then in verse 10 I love, "So that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior." And that's the point.

Mary: That is the point: how we do life, how we do life day today, how we do life as a woman adorns the gospel of Jesus Christ

Nancy: It can make it beautiful.

Mary: It makes it beautiful, or it makes it ugly.

Nancy: Right.

Mary: It shows it to be unattractive.

Nancy: I mean, the gospel is beautiful.

Mary: Christ is beautiful.

Nancy: Christ is beautiful, but we affect how others view Christ and the gospel.

As we've looked at these different elements that we find in Titus 2, we've explored them, we've studied them, we've put them under the microscope, I think it's important to say at the close here that when you let the Grand Designer, God Himself, into your life, let Him have His way and begin to shape and reshape, that what He does, the work He does, first of all, it's functional.

It works. Life works better when you let it work according to the way it was designed to work. But it doesn't just work better.

Mary: No. It's also beautiful. I think that's something both you and I have come to appreciate over the years. I know that as a young believer, younger believer, as a younger woman, I always thought God's Word was right. I had a sense that it was true and that God was God and that I wasn't God. So I had a basic respect for God's Word.

But I know when I bumped up against passages like this …