by Kenneth Sheets with Rebecca Miller
Two Godly women, Martha and Mary, both loved the Lord Jesus, but Martha was satisfied that her knowledge of God was sufficient, and thus, she thought serving was more important than more learning, and her thinking in this manner caused her to fail to seek that more perfect knowledge which comes from the very words of the Creator. Mary had chosen, as Jesus said, “the one thing that exists a need, the good part,” and that “good thing” was giving her attention to gaining that knowledge of God which could come only from His mouth, that is, Mary desired the knowledge of God which comes only through “hearing” directly the very words of the Creator. Whether Mary could perceive it or not, she had recognized the necessity of knowing God as He revealed Himself, not through the mediation of other humans, regardless of how “Godly” they claimed to be. She knew that God could and did use humans in helping one another to know Him, but when the opportunity arose to know Him from His very words, no human intermediary could compare.
The times of Mary’s serving would come, and she would serve just as Martha sought to do, but her serving would not be from a perspective which allowed “serving God” to even appear to supersede “learning God from His very words,” and she would serve from a heart even more purified by knowing His words and all that He intended to communicate as He gave them. In most modern assemblies of believers, women have been relegated to a subservient level where virtually all the members, including the women themselves, think that “serving” the assembly and their families is, essentially, the sum of God’s design for their lives. Women are viewed as not “needing” the more intensive analytical understanding of God that comes only through more intensive analytical study of His actual words, especially those in His chosen Hebrew and Greek languages.
Modern churches, in their own self satisfaction, develop women to be “Martha,” providing “ladies classes” and “ladies days,” etc., to help women know all the things they should be “doing.” They do these things without ever truly helping those same women to develop a heart that can never be satisfied unless it is continually growing in that intensive analytical knowledge of God’s person and nature which is available only through His very words. Indeed, in the present day, multiple generations of women have learned to be “Martha” but not “Mary,” and even the more “mature and knowledgeable” among both women and men believers cannot be trusted, unless they have a total change of heart in the matter, to provide the level of instruction needed by women; their thinking has become too greatly perverted by this wrong perspective of the role of women.
The failure of assemblies and families to provide this needed learning to women, and to assist them in partaking of it, has resulted in their inability to properly fulfill the Creator’s design, because many of them are totally unknowing of anything more than a simplified, surface understanding of the person and nature of God, and yet, these same women are both the primary teachers and “modelers” of God to the children and the primary human counselors to their own individual men. Despite the exceeding importance of developing women in order that they might convey an intensive and accurate perception of God to all whose lives they touch, almost all modern assemblies of believers, some in ignorance, some in pure selfishness, have violated and are continuing to violate the design of God for developing true “women of God”; they prefer instead that the women remain “servants” doing whatever “the church” needs them to do. God and His design, however, cannot be mocked or overlooked, and the women, Godly women by God’s standard as He looks on their hearts and not on their externals, are being destroyed, along with their children, their families, and the assemblies to which they belong. Most who are supposed to be the leaders of other believers have blinded themselves to this great need, having chosen to conform to the “traditions of men” instead of the actual design of God . . . and the destruction continues.