Male and Female Church Roles, Part 1

The point: Make your external adornment a matter of conscience before the Lord, ensuring it reflects godliness and avoids drawing attention to yourself.

Martin uses the analogy of a fashion show to explain that women should not use the church assembly to display their clothing or attract attention, but rather their external demeanor should reflect godliness.

All right, John? All right, verse 9. In like manner that women adorn themselves in modest or befitting apparel with modesty and sobriety, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly raiment, but which becomes women professing godliness through good works. So when women come into the assembly, they are to make it evident that they are not there to use the congregation as a professional model used as the people gathered at a fashion show.

19:19 - 19:59 Read in full sermon

The point: Make your external adornment a matter of conscience before the Lord, ensuring it reflects godliness and avoids drawing attention to yourself.

He gives an example of ostentatious hairstyles in Paul's day (like a 'triple beehive') to illustrate the kind of excessive ornamentation women were to avoid, which would draw attention to themselves rather than God.

It would be like a triple beehive hairstyle all piled up and just loaded down with all kinds of ornamentation. You couldn't help unless you were blind, but not looking, if for no other reason the very bizarre nature of it would turn your head. Well, he says, the women are to adorn themselves in befitting apparel with modesty and sobriety, not with this kind of quaffed hair that is excessive and gold or pearls or costly raiment, but, in contrast to that, they're to dress in a manner that is consistent with their profession of godliness, and they are to be far more concerned with appearing in th...

21:22 - 22:39 Read in full sermon

The point: Make your external adornment a matter of conscience before the Lord, ensuring it reflects godliness and avoids drawing attention to yourself.

Martin uses the analogy of dressing for a funeral to counter the idea that women should wear only dark, somber clothes in worship, arguing that God made Eve attractive and Christian women can add color without violating conscience.

Notice, he says, you're to adorn yourself in befitting apparel. Are you going to a funeral when you come to the house of God? No. So the idea that you ought to wear black in worship and come all pasty-faced and looking like someone just lifted you out of the morgue.

22:39 - 22:57 Read in full sermon

The point: Do not attract attention to yourself in God's house either by gaudiness or by excessive and morbid plainness; God is the center of attraction, not you.

He uses the analogy that one can attract as much attention by being a 'plain Jane' as by being a 'circus clown,' emphasizing that the goal is not to attract attention to oneself at all in God's house, but to focus on God.

You see, you can attract as much attention to yourself by being a plain Jane as by being dressed up like a circus clown. And there's some people who in their desire to be modest, they become so outspoken and out of touch with current styles and the rest that they attract attention to themselves. And the whole issue is when you come to the house of God, you don't attract attention to yourself. It's God's house.

23:34 - 23:59 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: The second directive for women is to learn in quietness and all subjection. Martin clarifies the meaning of 'quietness' through various New Testament usages, emphasizing a…

Martin contrasts Paul's teaching with alleged rabbinic prejudice against women learning, showing that Paul, as an inspired apostle, affirms women's capacity and command to learn, refuting the idea that Paul was merely reflecting cultural bias.

So when people say Paul was reflecting rabbinic prejudice when he said women were not to teach, etc., well, if that were so, the rabbis didn't have a very high view of whether a woman could even learn. She was just this mindless machine that produced babies and kept the home. No, Paul is not speaking as a prejudiced rabbi.

25:04 - 25:23 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: The second directive for women is to learn in quietness and all subjection. Martin clarifies the meaning of 'quietness' through various New Testament usages, emphasizing a…

He uses the example of busybodies in 2 Thessalonians 3:11-12 to illustrate 'quietness' as the opposite of disorderly, idle talk, suggesting that getting busy with work would quiet their tongues.

Some disorderly people who go around as busybodies. Verse 11. We hear some that walk among you disorderly that work not at all but are busybodies. Now them that are such, we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ that with quietness they work.

27:34 - 27:51 Read in full sermon

The point: Continually ask yourselves about the context and overall structure of a passage to avoid twisting the Scriptures and being vulnerable to those who do.

Martin uses the example of Priscilla and Aquila teaching Apollos in a private setting to illustrate that women can teach men under certain circumstances, but not in the gathered assembly of God's people as official instructors.

We're not addressing now in detail where may she teach, under what circumstances, what examples do we have that would take us into such matters as Priscilla and Aquila, a husband and wife, in the privacy of a home, teaching Apollos, a man, miting in the Scriptures, and yet, here was a husband and a wife, and the Scripture says that both of them were engaged in teaching another man. But it was not in the gathered assembly of God's people. There's no shred of evidence that Priscilla ever functioned as an official teacher in the gathered assembly of God's people. Obviously, in projecting the stru...

37:25 - 38:28 Read in full sermon

The point: Continually ask yourselves about the context and overall structure of a passage to avoid twisting the Scriptures and being vulnerable to those who do.

He references the book of Proverbs, where a son is told to give ear to the 'law of your mother,' to illustrate the mother's authoritative and consistent teaching role in the training of her children within the home.

We're not addressing now in detail where may she teach, under what circumstances, what examples do we have that would take us into such matters as Priscilla and Aquila, a husband and wife, in the privacy of a home, teaching Apollos, a man, miting in the Scriptures, and yet, here was a husband and a wife, and the Scripture says that both of them were engaged in teaching another man. But it was not in the gathered assembly of God's people. There's no shred of evidence that Priscilla ever functioned as an official teacher in the gathered assembly of God's people. Obviously, in projecting the stru...

37:25 - 38:28 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: The third and fourth directives are that women are not permitted to teach or to exercise authority over a man in the gathered assembly of God's people. Martin clarifies that this…

Martin quotes Dr. Knight's extensive study of the Greek word 'authenteo' (to have dominion/exercise authority) to refute the feminist interpretation that it means sinful domineering, asserting it means legitimate exercise of authority.

The word does not mean, and Dr. Knight has done an extensive study, of 127 usages of this word in secular Greek literature, and we have to do that in trying to ascertain the precise meaning, because it's only used here in the New Testament. So we don't have other New Testament usages with which to compare it. And it's his conclusion, and he's set this forth in a monograph, that never does it have the idea of a sinful kind of domineering, so-called Christian feminist, as we'll see in subsequent studies have said, what Paul is doing here is forbidding women from rising up and having a kind of a ...

40:54 - 41:38 Read in full sermon