Grace-Energized Women - Teach and Model Godliness

When the Gospel of the life-changing grace of Jesus Christ entered the Roman world of the New Testament, the condition of family life was very bleak. Paganism had all but erased the plans God had left for marriage and the family.

When Christ's church entered the world sharing His grace, life was very dark. Christian marriages and homes were started in a sin-warped, sin-darkened world of mixed-up marriages, sin-scarred lives, and confused families.

Men didn't know about their role as men in the home and church; and women didn't understand their gender-specific roles in the home and at church.

Husbands had never heard about servant leadership, and women had never had gracious, Spirit-energized submission modeled for them by their mothers or anyone else they knew.

The grace that Titus 2:1-13 offered empowered the believers to overcome every level of culture in the New Testament world that was completely antagonistic to the Christian home.

First, the Old Testament Jewish culture had moved away from God's plan for marriage and the home by expanding the divorce provisions of Deuteronomy 24 to include anything a husband didn't like. By Christ's day divorce was commonplace and expected. Many men felt women were only an object to be used. A common prayer that has survived through the centuries contained the following words that reflected the perception of women held in those days: "God, I thank you that I am not a Gentile, a slave, or a woman." Grace taught them to deny this error.
Next, the secular Greek culture that had influenced the world before the New Testament times had decimated women. In Greek society men were allowed to have concubines and consorts and maintained wi