Do you know how you read familiar Bible passages over and over again and then one day, it’s like you are reading that same passage for the first time ever? That happened to me last week. Actually, I was reading through several books of the Bible for my New Testament class and lost track of where I was and ran across this passage:
“The older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanders, not given to much wine, teachers of good things—that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.”
It’s embarrassing to admit how many times I’ve shared this
passage in various women’s groups. But up until now, it’s always been shared as
a challenge to older women and how much we, as younger women, need them and their
example. We need them to pour into us and to show us how to live godly lives
through mentoring. I had it down to a science what they needed to do for us not realizing that time has a way of sneaking upon us causing the tables to turn.
Yet as I read that passage last week, my pen went crazy
underlining different parts of it. I began wondering why I had never read these verses before and then checked the reference. My mouth fell open in shock as I discovered it
was Titus 2:3-5, the most famous mentoring passage ever! Wait, what?!?! How could that be especially when it's been the basis of several devotionals/lessons I've shared over the years???
It was the first time I ever viewed Titus 2 with “old woman" eyes.
I’m no longer that young one craving instruction in these areas (although there
will always be women I look to as mentors and will continually glean from), but rather I’m
the older woman with younger women in my care…six of them to be exact. Six lively
and talented preteens had just spent that morning with me and their faces came to mind as I read these verses.
It suddenly became scary to read some of these things and to
see my responsibility to them. They are the younger women wanting an older
woman to invest them, to show them the way, and to point them to God in the ways that I was
pointed to Him through the lives of many older women in my church.
The list in
Titus 2:3-5 instructs as well as convicts, yet it all boils down to
gospel-centered living. Am I living out the gospel every single day of my life
so that “the word of God may not be blasphemed”? Because if I’m living out the
gospel, it will reflect in the things
I do, in the ways I talk to and about others, in the ways I love and care for my
own family, and in the ways I act and react to life.
As God keeps using my seminary classes to help me work out what it really means to live out the gospel daily, may He also give me “old woman" eyes so
that I can be a part of building the church and building future generations
of the church.
