When you cook nutritious, tasty meals for your family, you are pointing them to the One who feeds the hungry and who satisfies thirsty souls with Himself. You’re giving them an appetite for Him.
And when you go to the time and effort to be sure that your husband and your kids have adequate clothing that fits, you are pointing them toward the One who clothes us with His righteousness.
See, every aspect of homemaking is meant to reflect some spiritual, eternal truth that we’re trying to picture to our world.
Domesticity. “What in the world does that word mean?” It’s related to the word domestic, home-centered, having a heart for home. It has to do with being devoted to home, having a heart for home, being domestically inclined. One Bible dictionary says, “It’s an efficient management of household responsibilities.” This has to do with the concept of a woman who is not idle in her home, but she’s actively involved in the life of her home and in household duties.
As soon as we get on this whole concept of women working at home, being keepers at home, first of all it’s a concept that’s increasingly foreign in our ure. Secondly, it’s very controversial because for the last fifty years or more there has been a concerted effort to pull women out of their homes and to say that what you do in your home is not nearly as significant as what you do outside of your home in terms of your worth, your value, your significance, your contribution to the society.
Throughout the book of Titus we see how the lives of believers are supposed to be in marked contrast to the lives of those who do not believe. Our lives are supposed to stand out from the rest of the ure. We’re supposed to be different. We’re supposed to be counter-cultural, swimming upstream as salmon, as we have often said on this program.
So where is the stream going? Our ure is characterized by things like , promiscuity, greed, lying, gluttony, debauchery, drunkenness, rebellion, and hatred. All of those things you read about in the book of Titus, by the way.
The world is supposed to be able to look at the church and see a massive difference. We’re supposed to be characterized by just the opposite of those things—love, gentleness, purity, self-control, truthfulness, submissiveness, well-ordered family relationship.
One of the things that is supposed to characterize Christian women is a heart for the home—what was known in the 19th century as the virtue of domesticity. That’s an important virtue for women in every era, starting when the Scripture was written. But I believe it is today in our generation an especially crucial means of revealing the heart of the gospel.
In the 21st century, for various reasons, women by and large spend most of their time in activities and pursuits outside their homes. At best, home or house is not much more than a physical structure where people park their bodies at night, and then people are often running in a hundred different directions the rest of the time. That’s at best.
At worst many homes, so called, and more importantly the people that live in them, show signs of neglect and are in utter disarray. And then at the other extreme you also have people who worship their homes. So they have designer homes that could be on magazine covers but in many cases have really broken fractured family relationships in those homes.
When we talk about working in the home, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to grind your own wheat or make your own bread. It doesn’t mean necessarily that you have a basement full of fruits and vegetables that you’ve grown and picked and canned.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that you make a quilt for every one of your children and your grandchildren. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you sew your own clothes and your kids’ clothes or that you stencil borders on their bedroom walls. Although, if you enjoy doing those things and those are things that minister to and bless your family, great!
What it does mean—working at home—is that you are devoted to managing and meeting the needs of your family. So this woman is working. Where is she doing it? Where is her job? It’s at home. She’s working at home.
That doesn’t mean she never leaves her house. It does mean that her efforts, her productivity, her contribution are based first and foremost out of her home, that her home is the primary sphere of her influence and efforts.
This says something about her priorities, about what matters to her, about the focus of her attention. I want to be quick to say that home working or working at home does not mean necessarily that you can’t have activities or even employment outside your home.In fact, we need to be careful not to speak where Scripture does not speak and not to impose on others an application of Scriptural truth that the Lord may have led us to make in our own lives. We need to realize that each of these principles, including working at home, may look different for different women at different seasons of their lives.
*Excerpted from a transcript of Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss
http://www.reviveourhearts.com/radio/roh/today.php?pid=10062
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