Lisa Barry: All this week on Gateway to Joy our special guest has been Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Nancy is the speaker for a new radio program for women called Revive Our Hearts and it will be picking up where Gateway to Joy leaves off at the end of this month. She's in the studio today with Elisabeth, and I am Lisa Barry here to get things started.

Elisabeth and Nancy, the subject I'd like for us to cover today is femininity because I know it's a subject that both of you feel very strongly about. Elisabeth, you and I had a hilarious conversation awhile back that had to do with women wearing oversized tee shirts to bed at night. What do you think about that choice of sleepwear?

Elisabeth Elliot: I just cannot even imagine a married woman wearing a tee-shirt to bed. It seems to me that we should be especially approachable and lady-like in whatever we are going to wear to bed. I don't think a tee shirt is in that category at all, and some women wear these knee-length tee shirts to bed. Well, who am I to tell them what they are supposed to wear to bed?

The visible sign which is everywhere in the airport is that I'm the only woman in the entire airport that has a skirt on. I mean, every single woman is wearing pants and usually great big thick old shoes, and very often they are accompanied by their husbands. Incidentally, Lars and I have noticed (you've probably noticed the same thing, Nancy) that the women always have the tickets. Of course, you are single so you have to have your ticket! But, the men they just go off by themselves and have a big yak and the women get in the line, they give the tickets, they have the passports, they have their shoulder bag, they have the money...and the men don't have to do a blinking thing until they are boarding.

Lisa Barry: Why is this happening? Are women taking control or are men abdicating it?

Elisabeth Elliot: I think it's both. I mean, as soon as the men saw that they didn't have to take control, that the women were delighted to take control, then they just wimped out. They said, "Fine, why do we need to bother with this?" They liked doing it. And, I'm just making a plea in my feeble way to say, "Let me be a woman--let me be obviously a woman."

From a distance, you can't tell the men from the women now because they are all dressed unisex. Can we think about that and do something about it?

Lisa Barry: Can you help us understand what it means to be a woman and how that makes us different from men or should make us different?

Elisabeth Elliot: It says in Titus 2: "Teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanders or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good."

If I were to have asked my mother if she had to work hard to be reverent in the way she lived, I don't think she would have had any idea of what I was talking about. It was so much nature in my mother--she knew what a lady was. My mother was a lady. And I remember more than one older woman saying to me, "You know that your mother is a lady." There was no question of that in my mind. My father expected my mother to be a lady and my mother always put on a fresh dress before my father got home in the afternoon. She didn't dress up the way she would dress for Sunday necessarily, but whatever she had been wearing in the house in her housework, she would change and she would be fresh and looking much nicer at the supper table for my father.

And Paul goes on to say, "The older women can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure." One of the bad things about women is that they can let go of their self-control much more easily than men can. And we ought not to do it. We ought to be in charge of our bodies. If we've been hurt or you feel as though your husband has been ignoring you or something like that, where do you take it? Directly to your husband and tear into him? Or do you just take it to the Cross and lift it up to the Lord and say, "Lord, You understand this. Help me to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home." That is where a woman belongs.

My heart goes out to the women who can't be home...the single women who of course have to make their own living and the women whose husbands require that they get a job. I think it is very sad. Why are the husbands not willing to scale way down, get a smaller house, fewer cars, whatever...in order to enable their wives to stay home and take care of their children?

So Paul is talking about being busy at home, to be kind and to be subject to their husbands so that no one will malign the Word of God. God has required of me that I be subject to not one, not two, but three different husbands. And they are very different. There's hardly a day that goes by when I have to be reminded that I am subordinate to my husband. There are times when I think I might be able to help him with some decision he has to make and certainly he would not resent that, I don't think. But, generally speaking, I bow to his arrangements, whatever they may be. And I'm very thankful that I'm fortunate enough to have a husband who travels with me, takes care of the baggage, takes care of the books, takes care of the tickets. He's on the phone hour after hour getting the tickets months in advance in order that we can be sure to get the seats that we want and that sort of thing. So I know I'm very blessed. Not very many women have a husband that can do that because most women's husbands are off in an office somewhere and Lars and I live at home and work at home.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: As you were reading that passage from Titus 2, Elisabeth, I am thinking about a very different passage in the Old Testament--Proverbs chapter 7--which describes much more, I think, the contemporary woman. It's talking in that context about an immoral, adulterous woman; but it's interesting how many of the characteristics in Proverbs 7 are much more typical of women today.

I think of that one verse in Proverbs 7 that says she is loud and boisterous and her feet never stay at home, which really is the contrast to the kind of role that Paul is giving us in Titus chapter 2 and in a parallel passage in I Timothy chapter 5. You remember that passage where Paul is describing what will qualify a widow to be cared for by the church. It gives a number of things that must be true of her life, which seems to me to be the things that we as women ought to be then aspiring to in our younger life. It says "she has been faithful to her husband, she is well known for her good deeds such as bringing up children, showing hospitality, washing the feet of the saints, helping those in trouble and devoting herself to all kinds of good deeds."

Lisa Barry: So why for the large majority of women nowadays, why are they so far from that kind of a goal?

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Let me answer that, but let me back up by saying something else about Proverbs 7 and that is, I just read one verse, quoted one verse, out of that passage. But there are many that describe more typical women today. There's a picture in that passage of this woman being the aggressor, the initiator in the relationship with this foolish, simple young man. She throws herself on him. Physically she is not discreet. I think of even in church today seeing women who just go up and give a big bear hug to a man who is not their husband. Not perhaps with any immoral intent, perhaps just not realizing how foolish it is to let down these appropriate barriers and distinctions between men and women. So, in many different ways we have this foolish woman described in Proverbs 7, I think, so much not only in our streets today but in our churches even.

You asked why it is. I guess I have two thoughts in relation to that. First of all, I do believe there's nothing new since the Garden of Eden. That's where we have our first classic role reversal: with Eve...with the Devil singling out the woman and ignoring her husband who was there with her, but the woman letting this happen and being the one to lead her husband and to feed her husband the forbidden fruit when it was God's design that the man should be the one doing the leading and the feeding. So in a sense, nothing is new.

In another sense, we have grown up in a generation--Lisa, the women your age and mine have not known anything else other than an environment that has been shaped and determined by feminist thinking. Even those of us in the church today who would not consider ourselves feminists, it's in the air we breathe. The feminists--really just when I was being born about that time in the 50's--set out with an agenda and with intent to eradicate the distinctions between men and women. The shame of it is that we have let them.

In the process, I believe, we have had something very precious and beautiful and a gift from God stolen from us. And one of my real burdens for my lifetime is that God would allow me to be a part of a counter-revolution that would take back that which has been taken from us. Now this isn't a revolution that means we go march in the streets or we write letters to Congress. This is the kind of revolution that is going to take place, I believe, by women saying, "I'm willing to be different. I don't have to fit into the culture. I don't have to look like all the other women around me. I'm willing to let God give to me that quiet and gentle and subordinate spirit."

And how I thank the Lord for older women, like Elisabeth and like my mother and others, who are models for us today. Now, I have to say there aren't many. But there are a few and I think we need to look to these women. We need to learn from them as Titus 2 says that they should teach us. That means we need to learn from them and to listen carefully. I think there are probably (if I could be so bold as to say this) some women listening to this broadcast and hearing Elisabeth describe her chagrin over the way women are dressed today and I think there are probably a lot of women who foolishly just cast that off and say, "She's just an older woman. That's just her opinion. That's just what she thinks."

And I want to say as a younger woman, I think it is very foolish for us not to listen to and heed the counsel and the godly wisdom of women who have walked with God, walked before us, walked down this road. We need to hear what they have to say and then we need to heed it. Not because Elisabeth Elliot says it. She certainly doesn't take any credit for this way of thinking. And I think if we didn't have the Word of God, neither Elisabeth Elliot nor you, Lisa, nor myself might hold to these viewpoints. But we do have an absolute authority in the Word of God. And for us to say, "I'm willing to be a different kind of woman--to be a woman, and in that sense to glorify God."

The passage Elisabeth read in Titus 2 tells us if we don't, then the Word of God will be blasphemed. People will not know the heart and the character and the ways of God if we don't take back that true, biblical womanhood.

Lisa Barry: Nancy, that was so well said. And what a powerful challenge to women to not be shaped by the world's mold.

You know, one of the things that have surfaced over and over this week is the value of leaving a legacy. I think it is easy to assume that a legacy can wait until tomorrow or next year or after retirement. Elisabeth and Nancy will both tell you the time is now! And there is no better place to begin than with a book Elisabeth has written called "The Shaping of a Christian Family." In it you will find practical helps through real-life examples in which one family made leaving a legacy a high priority in the home.

For information on how you can get a copy of the book for yourself, get in touch with us here. Call 24 hours a day. 1-800-7594-JOY. We also have today's program available on tape. Ask about it when you call 1-800-7594-569. Another option is to write to us at Gateway to Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, NE 68501. On the Web we're at gatewaytojoy.org.

Gateway to Joy is a listener-supported production of Back to the Bible. Tomorrow Elisabeth and Nancy Leigh DeMoss talk about how to revive a marriage that seems beyond hope. That's next time on Gateway to Joy.