Ministry or Manipulation: Choose!
Yes, a man will take the lead to communicate love and loving intentions by both words and actions. The problem with the phrase in the graphic is the word “worth” (worth submitting to) and its subjective interpretations. You don’t get to judge a man’s “competency” to lead through a SELFISH lens, women!
All the rights that men and women have, are not to be demanded, but to be surrendered in the context of mutual service — a context where the man’s leadership does create a space of freedom for the woman to FLOW WITH his leadership, instead of being in her head all the time trying to calculate how to survive.
In this way, a woman not already secure in her identity in Christ will gravitate to a neurotic tendency to JUDGE the man, moment to moment, as to her selfish and subjective assessment of his worthiness/competency, and use that as a justification to withhold loving service at a moment’s notice.
The relationship needs flexibility and grace — a going with the OVERALL course, the direction of his character, conduct, integrity score, etc.. The woman cannot just be poised to “mutiny” at a moment’s notice when any individual decision/direction is made on a daily basis. Man’s job is to CHERISH His wife, not “make her feel” any which way, including make her feel secure. No one can make anyone feel a given way.
What a man can do is demonstrate loving actions that the woman may or may not (given her past, her flesh, and her current state of rebellion or brokenness) correctly interpret as goodness. The man can LOVE HER BOLDLY enough to disrupt her selfishness, ungodly habits and bad attitudes, to uproot false beliefs that are keeping her from being her full God-intended self, which MAY OR MAY NOT “make her feel” secure, but which IS actually true love.
It is in this way of true love, her BEING actually cherished — that may or may not make her FEEL cherished, loved, secure, etc.. A good woman will recognize a man whose heart reflects God’s heart. And in that situation the love/trust that she has for Father God naturally overlaps with a husband who is also in love with Father God.
A worldly woman will fight true love and seek to subordinate the man because her behaviors demonstrate (in her brokenness and rebellion) that she seeks love-substitutes rather than agape love. Likewise, the worldly man does not lead, but seeks to subordinate the woman into an object rather than a cherished partner. Without God’s heart of real love at the center of the relationship, godly service (ministering to their truest and deepest needs) evaporates, leaving only two people taking from and manipulating each other. So sad!
The flesh and the spirit are at war and our responses in any given moment (selfish or unselfish, harsh or tender, sensitive or insensitive, etc.) are an indication of how that war is going.
People use words such as “love” without truly understanding what Cherish means, or what Agape means. The Flesh always seeks comfort zones of pleasure and control. A relationship addicted to that is textbook unhealthy. You are supposed to come to a relationship to bless, not to be blessed. And IF you get blessed in the process (which God says that to give IS more blessed than to receive), then that makes it emotionally fulfilling.
But we must always keep in mind that REAL LOVE is so ruthlessly committed to the actual highest and best interests of the beloved that emotional reciprocation might be (hopefully) a by-product of our interaction as a couple, but is not the goal. A legitimate desire, but not a legitimate goal. The world has no comprehension of, or ability to really love.
You cannot kill selfishness without killing your flesh and you cannot kill your flesh without being crucified WITH Christ Jesus.
All “romantic relationship advice” that does not have this core truth AS its actual core, is just playing around with the symptoms of relationship problems, and thus is waste of time as hopelessly doomed to fail. Intimacy will elude us and partnership will slip through our fingers like the wind.
Only true love seeks to serve from a secure place of power — meaning humble identity in Christ. To love in practice is thus to daily confront, confess and overcome your own selfishness, your tendency to manipulate people and rationalize it, instead of minister to them.
To love is to minister, giving from the fullness you have in Christ (a change-agent on Christ’s behalf, a true servant), whether you subjectively feel it in the moment or not.
IF you are addicted to good feelings from the relationship; you cannot hope to even begin to love, and the relationship is thus doomed, until that is rectified. To want good feelings is human, is understandable, and can be your DESIRE, but cannot ever be your goal, or else you the very fact that you are interacting with a goal to elicit a specific response from the other person puts you into the category of a manipulator, and thus one who sabotages and violates true love.
OK pause.
With all that said, and hopefully understood, (it took me years to understand that and even more to begin to practice actual love), women also have to address two other glaring issues:
(1) the decade plus in our recent history where women were so brainwashed as to demand the HYPER-SENSITIVE male. Women did this to not get stuck with a callous and selfish male, I GET it. But this told men NOT to take the lead and told them not to be men at the same time. That social engineering had good intentions but a flawed method for manifesting them. So men became “sensitive” for women, and then reactive to us INSTEAD of leading women.
Women wanted a RESPONSIVE man; but instead of saying THAT, women said “sensitive” man, and what that resulted in was promoting the “estrogenated” man that won’t provide loving leadership. It results in a man constantly checking in with them for approval. And that does not make a woman secure.
I’m talking about the emasculated guy that is looking to the woman’s reactions all the time to validate him as sensitive enough. If the man needs the woman to validate him, then he cannot love her, meaning truly lead her in a fear-overcoming way, because he is in reaction mode to her — precisely to what the graphic talks about, her judgements, opinions and assessments as to his worthiness to lead and competency to lead. So there is a profound balance between aware/sensitive of her needs, but not reactive to them or dominated by them.
Thus, a true man must go ahead and make decisions/actions that best forward her and his highest interests, meaning God-given purposes in the short AND long-term. While also doing his best to communicate the vision and intention to his woman in the process, wanting her understanding but not being responsible for her responses/understanding that is emotionally validating or not. You think it is hard to be a woman? Try taking on real masculinity! That is a daunting task that is SUPPOSED to drive a man to his knees, seeking the grace, the love, and the power to walk out his calling as a primary conduit of the love of God into this woman’s life.
(2) the ME TOO movement has men afraid to make a move because they rightly know that, at any point in time in the future, all their loving actions, contribution, service and leadership can then be magically reinterpreted by opportunistic women on-the-spot to be abusive and/or criminal. That results in men being put in jail for sitting with their knees too far apart (man-spreading, these opportunistic women call it) and other insanity that all works against harmony, against leadership, and against true love. WHY would a many try to lead or love a woman who is demonstrating selfishness and a propensity to be delusional?
To rationalize and re-interpret both the actions of a man through a demanding or manipulative/opportunistic lens? A wise man will recognize her as love-resistant and behave accordingly. But a good woman will call a man (inspire him) to be a better man who needs to receive from God so that he can best minister to her at every level.
Why should she submit and why should he lead?
So, yes, a man whose overall life shows insensitivity obviously does not cultivate a responsive woman. Likewise, a leadership-resistant woman, is either (1) accurately responding to a man’s lack of leadership or manhood, or (2) is the product of her own brokenness. Often today, it is #2, and the woman is unconscious of her own heart — how she has mishandled her own wounds and become toxic. Either way, a leadership-resistant woman cultivates a man who either gives up (resigns), walks away, or turns into a reactive follower — goes passive.
While men and women can complain about each other, progress only comes from a determination to own your part in the matter.
