Author: God-fearing mom | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Titus 2: 3-5

In some Christian circles around the blogosphere there is this idea of ‘Biblical Womanhood,’ which comes across as a sort of Titus 2 and Proverbs 31 theology for Christian women, whereby women seek to encourage and influence other women to believe and practice that their only sphere for true godly living is in the home.

But let’s examine the main passage they use to restrict women to be a homemaker only.

“…teach the older women to live in a way that honors God. They must not slander others or be heavy drinkers. Instead, they should teach others what is good. These older women must train the younger women to love their husbands and their children, to live wisely and be pure, to work in their homes, to do good, and to be submissive to their husbands. Then they will not bring shame on the word of God.” –Titus 2:3‭-‬5

First of all, I want to say that some of these women influencers tend to ‘slander’ other women as disobedient to Christ or not loving God enough to obey Him.

Second, they teach as though women are only called to teach younger women to be busy at home, and to love their husbands and children. But that alone is not what the passage says. It says to teach “…What is Good…” They tend to fail in recognizing that everything in the Bible is Good.

So women can teach the whole council of God!

Thirdly, I want to point out that they train the younger women *who are married*… to love their husbands and children. This does not mean also cause the unmarried women to feel ashamed, or to tell them to wait for God to bring them a husband, and that they should only aspire to be a homemaker!

Single women can stay single and embrace it and serve the Lord wherever they wish.

Fourth, to live wisely and be pure. Wisdom requires experience in living genuinely devoted to God and His truth; not just to His people-helpers! Also, bible study coupled with prayer and probably other books to help grow the noggin, in my opinion. Purity of both body and mind comes from renewing the mind with God’s Word.

Fifth. To work in their homes doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t get a job outside the home. By all means get one if you want/need one! It only means when you are home try to keep it tidy whether you train your kids to help you or not. That’s what I think. And there’s nothing wrong asking hubby to help. Also be teaching your kids about God somehow.

Five. To do good. Well, the Bible teaches us what is good. Plus, I think we know innately what is good. Well, at least you probably know what is bad… So, we can do the opposite!

Six. Be submissive to their husbands. Then they will not bring shame on the word of God. I read how in Greco-Roman culture it was a patriarchal society and they would use the Aristotelian household codes. So if you are a Christian woman you are told to submit to your husband so that the outsiders wouldn’t speak against the Christians or their Message. So that was the purpose of telling women to submit to their husbands; to show proper etiquette for that culture, so they wouldn’t offend people that would otherwise consider Christian women heathens for not appearing submissive to their husbands.

We still submit because it is good to do so in ways that honor God. But husbands equally submit to wives. But that’s for another post!

Anyway, that’s my take on Titus 2. That’s the way I choose to interpret it because that’s the way it makes more sense with all of scripture, in my experience, and with the help of bible scholars and some history.

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Marriage Trouble Part 5

I forgot to list a couple of verses in my last post that were used in Michael Pearl’s “Moral Earnestness Test:”

And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. – 1 Timothy 2:14 (This is where I got the idea of not trusting my mind.)
Like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear. – 1 Peter 3:6 (Not to fear consequences for submitting even while the husband is making foolish decisions.)

Writing these posts have been quite a bit triggering for me personally. Michael and Debi Pearl’s marriage teaching created a sort of abuse and Stockholm Syndrome situation disguised as Christianity. I will even go as far as saying it became tantamount to idolatry. It duped my husband to become entitled, narcissistic, and a tyrant. Needless to say, It didn’t make him a better, more mature spiritual leader. It hurt him. It hurt us. It hurt me. I was living a life of bondage which turned into another gospel, another message, a different spirit. It didn’t make sense with the rest of the Word of God.

A few years ago my husband scolded me for wanting to follow my gut to end a friendship with a woman I met on the internet. I don’t need to go into the story too detailed here but I believe she was a psychopath or at least a malignant narcissist. The way she idealized me, devalued and discarded me, after me giving her moral support for a year… It gave me PTSD.

Then I discovered this verse:

Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm. – Proverbs 13:20 (I can’t be keeping company with anyone who exhibits behavior of a fool as described in the Bible whether a friend or spouse, God warns His children. So boundaries are key!)

Around that time in the same year another blogging friend I knew for two years prior told me her husband was evil and had been abusing her and their many children and that he was leaving them. That gave me empathically induced PTSD too!

I think, at least in part, the PTSD caused me to start distrusting my own husband. I was no longer feeling safe with him as my umbrella of protection. I was sensing that something wasn’t right even more than ever. I was realizing I was in somewhat of an abusive marriage situation, both financially and emotionally. God didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to us either. One thing lead to another and our church paid for us to get counseling using a John Gottman Institute trained counselor. It helped us a lot!

Around that time, I got a big bruise that lasted a month and became a hematoma. This was caused by jumping out of bed and hitting my knee on the bed frame. I got a phone call thinking it was my husband and I wasn’t doing the housework. I had been relaxing instead so when I got the phone call I jumped out of bed and that’s how I hurt myself. I was contemplating about that hematoma on my leg realizing I was afraid because I feared telling my husband I was relaxing. You see, I had a ‘fake-it-’till-you-make-it’ system. A facade of being Super-wife that I was striving to keep up, while also thinking again God is not protecting me like I’m used to. Why? Then, a thought came to my mind:

God is a jealous God and He is jealous for me. Around that time I found this Bible verse:

Fear of man will prove to be a snare but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe. – Proverbs 29:25

Oh my gosh! You don’t know how relieved I was! God was revealing stuff I needed to realize! It then occurred to me something I knew and practiced before the Pearl teaching, was that scripture trumps my husband. Awesome! So since then it’s been a few years and I’ve been studying a bit of apologetics and egalitarian hermeneutics. It’s stuff I was interested in, but Debi Pearl made it seem like I wasn’t supposed to be interested in anything other than being an over-accommodating wife and mother. So that was the beginning of the end of my unnecessary marriage troubles. Now my husband says he likes me better with a backbone! 😜

That’s a glimpse of my personal story, but I want to refer everybody to a blog called: createdtobehelpmeet.blogspot.com. It’s an excellently done review of the book. I don’t have the book anymore, so I couldn’t really take it apart and give you a nice detailed review about it. All I did was share how it harmed, more than helped, our marriage and our spiritual well being.

Marriage Trouble Part 1
Marriage Trouble Part 2
Marriage Trouble Part 3
Marriage Trouble Part 4

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Marriage Trouble Part 4

I want to explain why I think the teachings in ‘Created to be His Help Meet’ book by Debi Pearl and the ‘Marriage God’s Way’ DVD by Michael Pearl are completely heretical at least in situations like mine was, and worse, dangerous for abusive marriages.

In ‘Marriage God’s Way’ Michael Pearl lists something he calls a “Moral Earnestness Test” on the screen showing all the difficult passages of scripture for women using the King James Version. He then does some commentary between verses and I’ll write whatever I can remember and/or what I understood his comments were. And then maybe I’ll add some personal comments underneath.

**Trigger Warning**

Michael Pearl’s “Moral Earnestness Test,” not necessarily in order:

Proverbs 31:11 – The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. {Michael Pearl taught that a woman should never spoil her husband’s reputation by saying anything negative about him to anybody.}
Ephesians 5:23 – For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
1 Timothy 2:11-15 – Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
Ephesians 5:22 – Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. {Wives should submit to their husband just like they submit to God.}
1 Peter 3:1 – Likewise, ye wives, [be] in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; {If they are not interested in Christianity, don’t try to evangelize them.}
Genesis 3:16 – Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
1 Timothy 2:12 – But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. (I understood that to mean it was sin to try to apply the great commission, to contend for the faith, to correct my husband in any way whether privately or anywhere.)
1 Corinthians 11:3-16 – But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman [is] the man; and the head of Christ [is] God. {Michael Pearl said that this means in the chain of command, my husband is god to me.}
1 Corinthians 14:34 – Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but [they are commanded] to be under obedience, as also saith the law. (So it was inappropriate for me to ask the pastor anything about the teaching. I had to ask my husband about it whether he heard the lesson or not.)
Colossians 3:18 – Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.

I just wanted to add some words and say that after seeing all those Bible verses scrunched together in that way, it is enough to keep a new young Christian wife very oppressed and confused, thinking I had to pick and choose whether to obey God’s Word or my husband. And to try to do both was really hard because I felt unequally yoked and in my zeal my husband would make fun of me. I hated being made fun of.

Don’t get me wrong. I was often rebellious to this system when I just had enough which was probably every day. Then I’d just keep trying to work the system. It felt like the rest of the Bible couldn’t possibly be for me. When I’d try to apply my personal studies I felt like it just didn’t work with my circumstances being married to a man who at the time seemed annoyed with my Christianity. This made me start feeling like I was losing my saltiness.

I couldn’t ask anybody for help because then that would require me to probably share something negative about my husband which would make me fall short of Proverbs 31 womanhood. I was stuck in bewilderment for many years just picking and choosing what seemed convenient at the time living with a confused conscience for a long time never trusting my head too much.

To be continued.

Marriage Trouble Part 1
Marriage Trouble Part 2
Marriage Trouble Part 3
Marriage Trouble Part 4
Marriage Trouble Part 5

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Kicked Out on Mother’s Day

This coming Sunday is Mother’s Day. It will mark a year from the day my former pastor indirectly invited me to leave his church from the pulpit. He said something to the effect: “If anybody doesn’t like that I’m rough around the edges sometimes, there’s the door!”

I had gently and winsomely been emailing the church about concerns over several months before that. Some of you maybe read my blog post series: ‘Why I Left.’

I think that assistant pastor who was being “nice” after being standoffish and ignoring my emails was doing a tactic to “pull the rug out from under me” to flatter me in order to make it plausible that I was the “problem” and he had a weakness. Ugh!

If so, watch out for that tactic, ladies, if you are one to contend for the faith. Keep praying for God’s guidance on what to do.

I should have given up after the second email was ignored and talked to the senior pastor in person. I wanted to but I was intimidated.

Titus 3:10-11 says: “Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them. You may be sure that such people are warped and sinful; they are self-condemned.”

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Marriage Trouble Part 3

Some of the things I remember that were negative about all the power I was giving my husband was I was busy trying to be so perfect. If my husband was less than happy it would really break my heart. One time he was unhappy for a whole week. I can’t even tell you what that did to me but I will say this. I got so desperate I asked God for help.

I gave up trying to make my husband happy by being a good wife. It wasn’t working. Debi Pearl was wrong! But after I prayed my husband called me on the phone on his way home from work and I was really raw with my emotions. I think God helped me by being able to get really honest with what I was feeling like. My husband had a long talk with me that night and it seemed he was a changed man. It was supernatural. Debi didn’t save us, God did. Debi put me in bondage to my husband.

We were having some financial problems and my husband wanted me to go to work. I told him I would learn to be frugal but that I couldn’t go to work. We had 3 children at the time. It wasn’t only because I was indoctrinated not to go to work. I also had some personal traumas about working with men coworkers. I also did not want to leave my children with strangers because of traumatic things I experienced as a child. I’ve always been very adamant about staying home. I don’t care what anybody says. That’s deeply ingrained into me. Yes, mommy issues again.

So for years I lived on change and a small allowance bi-weekly on payday. If I needed to use the bank card I asked permission. This wasn’t only because of my husband. It was also partly because I didn’t trust myself with money.

I think this came from the book too because I didn’t trust myself. Like I said my husband was very whimsical and I had to adapt. It was all on me to make everything work or rather, seem to work.

I felt so small and dependent, like a little kid. I didn’t have as much passion for God anymore. God thought I was inferior according to the Pearls. They never said it that way but that’s what happened in my experience as a result of their teachings.

I think what saved me is listening to my Bible CDs. I was coming across a lot of stuff that the book didn’t mention. It became clear that I needed to not pick up that book anymore and only read my Bible.

To be continued.

Marriage Trouble Part 1
Marriage Trouble Part 2
Marriage Trouble Part 3
Marriage Trouble Part 4
Marriage Trouble Part 5