There isn’t a man on the planet who in some sense doesn’t want to be Tiger Woods. He’s good looking. He’s physically fit. He’s a world-class athlete. He has a beautiful wife and family. He’s rich beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.  He had a father who loved him, not just in words but in action, pouring himself into his son, building a love that survives to this day, in many ways making Tiger the man he became.

Try as we may, there aren’t too many men who can lay claim to all of these elements of success at once. Tiger has it all, and it wasn’t just handed to him. He came by his success through hard work and discipline. He earned it.

In recent weeks, however,  Tiger’s personal life has become the stuff of tabloid journalism. It appears his beautiful wife may have used one of Tiger’s own golf clubs to knock him senseless when she discovered he only had eyes for – at last count – nine other women.

It could have been worse. Tiger could have been an abuser: an abuser of controlled substances or an abuser of his wife. No evidence of any of that. He could have been an embezzler. Not satisfied with having it all, he could have stolen even more. He didn’t. Like another famous athlete, he could have struggled with jealousy, flew into a rage, and killed his wife. Didn’t happen.

Tiger Woods isn’t as bad as he could be. But neither is he as perfect as he appeared to be. He’s not a thief or a murderer. He isn’t an abuser. Tiger is merely a serial adulterer. He enjoys being in the company of a variety of women. Tiger has just this one little quirk, yet that quirk was the trip wire over which his entire world came crashing down.

There isn’t a man on the planet who in one sense isn’t Tiger Woods. There isn’t anything in Tiger that isn’t in you. None of us are as bad as we could be, but the propensity for lust, lying, anger, and unfaithfulness are all there, hidden in a heart that is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. There isn’t any one of us who is not capable, like Tiger, of saying, “It’s only this one time. No harm.”

A moral code can keep the tiger in you in check for a time. The fear of getting caught is a restraint that keeps most men within the boundaries of their marriage. I’m sure it was that way for Tiger Woods. We have admired him as a man of disciplined perfection. But that discipline, that self-denial, which was so characteristically on display in Tiger’s athletic prowess, failed him with immeasurable consequences in his personal life. When push came to shove, Tiger had a great fall. Discipline, apparently, isn’t enough.

Neither is the power of the law and the fear of getting caught enough to restrain the depravity of the human heart, and yet that’s all most of us are counting on to keep us on the straight and narrow. No man, no matter how disciplined, has what it takes to keep himself from falling. Every man has an untamed tiger within, waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness.

The moral of Tiger’s Tale? If you’re looking for perfection, you won’t find it within yourself. Discipline and restraint are in themselves never enough to produce perfection, because all that is in us is depravity. Failure is inevitable. But failure is never final.

There is hope for overcoming failure. But it isn’t in you. And it obviously isn’t in Tiger. It’s in a Lion: the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, introduced to us in the inspired wrtings of the Bible, whose birth we celebrate this month. This Lion has prevailed over our untamable propensity for failure.   He has triumphed over every enemy poised against us for our personal destruction. He did it by taking on himself the likeness of our weak, vulnerable, and sinful flesh in his incarnation in Bethlehem, living a life of perfect obedience to the demands of the law, becoming obedient to the point of death, thus procuring the perfection that all of us long for and which God demands.

Jesus is perfect because we aren’t, and because we can’t be. And he doesn’t keep his perfection for himself. His perfection is for us, and for our salvation. And for Tiger’s. Because there’s nothing in Tiger that’s not in you.

Ephesians 5

I’d like to say that my wife Maria was my first love. But I can’t say that. As a seven year old boy my first love was Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman is an icon of the Feminist Movement, ceated by a liberal professor who thought boys were too aggressive because of the comic book heros they were reading (Batman, Superman, et al).

Wonder Woman is sent in the world of men to overpower them. He is drawing the idea of Wonder Woman from the idea that the way for a woman to make her way in the world of men is to overpower them with male-like strength.

We are living in a world where men and women see themselves in this kind of competition and rivalry. men are either predatory or passive so that women are often times seeking to protect themselves fromt the predatory influence or passive influence of men. We are living in a world of divorce courts and abortion clinics spawned by rivalry between the sexes.

Wonder Woman is patterned after a goddess in Ephesus named Diana, a goddess Paul woul have been familiar with as he is writing Ephesians 5. The Ephesians had all kinds of confusion about what it means to be a man and woman – so Paul addresses the gender wars in light of the gospel.

We assume that Ephesians 5 is given only to those who are married. That’s not the case. It’s part of a letter written to the entire congregation, saying you are to teach and admonish one another so that your marriage is not your own private event. If you are single, it tells you what it means to be growing in gdoly womanhood and manhood.

Paul is sustaining an argument in Ephesians 5 that begins in Ephesians 1 and runs throughout the epistle. When Paul says that he is speaking of Christ and his church he is not using Christ and his church as a metaphor for marriage: “Marriage is like…the sun and the moon…the dew and the rain…Christ and his church.” This isn’t a metaphor. Instead Paul is teaching that the marriage one-flesh union, and the identity of man as man and woman as woman is showing us and patterning for us of this mystery that is present that he has been talking about in chapters 1-4 of Christ and his church. What God had in mind from the very beginning is Christ and His Church and embedded around us are images, pictures of that.

Paul is teaching us about spiritual warfare.

1. Christ and the Creation of the Woman

Scripture indicts us as sinners and our initial reaction as sinners is to resist it.

What does submission here mean? When you have a godly home in which you have a woman who is following and trusting the leadership of her husband, and when you have a community of the faithful where young girls and single women are encouraged to follow the leadership of a godly husband, you see a picture of the gospel. God says in the New Covenant I am going to have a Bride who will not follow after the Baals, but follow the loving direction of her Christ, her Bridegroom.

The reason why we are not able to understand submission is primarily because first of all we take in and adapt to the cultural understanding of what it means to be a woman.

Young women have been conditioned to find their value in what other young men think of them. That is not a biblical perspective. God finds beautiful the quiet dignity of the heart, not external beauty. A woman’s value and worth is not determined by what men think of them. Women are not called to submit to men. A woman is called to submit to her own husband.

One of the reason what it means to be a godly woman is because we don’t understand what it means to love the church. The church is created out of the side of Jesus. The church is the sign of the victory of Christ. When we gather as the church in covenant community we are not simply in a place reminding ourselves of the sacrifical life and death of Christ, rather we re coming into Mt Zion, into the heavenly Jerusalem surrounded by heaven and earth.

When the church refuses to see itself in submission to the Lord Jesus, we will not see submission patterned out in marriage.

2. The Creation of the Man

We misunderstand love as simply being nice to someone or having some typr of hormonal reaction, which is how romantic comedies and popular music defines love.

Love is defined “as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.”

If a husband does not love his wife as Christ love the church, this does not negate a wife’s responsibility to submit to her husband.

Men think they can fulfill this command without real headship – sort of like the Queen as head of the nation but no real authority.

Illustrated by Jesus washing Peter’s feet. Jesus leads not by raw sovereignty or by passivity. He leads by discipling and teaching.

If we are to lead, we cannot be at the whim of events.

You believe yourself to be leaders, but you are not bearing the burden of your families. If you put the weight of decision making on your wife or expecting her to push against you when you make stupid decisions, you are not loving your wife as Christ loved the church. Men make decisions not in their own self-interest but in the interest of those whom God has given him to lead.

3. The Union of the Man and Woman

This is nonsensical in our world. Divorce has become so common place. You and I have moved to a place in which we have done to divorce exactly what the liberal denominations have done with abortion and homosexuality. “Sometimes it just happens.” God hates divorce. Not only because of what it does to children, men and women and society, but because it is blasphemy.

We may preach an orthodox gospel from our pulpits, but what kind of gospel are we preaching as we rip apart the image of the Christ-Church union in marriage?

God hates adultery because it is a picture of another gospel – of a Christ who abandons his church for something else.

So many of us are wanting to define ourselves by what we think we ought to be able to expect and receive, and not by the gospel. The gospel is at stake.

Session Two of the Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Seminar
Proverbs 7

You and I are dealing with Satanic powers who understand and know human nature and behavior. They know what it means to be a man and they know how to lead you to destruction and they will not do so suddenly because you will be alarmed by it. So they create for us an illusion in which we are able to slowly work our way to destruction, which is what the Holy Spirit is warning us about in Proverbs 7.

Satan wants to destroy a man at the very core of his sexuality. You are being watched. You are also being trained, which is why the Scripture gives the image of an animal who is being fed to illustrate Satan’s powers and deception.

Proverbs 7 is a word from a godly father about male sexuality and a call to wisdom.

The move toward sexual destruction begins with a man who begins with small compromises with what it is that is holding him to fidelity.

The preparation for fornication happens when we are young. And we are never beyond the point of being destroyed sexually even when we are old.

The issue for the young man in this proverb is that he doesn’t see what is waiting for him. It doesn’t start with an overt sexual opportunity. They start by creating in you a way of looking at women. From early stages you begin to see women in certain ways. He is cultivating within you not so much an opening for a sexual transgression, he rather creates the illusion that you are missing something because you are married.

If you are in a situation where you resent your wife’s appearance, you are on your way to sexual sin.

God has hardwired men for sexuality. Sexuality is not like addiction to cigarettes. Sexuality is always and continually raging within a man because God has hardwired a man to be husband and father. Every aspect of sexual desire is to drive you toward that one flesh union that God has designed you for.

Satan’s powers works against your sexuality by operating from the basis of what you notice about women and he will destroy you with it. This is the area of imagination. Satan will fuflill your sexual fantasies to the destruction of your sexual life.

The Satanic powers are looking to see what it is that will turn your attention and then they will set you up to be in that situation.

Proverbs 7 presents a woman that is contrary to nature – loud and wayward – yet God has designed a woman with peaceful dignity. She is masculine in that she is the initiator. She acts in a way that causes the forbiddenness itself to be the draw.

One of the greatest dangers that we face as men in destroying our homes is the idea that forbiddenness is sexy. You and I are trained toward our fallen nature all of our lives to see that to be the case. The forbidden is itself that which is alluring.

We are living in an American Christian culture that misunderstands love. Popular music, popular films offer two definitions of what love is: either sexual copulation or this sense of a hormonally fueled romance.

God has designed us, in order to drive us toward a one flesh union, with hormones. This is normal and natural in a season of life as God is drawing you toward one another. As you grow in your love for one another, and the longer we are together, we grow deeper in our love which lessens the hormonal fuel, but love cannot be reduced to the hormonal urge.

Adultery happens when we allow the hormonal urge to replace deep love. A single man who is in a sexual relationship is cheating on his wife, even though he doesn’t know who she is yet.

Sexual temptation does not start with your sexual desire. It starts with your ego.

There is a promise of secrecy in the text. Any sexual transgression carries with it the promise that you will never be found out, but you are always found out. Satan is destroying Christianity in America with electronic prostitution. We had the internet pornography incident as soon as it is over, and we act as though what is at stake is simply an act of your will.

This is not an act of your will. There are personal beings who are bent on your destruction with the promise that this will never be found out. It is not enough to erase the internet history and commit that you will not do it again.

This path towards sexual destruction leads to the hell of condemnation. We are ignorant. We do not see the hellishness that awaits us.

Every man who begins an adulteress relationship believes their lives will be better because you are ignoring death – the destruction that is waiting. Satan doesn’t come at you suddenly. He is saving you for something, so that he can destroy you at the very moment when it can have the greatest impact. You destroy the calf when it is big and strong. Satan waits until he can create the maximum amount of chaos in your life.

If we belong to Christ, we must flee and come out of our hiding and admit that we are in need of the power of the crucified and resurrected Christ and take seriously that adulterers will not inherit the kingdom of God. If you do not belong to Christ, he will not treat you as sons. He will give you over to your passions and to ultimate destruction.

When you are participating in sexual immorality, loading up the images on the internet, when you prepare your home for adultery by criticizing and belittleing your wife, don’t be deceived as to what’s happening.

There are all kinds of ways we put ourselves in a place where destruction can come upon us. We are being carefully lead along to the ‘blood room’ (the slaughterhouse).