With Mother’s day coming up in a few days, I thought that it would be helpful to address a topic that has generated quite a bit of heat and not enough light; that of the role of women in the home.
I must first start off with asking the question- What do you care the most about? The bottom line is this… if you care more about God’s word being honored than about your own thoughts and feelings on this or any other topic, then it will matter to you. If you don’t care more about God’s word than anything else, then it won’t, and you will most likely dismiss the topic altogether as being irrelevant, backward, and anti-modern.
Since there is so much confusion that exists that obscures with clouds of uncertainty the shining light of God’s word, I will boil it down to the following bullet points:
- The purpose of being a keeper at home is so that God’s word will not be dishonored. It then follows that if a woman is not being a keeper at home, that do some degree, God’s word is being dishonored because of her absence. This quality of ‘keeping’ can’t be done at a typical 8-5 job outside of the home.
“…to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored.” Titus 2:5
- The Greek word translated as ‘keeper’ is οὐκουρός (oikourgos). It is derived from two greek words: οἶκος (oikos) and ἔργον (ergon). Oikos means, “a house, a dwelling” and ergon means, “work, labor, action, deed”. ‘Keeper’ has connotations of being a guard, one who is aware of the things that are going on in the home, and the ‘watch’… or one who keeps watch over. See The New Strong’s Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
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- Everything she does should be with a view toward ‘keeping’, including but not limited to the following: guarding the relationships of the house of everyone in it, including husband and children, Insuring that the financial ‘ship’ is still floating.
Using the resources she has available to establish a comfortable, loving, nurturing, peaceful and protected home, as distinguished from simply cleaning the house and making meals.
- She guards her family’s time, treasures, relationships
implications include:
she will not have anything as a higher priority than fulfilling God’s will for her life.
There is also the aspect of the busybody. Originally used as a term to define a man who is not working and providing for his own needs, the term would equally apply to a woman who is out of her place. Her place is the home.