This is my hope and prayer for you: that in owning your manhood and womanhood and viewing it through the clarifying lens of the gospel, you would give God much glory, and experience much joy.

The evangelical church has had a lively debate over “gender roles” in the last thirty years. Sometimes, when complementarians—those who believe God calls men to be leaders in home, church, and to some extent in society—talk about embracing biblical gender roles, we’re heard as only wanting people to do what’s right. Let us make this clear: above all, we complementarians want to be godly men and godly women who experience the joy that comes from knowing God and living under his Word.

When you’re saved, you no longer see any area of life as a burden. You see all of it as a garden of delight. Everything before you presents an opportunity to give praise and honor to your Creator and Savior (1 Cor. 10:31). This extends, in fact, even to what you eat and drink—in other words, to the most basic parts of your daily existence! That’s incredible.

This helps us make sense of how we are to live as men and women. We know now that as blood-bought believers, we have the opportunity to magnify God’s greatness and goodness as men and women. Our sexuality, then, is not incidental. It’s not unimportant. It’s not a curse that we want to get rid of. It’s not a burden that God has given us that we do everything we can to downplay. Our
manhood and womanhood is a God-designed pathway to delight.

Our sexuality wasn’t designed by a secular entrepreneur, a victimizing pornographer, or a Jason Bourne wannabe. Manhood was produced by the spectacular intelligence of the Father. Womanhood was created by the cosmic brilliance of the Father. Our culture tells us the opposite: “Sure, you may be born with a few certain parts, but that doesn’t mean anything. Men and women are interchange- able. Gender is malleable, changeable, unfixed, unimportant.” This view sees gender as a construct, something created and foisted upon us by society, rather than than as an essential, God-made reality. The Scripture clearly speaks to this contested matter. God made Adam as a man.

Then God made Eve, an image bearer like Adam as a human being, but unlike him as a woman. She had a purpose in creation: to be his “helper,” a noble title befitting a high calling (Gen. 2:18). The man and the woman were like one another—fully human—but unlike one another such that they were complementary. In truth, all who affirm basic biology must own a substantially complementarian position.
But the truthfulness of this complementarity does not render it boring, merely factual, incidental. When Yahweh brought Eve to Adam, the man did not glumly nod his head in acknowledgment. He exploded with praise and delight:

Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (Gen. 2:23)

If this is read in church, it’s probably read flatly, without a lot of emphasis. In reality, the whole section should be in ALL CAPS. The man “at last” has his covenantal partner. He is lonely no longer; he has a helpmate; he finds the woman, a fellow human, to be unlike him, fearfully and wonderfully made. This difference thrills him and causes him to shout praise to his Maker.
The body, we see, is good. Manhood is good. Womanhood is good. We don’t all look the same according to our sex. Not every man has thick shoulders and a lantern jaw. Not every woman has a certain figure and lustrous locks. But whatever we look like, we all give immense glory to God simply by living joyfully as men or as women, savoring our divine design, seizing opportunities to live obediently as followers of Christ according to our sex and our foundational Christian calling.

This is why we’re here. This is what the complementarian movement, bursting with life, is all about. This is my hope and prayer for you: that in owning your manhood and womanhood and viewing it through the clarifying lens of the gospel, you would give God much glory, and experience much joy. These matters we have considered are true, given us by the Lord. These matters we have considered are good, and good for us.

Adapted from Designed for Joy: How the Gospel Impacts Men and Women, Identity and Practice edited by Jonathan Parnell and Owen Strachan, © 2015, pp. 19-21. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.