A Godly Woman's Work (Day 5)

"Diligence is viewing each task as a special assignment from the Lord and using all my energies to accomplish it."

As we’re told in Proverbs 14, “In all labor there is profit” (verse 23).

So as you labor for your family, it may not be with wool and flax, but as you work with your hands, as you work in your home and as you handle with your hands the practical details related to the care of your family, in all labor, there is profit. Labor is good. Work is good. And this woman who has a godly heart labors. She works to minister to the needs of her family.

Titus chapter 2 teaches us that women are to be home-workers—workers at home. That’s what the Word says. That’s what the Scripture says.

Now, that doesn’t mean—and we’ll see in this passage—that there is no other place that a woman works. But the first place that she works is in her home. Until she has cared for the needs of her home, she has not got the right to go out and tend to the needs elsewhere. The core, the central place of her ministry, of her work is out of her home.

There is an appropriate division of labor within marriage and family. God has ordained that the husband ideally should be the breadwinner, that he goes out to work to bring home resources for the family’s care and wellbeing. And what is the woman’s labor? She labors to manage the resources that he provides for his care and for the care of the children. She’s making an economic contribution as much as he is, but he’s going out to bring in resources and then she is managing them.

The functions that we see listed in this passage—functions related to clothing and food and home and the atmosphere in the house, the care of the house, the care of the home, and the care of the practical needs of that home—are distinctively the woman’s role and domain.

Have you embraced willingly and with joy . . . have you accepted the domain that God has given to you as a woman? Have you accepted the responsibility, the privilege of caring for the physical, practical needs of your family? Now, I don’t mean by that do you always love cooking three meals a day, washing clothes, cleaning toilets, mopping floors? I’m not saying in and of itself do you love those tasks?

I’m saying have you willingly accepted the calling and the privilege that it is to serve your family as a woman who reverences God? Is this the outworking of your love for God in terms of how you express it in your home? That’s God’s calling, and there’s blessing to be had when we embrace God’s calling and say, “Yes, Lord, I will accept that. I will work, and I will work out of my home. I’ll be a worker at home to make sure that the needs of my family are met.”

That requires diligence. It requires hard work, and it requires that she center her efforts around her home. That is her domain.

It should be understood that for every wife the first duty is the making and keeping of her own home. Her first and best work should be done there, and till it is well done she has no right to go outside to take up other duties. She is to be a ‘worker at home.’ She must look upon her home as the one spot on earth for which she alone is responsible, and which she must cultivate well for God if she never does anything outside. For the Father’s business [that’s capital “F”—Father, God—His business] is not attending Dorcas societies and missionary meetings, and mothers’ meetings, and temperance conventions, or even teaching a Sunday school class, until she has made her own home all that her wisest thought and best skill can make it.

There have been wives who in their zeal for Christ’s work outside have neglected Christ’s work inside their own doors. They have had eyes and hearts for human need and human sorrow in the broad fields lying far out, but neither eye nor heart for the work of love about their own feet.

The result has been that while they were doing angelic work in the lanes and streets, the angels were mourning over their neglected duties within the hallowed walls of their own homes. While they were winning a place in the hearts of the poor or the sick or the orphan, they were losing their rightful place in the hearts of their own household.

"Let it be remembered that Christ’s work in the home is the first that he gives to every wife, and that no amount of consecrated activities in other spheres will atone in this world or the next for neglect or failure there (pp. 67-68).” – J. R. Miller, Home-Making

So busy serving God outside of their own homes that it’s obvious by the condition of their health, or the condition of their husband, their marriage, their children, that they have neglected the first things: their priorities in their home.

It’s a lot easier to go out and take care of someone else’s children or pick up for someone else where you get thanks and gratitude and maybe even a paycheck than it is to do those more thankless tasks within your own home.

We have women who are out leading Bible studies. They’re leading ministries. They’re working hard in their church. They’re staffing the nursery. They’re singing in the choir. They’re teaching a Sunday school class. They’re active and involved in their local church or in ministry in their community, volunteering in different ways, but their own homes are in shambles.

Your good works ought to first be done at home. Ministering to the needs of your family. Then as God gives you time, opportunity, available resources, or in a different season of life, to take those gifts and those abilities and expand them, as we’ll see the Proverbs 31 woman does, outside of your own home.

 Lord, help us to view work in our homes as a means of offering up worship and love and devotion to You and ministering grace to the ones that You have called us to serve. Help us to see work from Your point of view and to see that the work of our hands is holy when it’s work done for You and for others. So give us a sense of biblical and godly priorities. And may the virtue and excellence that You’re developing in our hearts manifest itself in these very practical ways as we tend to physical, material and temporal needs of those that You’ve put into our homes. I pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

     Jesus, help me to see the value in keeping up with my home. I pray that it may be a heaven of rest for Nathan and I and a place of peace from the chaos of the world. I pray that You help me to be hospitable in opening my home to others and to remember that above, school and work, the home is the place You have called me to become more like You by glorifying Your father and loving Nater. Amen.