S2S Sisters: "God’s Design for Personhood: My Whole Self Unified for God’s Glory" Renita Petersheim

Our prayer is that you will be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power.

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to Strength to Strength Sisters. I'm Jamila Kurtz, and I'm so happy to be with you all today. The vision of Strength to Strength Sisters is to encourage women to be catalysts in advancing the kingdom through biblical teaching, testimonies of faithful women, and thought-provoking discussions. We're really excited to have Renita Peterschheim share with us today on the subject of God's design for personhood: My Whole Self United for God's Glory.

Renita loves a good cup of coffee, traveling, working in her perennial flower beds, and moving. She's a very valued friend of mine, and I know how much she loves discovering treasures in God's Word and her passion to share life and truth with others.

I really believe that God has gifted Renita with a unique blend of insight and life experience to speak on the subject today. After Renita shares with us, we're going to have our time of question and answer, so be ready with any questions you may have.

So I'm just ready and just here and just really excited to hear from God today. Renita, I'd love to pray for you before we begin. Thank you, God, for the way that you created us in your image. Thank you that you crafted us, Lord, with just a unique purpose that you have for each of us.

Lord, we just want to worship you right now, Lord, and just thank you, Lord, for creating us as your daughters. And Lord, I especially want to pray, Lord, a blessing over Renita. Lord, just give her the grace and the courage, Lord, just to share the message that you have given her.

And Lord, we only want you to be glorified in our time together. And so, Lord, we're trusting you, Lord, that the words that you want spoken will be spoken.

Lord Jesus, we just thank you, Lord, that your Spirit is so faithful to move among us. And so, Lord, we're just trusting you for a blessing today. We ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen. Okay, Renita, we're praying, and we'll turn the time over to you.

All right, thank you very much. So God's design for personhood, this is something that personhood is kind of a new word for me. I never really understood what it was till about a year ago I was in a conversation with somebody, and the word came up. And as I started studying into it, all of a sudden I realized, you know what, this is at the core of what I've struggled with all my life. And so as this kind of unfolds, some of it might apply to you, some of it might not, but I think that you will, yeah, be challenged, kind of like I was. And actually, as I realized this had to do with one part of my life, I realized that I was really failing in another part of my life.

Like it brought to light how I didn't really understand God's design for personhood as my whole self. So I hope that you'll come along with me, and we'll see. It's a huge topic, but we'll just see if we see what we can get done here in this amount of time.

So my struggle has been more with womanhood or femininity, and this has to do with that. So the questions of like, who am I, or what defines who I am, or what am I worth, or who or what defines my value? Supposedly I have inherent intrinsic value. I'm made in God's image, but what about me is God's image, and when do I get that value? When is that value assigned to me? Like my 13-year-old son walked by as I was making this PowerPoint, and he said, "Personhood." Have I entered into personhood yet? So this is the question: what is personhood, and when do we get it? What is our value? What really says that we are valuable and we are in God's image?

So the first thing we're going to look at is the culture's description of what personhood is. Now, personhood is when philosophers talk about personhood, they're referring to something or someone having exceptionally high moral status, often described as like a right to life, an inherent dignity, or mattering for one's own sake.

Now that asks a question: that is, are there non-persons? That's what this word means. Personhood means there are some people that are persons and some humans that are not. So what does that mean to us? So is a human being a person? This is the question that we actually have to ask.

Some people say personhood equals a human being. So the reason why being like, let's see, can I get my—what did I do? So do they have—they have a future like ours? They have potential. They have a full genetic code. So the human being is a person.

Some people say personhood has more to do with cognitive abilities and consciousness. Okay, so that means the mind has to be going. Sometimes they say like the heart has to be beating. That—when does that happen? That's late in second trimester. Some people say it's when a fetus is viable outside of the womb.

That's when a human becomes a person. Some people say personhood has to do with rationality and autonomy, having choice. Well, wow, when does that start? This was the conversation I was in a few months ago, or it was about a year ago. Is that three years old? Is that, you know, two years old? And what about the person who loses that rationality and autonomy? Okay, so think about that, that there are some humans that have lost rationality and autonomy. Does that mean that they're not persons anymore?

So personhood, what it's doing is it's saying there's two tiers. Personhood theory with its two-tiered view of the human body, one that sees no value in the body, but places all worth on the mind and consciousness. So the heart of the personhood theory is saying the body is no longer valuable. The self or the person is valuable. Dualism just means that there's two substances instead of one. Instead of this being one human being, one person, it's separating it apart.

Now there's some things that this impacts. Maybe as you were listening, you right away thought of abortion. Abortion is no longer about whether or not life has begun, when a life can be taken. It's about how has that human become a person? Because what they're saying is a person has moral and legal standing, but the body is expendable. Okay, if it's just a body, it's just an organism, it's just a tissue, it can be gotten rid of, but the person has moral and legal standing. Okay, so that's abortion. That's where abortion uses this person-body split.

Euthanasia. Okay, so the person exercises autonomy and control, but the body is a disposable piece of matter. So once a person is getting older and they realize, you know what, I'm losing my—I'm losing control here. I'm not going to be able to live on my own. I'm not going to be able to make choices. I'm going to make the choice to end my life now before all that's left is just a body just living there and suffering.

So euthanasia uses this person-body split. This just brings up all kinds of questions. What about the terminally ill? What about the mentally ill? What about the elderly? What about the person with disabilities? When the body doesn't matter and only the person matters, soon all of a sudden we have this thing of like, how much of a person? Can they be partially people? Are they partial personhood?

And another way that this is impacted right now in our culture is the hookup culture. This is saying that the body can have sex with whoever and whenever it chooses, and it really doesn't mean anything. The body is separate from the person. Now, if I was going to start a relationship, a mental, emotional relationship, that would be where my, you know, my heart would be engaged. But I can kind of use my body or use someone else's body and not have it affect their person. This is the hookup culture.

So there's like a host of ethical questions that come up when we begin splitting the person and the body. In Romans 1, when it talks about the spiral of degradation, it talks about the way that people start distrusting the Creator. It has this short phrase that says, "Dishonoring the body."

Is the body important or do we dishonor it? Actually, our culture has very low value on the body. It's only a useful piece of tissue. And even in our culture, maybe in our Anabaptist evangelical culture, we've kind of seen the body as a little bit of a hindrance. Sometimes we see it as like a sexual temptation or maybe a temptation to pride. You know, we don't want people to notice our bodies.

Even the way we might devalue pleasures of this life, good, the goodness of the earth, sensual pleasures that are rich with goodness, we might consider them worldly. We kind of have this sacred and secular split. And even when we're sick, we sometimes pray or maybe for having mental health issues. We ask people to pray, but we actually don't even think about like, am I caring for my body? Am I getting rest? Am I getting good food? Am I drinking enough water? We kind of devalue the body. We cast blame on the body and devalue the body. So we are at fault in this too. As I started wrestling with this personhood theory, I was like, wait, I think that this is hitting hard on me.

I don't care for my body. Well, is my body important or is it not? And now we'll talk a little bit about transgenderism. This is where I would like to bring us a little bit more. We'll kind of keep talking about this person-body split, but then really bring it into how this affects transgenderism. This is where the person is where you think you are. It's a mental assent to who you think you are, maybe an identity you believe in your mind, but your body is who you are. Another way we can split this is to split gender and biological sex. Gender is who you think you are as a person. Biological sex is what your body says you are.

So maybe this is a little bit of some a different way for you to think. This has been super helpful for me to think this way as I started understanding what our culture believes about this. So let's just go into this a little bit and just see what is being taught. This is the gender unicorn. This is shared with trans students in elementary and high schools, mostly for elementary students.

And here you can see the gender unicorn has lots of choices. This was actually presented to students to teach them that there is no unified self. So it's kind of a shattering, lots of divisions here, lots of choices.

This is what students and kids and young people are presented today with, all these choices. Now, back in the day, we would have never like really engaged with these terms. We would have been called tomboys, or sissies, something like that.

But I believe that evangelicals, us Christians, believers, and Anabaptists have our own kind of messed up way that we're trying to define gender. And maybe some of you have seen lists such as this. This was a list that I encountered when I began going to like marriage seminars, differences of male and female, and kind of a, you know, it's all broken down here, what males are like, what females are like. And sometimes this is termed like these are natural character qualities or godly character qualities.

And I never struggled with my gender or that I was a woman until I sat here in these seminars and I started looking at them and I'm like, wait a second, what's wrong with me? I actually have very few of the female ones, but I'm finding myself on the male side. What do I do about this? I was probably a tomboy growing up. Like I loved being outside way more than cooking and shopping. And I grew up in Oregon with a whole castle of brothers and boy cousins. And when I moved to Pennsylvania, there were a lot more girlfriends available. And I just was like, I don't think I like shoes enough. I don't think I like shopping enough.

I don't think I like recipes enough. Who am I? What's wrong with me? Why am I finding myself on this male side? So I had a choice. I had to either throw out the list or throw out me being a female or really ultimately say, God, you made me wrong and resent God for who he made me.

I didn't want to do that. And so I just, I continue to like wrestle with this. Where God, where who am I?

Where do I fit? And I'm a female, but do I really have enough of the female character traits to say that I am a female? So do you act stereotypically masculine? You're a man. Do you behave in ways that are stereotypically feminine? You must be a woman. That is actually queer theory. It's very stereotypically based to decide whether you're male or female. So I would have needed to pick, like I need to pick one of these, and maybe I would have leaned more towards the male side if I was being brought up in that culture. So that's our culture's description of gender, and the biological sex becomes a useless differentiation. Gender becomes choice. And we're big on choice in our culture, right?

An expression of choice, attractions, identity. This is gender, and biological sex becomes useless. And so we have surgeries and medical procedures to align the sex with the gender. So that's our culture's description. But let's go into the Creator's design, and we're going to find that in Genesis. So if you have your Bibles, you can turn there. I'm not going to bring a lot of verses up onto the screen. I'm going to be just reading them out of my Bible, and mostly I'll be reading out of the NIV.

So what is the Creator's design? The first thing we want to look at when God created the world is this word, order. Formless and empty is the way it started. In Genesis 1:2, it says, "Now the earth was formless and empty." Now I want you to grab a hold of those two words, formless and empty.

What did he do next? He formed and filled. Very important. Okay, formed and filled. So think about creation, the days of creation, day one, he formed, he ordered light from dark. Day two, he ordered water from sky. Day three, he ordered water from dry land. And so now he's got all this order in the earth, and then he begins filling. So he fills the dark and the light with sun, moon, and stars. He fills the water with fish and the sky with birds on day five. And day six, he fills the land, the dry land with with humans and with animals.

So formed and filled. Very important to realize that this is the order that God has made in creation. Now let's talk a little bit about humans. How are humans different? How are they persons? What makes them different, like particularly from the animals, right? And earth. Now a lot of people, if you turn in your Bibles to Genesis 2:7, a lot of people, this is where we get where man was created. I'll just read the verse. It says, "Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being or living soul or living creature." So a lot of people use this verse about saying that man was created unique.

But some of you know me, know that I love graphs. Here's a nice little graph that shows that actually the verse, Genesis 2:7, where it says, "Man is dust of the ground," it says the same thing about animals. Genesis 2:19, "The animals were made from dust of the ground.

Man has the breath of life in him." When Noah was commanded to bring the animals into the ark, it said, "Bring them in that have the breath of life in them." And then this phrase particularly, "Man became a living creature, soul being." That's a loaded word. The soul is a loaded word that makes us think this is where man is special. But it's actually the same Hebrew word. It basically means creature, and it's used in Genesis 1:20, 21, and 24 for animals. So here you've got creation of man and animals. All these things are similar. What this verse is, is it's different from inanimate objects, and these are animate objects. Okay, man and animals are animate.

So where do we get this thing of man being special, of being a person? It comes in the verses prior to that when God begins to talk about his plan of making man, Genesis 1:26 to 28, and then chapter 2, verse 15. It's the image of God. So grab onto those. It's just three short words. It's pretty loaded. It has two big concepts in there, but I'd like to read Genesis 1:26 through 28. Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

Verse 27. So God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground." And then jumping down to chapter 2:15, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it."

So this is the difference between animals and humans, this image of God. Now, what does the image of God mean? A lot of people at this point will kind of begin talking about conscience, being able to choose, autonomy, the ability to love.

Well, let's be really honest here. Those are personhood words. Those are personhood words that only start at age three, four, and they can be lost. So is that really what the image of God is? Is the image of God, can it be lost on my person, or am I in the image of God as soon as I'm a human?

So image of God, I said there's two big concepts here. The first one is image is actually a Hebrew word, selem, that means statue or idol. The image is actually a statue or idol of God. Now think about it. God said, "I do not want any graven images."

No graven images. Why? Because he made us to be his image. Now, this might be stretching for everyone to think about, but think about if a person that has a Buddha in their house, they don't believe this is actually Buddha. They believe this is an idol, a statue, but Buddha is a spirit. Same thing with the image of God. We are not God, and God doesn't have any graven images, but we are the physical representation of God on the earth. We carry him in our body. Nobody can experience God except by seeing our faces, except experiencing our love, our body language, the way we portray him. So the image is actually a word that means statue.

And think about this. When did you become the image of God? As soon as the embryo was formed, as soon as there's a physical representation of a human, that is where the image of God begins. A physical being, a human being doing nothing, thinking nothing, performing nothing, serving nobody. There's no brilliance, but as soon as a human is formed, they display the glory of God.

That should really shake us up and realize like we are displaying God by just being human. Now, the other concept that's within this image of God is that it says right away that we are going to rule. God is a ruler over all, and then he places this rule on us as his image.

It says over the fish, birds, domestic and wild animals, creepy crawly insects, and then he says to subdue or to bring under man. So we've got man, and underneath man, he rules over animals. Notice he's not ruling over people. This is not the call that we were given as humans. It was to rule over the earth and animals. And like the verse I read about him being put in the garden to tend and keep it, this is our calling to bring order and beauty and care for the earth, the animals, and to display God's glory.

So the other way that God places value on the body is by the body is the temple of God. Right away, you probably think of 1 Corinthians 6:19 and 20. It says that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Often we think about like letting Jesus into our heart, but there it is. It's this consciousness thing. That's actually not what the verse says. The verse actually says the body. The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. So the body becomes very sacred, sacred humanity. The human is so sacred.

But one way that I just noticed in Genesis, if you look at Genesis 2:21 and 22, it says, "So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep." This is when Adam goes to sleep so that God can create Eve. It says, "While Adam was sleeping, God took one of the man's ribs." And this word rib is translated rib nowhere else in the Bible, but the Hebrew word is translated board or side. For when the Israelites would take down the tabernacle, they would pack it up, move it to a new place in the desert, and then set it up. They would set up the ribs or the boards of the tabernacle. And then as soon as it was set up, the glory of God would come and fill the tabernacle.

So those ribs that are being carried by Adam and then taken out and built into Eve is a place for the Holy Spirit to come into and dwell. So sacred humanity, that rib, that board becomes the Holy Spirit's home, a place where the Holy Spirit can live in our body.

And then God places his ultimate stamp of approval on the body when Jesus comes in a human body. Colossians 2:9 says, "In Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body." Christ came in a human body. Now, deities never usually humbled themselves and dirtied themselves with humanity. They always want to rid themselves of the body, right? Like to Gnosticism, which was alive and well in Paul's day, you know, it was the getting rid of the filthy flesh, disdain of the body, escaping the world so that you could be a spirit, like all the folklore, right? The fables to get rid of the body. But Jesus was the opposite. He came into the human body and lived with us.

Now, as soon as he became a human body, gave him the opportunity to hunger, to thirst, to be hurt, to be killed. This is what Jesus valued, though. He came into the human body. So our goal is to be like the perfect ultimate human, Jesus, but not just spiritually, but actually live in this human body, care for this human body, and be like Jesus, the perfect human. The resurrection is also a way that he put his stamp on the body because when he was, when he arose, he came back into a human body.

He ate, he had scars, he was recognizable, he could be touched. And obviously his body was a little different because he came through the walls. So was he more like a ghost? Or what I like to think is I think his human body was even more real than the walls he passed through. So what is that resurrection body going to be like? I believe we can look at Jesus's resurrection body and say that's similar to ours. We are not going to be without the human body in the resurrection.

The Bible does not separate the body off into a lower story where it's reduced to a biochemical machine. Instead, the body is intrinsic to the person, and therefore it will ultimately be redeemed along with the person, a process that begins even in this life. Think about Romans 8:20 to 23 where it says, "We groan in our bodies waiting for redemption of our bodies." We're actually waiting for the redemption of our bodies.

In the final analysis, the New Testament does not argue for a rejection of the body, but for its redemption and its transformation into a site of moral and spiritual disclosure. Now, let me just break down these words a little bit here, but it's saying, here's the site of moral and spiritual disclosure. Your body is the site where that's disclosed. You have no other way of showing that you are a moral being. You have no other way of saying that you have a spiritual life in Christ except by your body.

We are made in God's image to reflect God's character both in minds and in our bodily actions. We have a physical religion, right? It actually is a lot of action. There is no division, no alienation. We are embodied beings.

That quote is from Don Welton in "Love Thy Body," which I'll just reference this right away. "Love Thy Body" by Nancy Piercy, an excellent book. It talks a lot about the person-body split. So I got some of the concepts from that book.

So there's our sacred humanity. We are physical beings, the physicality. Okay, we are physical. We represent, we are God's image in our physical bodies. It's the only way we can experience life without this. We aren't living anymore. So where does our sexuality fit in here? Sacred humanity and sexuality, it fits right into these. Okay, so think about formed and filled.

This right here is where our fruitfulness comes in. Think about in Genesis 1 when God says he's going to make man kind in his image. He makes the male and female, which that's connected to the image of God. I have a quote about that in a little bit. But right away it says, "Be fruitful, increase in number, fill the earth." So formed and filled also comes to the image of God into humans. We must have a way to be fruitful. So in the likeness of God, God created Adam in his likeness. But next in Genesis 5:1-3, it says God created mankind. He made them in the likeness of God. He created the male and female and blessed them.

He named them mankind when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his likeness, in his own image. So people begin being fruitful and multiplying in this male and female dimorphic sexual plan.

Reproduction was the plan, the way God made us. Now, this male and female thing, I was listening to a podcast and this Dr. Drew Johnson came on. Very, it just really intrigued me. I wrote it down. In Genesis 1, this is his quote. The text basically says that the image of God is male and female. That's a controversial statement. That's putting biological sex right at the heart of what it means to be human, what it means to reflect God as a human. For evolutionary biology, okay, think about evolution. That's controversial because if evolution had gone correctly and efficiently, there would be no male or female difference. There would be no sex. Nobody would ever have sex.

Everybody would be self-replicating. According to biologists, this would be entirely possible. There could be some form of a human that's self-replicating. It's an embarrassment of evolutionary thought that we've split up into two different sexes. This is the way we are made. We're two sexes that we can only reproduce and be fruitful with a male, with a female.

You can jot down this verse, Malachi 2:14 and 15. It talks about what was God's goal in the covenant of marriage, and it says to bring forth godly offspring. So marriage can only be dimorphic, two sexes married together. It will bring forth fruit.

So this is the goal of sexuality, is the fruitfulness. Two binaries become one flesh, ability to produce after its kind. And in the covenant of marriage, in the covenant, in a godly covenant, hopefully bring forth godly children after our kind, right?

So God put his stamp of approval on all this. He says it's very good. It's the goodness of creation, the goodness of the garden, home for the human, the goodness of the body, goodness of sexuality. All of this is good. So this is what we should be really looking like, right? This is the way we should be living. Sorry about my little dog.

But this is the creator's design. Now let's look at congruence desired. That obviously means that there's incongruence. So let's look at that right now. So the creator's design says order and beauty, rule and reign with God, and connected fruitfulness. These are the three main things in Genesis 1 that display the design that the creator came up with: order, beauty, rule and reign, connected fruitfulness. And then what happened? Chaos, right? The fall. And this is where incongruence happens. Okay, so you have order and beauty, but then you have chaos and disregard for caring for the earth. You have all kinds of order getting out of place.

Everything began to die, right? Beauty was lost. You have rule and reign with God, which was what Adam and Eve were designed to do. And eventually in the new heaven and new earth, this is God's plan for us. We read about it in Revelation.

But instead, we desired a rule over people. And think of the first temptation. It was to rule over God and his goodness, even to make decisions on our own. And connected fruitfulness, this was the plan too. But then just think when Cain killed Abel, he was sent out from the presence of the Lord. He went out and formed a city. This is really revealing this independent isolation, which breeds competition. And in our sexuality, it becomes lonely sex. And maybe lonely sex is a new term for you, but like pornography, masturbation, even hookup culture, these are lonely sex acts. It's not a connected fruitfulness. This was God's plan to have order, beauty, rule and reign, connected fruitfulness.

But this isn't what we experience all the time, right? We are living in the curse after the fall, incongruence. So let's look specifically now about the transgenderism. By kind of looking at this gender unicorn, I felt like it was super helpful. And this, as I said, the goal was to teach students that there's no unified self and also to turn away from the body rather than toward it. Think about it on this chart. There's only one thing that has to do with your biological sex. The rest is, see in this cloud in his mind, in his heart. Okay, so we've got some rationality going on, autonomy going on, rather than the body. So it's a turning away from the body to the mind, what you think.

So the gender identity here, instead of being only female or male, there's actually 72 medical genders identified. If you do your research, probably more than that. This is where LGBTQ+ comes in. The plus is because they're, they just, there's more and more and more. This is what the way that you believe in your mind, who you believe you are. Like I said, like when I was confused, right, what would I have thought I was?

Here's a quote from "Love Thy Body" again. Do you act stereotypically masculine and you're a man? Do you behave in ways that are stereotypically feminine? You must be a woman. This is queer theory, okay? Ironically, queer theory actually reinforces rigid gender stereotypes.

Now, by contrast, if you take your identity from your body, you can engage in a range of diverse behaviors without threatening the security of your identity as a man or a woman. When we are defined by our bodies, the whole width of human experience remains open. There is freedom in the body. So for me, all my confusion, I could be like, wait, I know by my sexual anatomy, I'm a woman. So I'm a woman. I can embrace that. God made me a woman. And now actually I can like eating steak.

I don't have to just eat chicken salad and, you know, beautiful salads and tea parties. I actually can eat steak. I can, I do wish I had a man cave. I mean, who wouldn't love to have a man cave? Who wouldn't love to have a nothing box, you know?

And I don't have to like shopping. I do have leadership giftings. And even though I nursed my children biologically, I struggled to nurture them naturally. But I can supernaturally by the grace of God. So there's this embracing, I'm a woman. And now I have freedom to actually acknowledge my incongruencies and desire more healing. So this is where I have found so much freedom in embracing my biological sex of being a woman.

Now, gender expression, you can kind of see all those green dots coming out of the unicorn there. This is the way people perceive them and they perceive themselves. This is the way they express themselves. So here you see it's either feminine or masculine or other. Now, what we need to understand is our culture is separating out gender as a cultural and social construct. Okay? It's only cultural. It's only social. Now, I want us to think realistically about this because think about our American culture and think about our Anabaptist culture.

Now, who should you be as a woman? You have to decide which culture you fit into. And I know we always like to say biblical, right? And we're going to talk about that in a little bit. But gender is fluid.

It's not very concrete. But conversely, the biological sex is always concrete. And culture is trying to divide them, right, with that dichotomy of body and person. But what we need to do is bring them together and say that they are tethered together. We believe they belong together. But yes, gender expectations do change depending on what culture you find yourself in and you live in.

Me being in the American culture, I believe I could do, I could have a lot of freedom as a woman that I actually recognize is not given within the church or the practice that I live within. So knowing when I'm coming into a certain gender expectations, I do practice a little different so that I am acceptable in my gender role. So biological sex and gender are tethered together, but not always the same depending on culture and social expectations. Now, as I said, we like to say that we expect our genders to be biblical.

What is biblical masculinity and femininity? Unfortunately, many of our beliefs about masculinity and femininity come from culture rather than the Bible, even though we sometimes rubber stamp these cultural norms with the label biblical. If something is truly biblical, it needs to actually come from the Bible.

Stereotypes might fit the natural desires and experiences of many or even most males and females, but not all. Stereotypes are descriptions of how many men and women behave, but they aren't biblical prescriptions for all. The Bible is profoundly liberating when it comes to how males and females are expected to act. This is why almost every command in the Bible isn't tailored to a certain sex. Men aren't commanded to be masculine. Women aren't commanded to be feminine. They're both just commanded to be godly. This is who we are trying to be like Jesus, a single man, right? This is who we are trying to be like. That's from Preston Sprinkle in "Embodied." This book is more about transgenderism, transgender identities, the church, and what the Bible has to say.

The best biblical wisdom I found on, you know, culturally astute, but yet biblically based.

So biological sex is our concrete. It is dimorphic. There's two. And it has to do with fruitfulness, with the reproduction. There's four ways we decide what our biological sex is. One of my kids was looking at a baby picture one time and said, "How did they know they were a boy?" I mean, or it was maybe a girl. "How did they know it was a girl? She has no bows in her hair. She's not wearing a dress." I'm like, "Well, external sexual anatomy, right?

Internal reproductive organs, presence of absence of a Y chromosome, endocrine system. These are all ways we know it's a boy or it's a girl, male, female, very concrete." This is what we need to really focus on. So back to this gender unicorn.

These last two, physically attracted to, emotionally attracted to, notice their hearts. And I'll just say that this is, I want to treat this with a lot of gentleness and care because it's so close to our heart. It's close to our person. And often these are things we never talk about.

Often I have found that here's actually where incongruencies happen in our Christian marriages. Okay? There is broken and incongruencies everywhere. And physically attracted to, emotionally attracted to, this is where you find things like same-sex attraction, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, heterosexual, and like the identities, there are many. And that's because this can change in a person. They can say, "I'm attracted to this person. I'm attracted to that person. I'm not sure what it is that I'm attracted about." But what I've found is many of these things are experience-based or history-based.

A lot of pain and stories go into these two, okay? Whether you're married in a Christian marriage and you are committed to being married to this person for life, and this is the only one that you will have sex with, what do you do with attractions that are not what you want them to be?

Sometimes our body betrays us, just to be really honest, right? Our choices, our spiritual life is so focused on God doing what's right, and our body betrays us. So shouldn't we have some of that same grace for some of the people that struggle with the attraction to the same sex? What should they do about it, right? The goal is to live in congruency with your body. Your body says you're female.

The attraction should be toward a male. But what do we do about sometimes the brokenness that incongruencies that we experience?

One thing I like to think about is one phrase that's in this book, "Embodied." He keeps saying it. You've met one transgender. You've met one transgender. We all have a story. It's all very unique. And wouldn't we all be further ahead if we would have an understanding ear that could listen to us? Somebody that would say, "Tell me your story, and I can help pray for you. I desire healing for you just like you desire healing." And the goal is to be to live in alignment, in congruency with our body, which God created in his image.

But we need to be able to give people the chance to be really honest about where they find themselves. Sometimes honesty is the thing that breaks the darkness. You know, tell that secret, break the darkness.

This person-body split also happens, as I said, within our Christian marriages. Maybe as you look at this, you think, "Hmm, you know, I've given my body, but I've withheld my spirit. I've given myself because I maybe knew I should or I thought I should, but I don't trust my whole person." Or maybe you've taken a body and used a body and have not been, it's been in disregard to the person. This can happen even within marriage.

But God's goal for marriage has been the word when Adam and Eve, it first talks about them having sex. Genesis 4:1 says, "Adam knew Eve." That's not a mistake that he used the word knew. It's the word yadah.

And in Psalm 139, he said, "God says, I know you. I know you're sitting down. I know you're rising up." It's a whole body experience. This is what God purposely used for the word having sex was knowing. Knowing is the word God chose to describe that. And this is what our marriages should be. A body and a person united. It's one. It's our whole person.

So we need to remember that we all have stories. They're all different. And understanding that, like, no, we don't isolate those people over there. They have this issue. No, we have it within us. We have these incongruencies within us.

Our cultural moment is an outrageous one. What we need is a different way, a fresh posture, a radically biblical community. One that, here we go, here's a couple of points I want to focus on. Affirms bodies, rejects stereotypes, pursues truth with humility, and lavishes grace on everyone who fails. I believe that right there at the end there, it's saying, "Please pursue people. These are people. These are not facts and statistics. Let's get to know people. There's a story here.

What is that story?" And remember that we need grace for our incongruencies. And so we need to lavish grace on everyone who fails. But let's look at these two middle ones. Affirms bodies, rejects stereotypes. There's just some practical points, okay?

Affirms bodies. We need to define our gender by our biological sex. We want to try to align with our biological sex. Embrace women's and men's biological differences. We are different. We actually have different shapes. And guess what? That's okay.

And it shouldn't be a thing of shame that we look different than a man. It should be a matter of embracing God's good creation. Bless our bodies. Don't curse them. The cycles of our bodies, the aging of our bodies, it's all beautiful. God made them beautiful. God made them, created them like he wanted them to. And then value humanity.

I've realized this as loved ones have passed away. You know, at some point, they really feel like they aren't the person you knew, but they still have value and dignity. And to care for the body of the one that you love with dignity, this shows that dignity is in the human being. It's not just the person. It's not just their mind. It's not their brilliance. It's not their capabilities to serve. It's actually that they're human. And let's give dignity to that.

And then reject stereotypes. I didn't need to hear that sermon, but I'll share this one with you, okay? The reject stereotypes, this has been one of the hardest things for me to wrestle with is stereotypical behavior. And actually, sometimes our teaching stereotypes has hurt our churches.

A lot of people find them outside the box, find themselves outside of the pink and blue boxes. And then they're not sure where they fit. And honestly, in our focus on family, which has been so good, our focus on family and stereotypes has actually kind of sidelined our singles.

And they're not sure where they fit because sometimes they have leadership giftings, but they don't have maybe a husband. And so we kind of have these stereotypes. We even sometimes divide the image of God and say, "We put the image of God together when we become married because male and female have to be married." That actually isn't in the description of the image of God. The image of God is the human, married or unmarried. Jesus was the image of God, the ultimate image of God. And Paul, probably single, he was the image of God as well. So rejecting stereotypes gives a place for those who find themselves outside of those pink and blue boxes and are singles.

We can engage in God-given identities and giftings and jobs. Remember that the original jobs in the garden were given to both male and female to rule and reign, to care for the earth, to bring order and beauty. That's, you know, male and female. And also the great commission, once again, given to male and female.

Now, in this thing of rejecting stereotypes and cultural constructs, I'm calling us though to obey sex-specific mandates in the Bible. There are verses that say, "Older women, do this. Younger women, do this. Husbands, do this. Women, wives, men." We need to obey those. Those are not stereotypes. Those are commands. And even though Christianity is so much focused on being godly, it's just to be like Jesus, there are sex-specific mandates. And so we need to pay attention to those. Those are still important.