Video Transcript: Some "Not so Virtuous Women"

Wow, it's day five already. Welcome to Lesson five. This, this lesson is entitled  some not so virtuous women, or were they, today's lesson is going to be just a  little different. After we talk for a few minutes, I'm going to give you a list of  scriptures that I would like you to read. So you'll have to turn off the video and  read through the scriptures. And then we'll come back together and wrap it up  with a summary of what we read, and also a reflection question. The theme of  this lesson focuses on the words of Jesus in John 8:15. I'm going to read from  The Message Bible, Jesus said, You decide according to what you can see in  touch, I don't make judgments like that. In the NIV, it says, You judge by human  standards. So one of the hardest things for people to do, I think, is to stop  passing judgment, on themselves and on others, often our judgments based on  past behavior. I have a friend who is still holding on to the hurt from her mother's behavior that happened 50 years ago. This tendency doesn't just apply to our  memories of others. Many of us continue to beat ourselves up for mistakes that  we made, even decades ago. It's important to decide that the past is not going  to be allowed to negatively impact our present any longer, or to dictate our  future. The salvation that is in Jesus is a complete and total saving he saves to  the uttermost until we accept our position as beautiful brides pure, lovely worthy, we limit the impact we can have for the kingdom of God. I'm going to share  some things I don't tell a lot of people but I have a really ugly past and it can still  bring sadness when a memories jogged is something that I did. I was an angry  person. I was proud and arrogant, and extremely disrespectful. I was married,  and divorced. By the time I was 21. Something that I had sworn would never be. I had become addicted to prescription valium and codine. And thankfully, my  brother intervened and ordered the doctor to stop giving me pills. And he threw  the rest away. Though a week later, I was free from that, I began running from  the person that I had become. I was married again at 23 to an abusive alcoholic. And I was desperate for just one flicker of hope because I believed that it totally  ruined my life. Jeremiah 29:11, scrolled across the bottom of the television  screen one morning, I don't know why I had the TV on, I don't know why it was  on a Christian Broadcast. But I saw the Scripture and God's promise, I know the  plans I have for you. And my heart grabbed on to the promise with everything in  me. And God began to speak to my heart. Now, something that's a little bit sad  is that although Jesus saved me at 23, I wasn't totally freed from the sense of  shame until just a few years ago. And that's nearly 40 years later, the pastor of  the church we now attend, saw the sadness in me. And through his kindness  and his encouragement, he showed me the heart of my problem was the sense  of inadequacy that came from not fully believing that my Savior had forgiven,  cleansed, and sincerely wanted me to take my full share of the inheritance as a  brand new creation. Now, I finally have shed the shame of my past once and for  all. But I want to encourage you that we don't want to do that to ourselves or  anyone else. Every born again believer deserves to know and function as a 

dearly beloved child of the King of the universe, a full member of God's family.  Every lost individual deserves to know that there's hope for reconciliation in  Jesus. So I have a couple of questions. These are going to be a little odd. Would you be friends with someone that you knew was engaged in prostitution? Would  you think that they were in God's favor? If you had a friend who wanted to have  a baby and said they would do it by any means possible? Would you think that  they could possibly be in God's favor? We're going to read about a few women  who seem like there is no way that God could see them as righteous and holy,  and yet he does. So I'm going to post on the screen some scriptures that I want  to read together and I'd like you to pause the video Once you have read through them, start the video again. And we'll kind of make a summary of what we've  read. And then I will give you some reflection questions. Here's the list of  scriptures, make sure that you pause your video and then come back in and  play, push play again, when you're done. And we'll talk some more (From the  video: Joshua 2:1-24, Joshua 6:22-25, Genesis 19:30-38, Genesis 38.  Deuteronomy 23:3-4, Ruth 1:1-4, Matthew 1:1-5) I would love to know what you  thought of these verses in the scriptures and the women that they talk about.  You, you know, it just seems like they're so different from what we've always  been taught a virtuous woman is. Let's read Matthew 1:1-5 again, before we  discuss. So Matthew 1:1, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of  David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac and Isaac the  father of Jacob. And guess what? Jacob the father of Judah, we read about him, and Judah, the father of Perez, and Zerah, by Tamar and Perez, the father of  Hezron and Hezron the father of Ram, and Ram the father Amminidab, and  Amminidab the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab. And  Boaz is the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse  was the father of King David. I think that you can see that the women that we've  looked at who seems to be not virtuous, by God in His sight, they're considered  virtuous enough to be ancestors of our Lord Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, in case your hearts telling you these are Old Testament stories, and something  changed in between the Old and the New Testament. Remember, Jesus used a  woman caught in adultery, to confront the religious leaders of their sin. And he  used the woman at the well to bring salvation to an entire town. So we might  ask, Why did God include these people in the ancestry of his son? What was it  that he valued enough to honor them in this way? Well, Rahab had faith that  God would continue to act on behalf of his people, and that he would also  protect her if she protected them. Tamar had faith in the trustworthiness that  God would honor her rights as a widow that were provided under the law. And  Ruth had faith in the God of her mother in law. She said, Your God, mine shall  be. Why do you think it's important, then, that God honored these women? What do you think that he's trying to tell us about how he views our worth? Reflect on  how you can apply this to your own sense of worth? Do you have things that 

keep you from feeling like you're worthy to be a full fledged minister of the  gospel? Do you ever think that the women who seem to have it all together are  somehow more deserving of God's blessing? Or do you think that maybe people that didn't make the same mistakes in life that you did, are more virtuous  somehow and more deserving of God's favor? I want you to take time to really  think this through and write about what God says about you. My prayer for you  today is that you will know without a doubt how very much God loves you, and  how pleased he is with you, and that you are able to put your trust in Him and to  become that victorious, virtuous woman of God. God bless you richly today and  I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.