Honoring Our Complimentary Counterpart Series

Honoring Our Complimentary Counterpart

Series: Making Relationships Work: Love, Sex & Marriage

September 24, 2017 – Brad Bailey

Intro

Today…we are continuing our Fall focus on Making Relationships Work: Love, Sex, and Marriage. Began with God’s declaration that it is not good for man to be alone….and last week the purpose of marriage… how getting beyond our false expectations can bring deep freedom…and today God wants to speak into our differences as men and women.

Today we are going to hear what God has to say to us about our unique complimentary nature as male and female…men and women. God provides this poetic summary of life…revealing a larger reality…something about who we are.

Genesis 1:26-28; 2:18, 21-25 (NIV)

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."…. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

Again…much can be said…but this morning I want to focus on being created male and female… on being complimentary counterparts to one another.

Human life bears God’s nature – we have the ability to join God to further bring chaos into order… for life to flourish…and to be co-creators of multiplying such life.

But this cannot be done alone... it is designed as a partnership of two complimentary counterparts …and God is uniquely reflected in that partnership…of male and female.

And we get a picture of when Adam discovers Eve and is wowed because she was like him…but also…because she was not like him.

You can almost imagine Adam saying: “Oh wow….God …big improvement!” But hen begins trying to understand this mysterious difference.

And to this day man is still trying to figure out a woman…and women a man.

From whatever point one may believe it all began…. to this day…we are still trying to know how to relate to our complimentary gender. In fact…more research is being done right now than ever before.

Mark Gungor describes the differences between a man and women’s brain in humorous way.

(Below is adapted from Mark Gungor’s Relational Physics from… “A Tale of Two Brains” and was shared in more natural brevity.)

Men – Their brains are made up of little boxes, there’s a box for every conceivable subject, and the boxes DON’T TOUCH EACH OTHER.

Women – Their brains are made up of a big ball of wire which connects everything to everything, and it’s driven by the energy we call emotion. (Important Note: If you ever tell a person with this kind of brain that their feelings IN ANY WAY don’t matter, you will likely find life to be lonely…and potentially short lives.)

This difference effects how each handles STRESS differently…

Men – Men have a box in their brains with nothing in it. Appropriately, it is called the “Nothing Box,” and it is where a man goes any time he has a chance, especially if he is stressed out. This is how a man can do something seemingly completely brain-dead for hours on end, like fishing or mindless channel surfing on the TV.

Women – When women feel stress… they find it helpful to get some connection going… by talking about the problem…talking lessons the intensity. If a man happen to be the one this woman needs to talk to, it is important that you just shut up and listen. She doesn’t want your help or your advice, no matter how good you think it would be.

Important Note: Men and women often try to offer to each other their own solutions to stress, but if you know someone who has the typical “man brain” and can sense that they’re stressed out, just let them go to their nothing box – and don’t try following them. Likewise if you know someone with the typical “woman brain” who is stressed, let them talk to you as you sit down, shut up, and listen.