The number of occurrences of sexual assaults is staggering. At least 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men are or will be victims of sexual assault in their lifetime. More staggering than the prevalence is the damage done to the victim. The effects are physical, social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.

Sexual assault is not just rape by a stranger with a weapon. Most victims (approximately 80%) are assaulted by an acquaintance (relative, friend, dating partner, spouse, pastor, teacher, boss, coach, therapist, doctor, etc.). Sexual assault also includes attempted rape or any form of nonconsensual sexual contact.

This post is written to sexual assault victims, not about them.

What happened to you was not your fault. You are not to blame. You did not deserve it. You did not ask for this. You should not be silenced. Nobody had the right to violate you. You were supposed to be treated with dignity and respect. You are not damaged goods. You are not worthless. You do not have to pretend like nothing happened. Healing can happen, and there is hope.

While all of this is true, you may still feel the effects of the sexual assault—disgrace, a deep sense of defilement and filth that is encumbered with shame.

Disgrace vs. Grace

Disgrace is the opposite of grace. Grace is love that seeks you out even if you have nothing to give in return. Grace is being loved when you are or feel unlovable. Grace has the power to turn despair into hope. Grace listens, lifts up, cures, transforms, and heals.

Disgrace destroys, causes pain, deforms, and wounds. It alienates and isolates. Disgrace makes you feel worthless, rejected, unwanted, and repulsive, like a persona non grata (a "person without grace"). Disgrace silences and shuns. Your suffering of disgrace is only increased when others force your silence. The refusals of others to speak about sexual assault and listen to victims tell their story is a refusal to offer grace and healing.

One-Way Love

To your sense of disgrace, God gives grace. He restores, repairs, and re-creates. A good short definition of grace is "one-way, unconditional love" (Paul Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life). This is the opposite of your experience of assault, which was "one-way violence."

One-way love does not avoid you but comes near you, not because you earned it but because you need it. It is the lasting transformation that takes place in human experience. One-way love is the change agent you need. You need something to change regarding the internal pain you are experiencing.

The experience of sexual assault frequently causes a victim to ask two questions: How can I be rid of my disgrace (2 Sam. 13:13)? How can I receive grace? The answer to both questions is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Redemption

The Bible begins with creation in harmony, unity, and peace, and it ends with a restored creation. In between these two "bookends" unfolds the drama of redemption. Salvation was needed because of the tragedy of human rebellion that resulted in disgrace and destruction. Because God is faithful and compassionate, he restores his fallen creation and responds with grace and redemption. This good news is fully expressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and its scope is "as far as the curse is found." Jesus is the redemptive work of God in our own history, in our own human flesh.

Victims can more meaningfully celebrate the victorious resurrection of Christ when they can identify with the horrendous victimizing of the cross. Jesus was the recipient of violence that mirrors much of what victims experience (shame, humiliation, silence, betrayal, pain, mockery, travesty of justice, loneliness, etc.). His suffering and death were real and brutal, but there was a resurrection after Good Friday. The cross is both the consequence of evil and God's method of accomplishing redemption. Jesus' resurrection is proof that God is about redeeming, healing, and making all things new.

Justin and Lindsey Holcomb are working on a forthcoming Re:Lit book dealing with this topic.

Porn Again Christian

Pastor Mark Driscoll's frank discussion on pornography and masturbation is now available from Amazon. Find out more.

Masculinity Reclaimed Series: Click | View Series

What we lack is a biblical image of redeemed masculinity that attracts, inspires, galvanizes, and steadies fellows into fruitful manliness. The place to start is Jesus, but even here we need to remove some cobwebs. Many aspects of his personality are obscured in popular perception by his safer, more sympathetic qualities.

Pagan men in my city are surprised to find out that Jesus spent a lot of his time ignoring protocol, defending the weak, electrifying multitudes with his words, upsetting hypocrites, speaking the blunt truth to politicians, giving his best friends nicknames (including "Satan" on one occasion), and getting very angry.

Culture Shapers, Leaders, and Warriors

Here I am only unfolding the idea of masculinity launched in the Bible's opening pages. Adam, from day one, was soberly called to a life of industry, responsibility and, when necessary, conflict (Genesis 2:16-17). In fact, it was his sheer unwillingness to engage in conflict (with the serpent in Genesis 3) that led to his ultimate failure.

The fact is that men are the principle—though not exclusive—culture makers. Statistics prove that if you win a man to Christ, his wife and children are many times more likely to follow than if the woman is converted first. Of course we want to see women and children saved, but I'm saying that we will reach them too by aiming for men.

The three core callings of culture shaper, leader and warrior, while not only held by men, are certainly weighted towards them. And it is the Bible, and the worldview it teaches, which provides this dignifying and inspiring identity for men—an identity only attainable by virtue of creation in God's likeness and redemption in Christ through sheer scandalous grace. Guys will work at, lead and fight for whatever the church does; it's only through the gospel we preach that these God-given and sin-tarnished characteristics can be deployed rightly.

So how has the worldview, with the most tantalizing and rewarding design for manhood, managed to alienate men so successfully in our day? Wherever have we gone wrong? I tentatively suggest (and I may need to be less tentative and more manly) that we have created church environments that are effeminate—positively off-putting for most real guys.

A Book You'll Actually Read:

Clear, biblical answers to some of the most common questions—all in concise books you'll actually read! Mark Driscoll boils down the big ideas into little books. Find out more.

Masculinity Reclaimed Series: Click | View Series

Would you like Barack Obama on your kid's work rota? OK, maybe someone with his leadership gift and—assuming he loves Jesus—you'd be pleased, right? Not a man to let go lightly. Well, a former US President (and a legendary one) was let go. Why? As a young man Theodore Roosevelt, serving in a Sunday school, noticed a boy arriving with a black eye. When Roosevelt asked, the boy explained with embarrassment that another boy had pinched his sister, so he'd taken a swing at him and gotten into a scrap. Roosevelt gave the kid a dollar and a pat on the back. The future president was quietly removed that week.

I reckon there's a parable for us, and by "us" I mean the contemporary church. There is an expression of masculinity—an aggression, protectiveness, and a sense of injustice—which is primal in all men. I even see this in my boys. (The youngest seems to have come out of the womb yelling "charge!") Sure it has been horridly distorted in all men by the fall, but it's there.

The Choices

Men are wired with instincts, and it seems we have three choices:

• Abdicate indiscriminately to these instincts. This option leads to ungodly, ill-disciplined, boastful masculinity (chauvinism).
• Exclude them. The second leads to what we have had for centuries: churches that can't cope with men who reward boys for fighting for their sisters. (Churches which, in the words of Leon Podles, are "women's clubs with a few male officers." The husbands stay home or get dragged along, and look glazed till they hear the golden words, "We'll close the meeting there.")
• Redeem and channel them. The third option is the most difficult and the least fashionable, but it's also the most biblical and the most promising when it comes to getting the world changed for good.

One Saturday afternoon, I sat in my car outside a football ground (soccer field) in my city as it emptied. As thousands of young blokes spilled onto the pavements, I imagined the force for God unleashed in Brighton should the vigor, comradeship, belligerence, and strength before me be put to use for Jesus' kingdom! What would have to change for us to harvest and harness this multitude? Probably quite a lot (the next Teddy Roosevelt would get to keep his job, for example). Is it worth that price?

Death By Love:

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears tackle some of the most serious redemptive aspects of Jesus' work in these twelve letters of counsel to individuals. Find out more.

As part of the Trial series in which I recently preached through 1 Peter, one sermon in particular got a lot of traction both online and on the radio. The response to Marriage and Men from 1 Peter 3:7 has been very encouraging, and I want to sincerely thank those who took the time to listen to that sermon and pass it on to their friends. Since posting it we have had churches ask if they could replay it at their churches for men’s groups, Father’s Day, and so on. The request has been very humbling, as even an amazing church of 10,000 people is planning to show it for their Father’s Day services. So the guys in my Preaching and Theology Branch of Mars Hill Church have been kind enough to post the sermon online in a 720p video format for free download, in a higher resolution than our normal video files, for use by anyone who wants it.

Download “Marriage and Men” in the downloads section of this media page.

Trial Study Guide:

Get the companion study guide to Pastor Mark's latest sermon series in downloadable PDF form. Find out more.

When you work with guys who can sit in a room with five other guys and watch endless amounts of porn as if they were watching 24, then you know you don't have the average job. This is the case for guys serving in the military, especially in Afghanistan, Iraq, or out at sea.

In order for the average guy—who doesn't read Grudem's Systematic Theology—to pick up and read a book about Jesus, you need to punch him in his gut, metaphorically.

It was this mentality that led us here at Mars Hill Church to ship out 800 of Pastor Mark's books, including Porn Again Christian, to men serving in the military. The majority of these books are heading out to Jonah's, Abraham's, and Daniel's old stomping ground of Iraq. Others are going to aircraft carriers, guys who are stateside prepping for an upcoming deployment, and other US installations around the world.

Part of our mission with sending these books is not to have guys simply reading these as an end in themselves, but rather to get them into Scripture.

I wanted to thank those of you who are backing us and have decided to support these men with these books and the Vintage Jesus DVD curriculum. These tools will enable them to grow as the husbands, daddies, and warriors their Lord wants them to be. It will also help them speak into the lives of guys they are serving with who have a very twisted view of who Jesus Christ is and what it means to be a man.

What Troops are saying:

Matt, US Army Ranger in Iraq:
“I grabbed Porn Again Christian and never put it down. I needed that book, and most of the guys I work with need it as well. I think there is a tendency in our desensitized culture to think certain images or magazines are just part of what it means to be a man today.”

Roger, US Army Chaplain:
“The copies of Porn Again will be perfect for our soldiers. Porn Again is awesome because nobody talks about that stuff, at least not honestly (and frankly nobody talks about masturbation).”

John, US Navy:
“I read Porn Again in its entirety right after I got it. I wish I’d have had it before our ship pulled into Hong Kong, but there will be many more port calls during this cruise where several thousand sailors could benefit from having that booklet’s content on their hearts and minds.”

Porn-Again Christian:

You are part of a culture that spends more money each year on pornography than country music, rock music, jazz music, classical music, Broadway plays, and ballet combined. Find Out God's view.

Any recovery of an authentically biblical understanding of men and women must begin in the Garden of Eden. It is there that we learn about the special creation of Adam and Eve. It is there that we read God's mandate to the first male and female. And, perhaps more importantly for this article's purpose, it is there in the garden that we are able to see the effects of sin and grace on the relationship between Adam and Eve. Of these lessons on the relationship between the sexes, it might be the case that the effect of grace on Adam and Eve's sin-broken relationship receives less attention than some other equally valuable biblical truths recorded in the first chapters of Genesis. This article will explore this perhaps neglected lesson on grace in the garden. It will do so by posing two questions: (1) Why does Adam call his wife Eve; and (2) What lessons does this surprise ending to the narrative of the fall teach us? Although this article will focus on Adam's role in acting in accord with the grace that he has received, other equally important considerations regarding Eve's transformation by grace could be developed as well.

Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. By William J. Webb. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001. 301 pp. n.p.

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes I wonder if egalitarians hope to triumph in the debate on the role of women by publishing book after book on the subject. Each work propounds a new thesis which explains why the traditional interpretation is flawed. Complementarians could easily give in from sheer exhaustation, thinking that so many books written by such a diversity of different authors could scarcely be wrong. Further, it is difficult to keep writing books promoting the complementarian view. Our view of the biblical text has not changed dramatically in the last twenty five years. Should we continue to write books that essentially promote traditional interpretations? Is the goal of publishing to write what is true or what is new?

One of the year's high holidays in towns across America is opening day of deer season. Like all holidays, preparations begin long before the actual day arrives. In September hunting paraphernalia appears on the shelves of the local True Value: rifles, shells, scent, jumpsuits and caps in brilliant hunter's orange. The big day is usually a Saturday in November.

A young farmer warned me my first year in ministry: "Might not be too many men here next week, but don't take it personal. We'll all be out looking for our buck." Sure enough, there weren't many men in church that next week.

Covenant Promises
The basic context in which we bring children into the world and do all our work in caring for children is the covenant God has made with all who love him and who seek to walk in his ways. He has promised to love not only us, but also our children (Gen 22:15-18; Ex. 20:5-6; Acts 2:37-39). But do these wonderful promises mean that our children will not go through difficulties and even times of turning away, rebellion, and dissolute living? Consider the reality that we are not perfect ourselves — our own lives are damaged deeply by sin in every area. We do not pray as we should for our children. We do not live before them in full obedience to the Lord in everything we do. We do not teach them perfectly the glorious truth that we know touches every area of life. In addition we do not bring perfect children into this world. They bear the stain of Adam and Eve's sin etched right through them —though they also bear God's glorious image. C. S. Lewis captured this double reality with the words of the centaur in Prince Caspian. Our children also bear the inheritance of our particular brokenness.

Jumping Right In
We live in an interesting time of twisted confusion regarding the nature of gender. Men and women wonder how to relate to one another in the home, the workplace, and in the churches of Jesus Christ. In many ways our world is more just, more equitable, and more open than any society in history. Great strides have been made to afford freedom in the workplace, political participation, and education for women in our culture. Yet our understanding of ourselves has also greatly eroded with many social struggles and aches. What began in western culture to bring equality has led to a world that despises our differences, sees gender as a mere social construction, with both biblical masculinity and femininity cast aside. To be honest, it is simply an affront to the modern mind that God created us uniquely and distinctly as male and female, both biologically and psychologically. Though modern research is showing that down to our very brains, we are different, many persist in believing that men and women should occupy the same roles and spaces in the home and culture. We live in a time when men are thought to be capable of being as good a mother as a mother and fatherhood is quickly becoming an endangered art. Take all this into the dating world and many just scratch their heads. In this paper my goals are not ambitious. I want to look briefly at our struggles with being a man or a woman in our society. Second, I want to look at some of the confusion which is displayed both in pop culture and in academia regarding gender. In doing so I will look at the word Feminism and strike fear into the hearts of the men – just kidding, but we will look at the strengths and weaknesses of feminism. Finally, I will close with a very brief treatment of gender according to the Bible with application to the family and the church. This will not be an in-depth research paper; just some analysis which I hope will assist us forward in our discussions of being men and women. So let us begin with our struggles…with each other, with ourselves.