If we focus too much on what the text explicitly states and less on the influence of God that created this God fearing woman, then we potentially uphold an unbalanced ideal for womanhood.

Shema’s offered some wisdom here from her first installment of Biblical Womanhood. She’s promised future articles to develop the discipline and concept of biblical womanhood further, and the Areopagus is hoping she will condescend to other quest appearances as well.

I’d like to piggyback off this thought, and expand it to the Christian walk in general. There’s often a false dilemma offered to Christians, an either/or set of alternatives that shouldn’t be thought so. This either/or set delivers what Shema termed an unbalanced ideal. Sometimes we’re instructed that doctrine is the most important thing to the success of the Christian life; other times, we’re told that obedience is the indispensable key to the Christian life. I’d like to suggest that a third, and more balanced, approach is actually correct.

The simple truth is that they’re both prerequisites to any successful Christian walk, and your walk will suffer without both of them. I think it’s reasonable to set forth the following four possibilities, a Christian walk possibility square, if you will:

• there are those who know, and don’t do.
• there are those who don’t know, and do.
• there are those who don’t know, and don’t do.
• there are those who know, and do.

Obviously, the last category represents the ideal Christian walk. Who or what do you think might be represented by the other three categories?