Understanding Male Temperment

Welcome to Heart of the Matter radio with author and host, Cynthia Elsemons. How does a godly woman live in a world out of sync? Cynthia digs into the issues women face in our complex culture to set a path through the chaos. It's for women seeking the elegance of God's wisdom.

So prepare yourself to listen, learn, and rest. Now here's your host, Cynthia Elsemons. We're all familiar with the story of creation. Remember how God showed Adam and animals and asked him to name them?

All day long Adam saw male and female walk past him. I'm sure that that made him realize he was missing his counterpart. And I've joked about how long it took Adam to realize that he was missing his counterpart. And that's just a joke.

Don't rub it in too hard with your husband. Just as 218 says, the Lord said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. That word suitable has the idea of corresponding to.

That makes us realize that we are different as husband and wife as male and female we are two halves of a whole. We correspond, but we don't think the thing. He made women as nurturers to bear and care for children, the next generation. I mean, how else are we going to get the next generation unless women have babies?

The Bible speaks of us as working at home and working out of our home as in power of 31. But we as women will also respond to difficulties and troubles in different ways. Compare what King David said to his son as he was about to hand the kingdom to him. He said, I'm going to weigh of all the earth.

Be strong and show yourself a man. Well, now that's not what I'd want someone to say to me as I got all that responsibility. I want someone to hug me or put his arm around me. Not to say be strong, you know, handle it's like a man, but a man likes that.

He likes someone to give him a challenge and to believe in him. I have with me Dean Broke-Closke. She is with Cross-Purpose Ministries and she is a founder of this ministry. This ministry is all about healing personal relationships.

Welcome, Dean. Thank you so much, Cynthia. Could you briefly tell us what led you and your husband to start your nonprofit ministry, Cross-Purpose Ministries? I guess this actually started unbeknownst to us shortly after we got married, went to stubborn, willful people, just bumped heads and came to the brink of divorce twice.

Not enough for us to do that once, but we did it twice. And the second time God saved our marriage and us in spite of ourselves. It was such an overwhelming parting of the Red Sea kind of miracle for us that it really changed our lives and set us in the direction to follow what we did understand. It's a calling to help other people that were in the same kind of dark situation that we had again.

So that led to probably 25 years of working with marriages and couples, first as laypeople and then our staff as directors of the marriage and deadly ministry of one of our local churches. We felt the calling to reach even more people with these profound truths of God, namely that he had called us all to relationships. First of all, relationship with him and then relationship with each other. The fact that we tend to bump heads when we get into relationship with each other merely points out some personal issue in each of us that would not surface if we didn't have the joy of coming into contact with somebody else.

What I like about that is that you're giving away what God gave to you. And that's exactly what it says in the Corinthians, that when we receive something from God, whether it's encouragement or other things, that we are to pass that on, that it's not for us. I'm just really impressed that you're willing to go to so much trouble to pass that on to other people. This experience where you really butt heads with your husband caused you to want to and need to understand more about men.

Tell me some more about that. God blessed us with three sons. I really was. I grew up in a family of three girls.

My father was just a very gentle kind, hearted person who knew how to get out of the way when the estrogen started flying. So when it came to testosterone flying, I was clueless. And of course, that experience that Tom and I had had in our relationship showed me that I had a lot to learn about men. So I basically just came to this point where I was feeling overwhelmed and totally inept at raising three boys to become men of God.

And I needed God's supernatural power at work in order to do it. So I ran to him. You also mentioned something there that I want to highlight. That's a typical maneuver is that failure to engage because sometimes when things get hard, people just drop out.

No, my husband said his father, which is sit on the front porch and just walk out and let it happen. What happened? Because he didn't want to engage. So that's not the answer.

Can you tell me a little bit? We know that God knows everything. Tell me a little bit more about what else helped you to learn. Once I started seeking the Lord about this, he really put me into scripture because the most part of my life, I was basically illiterate when it came to the Word of God.

So I started going to Bible studies and there I started learning what the relationship between men and women was supposed to look like from God's viewpoint. I started understanding what a godly man was supposed to be, what a godly woman was supposed to be. And yes, I zerived right in on the fact that my husband was not living up that godly man's role. And so instead of just pushing me in the right direction, I kind of turned that all around and was frustrated with this man that God gave me in the fact that he wasn't doing what he was supposed to do.

But the good part about that was that I went to the Lord in prayer over it. One night in particular that I will never forget, I started praying that Tom had become the priest of the family, that he would be the disciplinarian in the leadership role that God had called into. I mean, I thought my prayers were amazing and unanimous towards Tom. At the same time, I was volunteering to the Lord to help him by passing along to Tom all the Bible knowledge that I was now accumulating from being in the Word.

And I knew he would benefit tremendously for that. So I was just telling God, you tell me what to do and I'll do it. He spoke to me in that moment, so profoundly, it was almost like an audible voice in it, stopped me in my tracks. And what he said was, you shut up.

Well, I mean, I was dumb. My first question was, Lord, surely you didn't just tell me to shut up and give me this idea. He's not going to get this. He's not going to church.

He's not reading the Word. He doesn't have a Christian friend. There is no way he's going to get this or less I tell it to him. That's when Lord gave me a huge white lesson and he said, you be quiet.

I don't want you saying another spiritual thing to your husband. You may pray for him and you may treat him with honor and respect and serve him well. But I don't want you saying another word to him. But what I do want you to do is focus on your issues.

And of course by the time the Lord had said to me three times, shut up. My stubbornness figured it was like, all right, I will. And again, and within two weeks of me doing that, Tom came home from work and asked me a question about pressure. I thought I was going to fall over because he would not talk to me.

So I got so excited. I'm going to be serving, I'm going to be serving, I'm going to be doing that. You answered the question and you don't get it. That happened for a while.

And what I didn't realize was in that period of time that I was quiet, God was able to move in and speak to Tom in a way that I never could have. I never could have. I never would have imagined it in that time frame. The Lord was so working on his heart that while he was in his car, he started plugging into set tapes of the Bible in listening to scripture.

Now, I'd given those cassette tapes some time ago, which never got used to it. But this is when he started listening. The Holy Spirit was working so powerfully on his heart that he would have questions about things and heard any come from this question. God did a profound work.

He actually created for the first time a safe place between the two of us because he brought us together in him. We weren't at each other's place anymore. We were learning the word of God together. It started changing everything.

It's interesting that you were focused on him instead of on yourself. And that kind of reminds you of Genesis, you know, Adam and Eve, rather than saying, Hey, I blew it, God, I'm sorry. They automatically pointed the finger at the other person. It's a very natural thing.

It's hard for you to own up to your own fault. But I love that verse that says that they were won by without a word by the behavior they were. I think it's in caution. So you can see in your story how that happened.

Can you tell me why you think that made a difference? What is it about a man that would work better? This has to do with one of the basic differences that God built into men and women. And that is the fact that men respond to respect while the greatest need of a woman is to be lost.

And what happens is we came to give each other what we're familiar with. So as women, we'll give our husbands luck and wonder why we don't get it back. Well, that's not their language. Their language is respect and they're looking for respect from us.

But that's not our language. And so oftentimes we don't even know what that looks like. And as a result, we usually end up disrespecting our husbands with our mouths. But not just that.

I mean, we're great with facial expressions and body language. So it doesn't even have to come out of our mouths. But then to see it in a very often the message that they're getting from us is I can't believe that you're such an idiot that you can't understand it. And that just does not encourage men at all.

You're talking then about respect being kind of a major difference there between a man and a woman. How does that work and everything like? My husband can never find something in the pantry. He almost needs you to go get it because when I send him, he doesn't see it.

And you can't just place that you don't respect him. So how can you make that work? What does that look like? I really think that goes back to what the Lord basically commanded me to do.

And that was to work on my own issues because in the process of working on my issues, I am drawing close to God. And as I am understanding the character and the nature of God, I can more easily see how he divided his characteristics between men and women. And now instead of me taking an offense to some of these things about my husband that I don't understand, I can actually start to admire them because I see them in the character and nature of God. And I also see my nurturing, loving tendencies in the character of God as well.

He was very deliberate about setting those things apart and putting one in the mail and one in the mail. So I think that's the biggest help. And what goes along with that is Jesus in talking to the Pharisees told them that it was out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks. So when these words, disrespectful, frustrations, anger, anything negative, when that comes out of our mouths, that's actually more of a reflection of what's going on in our hearts than it is the behavior of our husband.

And once we start understanding that, we realize the volume of work that we need to do. And following God in this process is going to teach us those things that we really need to know. I'm real interested in your comment that you think that God divided his characteristics between men and women. Can you give us an example about men are analytical creatures versus women being emotional creatures?

Well, God is tremendously analytical. I mean, he is very personification of wisdom. And so it is that nature that he takes and he puts into man. But God is an emotional creature as well.

And you can see throughout scripture how the Holy Spirit agrees how Jesus was wrapped with pain regarding the fact that the Pharisees didn't get it. When he said woe to you, that was his heart breaking. So God has both of these qualities immensely. But again, he separated them out.

He separated out the hunter warrior assets for men versus the nester assets for women, but God embodies both of them in our communication issues. Men tend to want the headlines. Give me the important stuff and I'll go for it. Women on the other hand love details because that creates the story and we want to follow the story.

And even in the way that the Bible was written, you see those as these. You see extraordinary detail, but you also see major concepts presented. So it's just fascinating to me that the Lord did this. And of course, to put all of those characteristics into one human being, I think it was just a lower job.

I hope people could manage it. So he rightly divided them. I particularly like the passage where Jesus spoke to Israel and was scolding them saying, I would like to gather you under my wings as a mother hand gathers her chicks, but you would not. He was actually angry when he said that.

But as mothers, we can relate to that because we would do that in the protection kind of thing that we would want our children close to it so they protected. So I think you're right. I think God does have all these characteristics and he did give us half and half so that we had to work together. He's the one that takes two opposites and make them into a hole or a series of gifts.

He gives different people and makes all these people with different gifts work together in the church. And how the opposite of what you would think is you would think you would work with people that would be like you. Instead, you have to work with people that are very different. I think that's God's idea.

That's the way of doing things. It certainly is. It just promotes the fact that each one of us is wonderfully, uniquely made. We are uniquely gifted by him to serve a specific purpose.

And if we don't follow his plan and designed to discover what that is and to fit into the block within the body that he made for us, then the body has a hole in that place. There's nobody else that can tell it because there's no one else created exactly like you or like me or like anyone else listening. We're all totally unique. That's exactly right.

I know that in Romans it talks about spiritual gifts in the context of a good self esteem because he's saying you have a gift to give. And I think that's an excellent way to get us to realize that each of us is valuable because he wants each of us in a different place doing something quite different in our time. Right now our world is coming to pieces in some ways, but God knew that ahead of time. And he put us here for this time and for this place for such time as this.

So I agree with you. Okay. So now we know now we kind of talked about some differences. How can we fully cooperate with God's plan in our marriages with our husbands?

It's a twofold process. The word says my people perish for lack of knowledge. So there's some fundamental things that we really do need to learn and some of those are these basic differences because without understanding that we will think that the other person is being very intentional about not cooperating with our plane and in fact making our life difficult and or miserable. When we understand that it can be a huge step forward.

But now we need the one, the Lord Jesus as the source of all wisdom pulling this together and empowering us to do what we can't do. The problem with just acquiring knowledge is that we all understand knowledge from an experiential place. For instance, if you were to ask a person who had been blind from birth to describe hot pink. I mean, that's even a ridiculous question to think of.

You know, they've never had any experience with hot pink and there's no way to describe it. In fact, we've seen it and most of us have trouble describing it. Except to point to it. But all that means is we will understand these differences through the lens of our individual perspective, whatever that is.

Probably a better example is a friend of mine that had an alcoholic father. When she heard the screen door slam, she knew he was leading and she never knew he was coming back. For someone who grew up in a family more like mine, if I heard the back door shut and my father was on his way out, my assumption would have been, well, you know, he was going to make a trip to the store and bring back a carton of milk. It was a completely different perspective.

What we have to understand is that our perspectives and our experiences will limit our understanding of anything, our understanding of our husbands, our understanding of our children, and the only one that can still end that gap is Jesus. Again, because he knows each person from the moment that person was assigned a name and knit together in their mother's womb. He knows the DNA. He knows the inside and the outside.

So unless we are combining knowledge with minute by minute instruction from the Lord, we are still going to make a mistake. And unless we are praying and seeking the power of God to walk out these things, we will hit the wall. All of our good intentions are not strong enough to take us there. We need the power of God that works manifesting in our lives in order to really be able to walk this out.

I totally agree. God wants people to live life on this earth. If we didn't, we'd die the minute we came to Christ. There is a growth process as part of living.

And as you live, you start to sometimes even understand scripture more completely and you understand how God works and your need for God. So I think he left us here on a purpose. And I think you are right. Relationships are very, very much a big part of that.

In closing, let's talk a little bit about how 38 years of marriage have taught you to kind of understand your husband better. How has that helped? Praise God. I don't make all of the mistakes that I did at first.

And again, most of that is because the Lord has me on this continuous journey to find out more about what makes me tick, what makes me angry, what makes me react, why I have certain emotions. And then how, oh, also how I have certain expectations that I project on to people. And then I have these reactions usually negative when that person doesn't live up to the expectations. So this has everything to do again with me.

God loves each one of us so much as individuals that these things that usually have been with us most of our lives, these things that drive us in directions that are not too positive. He wants to give us healing in those things. He wants to give us freedom from those things. And when we are free, we can see more clearly through his eyes and love more effectively with his heart.

Our human understanding and our human law is finite, as I said before. At some point in time, we're going to hit the wall. We're going to sail. But if we are in the process of continuing to shed the old man, the old junk so that there's more and more room for the Holy Spirit, then our perspective changes to line up more effectively with his perspective.

And mostly, it changes our heart. And then we come back to what Jesus said about out of the overflow of the heart. This is probably what has changed the most in my life and in our relationship. As God has changed me, what comes out of my mouth and my actions has changed as well to look more like him.

Am I there? No. This is clearly a lifelong process. But I am at least on the journey.

And what has been so awesome about this journey is that it has reeled my husband in because he often has said, you know, I just don't expect anybody to change. You know, people are basically who they are and, you know, they don't change. But he said that he actually saw change in me. That was not something that I set out to do.

In fact, I had no idea that he was being any change. I just knew that I wanted more of a Lord. That process did change me in spite of me and without my full involvement in it. I mean, that's what I wanted, but I wasn't trying to do it in a second.

I did. So that was what God did. And when he did that in me, he drew Tom in because Tom wanted a God that was so loving and so compassionate offered him such hope. And so the process of God doing that working with Tom has radically transformed our marriage.

Do I get it right all the time? Absolutely not. And that happens on a daily basis, unfortunately. But I also don't get it wrong as often as I used to in the most disastrous way that I used to.

And the result is that God has taught us both how to exercise his grace and his forgiveness. And so this is what now is really making the relationship work because he is at the center and he's given us both what we don't have, which are supernatural attributes in power by his whole experience. I did remind you the verse in 2 Corinthians 3 18 that says, And we all with unveil face beholding the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to the other. God is in the business of changing us from what we were to what we are.

You can find Dean and her ministries at CrosspurposeMinistries.org. I just want to give Dean a big thank you for being here with us today and sharing. Bless you. You've been listening to Heart of the Matter Radio with Cynthia L.

Simmons. Your comments and questions are always welcome. Contact us at Cynthia at CLCimmons.com. We'd love to hear from you whether you're an author, young mom, a mother of teens, a homeschool mother or an empty nester.

Join us next time as Cynthia once again sets a path to growing wisdom and a closer walk with a Savior here on Heart of the Matter Radio.