The Glory of Womanhood (Part 4): Receiving Womanhood with the Mind of Christ

By Heather Ross · Christian devotionals for women

About the author

Corinth was a city alive with movement and gain, where roads and markets filled with traders, cargo crossed the isthmus, and workshops rang with the labor of men shaping pottery and bronze. Wealth moved through the streets, passed through busy hands, and gave the city its own cast of life.

The canal in modern-day Corinth

Commerce, craftsmanship, and the reputation of prosperity were woven into the ordinary feel of the place, so that day after day Corinth set before its people a particular vision of what mattered, what was worth pursuing, and what kind of life should be counted enviable.

Girls grew up in a place already teaching them what beauty looked like, what freedom meant, and what kind of womanhood won approval.. Those lessons were carried, as it were, in the very air of the city itself—in its ambitions, its pleasures, its reputations, and the values it rewarded. The church at Corinth had been called out of that world, but it had not ceased to feel its influence. 

Like all believers, they still had to learn how to think again.

In this section of 1 Corinthians, Paul has been leading the Corinthians steadily back to creation. He has shown that the woman is the glory of the man. He has reminded us that she is of the man. He has taught that she was created for the man. Again and again, he has drawn their eyes back to the beginning, so that womanhood might be understood, not by the corrupt spirit of the age, but by the perfect wisdom of God.

Earlier in the passage, Paul raised a practical concern about how a woman was to conduct herself in worship. But by the time he says, “For this cause,” he has led us beneath the surface of that concern and back to its root. He has been unfolding creation, showing that the life of a woman is to be shaped by the order God Himself established in the beginning.

Artist's rendering of ancient ruins

Similarly, Biblical womanhood begins with the Word of God, which teaches a woman to see God’s design as good. It grows as she learns to receive womanhood, not as something to resist or redefine, but as something given by God in wisdom. It deepens as that truth begins to shape her actual life—her speech, her responses, her conduct, her service, and the way she carries herself before others. From there, outward expression follows in its proper place.

“For this cause” reminds us that what God established in creation is meant to mold life. 

But before we speak of outward expression, we begin here: with learning the mind of Christ on biblical womanhood. As Christian women learn to receive His design with gladness, God’s truth begins to work its way outward—into their speech, their conduct, their service, their responses—into the whole manner of life, for a woman will live out, day by day, whatever vision of womanhood she truly believes. 

If she believes the world, that belief will show itself. If she believes God, that too will surface.

Inward renewal appears in life's habits.

Of course, humility, teachability, obedience, and self-denial belong to all Christians. But Paul is pressing the truth further here. He is not speaking only of the general mind of a disciple, but of the way the mind renewed by Christ receives womanhood itself from the hand of God. This mindset restores womanhood, calling women to love God’s wisdom in making womanhood what it is, and to honor Him in the very life and calling He has given.

And when that inward renewal is truly taking place, it  begins to appear in the ordinary habits of life, in the spirit a woman carries into her relationships, and in the way girls are taught to embrace womanhood from the beginning. (That is where I hope to turn next.)

Corinth had its own cast of life, and our age does too. 

But the Word of God teaches women to think again.

Part 1    Part 2    Part 3