"Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled."
If you're a Christian, and you're a woman, you're older than somebody. If you're not teaching and pouring into a "younger woman", not only are you being disobedient, you're helping create a whole generation of women who will just flounder around in the areas of being a wife and mother and godly woman.
Every Sunday morning at 9am, I meet with a group of 11th and 12th grade girls and we study and debate and struggle through the hard words of Jesus together. I've been meeting with this exact group of girls on a weekly basis since they were in 6th grade. Now, I and they will admit that I'm no Beth Moore. But I am older. And that seems to be the only requirement in this verse. It doesn't say the older, wise, super-duper godly women. Just the older. And I figure we can all approach it one of two ways:
1) Maybe when you were their age (whatever "they" is younger than you), you were close to God and you stood strong and you know all the struggles that they will experience and you can coach them on how to live as you did. There's an older lady in my life like that. She's an amazing mom who, I'm pretty sure, has never raised her voice at her kids. Ever. To her I often say, "How are you like that?!?".
2) Maybe when you were their age you screwed up in every possible way that you can. There's lots of times that I tell my small group a "Here's how not to handle that situation...believe me...I know" story. I say wisdom is learning from other people's mistakes so that you don't make the same ones.
Regardless of your approach, these are some necessary relationships that need to be happening within the body of Christ. I think that my 11th and 12th graders need to be teaching and pouring into some middle schoolers (which, I'm proud to say, they are), and some middle schoolers need to be talking about God to some elementary aged girls, and I even tell my 6 and 4 year old daughters every Sunday that they need to look for someone that they can teach about Jesus. Sometimes they'll say, "But our teachers are teaching them. Why do we have to?". But I want it to be ingrained in them so that they will always be women who play a part in passing on the legacy of godliness to the next generation of girls.
The lie that you have to be some old sage of a woman and bake your own bread and call your husband "my lord" is from Satan. I think he's had too many of us fooled and talked out of this responsibility and it shows in our "christian women culture."
So, find you some younger girls and dig in. And if you have daughters of your own, go ahead and start getting them in on this. Otherwise they'll be thirty-something thinking, "One day when I'm a little older and wiser, maybe I'll do that Titus 2 thing..."
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