This week I spoke at the Women’s Bible study on Philippians 4:1-9 (Audio at the bottom). This passage has an interesting beginning to it because Paul starts by admonishing two female leaders in the church. He never specifies what the problem was, but he encourages them to be of one mind and to live together in harmony.

When I first encountered this passage, I was a little frustrated. I mean, women already have the reputation for being catty. Do we really need a Scriptural passage to reinforce it? To be fair, we really have no idea what was going on between these two women–they could have had a genuine disagreement over how to disperse the church’s resources, and their feelings got hurt along the way. No claws necessarily came out. But even so, it caused me to stop and ponder why it is that women are so darn competitive.

I talked about this some in my message this week, but I wanted to highlight a few tidbits from it because I found this information to be so fascinating:

• More than 90 percent of women of different social strata claim that envy and jealously toward other women colors their lives
• 80 percent of women say they have encountered jealousy in other females since they were in grade school
• 90 percent of women in diverse jobs report that competition in the workplace is primarily between women, rather than between women and men
• More than 65% said that they were jealous of their best friend or sister

I found these statistics in a book entitled Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth about Women and Rivalry by Susan Shapiro Barash. Barash is not a Christian author, but she’s written a lot about female relationships. In this particular book, she included an explanation for female competitiveness that I found to be very insightful. She wrote:

“Our definition of ourselves is bound up in our perception of other women. We see ourselves through comparisons with our mother, our sisters, our friends, and our colleagues. For a whole host of reasons, we have a hard time seeing ourselves as separate individuals with destinies of our own. Instead, we view our identities as a kind of zero-sum game: We succeed where our mothers fail; we gain what other women lose. We can’t envision succeeding or failing on our own terms; we can only measure ourselves against other females. So first we envy the powerful women we see in the media, and then we symbolically triumph over them as they crash and burn.”

In other words, competition between women ultimately stems from finding our identities in something other than Christ. Namely, we are measuring ourselves against one another and against some vague, cultural conception of what “the perfect woman, wife and mother” looks like. Before the Fall, we were free to enjoy relationships, but ever since then we’ve been using relationships for our own broken purposes.

Barash’s comments were revelatory to me. Women do often function in a zero-sum game mentality, as if there can only be one winner. We have a scarcity complex, as if there’s not enough of God’s goodness and blessing to go around, so we need to fight for it.

That is why, in the face of our “threatening” sisters, we need to remember two things:

1. God’s love and grace are infinitely abundant. He will never run out of good, unique plans for His children. We don’t have to feel as if one women’s triumph is at the cost of every other woman around her.

2. God has a different plan for each of us. I like what Barash said about individual destinies. Rather than try to conform our lives to some pre-determined cultural mold, and subsequently feel like a failure when some part of your life does not, focus on the plan God has for you. then you won’t be stuck comparing yourself to others to see how you’re doing.

Some interesting things to think about. But the main thing to remember is that in a culture where women are so highly competitive, this is an area in which we can easily stand out. The first step in doing this is acknowledging that we women are competitive and understanding why: That is, we’re sinners in need of the peace and security of life in Christ.

This week at Women’s Bible Study I taught on the first half of Philippians 3 in which Paul confronts some spiritually toxic religious leaders. They are trying to add stipulations to the Gospel–namely the Jewish law–and Paul is irate. His subsequent response to them is both clever and challenging, and I learned a lot in my research this week. In case you missed my talk, the audio is below:

One of the things I mention in my talk that I wanted to highlight on my blog as well is Paul’s testimony. It’s totally different than how we think of testimonies today. Generally when someone is asked to share their testimony at church, it’s because they have a really dramatic story. Before Christ their life was in the gutter, but then they got saved and now they’re completely different. That kind of thing.

Paul’s testimony, on the other hand, doesn’t go that route. If you read Philippians 3:4-6 Paul essentially shares his testimony, but he does so in a surprising way. He describes his life before Christ, but what is striking about his story is that he emphasizes how good he was, not how bad. In fact, his life pre-Jesus was pretty much all that he hoped it would be and more. He was perfectly happy and content. He was on the road to success, and he thought he had a good standing before God.

But then God intervened, opened Paul’s eyes, and the rest is history.

Now I don’t know about you, but I take a lot of comfort in Paul’s testimony because I always thought my testimony was lame. I never had a rebellious phase. I was a good kid who always did what I thought was right. Along the way I heard about Jesus and it sounded right to me, so I began to follow Him.

Not exactly the kind of story that your church will make a video about.

Yet Paul’s testimony reminds us of something very important: EVERY testimony is powerful. You see, we talk about non-Christians as if they’re all miserable and they hate their lives so we need to show them a better way. But that’s simply not true. A lot of non-Christians are perfectly content and happy with their lives. They don’t think they need anything else. To these people, Christianity is merely a lifesaver to those who are drowning–it’s just one more self-help option among many, but not something they really need.

It is for this demographic that “lame” testimonies like mine are important. For those people who believe religion is just an “opiate for the masses,” our lives prove otherwise. Not all of us came to Christ because we’d hit rock bottom. For some of us, we heard the Gospel and knew it was true. That was all it took. And for others, we had everything the world had to offer but we knew that there had to be something more. And then we found Christ.

These are less dramatic stories and they don’t get very much attention, but your testimony is powerful to someone. So own it! Tell you story to people. Why do you follow Jesus? What brought you to him? Your story doesn’t have to be dramatic, but you DO have to have a reason. So don’t be ashamed of the way you became a Christian. If you’re like Paul, then you’re in good company!