PURSUIT - Christian women love to play the pursuit card. "You're the man. It's your job to pursue me!" This is not a biblical concept. I can't give any citations because they don't exist. At best, I could explain sociological structures that existed at the time the Bible was written, but the Bible never endorses those cultural concepts as God-ordained any more than polygamy. In reality, this is a ploy from the feminist imperative telling women that men should be doing everything and women can just do whatever they want and the "Good-Christian Guy" just needs to keep being a beta chump toward her anyway, no matter how frigid or denying she may be.

SEDUCE - Instead, what I do see happening repeatedly is that women who wanted men to pursue them had to take the responsibility for seducing the man before he chased her. Interestingly, we have two primary books dedicated to female characters: Esther and Ruth. Esther got her position by seducing the king into selecting her as his new wife. Likewise, Ruth seduced Boaz. Although many like to reject this, it's pretty obvious Naomi had an agenda of hooking the two up from the start and Ruth did whatever Naomi said. The plan was to get Boaz to marry Ruth from the very beginning. Are we really to believe these women weren't chatting up about this plan each night? The Bible as much as tells us they were.

Now, some people would want to throw out the immediate objection: "But we're the bride of Christ and God pursues us, so shouldn't we emulate him by pursuing our wives the same way?" This is the type of thinking of someone who still has the wool pulled over his eyes. This tries to impute the feminist imperative on how we understand God and the Bible when Scripture itself actually says the opposite. Yes, there is an element that God is the original initiator - he has to be because we're incapable of our own salvation apart from him. But once his enabling grace was given:

  • "Seek first His Kingdom"

  • "Come to me, all you who are weary"

  • "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart"

  • "Those who seek me diligently find me"

  • "Ask and it will be given; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened"

  • "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you"

  • "He made one man from every nation ... that they should seek him and find him"

This list can go on for ages. But let's also look at the practical observation-approved aspects of the world. If God was pursuing everyone the way we think, then how can billions of people in the world go day by day without ever feeling any real impact of God's pursuit on them? I'll tell you why; or rather Paul will. Starting in Romans 1:18 Paul explains that God puts himself out there - he makes himself known to us, then the responsibility for responding is on us. If we fail to respond to our awareness of God, he hands us over to a darker mentality, then darker and darker until the "depraved mind" in verse 28. Where is God's pursuit in the path that Paul preaches? It's the reverse - the expectation is that we would be the ones to pursue God.


Lost Sheep - Once we're his, if we wander astray he brings us back (the lost sheep and all) - but that's us applying RP to a wandered spouse who is walking away from the relationship, not a pursuit in the way most women mean it when they charge their husbands with pursuing them, which usually amounts to "buy me flowers; give me love notes; massage my back without expecting sex; etc." Sure, we can do these things in our own right when we want to - but not in response to her demand. That actually cheapens our affection because if she can get it on demand, she no longer values it any more than free pens when you're at a job fair.

It's the husband's responsibility to keep his wife safely within his frame (the sheep pen). But at the same time, the wife has a responsibility to seduce her husband just as Ruth and Esther seduced their men, and just as each of God's people began their journey by opening their hearts to God and fostering a condition where he would come in and change our lives. In that sense, "the prayer" is (although often ineffective) an effort to seduce God - to say, "God, I want you to come inside me" just as a wife might do things to communicate to her husband, "I want you to come inside me."


INITIATION

Now, I know that some people are ready to accuse: "But you can't control her, so the seduce section is worthless!* Righto. Let me be clear, though: the burden of initiation in sex is still on the man, whether she seduces or not. There have been several times that I've initiated with my wife when she made no effort on her appearance that day. After having a baby she had to remember how enjoyable sex is before she could want it again (specifically: enough to seduce me). Otherwise she'd just be eating up all my self-improvement as an easy freebie. Don't be a doormat - initiate even when she's giving you the "off signals" or else what's the point of all your self-improvement? (just be ready to back off on a hard no). As you start to function within the natural order of the system, ideally she will return to that order as well. And if she doesn't, that's why you work on your OI and ultimately why Jesus gave the Matthew 18 process for when someone sins against us (not to mention 1 Cor. 5 and 7).

As I have often said, physical reproduction is synonymous with spiritual reproduction. God is always initiating with us to share our faith. After all, it's his great commission to us. Remember how when you were first saved you thought everyone needed to know about Jesus?!? We have simply rejected him so often that we have numbed ourselves to his approach, like our feminized society tells us is normal and appropriate for wives. By rejecting evangelism, we are accepting the reality of the feminist imperative in the way we live our spiritual lives. If God didn't give me an internal compulsion by His Spirit toward sharing my faith, I'd probably never do it except in fulfillment of a duty (and how much do you enjoy duty sex?). Like any case study of a LL (low libido) on r/deadbedrooms, "I could go the rest of my life without it and I'd be just fine." But boy does God not want that from us. He's initiating all the time - stop numbing yourself to it. Bringing it back to the physical: husbands are and should always be the ones to initiate physically with our wives just as God initiates with us.

[Bonus: Does that mean God's a bad leader? No, because he has abundance. If you won't respond to the call to share the Gospel, he'll raise up someone else who will. And if all of humanity rejects him ... "I tell you ... if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out" (Luke 19:40).]

The key distinction here between pursuit, seduction, and initiation here is that as God leads us [read: real pursuit, not the way wives present it], if we're faithful to following, we actually become the [seducers] who are eager to respond to God's [initiation]. As we develop an internalized passion for evangelism, the Spirit no longer has to prompt the desire for evangelism in us - we're constantly wanting it with every new non-Christian we meet, and it's exciting. Sometimes we even do initiate without a clear prompt from the Spirit. In those cases the Spirit either follows suit or he doesn't. God's plan doesn't depend on our actions any more than your plan should depend on your wife's, though we can happily incorporate favorable behavior into our intentions. More often than not, the Spirit responds to our matured desire for evangelism (which is spiritually "sexy" to God) by initiating with us to help us find those opportunities.


Bottom Line: The order goes something like this: (1) Men should lead their wives; (2) Ideally this prompts a wife to be seductive; (3) Husbands then initiate sex with their wives under ideal conditions

  • Note 1: The typical female intentions behind "pursue me" are discretionary in #1, not mandatory in any part of this process.

  • Note 2: Often-times step 2 has to be skipped for most of the early months of a man's RP journey or through certain life situations (such as time off sex due to a newborn) because until the wife remembers how great it is to have sex with a real man, she's not going to want it enough to seduce you. The conclusion is that it's all your responsibility - but you need to lead her in fulfilling her role (i.e. #2), not in overt ways (i.e. "You need to seduce me, here's how ..."), but by being a man she wants to seduce.