The Daily Blade, hosted by Pastor Joby Martin of the Church of Eleven22 and Kyle Thompson of Undaunted.Life, is a short-form devotional show that equips Christians to apply the Word of God to their everyday lives.
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We use Queen Penelope’s long resistance in The Odyssey to talk about a virtue many men have lost: faithfulness under pressure. We connect her endurance to Proverbs 31 and Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25, then challenge you to re-commit to the promise you’ve been loosening.
• Penelope’s weaving and unweaving as a strategy of endurance • Conviction over relief when the cost keeps rising • Proverbs 31 as resilience and trustworthiness, not sentiment • Matthew 25 and the wisdom of keeping oil for the lamp • Faithfulness under pressure as strength, not softness • Vows revealed when chips are down and drama is loud • A concrete prompt to re-grip one commitment today
So I want you to survey your life and find a commitment that you have made that you have been loosening your grip on. So maybe it's a vow or maybe it's a discipline or a conviction or a promise that you made. And I want you to re-grip. I want you to re-commit to it today.
Welcome to the Daily Blade. The Word of God is described as the sword of the Spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.
Alright, we're winding these last two weeks to a close. So we've spent that time looking at Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, and we pulled out the biblical lessons that we can find from this incredibly important piece of ancient literature. And then today's story is technically about a woman, but the virtue underneath is one that most men in our society have completely lost. So really key in here. So for years, Queen Penelope of Ithaca has been fending off over a hundred suitors who assume that Odysseus has died, and they're pressuring her to remarry. So she says that she is unable to remarry until she finishes weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law. She says that it would be disrespectful to let him die without one ready. So she sits there day after day, weaving in front of everybody, and then every night after all the suitors leave, she goes back and unpicks what she wove that day. So obviously, Queen Penelope is trying to stall. For three years, the suitors just wait because culturally they cannot push back against a woman who is trying to honor the dead. So only when one of Penelope's servants betrays her do they find out what she has been doing, and then they force her to finish the shroud. And there is a very interesting, intense scene where Penelope is speaking with Odysseus, right? This is towards the latter part of the poem. She's speaking to Odysseus, but she doesn't realize it's him. Like she still thinks that he's a beggar, just a beggar that's been walking around the hall. And she tells him this he that is righteous and deals righteously, the people tell of his praise among all lands, and many shall call him blessed. So this is the woman that has built her entire survival strategy on her conviction that you must do the right thing, even if it costs you greatly. Like standing on conviction is better than the relief of giving in. And look, she has every reason to remarry at this point. Her estate has basically been bled dry by suitors. Her son is gone and likely in danger, doesn't know if he's coming back. Everyone around her is expecting her to eventually remarry, right? And everyone assumes that her husband is already dead. But instead, she held the line for years,
fueled by nothing other than her own personal constitution. And guys, almost to a T, Proverbs 31 describes this kind of a woman. So if we start in verse 10, an excellent wife who can find. She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not harm all the days of her life. And the narrative just goes on from there. You guys can read it through the end of the chapter on your own. So this isn't just about romance and, you know, lovey-dovey feelings. This is about resilience and endurance. The faithfulness described in Proverbs 31 and the faithfulness of Penelope, it's, you know, it's can it's not contingent really on whether or not the marriage is easy or if it's convenient at
the moment, right? And let's return again to Matthew 25. At the beginning of that chapter, we see the ten virgins waiting for a delayed bridegroom. This is the parable of Jesus. So here's Jesus talking in verse 2. Five of them were foolish and five are wise. For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. So this is essentially Penelope's exact situation. So she didn't know that Odysseus would be coming back, but she held out hope and she did her part just in case. She kept the lamp burning anyway. She kept it burning well past the time that any normal, well-adjusted person would think that she should, right? Because look, men, all of us will be under pressure at some point. And even, even as I just said that, it sounds ridiculous because, like most of us, men are under pressure all the time from all areas. But faithfulness under pressure is not a soft virtue. It's not a feminine virtue either. Like it's one of the hardest, most countercultural things that a man can practice when most of us have been trained to fold the second something gets difficult. So many of you have made vows, you know, maybe to your wife, to your church, to your job, to your kids, to your convictions, whatever. The test of whether or not those vows or promises mean anything is not when everything is going according to your plans. The real virtue is revealed when the chips are down and when the drama is the loudest. That reveals whether or not those were vows, or just some, you know, nice words that you said at some point in the past. So Penelope held the line for years against the pressure from an entire islands were the people, and she did it without any certainty of what was to come. And look, for us as Christians, we have certainty that God is faithful and that he is good. And if a pagan woman in a Greek epoch can endure under tremendous pressure with almost no certainty of what's to come, then what is your excuse as a Christian for folding the first time your faithfulness gets costly?
So I want you to survey your life and find a commitment that you have made that you have been loosening your grip on. So maybe it's a vow or maybe it's a discipline or a conviction or a promise that you made. And I want you to re-grip. I want you to re-commit to it today. I want you to pre-decide that you will endure regardless of the pressure you're feeling, not because it's easy, but because it's the right thing to do. And you need to notice too that this wasn't just a one-time thing that Penelope did. It wasn't just one big dramatic action that resolved your issues. It was, as Eugene Peterson described, a long obedience in the same direction. So Penelope kept the lamp burning for years without any guarantee that it would pay off or redound to her benefit. You should keep yours burning as well. We serve a God that created the cosmos, and he allows us to be in these circumstances so that he can use it for his glory. We just have to hold the line.
