Woman Evolve

Sarah Jakes Roberts, a pastor, businesswoman, and leader of the Woman Evolve movement, presents a faith-based empowerment book that reimagines the biblical figure of Eve as a source of inspiration rather than shame. Drawing on Scripture, personal memoir, and practical exercises, Roberts argues that women can transform past failures into catalysts for growth rather than reasons for self-condemnation.

Roberts opens by describing a women's conference where attendees wore shirts listing celebrated biblical women, but Eve's name was absent. Where Roberts once resented Eve as the woman who "basically ruined God's plan for humanity over a piece of fruit" (1), this exclusion sparked compassion. Eve's story, she realized, mirrors every woman's experience of knowing better but failing to do better. Roberts frames "forbidden fruit" as a metaphor for any recurring cycle that diminishes one's sense of value and identifies her own first encounter with it as her teen pregnancy, which she describes as the culmination of deeper patterns of fear, anxiety, and depression. Her mission is to rescue Eve and, by extension, every woman seeking to produce good fruit despite past exposure to forbidden fruit.

Roberts offers an imaginative retelling of Eve's creation: the first woman waking in the Garden of Eden, marveling at her body without any external standard of comparison, discovering Adam, the first man, and receiving the charge to subdue a world she did not yet understand. Eve entered a world already organized and was undone by a single question from the serpent: "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?" (15). Roberts proposes that destructive action traces back to an unanswered question. Her own root question, "Do you really belong here?", began when she was seven and her father, a pastor, moved their church from West Virginia to Texas. Sitting without her mother in a congregation of 1,500 strangers, she first experienced the rejection that seeded years of insecurity.

Roberts examines how the serpent's question changed Eve's mental environment. Before the encounter, all Eve knew was goodness; afterward, she had to consider whether God might be withholding something from her. Roberts argues that every thought originates from either faith or fear, and that most people accept this duality as normal, choosing stagnation over the risk of choosing wrong. She distinguishes between thinking better and knowing better, contending that transformation occurs only when thoughts graduate into deep knowing, which compels action.

Analyzing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:17), Roberts argues that before eating the fruit, Adam and Eve experienced reality without categorizing it as good or evil. God never intended humanity to judge bodies, failures, or experiences through a binary lens. She proposes a three-part framework for managing what one sees: control and replace (removing harmful input and substituting it with what motivates growth), contain and embrace (repackaging difficult experiences with accurate labels rather than repressing them), and compare and release (seeing one's life the way God does, using prayer to align one's vision with God's).

Roberts turns to what she calls the war of seed, focusing on Genesis 3:14-15, in which God places enmity, or hostility, between the serpent and the woman and between their offspring. She concludes that God chose the woman who had already been deceived because God had more faith in His creation than His creation had in itself. Women must direct hostility against everything opposing their divine identity rather than inward at themselves. The serpent operates through seeds of division and confusion, while God's seed manifests as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

The book's middle chapters shift toward practical application. Roberts distinguishes between who one is (essence) and what one does (titles), arguing that roles should flow from identity. She reinterprets Genesis 3:20, where Adam named the childless woman "Eve, the mother of all living": Adam named her not for who she would become but for who she already was, a nurturer of the life around her. Roberts illustrates this with her own trajectory. After dropping out of college and waitressing at a strip club, she became a receptionist at an aviation company where she created systems and demonstrated the leadership qualities she now uses to run the Woman Evolve movement.

Roberts devotes sustained attention to the feeding of the five thousand (Luke 9:13; John 6:3-13), calling it central to understanding God's desire for multiplication. The boy who surrendered his small lunch represents uncomfortable vulnerability. The disciples, underresourced for the task, represent the experience of feeling unqualified. Jesus, the multiplier, combined the boy's offering and the disciples' effort with His anointing to produce the miracle.

Examining Adam's words to God in Genesis 3:12, Roberts reimagines Adam's experience: his joy at discovering Eve and his devastation when that blessing became a source of pain. She defines blessing as God allowing His resources to become one's own and argues that blessings retain value only when one sees them as gifts from God. She discusses Martha, who busied herself hosting Jesus, and her sister Mary, who chose to sit at Jesus' feet (Luke 10:38-42), framing Mary's choice as soul care over busyness. Roberts also analyzes the disciple Peter's attempt to walk on water (Matthew 14:28), arguing that although Peter sank, his attempt set him apart from those who stayed in the boat, and she introduces a three-tiered goal framework: short-term, long-term, and generational goals.

Returning to Eve's story, Roberts traces her persistence through failure. Eve bore Cain and Abel, but Cain murdered Abel, ending Eve's first effort at fulfilling the promise in devastation. Rather than stopping, Eve bore a third son, Seth, whose son Enosh was born, and "then men began to call on the name of the LORD" (Genesis 4:26). Roberts draws a lineage spanning 63 generations from Adam to Jesus, arguing that Genesis 3:15 foreshadows both Jesus and Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, who represents the culmination of what Eve set in motion.

Roberts explores the necessity of community through the encounter between Mary and Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-45). After the angel told Mary she was highly favored, Mary was troubled rather than joyful, illustrating how difficult it is to receive blessing when one sees oneself as ordinary. Mary sought out Elizabeth, another favored woman, because "favored women need other favored women" (171). Roberts shares a parallel: the Sunday before her first national tour, she was overwhelmed by feelings of unworthiness until she heard God reframe her past as preparation for her purpose.

The book closes with the unnamed woman of Revelation 12, whom Roberts reads as a composite of Eve and Mary. This celestial figure, pregnant and pursued by a dragon, gave birth to a child destined to rule all nations, then fled into the wilderness to a place God had prepared for her. Using Isaiah 46:10, Roberts reinterprets the chronology of Eve and Mary, arguing that because God already knew what would happen in the garden, Mary's redemption was sealed before Eve ate the fruit. She references women who entered their own wildernesses, including Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Anne Frank, and Madeline Swegle, the first African American woman to earn her wings as a tactical jet pilot in the US Navy. Roberts closes by affirming that every woman contains both Eve and Mary, and that the command "Woman, Evolve!" is both a benediction and a call to action.