If They Continue

All right. Well, now we come to the sermon. And today is Mother's Day, and it's one of the few Sundays that I always plan on stepping away from whatever sermon series I'm in or whatever book I'm in. I always do take Mother's Day and also Father's Day to preach a sermon, a topical sermon, on... and motherhood today and fatherhood when Father's Day comes. If you've been around for a while, you know that it's not normal for us to just go away from a book of the Bible that we would preach, you know, study through verse by verse. But I think it's important with motherhood and fatherhood to take that time. And you might be wondering, well, why motherhood and why fatherhood? And the reason is because we live in a day when what a man is, what a woman is, what their respective roles and responsibilities are from God up for grabs, and everyone's offering an answer, you realize we live in a society where two men can get married. We live in a society where a man can decide he's a woman and compete athletically against women or use their restrooms or locker rooms. And so the question of what a motherhood is is just downstream of this sort of chaos. And so I think it's very important for us to take time as Christians to recognize, one, that these questions are being asked, and two,

How does God answer them? That's what we ought to concern ourselves with. Because what a mother is and what a mother does is up for grabs today. And so today I want to talk about that. I want to talk about what it means to be a mom. And you might think, well, that's a pretty simple question. You have children, you raise them up and those sorts of things. And there are some physical tasks, tangible things that I suppose we could say define motherhood. But there's much more to motherhood than simply having children. Any woman can have a child, but we ought to concern ourselves with what is Christian motherhood? What does God desire and require of women, Christian women?

as they enter into motherhood and as their mothers. So that's what we're going to be studying this morning. My goal is to make sure that we understand what a mother is and why we honor them. After all, that's what we do on Mother's Day in one way or another is we honor our mothers. And so I want us to think for a minute, for some time, about what that looks like and what exactly is it we're honoring them for. Our text this morning is one that I actually preached on in the fall. We're going back into 1 Timothy 2, and we're going to be studying just verse 15. 1 Timothy 2, verse 15, and it says this. It says, This is the word of the Lord, and you say, thanks be to God.

All right, now as I said, this is a passage that we studied back in the fall, and it was in our regular study of 1 Timothy. We're still in 1 Timothy. At some point, we will get back to studying 1 Timothy, but I thought that this would be a good verse for us to study as we consider motherhood. And I would like for us to consider these truths again. In our previous sermon, I spent a lot of time talking about The first part of this verse, that women would be preserved through the bearing of children, and what that meant to them, that it was a promise given to God, that as they've been instructed in the preceding verses about how they're to dress, how they're to behave, how they're to conduct themselves, and that they're to submit to their husbands, that they're to not teach or exercise authority in the church, this verse comes at the very end as a comfort to women, saying that there is salvation, there is hope for women, even as they've sinned in the way of Eve.

And that their preservation, their salvation, will come through the bearing of children. Now, I realize that just saying that much, if I were to say it outside of these walls, there would be pushback. And they'd say, well, how can you say that? That's not right. Women, you can't say that about a woman. What if she doesn't want to have children? Or what if she's not able to have children? And we could start raising our questions. And I want to come to some of those questions, but some of them I want us to look at and go, that's not... a good question. We're not going to justify that with an answer. What if a woman doesn't want to have children? My answer is they should want to have children, okay? Because the scripture presents to us children as a blessing, as a heritage, as a mercy and a kindness from God. And so a woman who doesn't want to have a child is, there's something more going on. There's something more at play. This is not something that Christian women are able to decide they want or don't want.

liberty without having any consideration for what the Word of God actually says. Our verse here tells us that women will be preserved through the bearing of children, and there's no qualifier that says if they want to have children. And so it may be an answer with perhaps a sharp edge, and I'd say, well, this is what the Scripture teaches us, and we trust by faith as Christians that what God says is good and right and true. And so as Christians, and specifically Christian women, we say, You should want to have children. And I realize that not every Christian woman doesn't want to have children. In fact, the vast majority of them do. And we have these other considerations like, what about those who can't have children because they're not married? Or what about those who can't have children because they're barren? And I want to come to those. But I don't want us to sacrifice the normal on the altar of the abnormal. The vast majority of Christian women will get married and will have opportunities to have children.

And so scripture teaches us that women will be preserved through the bearing of children. This is what we focused on a lot in this previous sermon back in October. This morning, I want to focus on the second half of it, the end of it. This sermon's title is, If They Continue. And so I want to talk about the second half of it, if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint. And so I want to begin by asking you to think about a question. And the question is, why do we celebrate Mother's Day? Why do we have a day? To celebrate mothers. And if we were all here in person, I'd wait and you would respond. And you'd say, well, because we love them. Or because of all the things they do for us. Or because we appreciate them. And we just want to be able to demonstrate that to them. And so what do we do on Mother's Day to celebrate? To show our mothers that we love them, that we appreciate them? Well, we often do things that they enjoy.

We might give them gifts, things that they like. We take a day and we say, you know, there are things, Mom, that you don't normally get or aren't able to have, and we know that you appreciate, and so here is a token or a day set apart where we give attention to you and to the work that you've done and the sacrifices you've made for us. We love you, and we'd like to demonstrate that. That, in a nutshell, is what we're celebrating on Mother's Day. we're celebrating the love and the sacrifices that our mothers have made on our behalf. It's a day where we set aside time to thank God also for the women in our lives who've loved us and given themselves to us as mothers. And so really, if you boil Mother's Day down to what it is, it's a celebration and an expression of our honor for our mothers. Now, here's the question. Is everything a mother does worthy of honor?

And you might go, no, I don't think so. And I go, right. So what I want to do is spend some time this morning talking about what is honorable motherhood. If on Mother's Day, what we're aiming to do is give honor to mothers, I want us to think about what honorable motherhood is, because I think we would all agree that there are things that would be not considered honorable for a mother to do or to be. And so the first question we're going to aim to answer and spend most of our time working on actually is, what does honorable motherhood? look like now motherhood is a hard thing to talk about and in general and it's especially hard for a man to talk about because after all I'm not a woman and yet it is something that we need instruction on and we need to be considering and what I know from experience and from counseling from things I read and from my own eyeballs is that what motherhood is and what being a good Christian mom is

is a real question that most women don't have an answer to. Or if they do have an answer to it, it's a fairly narrow answer. And what I find is that most mothers, whether they're about to have their first child or whether they've got children who are grown and out of the house, is that they have a good bit of insecurity about their motherhood and whether what they're doing or what they've done was right and good and whether it honored God. opening a wound for the mothers my goal is not to open the wound and leave it open but rather to open the wound and to to repair it to put it back together to to bind it up with what god has said to help you with the insecurities that you have as a woman, as a mother? Or you husbands, how do I help my wife feel secure? How do I help her not be worried about being a mom, about messing up the kids, about ruining everybody's life? Because these are the things, after all, that mothers do think about and worry about. And they worry about them before they even give birth. And so my hope is that today, we as mothers, we as husbands and fathers, and we as children, will gain some understanding about what it means.

to be honorable to our mothers and what they should be aspiring to, what we should be encouraging them to as Christian mothers. So what does honorable motherhood look like? Well, our text begins by telling us that some women will be preserved or saved through the bearing of children, which means that they need saving. It's one way of saying that women are sinful and not everything they do is right and good. They're not even any less sinful than men. And that as such, they need saving. They need redemption. They need the mercy and the grace of God. And what this verse tells us is that that mercy and that grace is going to come to them. They're going to understand it. They're going to grow in holiness through becoming mothers. And we recognize that not everything that a woman does as a mother is laudable or praiseworthy. There are many things that mothers do that you women...

are plagued by, that you've done, that you say, that was not honorable, that was not good. And so I want to talk a little bit about that this morning. And I hope that my words are not discouraging or hurtful to you, but I've also noticed that in Christian communities, Mother's Day and Father's Day are handled very differently. When Mother's Day comes around, it's a celebration. It's a very happy time. Everyone is very glad and very thankful for their mothers. simply because they've given birth to them and cared for them and done all that they've done. But when it comes to Father's Day, it's not the same sort of thing. When it comes to Father's Day, often what happens is men are told they need to step up and they need to do a better job and that they're failing. Now, I always tell my kids not to say this, but I'm going to say it, okay? You ready? That's not fair. All right? That's not fair. Now, my principle in life is not that things should be fair.

But what I want you to see is that there's a problem there. If we think of mothers as walking on water and doing no wrong, we actually do them a disservice. Because what are they supposed to do with their failures and their shortcomings and their fears and their anxieties and their sins? If all we ever tell them is, you're great and wonderful. The men, on the other hand, get told, you need to do better. And for our part, that's good for us. We need to be told where we've fallen short and where we need to grow as Christian men, as husbands and as fathers. And so I hope this morning to do that with the women. And I hope that it's a blessing to you all. And so, there are honorable as well as dishonorable things that mothers do. I want to talk about a couple of ways, a couple of marks of honorable motherhood that come from our text. The first...

As we read the second half of the verse, it says that they will be preserved through the bearing of children. And then there's this qualifier, if. If what? If they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint. Now, faith and love and sanctity or holiness are the three main points, the three things that I want us to spend some time on. But there's this word that comes before it that I think is very important. It's continuing. They have to continue in this sort of thing. And so what does it mean for a mother to have to continue in something? Well, it means that motherhood requires endurance. It's not something that you do and then it's over. A mother is something you become and then that's what you are. I often hear young mothers when they first have their child, they talk a lot about how much the baby sleeps or how much they want the baby to sleep. We want them to sleep, we want them to sleep. And I look and I go, you don't understand yet. Life's not going back to what it was before.

It's just not. It's going to change now. And the reason is because you are now a mother. Before, you weren't a mother. You didn't have a baby to take care of. But now you're a mother. And life's not going back to what it was before. And that's a good thing. That's a helpful thing to you because this scripture tells us that you will be preserved through the bearing of children if you continue, if you endure, if you persevere. And so in this way, motherhood is a lot like marriage. If you think about it, when someone is preparing to get married, there's a lot of attention, months of preparation and work that go into what? Well, go into the wedding, right? And when we do premarital counseling, one of the things I say to them is I say, you know, the reason we're sitting here is because you're putting an incredible amount of work into preparing for a day. What I want to do is take some time to prepare for every day that comes after that day.

Because it would be foolish for me to say to you, it's good that you spent all this time and this energy and this preparation and done all this work to prepare for your wedding day while neglecting to do any of the work to prepare for having a good marriage. And so one of the things I say to people when they first come in for premarital counseling is I say, you all have expectations about what marriage is going to be like. And I try to draw out of the woman and out of the man, what do you think marriage is going to be like? And the whole goal is for me to say, You see that you have those expectations, and they say, yes, I see I have those expectations. Then I say, do you have any idea how to get that? Because that doesn't just grow up out of the ground by itself. A good marriage, a strong marriage, takes a lot of hard work, and it's difficult, and it's glorious, and it's very enjoyable, but it is not easy. And they kind of look at me in premarital counseling, and they go,

You're not speaking my narrative back to me. You're not telling me that everything's going to be great. You sort of start to see the rose-colored glasses come off just a little bit, and they look and go, you think it's going to be hard for us to be married? And I say, yes. And then the funny thing that always happens is within a month or two after being married, I go up to the couple and I say, how are you guys doing? How are the fights going? And they say, it's wonderful and great. Thank you so much for all your counseling. You know, we just haven't.

really had a fight. You know, we just, it's just wonderful. You know, we're so thankful for all that help. I think we've avoided the trouble. And I just smile at him, and I think, well, I'll come back in a couple more months, and we'll see how you're doing again. And usually by six months, that's not the answer I get anymore. Now I get the answer of, this is really hard work, and he does things I really don't like, and that really hurt my feelings. And the man says, well, she's not what I thought she was. And I go, oh, okay, you're starting now. You're starting.

Now let me help. So that's marriage. Now, my contention is motherhood's the same. You have nine months of pregnancy. Nine months. And if you were to ask a mother, you'd say, those are difficult months. You spend the first few months feeling sick and not wanting to eat anything, and the next few months your body's changing, and the third set of months you're getting uncomfortable and scared about what's to come and when. When is it going to happen? When are we going to have the baby? When, when, when? Questions you can't answer. And what is all of that preparation for? Well, in one sense, it's for the birth. But what I tell moms and my wife tells moms when they're saying, I can't sleep anymore at night. I'm up and I'm uncomfortable in my hips and my back and all these other things. We're sitting there thinking, this is just preparation for when the baby comes. Because you're not going to go back to sleeping all the way through the night. And even when the baby does sleep through the night, they'll have accidents. They'll get sick.

There will be all kinds of things that go on. Your life is going to change for the better, but not for the easier. And so motherhood, like marriage, is not about an event. It's not about the wedding day. It's not so much about the birth. All of the pain and the agony of the birth is wiped away, says Scripture, when the mother has the joy of holding her child. But truthfully, her work has just begun. She is now a mother holding her baby in her arms, and her life will never be the same. And so what does she need? Well, she's going to need to continue to endure, to persevere as a mother. Any woman can have a child, but a Christian mother is supposed to give honor and glory to God in her motherhood. And that's what I want us to be talking about now. Christian motherhood, the thing that they have to persevere through and continue in, is a very high calling, and it's a crucible.

It is the refining fire of a Christian woman's growth and holiness. And this is as true of a woman with many children as it is of a woman who has never been married or a barren woman. Because if you were to talk to a Christian woman who has children, she'd go, it's really, really hard. And she's processing and working through and why is it hard and what am I doing wrong and what am I supposed to, like, she has all these questions and all this angst and all this guilt and this big mix of emotion inside of her that she doesn't have answers to. Now, if you were to go ask a woman who's gotten into her late 20s, maybe her 30s, and she's not married, what does she process her life through? She processes it through her ability, the prospects of her getting married.

and her ability to have children, whether she's going to be able to, because she had these dreams of what her life would be. And every month and year that goes by, she's seeing her dream change and slip away. And so my contention is she's processing her holiness and her relationship with God through her ability to have children or not. And I'd say the same is true of a barren woman. What is constantly on the mind of a barren woman? Why? Why? Why can't I have children? What's wrong with me? Does God not care? Does he not see my desires? And so I want you to see that women are processing in their lives, whatever station of life they find themselves in, they're processing their faith and their salvation and their relationship to God through their children.

And that is what this scripture teaches us, is that women will be preserved through the bearing of children, that it is hardwired and written into your heart to process your relationship with God and what he requires of you and your sin and where you need to grow through children. And some women do that through having children. That's the path that God leads them on. And some women do that through not having children because that's the path God leads them on. But they're still processing the same question. This is how God sanctifies women. No matter what station of life they're in, whether you're young or you're old, whether you're single or you're married, whether you have one child or many, this is your refining fire. This is your crucible. This is the arena where you work out your salvation with fear and trembling. This is what the scripture teaches us. And so in that process, how ought a woman to conduct herself? What does it mean for her to give glory to God and to honor God with her motherhood? Well,

Paul says that they ought to continue in faith and love and sanctity in every season of life. Now, if you were here, I can imagine what the looks on your faces would be. And what I would imagine is that most of you don't want to look at me right now. And you're discouraged by what I'm saying. And I remember I said at the beginning, my goal is not to discourage you. It's not to paralyze you with fear. is first to pull the covers off of the things that go on inside of your heart already and say, these are not yours to bear alone. This is not only for you. And also, you're not the only one who feels that way. One of the benefits I have when I get to preach and standing up front is I get to see everybody's face when we meet in person, right? And what I get to see is how everyone feels like they're the only one that's failed.

But it's a lie that they believe because what I watch is dozens of people have the same reaction. And yet they all think they're alone in their failures. And they all think they're the only ones who've messed it up and who've destroyed their life or the lives of their children or what have you. And so my goal is not to increase your burden, but to acknowledge the burden that you feel, that you're acutely aware of, and then to help strengthen you to persevere under it. Okay? Because this is motherhood. So there are three ways. Faith, love, and sanctity. The first is faith. Now, faith is antithetical to fear. The two can't exist in the same place. And it is true that generally women struggle with fear. And that their fear abounds or finds its most intensity surrounding their children.

They're afraid for their children. They're afraid for their safety. They're afraid for their health. They're afraid for their education. They're afraid for their future. They're just afraid for their kids. And yet fear and faith don't mix. They can't exist in the same space. Now, I want to compare the two of them for a minute. And I want you to think about the answer to this question. I think it's pretty obvious, but I'll ask it. Is fear a good motivator? And we'd all say, yes, fear is a good motivator. You'll run faster in your life when you're scared than at any other time in your life, right? Fear is a good motivator. Now, is faith a good motivator? And we're like, well, I've experienced fear being a good motivator. I believe faith is a good motivator, but I don't know that I've experienced it in my life to be a good motivator. I want it to be a good motivator, but I don't know that it has the same grip on me that fear does.

And yet I do believe it is a good motivator. And so I want you to say yes. Both of them, fear and faith, are good motivators. One of them is natural. Fear is a natural motivator. When you're afraid of something, you're stirred up to action. Faith requires cultivation because it's a gift that God gives us. It's not something we go get off the shelf. But I want to compare them in another way. Is fear a good comforter? And all of a sudden you're like, no, fear is a terrible comforter. What fear does when I've failed, what fear does is intensifies the failure. It makes it more miserable. There's the failure, whatever it is. As a mother, you name it. Whatever the failure is, you go, there it is. This is what I was afraid would happen. And then what are you to do, mom? What are you to do, dad? What are you to tell your mom? Or tell the mother of your children? She's afraid.

And what I want you to see is that fear has no ability to comfort, no ability to build up, no ability to actually help grow. It can help you get away from something, perhaps. But it has no ability to deal with the reality of sin in your life. Other than to say, you're a sinner and you failed and there's no hope. That's all fear can put in your mind. Faith, on the other hand, brings comfort. Faith in God's mercy. And his kindness picks up the downtrodden and the brokenhearted. And it enables us to confess our sins, to seek forgiveness from God and whomever we've sinned against, and to continue. You know that in your life when you fail, it's like everything grinds to a halt, depending on the magnitude of the failure. Everything just stops. And you're left going, now what? What do I do? Where do I turn? How do we get going again? And time...

creates enough inertia to get you going again. But if you proceed through that failure by fear and not by faith, what it makes you is more tentative to go forward. It makes you more fearful. Because you go, I screwed it up once, I don't want to screw it up again. What's going to happen if I mess it up again? And I say, this is the wrong path. Women will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith. And I realize fear is common. Fear is natural. Fear is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It's in all of us all the time. But it's not as it should be. Faith comes to us. Our God comes to us and gives us faith that when we fail, when we sin, those sins and those failures are able to be dealt with, confessed, repented of, and forgiven, and healed. And so mothers have to be faithful.

They have to live by faith. And when they see their failures, they have to fight against being fearful that they'll fail again. I've often told Vanessa, I've never met a parent who gets to their children being adults. I've never met the parent who doesn't have regrets, who doesn't say, I didn't do it right. And I tell her, I expect that that will be the case for us. And I don't say that to be fatalistic and to just go, well, it doesn't matter. We're going to fail, so don't worry about it. But what I mean to say is the reason I'm not fearful about this is not because I don't think I'll fail. I already have in many, many ways, and so has my wife, and so have you. I say it to say we are going to trust God with our children, and we're going to teach them to trust God with their sins, particularly at the point of their sins. We're going to teach them to trust God.

And we're going to demonstrate that with them. We are going to trust God with our children. We are not going to be afraid. We're going to be faithful. And this is especially necessary for mothers in part because they spend so much time with their children. And so what is the message to a mother who's failed? That there's mercy and there's forgiveness and there's cleansing and healing through the shed blood of Jesus Christ for your sins as a mother. Now persevere. A mother has to be faithful. What else is she to be? she's supposed to continue in love. Now, love is a strange thing because if you went to a mother, you realize how unnatural it would be for a mother to say, I don't love my children. But there's this strange thing in Scripture that I always find it to be very helpful to me is that one of the first thing that older women are supposed to teach younger women in Titus chapter 2 is to love. I want to read it to you. Titus 2 verses 3 and 4 say this.

Now what's that mean? Why do I think that's so interesting? Well, I think it's interesting because if you were to ask a mother, do you love your child, she'd say yes. And yet, this scripture tells us that they actually need to be taught how to do that. What it says is that her desires and what she... wants to provide and do for her children may not be the best things for them. That what she would consider love may not actually be love. And so they need older women, older mothers and grandmothers to come and to say, that's not going to work. That's not loving your child. This is loving your child. Every mom, similar to her wedding day, has these ideas of what marriage will be like. The same is true of motherhood.

Every woman thinks she knows what motherhood's going to be like. Maybe she looks over at other moms and she goes, well, I'm not going to have those problems, and my kids aren't going to behave like that, and my kids are going to have this thing or that thing or the other thing. Whatever it is she wants for them, I'm going to do it right. That's the subtext that she doesn't say, but she's very committed to. I'm going to do it right. I'm going to make sure my kid never hurts, never goes without, never has pain. But then they have children, and very quickly they figure out.

This isn't what I thought it was going to be like. And I go, that's right. It's a very common theme when mothers first become moms and their babies are first born. They say, this is way harder than I thought it was going to be. They're often intimidated at the prospect of taking care of a baby. Just one. What about two? What about three? And they're exhausted by being a mother. And that's just the beginning. What about when they become teenagers? Do you think mothers of teenagers have got it all figured out and that they just don't have these temptations to fear and they know how to love their children? I remember being comforted by a thought one time. I watched an elder in my old church that I had a lot of respect for. I watched his first daughter get married. And it was such a comfort to me to go, this is the first time in this man's life he has ever done this. Because he was all...

Unsure what to do. And I'm going, I recognize that. My wife and I, we recognize that. This is their first daughter getting married. They don't know how to do this. We recognize that we don't know how to do this. That's motherhood. And they had older people even then helping them to know how to love their children as their children got married. And so at what point does a mother stop needing instruction in how to love her children? I don't know. I think even when they, you know, up and until they have grandchildren. They need instruction about how to love their children and how to help and how to encourage and how to support and how to be quiet sometimes. Mothers are always needing instruction in how to actually love their children. They may want good things for them, but they may not have the corner on the market about how to get those good things for them. And so they have to persevere in love of their children, which in a lot of ways is saying they have to persevere in self-control, doing what is right, not what is expedient or what they feel like doing in the moment.

The job of being a mother never ends. So it requires love. The final thing it requires, this scripture says, is that they continue in sanctity with self-control. Sanctity is not a word that we use often, but it means obedience or holiness. A Christian mother must also continue in obedience to God. One of her primary jobs is to teach her children to know God and to trust him. Now there might be one of you that's like, no, that's dad's job. I'm not saying the dad doesn't have a role, and I'm not saying the dad's not supposed to lead in it. All I'm saying is it's the mother's job. She actually has a responsibility to her children to teach them these things. In 2 Timothy 1, chapter 5, Paul's writing to Timothy, and he says this. He says, Now, you might wonder, where's Timothy's dad?

And I'd say, Timothy's dad's not in the picture. Timothy's dad was not a Christian. Paul became Timothy's father through faith. So how did Timothy come to believe? It was through the faith and the instruction and the example of his mother and his grandmother. This is whom Paul attributes Titus' faith to. That's one thing to talk about mothers, and on Mother's Day we talk about mothers, but here we see grandmothers even have a place in this. That their behavior, that their conduct, that the way that they live, even in their old age, even once their kids are grown and gone and have had children of their own, grandmothers still have a place where they're working out their preservation, their salvation. They're working it out as grandmothers and mothers. Have any of you had a grandma that you looked at and you go, I remember grandma, I remember grandpa. They had these things, they had their ways.

You didn't know the blessing when they were alive and when you were young. But when you became older, you went, oh, grandma was wise. Grandma knew what she was talking about. And so a mother, a woman, grandmother, is to persevere in sanctity and obedience with self-control. She can't quit. She can't take a break. Not without consequence. The children are always watching. Always watching. And I would say the same thing to a father. Your kids are always watching. And learning. And some of us go, oh, so hard, and that's so heavy, and I don't know what I'm going to do. And what I want to say to you is, that's not how we should process it. What we should see is the fact that our kids are having, and they're ever watching I. I think we should think of that as a kindness from God. That the ones that we have such affection for are always watching us, always keeping track of our ways. That's a kindness of God. And a large responsibility.

So we ought to act accordingly, right mom? Now you might still be thinking, what a burden. This is Mother's Day and all you've done is loaded me up with an overwhelming burden. And what I want to say to you is, these are the terms of Christian motherhood. And whether you want to be a mom or not, you will process your holiness through your motherhood as a woman. That's what happens. That's what I said at the beginning, and now that we've gone through Paul's instructions to mothers, I want you to see this is the way you will process through it. It's inescapable. It's the Nineveh to you. You have to go there. You will go there. So these are the terms of Christian motherhood, and what I want you to walk away with and want you to know in the end of it is that in the breadth of this work, God has promised never to leave you and never to forsake you in it.

You're right to look at yourself and go, this is too much for me. That's a good first thought, but it's not a good last thought. Your first thought is, I can't do this. And that's a humble thing to say. And your next thought ought to be, but God will help me. And he has helped me. And he's been gracious to me, and he's been gracious to my children, and he's given me many, many of the desires of my heart. And yet he calls me to still higher in my faith and in my love and in my holiness. and he'll meet with me and walk with me in it and through it. And so this is what we honor on Mother's Day. We honor our mother's faith and their love and their obedience, realizing that none of it is perfect. She realizes that. We realize that. But we honor what is pleasing to God. We honor the sacrifices that they've made on our behalf, the sleepless nights, the attention to detail, the care, and the ministry that they have in our lives.

That's what we honor them for. One of the last things I'll tell you is we don't honor them and we don't celebrate Mother's Day because we feel sorry for mothers. It's one thing to say that their work is very hard and it's very big and it's all-consuming, and that's all true. But that does not produce pity. We ought not to pity women who are mothers. Because to pity them is to say that you poor thing, you've got to do this hard thing. And it's to denigrate the value and the importance of the work that they do. It's very necessary that wives and mothers be honored for the work that they do to glorify God. And if you feel sorry for them, you are not honoring them. No matter what difficulty and what burden a mother is facing, I don't say to them, I feel sorry for you. I can sympathize with the burden, but I don't feel sorry for them. Because God's given them this work, and he's promised to attend them in it.

and he hasn't left them or forsaken them in any part of it. And so to feel sorry for them would be to say, I think that you shouldn't have to bear this. Instead, what I want to say is we're going to trust God together. We're going to walk through this together, and we're going to give glory to God because he's not left us or forsaken us or abandoned us in any of it. It's good work that he's given you to do, and I honor you for it. You mothers and you grandmothers and you aunts. And you Sunday school teachers and you nursery workers, I honor you for the work that you do of motherhood, of mothering the children that God's given to you. It's a very high calling, and in yourself you're not able to do it. But with God's strength you are, and you do. And so thanks be to God for his mercy and for his grace and for you and the work he's given you. So how do you honor a mother who is on this day? Well, if you're younger, you obey them. You children who want to know how to honor your mother.

or think that you're supposed to honor your mother. There is no greater gift that you can give her than to, and no joy that will surpass your obedience to the Lord. That's how you can honor your mother. You can buy her flowers, and you should, and you can get her chocolate, or you can buy her a piece of jewelry, or you can take her out to dinner, or you can make the dinner yourself. You can do all of those things. I'm not opposed to any of it, but I promise you she would give up all of those things for your obedience, your obedience to the Lord. That's what's most important to her.

And that's what you ought to give her. That's the way you can honor her. You older children, respect and deference. The work of motherhood is something that's trampled underfoot in our society. And it's something that we as Christians ought to make a point of honoring and respecting. And not just the office, but the people, the women who've given themselves to that work, who've given their lives to it. They're worthy of respect. They're worthy of honor. We ought to defer to them and give to show them grace because it's no small thing they've undertaken to do. And there are not many in this world who are telling them, good job, mom. You've given your life for a good thing. You've forsaken all of the rest of the world for the sake of these. And it gives glory to God. And so we ought to respect them and we ought to honor them and we ought to praise God for them. God's given each of us a mother and we honor him through honoring them.

This is what we tell our children, right? Children, obey your parents in the Lord. Honor your father and mother. Why? Because in so doing, those children give glory to their father in heaven. And the same is true of us, whether we're young or whether we're old. We give glory to God as we honor our mother for the good work that God's given her to do. So that's what we ought to be doing today. And not just today, but every day. Because her work is not only one day long. It's a lifetime. And so we ought to honor her and give glory to God and thanks to him for giving us mothers. Let's pray.