The Wise Woman Builds Her House

and motherhood's calling. My goal this morning, realizing that this is not an uncommon thing for churches to do, my goal this morning is not to tell you pithy things like a Hallmark card. If you want those sorts of things, you can go get Hallmark cards. But we're people of the book. We love God, and as we consider and think about motherhood, what I want us to consider and to think about is what God has to say about it. Sometimes when you go to the store and you think, I'll get a card for my wife, there's always things in there that, at least for me, that cut across the grain where I think, this is not exactly what I would say to my wife. It's a misapplication of it. It creates, I think, pressure on mothers. Some of the cards, you know, when I was looking this past week, I thought, man, some of these cards create an awful lot of pressure on mothers that I think is inappropriate. When it says things like, you're my everything and everything I, you know.

everything you do is perfect and you give meaning to my life, I think, man, what woman can bear up under that pressure? She's not God. And probably she faces enough temptations in her own day-to-day life as a mother to be more like God in terms of being able to provide those things. I think, man, these cards just double down on it. And so that's not what we're going to be paying attention to this morning or studying. What we're going to be doing is considering Proverbs. 41, just verse 1. But before I read it, I want you to know sort of the topic. What are we going to say about motherhood? And it's something I always have to figure out every year because we always talk about motherhood every year, and I'm convinced that I shouldn't preach the same sermon every year. There's more than one thing to say about it. And so what we're going to be driving at this morning and considering is simply the great impact that a mother has on her home. This is what this passage teaches us, and we're going to tease that out this morning as we study it.

that impact can be either good or bad. That's what this passage teaches us. It's not presumed that her impact will be good, but that it can be good. And so would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Proverbs chapter 14, verse 1. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. The wise woman builds her house, but the foolish tears it down with her own hands. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, you might think, well, this doesn't say mother's in it. And I say, I know. But to be a woman is to be a mother. In the same way that to be a man is to be a father. Now, the most obvious manifestation of that is when a woman's married and she has kids. But how is a woman supposed to be prepared for that day? Except to be taught how to be a mother from her youth up. And where is she supposed to learn how to be a mother?

except from Scripture. And so here we have an instruction to women. And it's meant to put them on alert, I think. And just to say, here's a thing you need to consider. Because your actions and the things you do have a great impact on your family, on your house, on your husband and your children. Now there's a common misconception that I want to deal with right at the beginning. And that common misconception that I think women are inclined to believe is that they don't actually have an effect on the people around them. I think part of the reason moms get so worried about the impact of other people on their children is because they've come to believe a lie that other people have more influence on their children than they do. And that's simply not true. Parents have the most impact and are the most formative influence in their children's lives. And mothers have a ton of influence, especially because they are the ones that spend most of the time with the children when they're young. Mothers have an incredible amount of

responsibility, but also influence on their children. There are times when Vanessa and I look at our kids and she goes, that's you. He's doing what you do. And sometimes she smiles. Many times she smiles. And sometimes she goes, ugh. And there are times I look at them and I go, that's your mother. That's not me. And many times I smile and sometimes I go, ugh. It's a delight as a husband and as a father to see my wife being reproduced in her children. And so from the very beginning, I want you moms to know and those, you husbands to know, your wife has an incredible impact on her family, more on her family than on anyone else. Or maybe a better way to say it is she affects everything else in the world through her family. The things that she gives and that she pours into and that she sacrifices for her family and for her children.

It is the primary way that she impacts the greater world. In our society, you'd feel the pressure to say, no, don't give yourself to this work in impacting, making a difference, if you will, in the world through your family. Do it directly through yourselves. And I say, you'll have much more impact if you'll give yourselves to your children and to your husband and to building up your home, to building up your house. As Solomon says in this proverb, a wise woman builds her house. She has impact. Her work is not in vain, and it's also not inconsequential. And so the question is not whether or not a woman will impact her home, whether her behavior, her actions, her priorities, her love, her heart is there. The question is, what will the fruit of it be? Will she do good things, building her house, or will she do evil things, tearing it down? It's worth noting at this point that I'm not talking about absolutes.

There is no perfect man, as every woman who's married knows, but there's also no perfect woman. Even Mary, the son of Jesus Christ, was not a perfect woman. She was a sinner, like you and like me. And so when we talk about this work of building up or tearing down your house, I want to caution you, especially you ladies, to keep from going into the ditch of it's either completely perfect or it's all a failure. And there's no hope. These are not our only two options. And in fact, neither one of those options are possible. The question is, will your work and your sacrifice, when all of the work is done and we total it all up like we're calculating up a bill, will the sum be built the house or will the sum be tore down the house? And of course, we all want it to be built the house.

But we have to understand from the very beginning that in the midst of building a house, there will be failures. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. It doesn't mean you should give up. It doesn't mean you should give in to despair. In the process of building a house, it is inevitable that there will be nails that are bent. If you build something, you will cut something wrong and have to recut it. You'll drive a nail and it will bend instead of going in. There will just be problems. What do you do with bent nails when you're building a house? You either straighten them and drive them, you pull them out, or if you can't get them out, you smash them down and you put another nail in the same spot. The goal of a nail in a wall is to hold the wall together. And if a nail comes out of the gun and bends, you don't go, oh no, just burn it down. The whole thing is just, there's no more hope. You fix it.

And this principle applied to our lives as Christians and to mothers in your home is when you fail, don't make more of it than it is. Build your house. Everything that we do in this life is fraught with hardships and setbacks and uncertainty and things not going the way we thought they would or hoped that they would. This is life, this side of glory. We wake up in the morning. We go to bed at night saying, I hope in the morning I feel like this and I get this done tomorrow and my day goes like that. And then some kid pukes in the middle of the night and you're like, well, so much for tomorrow. Or you get sick or the power goes out or who knows what. But which one of us can say, this day went just how I planned it to go. This is just not our lives. And so when you face adversity, when you fail, pull the nail and put a new one in its place.

This is what it means to build a house. This is what it means to build a home. I never mean to say you shouldn't worry about your sins. Some women here should worry about their sins because they're not inclined to. They're just kind of like, what, you mean I did something wrong? I didn't do anything wrong. That woman should worry about her sins. But the woman who thinks that the whole world is held up by her ability to do it just right, shouldn't worry about her sins. She should confess them. She needs to confess them. She needs to see them. But she needs to accept God's solution to her problem. And the solution to her problem is not overwhelming guilt and overwhelming despair and frustration and, oh no, and look, I'm a terrible person and I never should have had kids and I just, I'm going to destroy everything. That's just crazy. It's common, but it's just crazy. You're not sovereign. God is.

And what you want as a mother is your house to be built. And if your house is to be built, God will have to straighten out some of the nails you bent over, many of them. And you have to trust God to do it. And there's freedom in trusting God. I'm not saying, nah, your sin doesn't matter, don't worry about it. I'm saying trust God when you fail. Trust God when you fail. So are you going to build your house? Well, I want to say to you, and I think if you were to read commentary on this, verse from days gone by, what I find about these kind of passages, particularly pertaining to manhood and womanhood, is there's precious little written about it in the past. Because the work that it entails was commonplace and the people understood what it meant. But nowadays, where motherhood and fatherhood and children and marriage are all being relegated to the back burner, I want to say to you that a wise woman builds her house. This is her orientation.

This is her priority. And so wives and mothers, you have to realize, men, you have to realize your wife is not being taught, has not been taught in many ways to prioritize her home and to build it. She's presumed that that'll need to get taken care of and she's been taught and you've been taught that this is a collaborative effort that husbands and wives do equally. But the scripture tells the woman to build her house. It warns against women who don't build their house, who don't give their time and their energy to this work. Earlier in the book of Proverbs in chapter 7, the adulterous woman is described as boisterous and rebellious. Her feet do not remain at home. She is now in the streets, now in the squares, and lurking by every corner. Now you might say, are you saying that I'm an adulterous woman if I don't?

If I'm not home all the time and I say no, not so much, but maybe, what I'm saying is you have to consider your priority, what your top priority is. All of our lives is a question of working out what our priorities are. All of our lives are saying yes and no. And the way that we determine what we can say yes to and what we should say no to is by considering what our priorities are. You can't have three number one priorities. You have to consider, even though there may be three things you really, really want, if those three things come into conflict and you can only have two of them, you have to determine which one is number three, which one you'll go without. And then if your first and your second priority come into conflict and one of them has to wait, you have to know which one has to wait.

And it's very hard because none of us want to say no. We want all that we want. We think we should have all that we want. But we have to be able to say yes and no. And this passage, along with other passages in Scripture, teach us that a woman's number one priority should be her home. Now I know I've got a third eyeball right here. This is not what's said. This is not what's expected. I know in our circles you say, okay, this isn't foreign or crazy to me. But I know that as soon as you walk out those doors, you're going to be like, That's weird. That's not what anybody around me is doing. I don't want to be weird. I'm sorry. Our choices in every area of life, are we going to serve God and love him because of his love for us sending his son? Or are we going to worry about what other people think and let them dictate to us what our priorities should be? This is the question that we face. And I think that it's especially...

It's on display and front and center when it comes to motherhood. What should a woman's priority be? What should she be working toward and being trained for? She should be working and trained for being a woman who builds up her house, a woman who invests and cares for those in her home, realizing that that is how she will affect the world. Now, is that extravagant? What's that saying about women? It's rebellious women make history or compliant women never make history. Yeah, well-behaved women seldom make history. What's that supposed to teach you? Be a rebel. Break the mold. But these are not God's words to us. And so it may not be adultery that's your temptation, ladies. In Proverbs 7, he says, the woman who doesn't remain at home is an adulterous woman out in the streets, in the squares, lurking by every corner, looking to have her lusts satisfied.

But don't dismiss what the scripture says because you say, well, that's not what I'm out doing. What you have to figure out is, what are you out doing? What are your priorities and what is it that's being sacrificed in pursuit of that? And build your house. In Titus 2, one of the things that older women are supposed to teach younger women is this same work. They're to teach them to be workers at home. To be workers at home. And so if you're going to succeed in building your house, You actually have to put time into it and energy into it and effort and sacrifice into it. Many times, especially with young wives and young mothers, they're not sure what to do with themselves. They think, I've got all this time on my hands. I don't know what to do. I don't have anything to do. If that's your case, if you feel that way, I say many women feel that way, what you should do is go to an older woman and ask her what you should do.

It's the older women in the church's responsibility to teach the younger women in the church how to prioritize their home and their family, how to build their house. And you might think, well, I don't want to do it the way she does it. I say, that's okay. You don't have to do it exactly how she does it. You can prepare different foods. You can have a different process for how you do laundry and how you love your husbands. Inevitably, your husband will want different things than her husband wants, but the principle remains. Be workers at home loving your husbands and your children. And you might think, well, that's demeaning. Isn't there something more to my life than that? That's no big deal. And I say to you, yes, it is. Go to the store and watch the kids in the kids' aisle and tell me it's not a big deal. Go to school and watch the kids' behavior or talk to a teacher and ask them, is it a big deal? The fact is children need their mothers.

And they don't just need them when they're able to communicate and able to talk and when they have felt needs that mom should be the one to meet. They need their mother's love. They need their mother's attention. They need their mother's affection. And you can't put that stuff on a checklist and say, I did that. I did it good enough today. Check. I gave the 10 hugs that I was supposed to give. It's intangible. But it is profitable. You might wonder, well, What about women working outside the home? You're saying women should never, ever, ever work outside the home. And I'm saying, that's not actually what I said. I'm talking about priorities. What I am saying is, you should not, as Christians, sacrifice this work, and really this work at the beginning of your life, since many of you are young and new in marriage. The work's not obvious to you. The work is actually figuring out what the work is. Right? When you get a bed from Ikea, there's just this pile of wood and bolts.

Your first work is to sort it out and to figure out, okay, I need to orient to this pile of sticks because it's supposed to be a bed, but it looks like kindling right now. The first thing you have to do is figure out what you have and what you're supposed to do, and that takes time, right? The hardest part of putting together one of those beds is figuring out what they call things and what number letter this is on the diagram. Then the putting together is pretty easy. You need a screwdriver and a wrench. It's pretty easy to put together. All of the work is in figuring out what is this that I'm supposed, what am I supposed to do with this? That's the work of motherhood. The first thing you have to do is figure out what am I supposed to do with this? My time, my life, my gifts, my intellect, what am I supposed to do with it? And so I encourage you, give yourself to that work. None of us want to do work that's hard for us or that we're not naturally good at because it's discouraging. You make mistakes.

How many times have you tried to put together an Ikea bed and get halfway through it and realize you used the wrong bolt in the wrong place and you've got to take the whole thing back apart now because you don't have long enough bolts now? It happens to me. What do you do then? Oh, well, no, we don't need a bed. No. I'm sorry. What you do is you say, I guess I'm going to take it apart and put it back together the way it's supposed to be. This is our life. This is a mother's life. You want to be about this work. And a career should not get in the way of this work. It's very easy at the beginning of marriage when there's not kids crawling all over the place to think, why have all this free time and all this stuff? And I say, well, Lord willing, there will be someday kids crawling all over the place and ample amount of work to do. Take the time when you don't have all of those burdens on you to figure out how to do it. Or you'll have created a deficit and you're going to be paddling really hard later in life.

what it will end up producing is a hatred for motherhood. Because you don't know how to do it. You don't know what it means to sacrifice for someone else. But that really is the definition of motherhood, is to give your life for someone else. To give your blood and your sweat and your sleep and your tears for the benefit of your children and of your husband. So for a woman to build her house, it needs to be her house she's working on and she needs to... Give herself to it. Can a woman have a job? You tell me. It's your life. That's not a rhetorical question. I'm not answering my question with the way I'm saying it. I'm saying you have to figure that out. You husbands and you wives have to figure out how your life should be ordered, what your priorities are, and how you're going to do the things that God calls you to do. And if a job fits into that, then a job fits into that. I've known women in my life.

Vanessa and I have known who have jobs and who are more motherly than women who have half a dozen kids, who have a real strong principle against never doing anything outside of the home. What I'm trying to get at is your heart and saying, where is your heart, ladies? What do you love? What do you think about? What do you care about? What approval are you seeking? And this is work that goes on, as I've said. already early on in life, but this is work that continues throughout a mother's whole life. Whether you're young and even still single or whether you're downsizing because all of your children are out of the house, the first lesson that we have to learn from this passage is that a woman's home and family must be her first priority. You can't obey what Solomon's saying here. You can't build your house if you don't work on it, if you don't say no to other things for the sake of your family.

Another thing I'd like you to know, you should know about building your house, women, is if you seek to obey this passage, sacrifice, giving of yourself for the benefit of others, it's the only way. It's the only way. There's no way to build your house without sacrificing. And I'd also tell you that there's not a nobler or more worthwhile calling that you can give yourself to than this work. I won't tell you it's not sacrifice. I won't tell you there won't be hard days. I won't tell you that you feel like you've lost yourself in the midst of all of the responsibilities and needs. Those are common to mothers. And so we don't say to mothers that feel that, no. We say yes. But there's a good work you're doing that we trust God to bear good fruit from in his time. Don't grow weary in it. We need your sacrifice, Mom. You're a lot more than a cook and a maid.

or a facilitator, or a chauffeur, or a scheduler. Inevitably, all of those things get done, but your calling is much more than that. Think for a second when Eve was in the garden. God describes her, and he gives her this explanation of her name. And what does he say? You're the mother of all the living. You know, just, oh, I am. That's how we feel about it. That's how I'd feel about it if it was me. a sinner, and at that time she wasn't. But could you imagine to look out into all of creation and go, the mother of all the living. Every man, woman, child that will ever be created in this world that came from you, you're their mother. It's a big work, requires a lot of sacrifice. If you give yourself to this work, you will be building your home and strengthening those that live there, as well as the guests and the friends that come into your home.

You ever go into people's houses and there's sort of this intangible sense of the home? What's it like there? Sometimes you can tell if it's a harried home or you can tell if it's a put-together home or if it's a comfortable place. There are places you feel more comfortable and places you feel like, I don't know what the rules are here. That's the result of the husband and the wife working together and whether or not their home's a priority and whether they're working at it. The places that you feel comfortable, one of the things you should learn is they work at that. This doesn't just happen. They have to work at that. She's mothering. He's fathering. They're making a home. They're building their house. She's participating in it and doing her share, sacrificing what God requires her to sacrifice so that when we show up, we're welcomed and we're comfortable. Now, if you go into someone's house or more, more, uh, when you come into your own house and you find hospitality and warmth and comfort, you should be sure to express your gratitude for her work, for her mothering, for her care. One of the things I learned from my wife that was very helpful to me, having grown up the way I did, I didn't know, she says, about meals, she said, the reason manners are so important in our house to me is because that's the way that you guys communicate that you appreciate the work I did.

If you'll be respectful, if you'll be patient, if you'll care about other people. I've cared, I've prepared, I've sacrificed out of love. The way you can communicate to me that you love me too is by enjoying the meal with me. To some of you, you're probably like, you didn't know that? And the answer is no, I didn't. Some of you might know that, but some of you probably don't know that. We need to learn it. We should express our gratitude for the sacrifice and the giving that our wives and our mothers do. And it may be that they don't do it perfectly. In fact, most likely, they don't do it perfectly. And yet their work and their sacrifice on our behalf is still worthy of gratitude and thankfulness. Think of it this way. Your gratitude to your mother is one of the primary ways you can help her fight against her own temptations, to think that her work is insignificant. Her calling is a hard calling, and yet it's a worthwhile calling. And all day she's dealing with lies and temptations from inside of her and from our culture, saying, no, it's not. It's not worth it. You should be doing something more important, more meaningful. The way you can help her fight those temptations is by encouraging and thanking her for the work she does. Our perverse tells us that,

A wise woman can build her house and a foolish woman tears it down with her own hands. But I submit to you, one of the primary ways that a woman will be tempted to tear her own house down is if there is no gratitude for her work. And so encourage her. Help her in it. Don't undo the things that she does because of simple carelessness and selfishness. I want to come back now to the imperfections of motherhood. The fact that building a house doesn't go off just perfectly. Mothers, you're gonna sin. You do sin. Confess your sins. Sin is what tears down a house. But not really sin, unconfessed sin. Sin that's left to fester. Sin that's left to be tolerated or endured. Sin that's excused. This is one of the things that tears down a house. And one of the simplest ways that Satan will get in there and try to wreak havoc.

So when you sin, as you're sacrificing, don't think more highly of yourself than you ought to. Confess your sins and seek forgiveness. Not all of the temptations that you face come from outside. It's not all the kids and all the schedules and all the sleep, lack of sleep perhaps, or the sickness or whatever else you face. It's not all of your temptations and occasions for sin don't come from outside of you. The truth is many of them come from inside of you, meaning you did it. You caused it. You responded to whatever's going on outside with a bad attitude, with faithlessness, with jealousy or anger. When those things go on, don't dismiss your sins by saying, it wasn't my fault, it was the snake. Say, I'm sorry, here's the thing I did. I did it. Please forgive me for it.

wherever your temptations come from, if you give in to them and you don't address them, this will result in you tearing down your own house. And so if you don't want your house torn down and you don't want the relationships broken, confess your sins and seek forgiveness from the ones you've sinned against, the Lord and your family. Two more things. To build up your house, mothers have to make time to seek the Lord. You have to make time for it. There's all kinds of pressures and all kinds of demands and all kinds of expectations, and it's true that you won't get to all of them if you make this a priority. But my question to you is, is what you're working on getting the list done or is what you're working on building your house? If you're working on building your house, you have to make time to seek the Lord. All of us are busy. All of us are on to the next thing. Building your house demands that you make time to fill your spiritual cup, that you make time to spend with the Lord.

so that you have something to give to your husband and to your children when the sacrifices come. Your job isn't just logistics and details. Motherhood's a spiritual calling with responsibilities to your husband and to your children, not as the leader and protector of the home, but as the mother. So make time to seek the Lord so that you're better equipped to love and to sacrifice for the ones that are around you. Sometimes it's as simple as saying, that work can wait. The one thing you know that's true about whatever it is you've got going on is it ain't going anywhere. It will be there. So take time to seek the Lord. The final thing we'll say about building your house is you have to trust God with your family and especially with your children. Your children need to know Jesus. They need to know their sins. They need to know that God is holy. They need to know they have a problem.

close and personal, their sins. Both your husband's and your children's. You're going to see their need of Jesus. Don't cast aside or ignore the fact that everyone in your house has a soul and has spiritual needs. They don't just need dinner. They don't just need clean clothes. They don't even need you just to be happy. They need to see you living by faith. And they need to see you living by faith at the points... Where it's scary to live by faith, and that really is with your kids. Pour into them, both by example and instruction, and then trust God to water and to bring growth to the seeds you plant. Motherhood is a long-term endeavor. Some of you have kids that are out of your house, and I bet there's still a good long list of things you hope for and want and pray for your children. Grown up with kids of their own, and you still go, I just want them to...

They need to see and grow and trust God with his timing. But you be sure to pour into them. Don't pour into them because you're afraid. Don't pour into them because you think there's no hope apart from you. Their hope needs to be in Jesus, not in you. Pour into them because you trust God. The vulnerability of trusting God with your kids is intense at times. The pressure, you think, look at the mess I've made. Look what I said. Look what I did. All hope is gone at that point. Right at that point, trust God. Ask him to be merciful to your children and to give them eyes, spiritual eyes to see your weaknesses, but more than that, to see his goodness and their need of him, whatever your weaknesses are. In the end, moms, dad, you're not going to stand before God and give an account for your children's sins. They are. And your work, your primary work, Whatever else you do or don't do for them is to prepare them for that day. And yet you can't do it for them. You can't make them believe. Here Solomon says, a wise woman builds her house. But in Psalm 127, what does David say? He says, unless the Lord builds the house, they who labor, labor in vain. And so this is the tension we live in, that mothers live in. Wise woman, build your house, knowing that unless the Lord builds the house,

You labor in vain. What you're supposed to do with that is not despair and go, oh no, I can't do anything. What you're supposed to do is trust God that he will build your house. That he will give you the desires of your hearts. And even if he doesn't, even if it's his will that your children would not love him, you will have loved him. And you will not stand before God and give an account for whether or not your children love God. you'll stand before God and give an account for whether you love God, whether your motherhood was marked by your love for him or not. And so be sure that that's the thing you're pursuing as mothers, as wives, as women. Let's pray.