Which First Dwelt In Your Grandmother Lois And Your Mother Eunice

Now, motherhood is an interesting topic because it's something we talk about a lot and focus on a lot around here. Manhood, womanhood, motherhood, marriage, children, training children, these types of things. The reason we focus on them is because we understand those to be the areas that our society is getting wrong and messing up. Another way of saying that is we see these to be areas where Satan is attacking and where God's people are being led astray and being consumed. for lack of instruction, for lack of discipline, for lack of training. And so we've made it our goal to focus on these things. When we come to a day like Mother's Day, we don't stop for many holidays and decide to preach a sermon on the holiday of the week. But with motherhood and with fatherhood, it's always been our practice to take a week and to focus and to preach specifically on that topic. And what I find is that motherhood and fatherhood are something that

The Bible doesn't talk a ton about in great detail. We don't have long lists of this is what a mother is and it's this and it's this and it's this and here's how you do it and here's the priorities and here's what's good. We have passages that speak to femininity, to godly femininity and these types of things. Proverbs 31, Ephesians 5, 1 Peter 3, they talk to wives. We have instructions somewhat to mothers, but by and large, it's something that's assumed. or intrinsic to man. And so we find ourselves at a time in history where something that is foundational to our creation, man and woman, father and mother, husband and wife, these types of things, that these foundational things are being attacked by Satan. And so we're having to come back and to rebuild the foundations, much like Nehemiah or Ezra did in their time. They went back and said, we have to fix the foundations. And so that's what we're doing.

This morning, as I said, we're going to be focusing on the topic of motherhood. That doesn't mean that this sermon won't have any bearing on men or husbands or children or those without children. When we read Scripture, you have to remember Scripture's own exhortation that all Scripture is profitable, and not just for some people in certain seasons of life, but that all Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable to all of us at every time, so that we might be well-equipped for every good work. And so if you're a single man, this morning's topic should be a guiding light in choosing a wife, okay? Every young man has priorities in how to choose a wife, but that doesn't assure that they're godly ones. If you're a single woman, our topic this morning should set your due north. It should give you what you ought to aspire to, what sort of woman you ought to want to become.

There's not more to being a woman than what God has to say about it. And as I said earlier, our society is not teaching you godly femininity. Quite the opposite. Motherhood for women is not required for them to be a Christian, but it is the principal means by which God sanctifies women. This is what God tells us. Women will be saved through the bearing of children if they persevere in love and sanctity and self-restraint. And so this is the thing that makes women most like Jesus. It's hard. It's the battlefield that women fight on throughout their whole lives. Some fight to get onto it through marriage. Some fight and desire it due to infertility. And then some, many most, fight once they're on the field and don't know what to do.

That it is a fight. It is very much a battlefield. And so you men from the very beginning ought to understand all of your affinity for war and competition and victory that you have wherever you express it. Motherhood is where your wife is doing that same work. And it's just as intense for her there as it is for you in the workplace or wherever it is you compete. And so my hope this morning is that God will help each of us, men, women, mothers, fathers, children. To love motherhood and to do the work of reclaiming it first in our homes and families and to teach our children to do it about it as well. So that we might actually be salt and light at this point in society where what is a woman is a real question. And whether motherhood is noble or worthwhile for a woman to pursue is something that not everyone has an answer to or a good answer or a godly answer.

Our text this morning is just one verse, 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 5. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord? Paul says this, For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am sure that it is in you as well. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now you might be wondering, how is he going to preach a whole sermon about motherhood from this? You're going to find out. In this verse, we start with Paul speaking to his spiritual son, Timothy, and about Timothy's faith. For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you. So he's talking about Timothy. He's talking about Timothy's faith, and he's describing Timothy's faith as being sincere. In 1 Timothy 1.5, in the first letter that Paul wrote to Timothy, he said this. The goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and...

A sincere faith. And so this idea of a sincere faith, of Timothy's sincere faith, is something that the gospel is supposed to produce. When Paul says the goal of our instruction is, he's saying the reason we proclaim the gospel or the fruit that we expect the gospel to produce in people's lives are these. Love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. And so Paul picks up that same phrase here in 2 Timothy. For I am mindful. But here he doesn't just say this is the goal of our instruction. Here he says where it came from or who else has it. I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice. And so we find out in this passage that Timothy, though his father was a Greek and he didn't grow up as a Jew, he had both a mother and a grandmother.

who believed. We know that Timothy's dad was not a Jew. His mother was a Jew, but his father was not. His father was a Greek. And so you have to think for a moment about the sort of house that Timothy grew up in. I'll ask you a question, just a statistical question about our society. Whose faith is the most important? With regard to children becoming Christians, whose faith is most important? It's the father's, okay? But Timothy... stands in as not as an exception to that rule, but as a manifestation of that not being the only way. Timothy's faith is connected to both his mother and his grandmother's faith. And so I bring that up to say to you mothers, listen, I don't want you to think that you have no influence over your children and even your sons. You have a great influence over them, okay?

And ideally, in a perfect world, the mom and the dad are unified about these things, they're agreed about these things, and they together raise their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. But it wouldn't be strange for you to be tempted to think that your work, your work of motherhood, your work of love, your work of service, your work of care, the sleepless nights, the worry, though the worry is not the right thing to do, love expressed as worry is a thing mothers do. it would be understandable for you to think that it doesn't really matter. And I mean to tell you from the very beginning, in fact, it does matter. There's a lot of talk today about what's important for children. Our mother's important. Our father's important. Which one is more important? Which one's more important? Which one can you do without? Well, it depends on what we want the outcome to be. Can someone live to adulthood without a father? Can they grow to that stage of life? Yes.

Can someone grow up without a mother who's involved in their life? Yes, but it will cause harm. It will cause harm. And so you children need to realize that you need your mothers, that they are not insignificant, that they are not just there to provide and care for your physical needs. You need them. And you mothers need to not shirk that responsibility. Your kids need you. There's not something more important for you to be doing with your life. There's not something that will be more profitable in God's sight than you giving your life for your children to train them and raise them up. And I realize that creates a lot of tension and a lot of angst in mothers or in women or as they consider the prospect of marriage or having children. They feel like, well, everything I want, What do I want? And they'll ask other people, maybe not explicitly, what should I want? Like, what should my priorities be? But everyone's telling them what their priorities should be. This is what should be important to you. This is what you should organize your life around. Other things should get in line behind these things. And what you find in society is that the thing that's never on the list is becoming a wife and a mother. If you ask the girl when she's little, five or six,

young and she's playing with her dolls and she's doing mom things and she's playing with her kitchen and that type of stuff, we'd say that's a natural thing. But as they get older, they start to question whether those desires and those expressions of femininity and whether that is a sufficient mission or goal for their life. By the time they get to middle school or into high school age, if you were to ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up? Precious few would say, I want to be a mom. I want to go to college. I want to get a degree. I want to make money. I want to help people, but not her own people, not her family. I'm not saying this to badger you or to beat you up, but I am saying this so that we're all on the same page about the pressures that women face in our society. And it's not just pressure from out in the world or from their school counselors. It's pressures they face from their own family, from their own mothers.

It's not just the kids who are subject to these pressures and these expectations. So we're Lois and Eunice deficient. What do we know about them? This is what we know about them. This is what we know about them. And I mean to tell you, if I could go back or if I could have my name recorded in Scripture and be commended, I would consider it a great honor. And that's what you find with Lois. and Eunice. The only thing we know about them is that they were Timothy's mother and grandmother, and that the thing that defined them, that characterized them, was their sincere faith. It wasn't Timothy's father or his grandfather, but his mother and his grandmother who loved Jesus. When did Lois and Eunice come to faith? Have you ever wondered that? I think we just kind of assume that they were just like, there's just this heritage of belief.

grandmother, passed down to mother, passed down to son. I don't think that's actually the case. I think actually they became Christians not long before Timothy did. If you were to look at Paul's missionary journeys, you would find that he went through the cities they lived in, Iconium and Derbe and Lystra. This is the area that they lived in. That Paul, on his way back to Antioch on his first missionary journey, he came through there. And that on his second missionary journey, He sort of reverses course and goes back the way he came. And this is what it says in Acts 16, verses 1 and 2. It says, Paul also came to Derbe and to Lystra, and a disciple was there named Timothy. So what do we learn? We go, okay, so before Paul got there, there was a guy named Timothy, this Timothy that's being written to here at 2 Timothy, that he was a disciple. So he had become a Christian sometime before that, sometime before Paul's pass through there on his second missionary journey.

And Timothy is the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek. And he was well-spoken of, he being Timothy. He was well-spoken of by the brethren who were from Lystra and Iconium. And so if we were to suck out of that the marrow about Timothy's life, we know that Timothy has become a Christian or a believer. And it happened sometime before Paul goes through on his second journey. If you carried on in... Acts 16, what you'd find is that because of Paul, Timothy's reputation, Paul wants to take him along with him and does, in fact, take him along with him to train him further. So at some point before then, he became a believer and had been a believer long enough or had done enough to develop a good reputation among the brethren. And if we put that together with 2 Timothy 1.5, our passage, we realize that that faith that Timothy has, that Paul commends, first dwelt in his grandmother and his mother Eunice.

I suspect that Lois and Eunice were converts of Paul's first missionary journey through there just a few years previous. And that the sincere faith that God wrought in them was bearing its fruit in Timothy. Another way of saying this is I don't think this is actually a passage primarily about covenant succession. The subject of this text is the quality of their faith. It's described as being sincere. It's meant to call to mind. Something that was true and known about both Lois and Eunice. So what is sincere faith? What does sincere mean? It means genuine or honest or heartfelt, true faith. A true, sincere faith that's open and willing to be known. It's not a hypocritical faith. Last week I talked about hypocrisy, that that being a great danger here. And Lois and Eunice, And Timothy are set up in juxtaposition to hypocritical faith. They have a sincere faith, a humble faith, an honest faith, a faith that answers and serves Christ. And so if we ask, where did Timothy get his sincere faith or from whom did he learn it? We would be right to assume or to attribute that lesson to his mother and his grandmother. That he would have noticed.

A marked difference in them as they came to faith in Jesus Christ and believed on him, they changed. They became faithful, full of faith and a sincere faith. And that ministered to him. God used that to minister to him and to bring him to faith. Now, whether he was there when they were on that first missionary journey, we're just not told. whether Timothy was with them or not. But we know that they were believed first and that Timothy believed after them and that the common thread between all of them was a sincere faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So mothers, you ought to aspire to have a sincere faith in Jesus Christ. And it's not the sort of thing that's going to get you likes and clicks and follows and make you popular in the world. It's just not. And it shouldn't be your aspiration anyway.

But it is precious in the sight of God and it is essential to your children that you have a sincere faith that you seek after it. And so I don't want you to teach your children to lie or to be hypocrites by moderating your behavior and speech according to who's around. Okay? I'm of the opinion that only the people in your house know what you're really like. Your siblings, your spouse, your parents when you were a child. There's a small circle of people who've seen the unfiltered version. But out in public, we have the filtered version. We have the curated version. We have, you know, we moderate ourselves. But those people who see you with your hair down, without your makeup, first thing in the morning, they ought to see sincere faith.

It's really not of any benefit for you to project sincere faith to everyone else if your children aren't the primary beneficiaries and your husband's not the primary beneficiaries of a sincere faith. They're the ones who need it the most. So mothers, be honest. If you want to have a sincere faith, close the distance between how you speak and behave and act in public and at home. Is he telling me to be more loud and boisterous and fearful and obnoxious in public? That actually is a step toward continuity. So I won't be mad at you if you do it. It doesn't mean that's what you should aspire to be, but honesty, you know? Like if you have a strong personality, you're not fooling anybody. We just know you're trying real hard in public. Like just be you and work from there because at least now we're honest in public and in private and we can...

We can now make strides towards sincere faith. What I find with women is that they tend to care a lot about relationships, and they tend to do a lot in effort to serve or cultivate or protect relationships. And what I want to tell you is relationships are the result of your sincere faith or your hypocritical faith. They're not what produce it. You serving God and living and desiring and cultivating a sincere faith is more important than your relationships. And you'll never have good relationships, which I understand that God's wired you to care about. You'll never have them the way you want them if they're the end you're desiring. You have to seek after Christ. You have to humble yourself before him and entrust the relationships to his care. Honesty and heartfelt faith do produce better relationships than manipulation and guilt-tripping.

Better than silence when you're upset. So sincere faith is genuine and honest. It's heartfelt. What else is it? Sincere faith is not shaken by trials or by suffering or by sin. Do you feel the bar going up? Can you still reach it? Do you still feel like you can grab it? Get over it? Like I can still get a hold of what sincere faith is? First it was honest and it was open and it was heartfelt. Now it's sturdy. It's immovable. It's not shaken around by trials or suffering or sin. And you think, man, that's a high bar. You mean my fear? You mean my control? You mean my worry? Those things don't mix with sincere faith? No, they don't. They don't mix with it.

So are you saying I have to be perfect and that I can never, if ever I'm worried for a second that I have, that everything is destroyed and ruined and all is lost? No, that's not what I said. But I would ask you, do you feel in your bones the phrase, I believe, help my unbelief? What trials and suffering and sin do is they peel off our masks. That's what they do. The masks that we put on and the ideals that we aspire to, all suffering does is peel them off until at some point we've gotten down to the real article. What is here? And I'm saying at that point, when all of the aspirations and all of the hopes and wishes are set aside and you say, what is actually here at the core? That's the faith I'm talking about.

Is there faith when all of the other stuff is taken away or is there not? Is there faith when it's about your kids? Is there faith when it's about your health? Is there faith when it's about your marriage? Some of you will face trials in your life that are acute, that are tragic, that are enormous and overwhelming. You'll also face some trials and sufferings that are chronic and that just last over years and decades. And they're just always there. As you face them, as you bear up under them, as they overwhelm you, you ought to aspire to having a sincere faith, a gentle and quiet spirit. You ought to hope in God. I'm going to move the bar up a little more now, okay? There's more to what a sincere faith is. A sincere faith is an expressed faith. It's not sufficient for you to believe in Jesus and have your own little quiet time all by yourself.

It's actually meant to be something that you communicate to other people. First and foremost, the ones that have your name and that live in your house. Faith is not something that's private we keep to ourselves. It's also not something that's intellectual that we store up in our heads. Remember, a sincere faith is first a heartfelt faith, which means that's where it's rooted. It has to do with our affections. It has to do with our desires. And so you have to cultivate your own heart. as well as the hearts of your children. Wouldn't you like to know what Lois and Eunice said to Timothy as he was growing up? I would love to know. You know, there are like some family stories that you find out about other people and it's really encouraging. Sometimes it's really discouraging because you're like, oh, nothing like that. But God is faithful, so maybe he'll make me like that. But wouldn't you like to know what their sincere faith actually looked like in the life of Timothy? Oh, man.

Wouldn't it be sweet? But is there any question that they spoke to him? That they prayed for him? That they corrected him? That they served him and cared for him? A sincere faith is an expressed faith. We are to share what we believe. It's a lot easier, I find, for women to talk about their desires or as they get older, their fears and their regrets. But they're not as concrete with the things they believe. You ought to be clear in what you believe. both by what you say and by what you do, such that if someone were to come in the future and ask your kids when they were growing up, what did your mom teach you? You would have some confidence, not a proud confidence, but a humble Christ-honoring confidence that you taught them the gospel, that you taught them what forgiveness was, what mercy was, what sacrifice was, what forgiveness was. Don't you want your kids to learn that from you?

There's many other things you'd like for them to learn from you and many other things you ought to teach them in preparation for them becoming adults. But that, if we teach them the whole world, but we don't teach them that, we've left our work undone. And I don't mean that you teach them the facts of the gospel. I mean you teach them the heart of the gospel because it's in your heart. We can teach them the doctrines of grace and you can catechize them and you can teach them to pray and you can... Teach them all kinds of true things. And that's a part of it. But as they're taught, you've all had teachers that you could tell that what they were teaching you wasn't just something that lived in their head. It was something they cared about. It was important to them. They believed it was true. That's what it means to have a sincere, expressed faith. That your children would learn from you, at your knee, who Jesus is and what the gospel is. If you want the gospel to take root in the heart of your child,

It has to first have taken root in your own heart so that you can teach them. Maybe another way of saying it is, moms, you're going to have an impact on your kids greater than you know. And the danger is never that they won't love what you love. The danger is that they will, and it won't be Jesus. Or maybe it won't be Jesus as the first priority. And so there's work for mothers, and there's help for mothers. As the bar gets higher and higher of what sincere faith is, of what Lois and Eunice were, I want you to know that they weren't special women. They weren't the best of the best. They weren't the only ones. They were children of God, and he helped them be what they were. And so if you find yourself deficient, if you find yourself weak, if you find the things I'm saying to be discouraging or lamentable, I want you to trust God right now that he'll help you become a godly mother. Don't be protective of your motherhood in such a way that no one can tell you that you have room yet to grow. Don't be upset that it's a man who's saying it instead of a woman in the privacy of your own home, worried about how you feel all the time. Do you want to be like Lois and Eunice? Do you want to have children like Timothy? These are the questions. And so from a very early age,

You have to talk to your children and you have to relate to them about God. That's your job. There's really nothing else that you'll do that's more consequential. Even if it's not big and seen by everybody, there's nothing else that will have more of an impact on your children. And it's not your husband's job alone. And it's not the church's job. And it's not the school teacher, Christian school teacher's job. Primarily, it's your job. If we believe in a division of labor and a difference between men and women, all I'm getting at is one of the essential parts of what it means to be a woman, a wife and a mother. It's right at the top of the list. Now, you husbands, is that what you want to be at the top of your wife's list? Do you want her love for your children getting in the way of your priorities? Does it bother you when she cares about them and wants to talk to them and process about them and pray for them and teach them? Does that bother you? It shouldn't bother you. It does bother us, but it shouldn't bother us.

That's our sin in relation to it. You hear me speaking, you're like, yeah, I want my wife to want all that stuff. And I'm like, man, it's not far behind to ask whether you want that stuff for your family. I think one of the difficulties that men face is that we want our wives to be very godly, very competent, very faithful, but we think that their capacity is just never-ending, that they never run out of time or energy. They never actually get overwhelmed, or they shouldn't anyway. And then when we stay home with the kids for a few hours, half a day, all of a sudden we're like, ready to pull our hair out. And yet somehow we're not able to connect with the fact that our wife does that all day and at night, and we still think they should have more to give to us. It's pretty foolish when you think about it. Guilty as charged. Men, if you want your wife to be the kind of woman I'm talking about, you have to figure out how to make room in your life for her to be this.

You have to take burdens off of her. Your priorities have to revolve around this. As I say, as I'm talking, I'm saying, this is what women should aspire to and this should be their priorities. They can't do it if their husbands aren't agreed to having it be a priority of their home. If you think that her job is to be all of these things and to provide for the family financially, you're putting your wife in a really difficult position. And you don't actually even have to do it for her to feel the weight of it. If she knows that you think she could do more.

perpetually could always just do a little bit more. It doesn't really matter if she's actually working outside the home or actually involved in this thing or that thing or the other. And yet you do all have to realize, both husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, that our time and energy are a limited resource and we will only spend what we have on the things that are most important to us. And if this is not what's most important to you, it will bear the fruit of it not being the most important thing to you throughout your life. And all I want is for you not to scratch your heads at the end of it and wonder, why is it that our kids behave this way or act this way? Why is it that our marriage isn't, that my wife and I are not close? Why is it that we function better as business partners and we can get a lot of work done together, but we don't love each other or relate to each other? Why is it? Take a step back and ask yourself, is this what you want your wife or women, is this what you want to be the priority? You can't do it all.

You can't do it all. When you're young, you think you can do it all. You have a lot of energy when you're young. But as you get older, you can't do it all. And when you're young, you make lots of mistakes. And the benefit of having lots of energy is you have lots of that energy is to be spent cleaning up the messes that you make. But you won't always have all the energy or the free time or the bandwidth to do that. And so all the things you practice when you're young serve you well or serve you poorly when you're older. So spend your early years prioritizing these things so that when you get older and are more busy and are more tired and have more responsibilities, you've trained these priorities into your heart and into your life. So I want to read to you now, I want to read to you a quote from G.K. Chesterton from a book he wrote called What's Wrong with the World.

There's a lot in the book, and not all of it's about men and women, but there's an extended section in the middle of it where he just talks about the differences between men and women. And G.K. Chesterton is an adamant Catholic. He despises Protestants. He despises, with a perfect hatred, Puritans. He's against it. And so don't get your theology from G.K. Chesterton, okay? The quote I'm going to read to you is not a... a theological statement. It's a statement about the differences between men and women, and particularly about motherhood. And he's also a Brit. And so a lot of his references or the way he speaks have to do with England. And so some of the references in this quote have to do with England. If you don't know what some of them are, that's okay. You'll know what some of them, you will know what, you all know who Queen Elizabeth is, right? Okay, well, so she's in this quote. So think about her work.

All right, this is what Chesterton says, and this is in his diagnosis of what's wrong with the world as relates to men and women pertaining to motherhood. He says, babies need not be taught a trade, but be introduced to the world. Right, who needs to be taught a trade? Men do, right? Babies need not be taught a trade, but be introduced to the world. To put the matter shortly, Woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are and some that there aren't. Have you ever gotten tired? Why? Why? How come? Mommy, what do you know about? Can we? How about the other thing? And it's like, are you serious? That's what he's getting at here, okay? Some questions that all the questions there are and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. And here this idea of specialist. He says men have to specialize in their work. They have to be good at a thing.

But women are generalists. They have to be good at everything. But they don't have to be as good at everything as a specialist because they have so much to do. They don't just have one task. They have a thousand tasks. And so he says, it would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now, if anyone says that the duty of general enlightenment is itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worthwhile to cast this burden on women. In order to keep common sense in the world. Do you wives ever get fed up with your husband's stupid conversations? Theoretical conversations about sports or about politics or about theology. And you're just like, seriously, like there's kids here that need you and you want to talk about this. What's the point? That's what he's getting at. That the work of training children and introducing them to the world is given to women because they have common sense. And it turns out actually that women are more practical than men.

When it comes to the necessities of life and what needs to be done, they are more practical than men. Men are happy to sit and think and talk and wonder and waste time and do their thing. Women don't understand it. If you were to read the book, he also talks about the necessity of that for men. But in the issue of raising children, he says, we have women do the work because they're more practical. They have common sense and we all need it. Carrying on. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot, with the utmost energy of imagination, conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit that the woman drudges in the home as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. Motherhood is hard, is what he's saying. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling and colorless and of small import to the soul, then I say I give it up. I do not know what words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays,

To be Whitley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, and cakes, and books. To be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals and manners and theology and hygiene. I can understand how this might exhaust the mind. You know, if you had to focus yourself on one task and just pour yourself into it, I can understand how that would exhaust the mind. But I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career? to tell other people's children about the rule of three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe. How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task. I will never pity her for its smallness. So if we were to strain out, Everything he said about motherhood. What did he say? Something to the effect of, it's the most important thing in the world. And that women are given this work by God for the preservation of mankind. And they bring certain things to that work that can't be given or produced in any other way. Their job is so big. Men, we go to work every day and we do the same things. Right?

You don't go to work one day and you're an IT guy and then you go to the next day and you're a construction worker and then you go the next day and you're an English teacher and then the next day you're, like, you don't do that. You go to work and you pretty much do the same thing or the same things, you know, within a fairly narrow range. You just go do the same thing every day. And if you had to, if someone was like, hey, why don't you go do this today? You'd be terrible at it because you weren't trained in it. But you should know that your wife's life is as wide as the world is big in the things that she has to do. This is motherhood. These are the kind of women that Lois and Eunice were toward Timothy. And so we ought not to despise it and look down on the work of motherhood. We ought to honor it. We ought to make room for it. It's a terribly inefficient endeavor, okay? Maybe you men need to hear this. Motherhood is notoriously inefficient.

And that's by design, and nothing's wrong when things don't get done as efficiently as if you were doing it. And the reason you would get it done more quickly is because you don't care about the things that your wife does. Things she cares about are important. So make room and time and space for her to pursue them and to cultivate them. Take the dinner table, for example. If you went to a bachelor's house for dinner, what would it be like? What would the food be like? Pizza out of boxes. probably eaten off of paper plates, maybe just off of napkins, right? When you put your arm on the table, not your elbows because those don't belong on tables, but your arm, what would the table be like? Well, you might think, well, there wouldn't be a table. There wouldn't, right? But we can know a couple of things. All of the trappings of a nice meal would be absent. They'd be absent. There might not even be a table.

There wouldn't be silverware. There would not be any home-cooked food. Everything would be out of plastic and cardboard. Now, if you went to the house of a young lady, how would it differ? Well, there'd be a table. It would be clean. There'd be real dishes on it. They would have made the food. They would have thought about whether, they would have done this thing men never do. They would have asked, are you allergic to anything or is there any type of food you don't like? Men, we just order the kind of pizza we like, and if you don't like meat lovers, too bad for you. Oh, you have a gluten allergy? Bring your own food. That really is the difference between men and women. But the men, he would have gotten dinner all prepared and taken care of, and it would have taken him like seven minutes, plus the time to go pick up the pizza, right? Because he's efficient. But the quality of what's produced, it's worlds apart. And so your wife's in efficiency,

motherhood and in caring for the home and in caring for the children, nothing's wrong with it. It's much more pleasant and enjoyable. You men who are married now have become accustomed to your wife's love and care and support for you. To the point that when she leaves, you're kind of like, well, how am I supposed to do this? It's good for you to need your wife. And if you need your wife to do these things and be these things, do not punish her for it. Let her be a woman. Let her be a mother. It'll be important to her if it's important to you. Or maybe a better way to say is it has to be important for you first. Then she can learn to have it be a priority for her. And the reason I say it that way is because most young women have not been trained in any of the stuff I've talked about. They've never been taught how to do what I just described. As I was describing the bachelorette's house, I'm well aware of the fact that many bachelorette's houses would function just like the bachelor's house today. And that's a shame.

It's a shame. It's a lack of femininity. It's a flattening of the differences between men and women. That woman will not be a good mother, if I can just put it plainly. And she will be very upset about the fact that she realizes, when she realizes she's not a good mother, she will be very upset about it and disappointed about it. That doesn't mean that she'll then commit herself to learning how to do it. She may just double down on her work or her other pursuits. But she's missing something that the society has stolen from her that we as Christians ought to give back to our women and train them to be. They can be women when we become men and when we honor the things that God made them and intended for our wives and our mothers and our sisters to do and to be. If your wife is depressed and has mommy guilt, it's a real problem. You should sort it out with her.

and figure out what pressure she's feeling and what expectations of yours she's trying to meet that are getting in the way of her loving her children the way God intended her to do. And then you should take those hurdles out of her way. So what are the priorities of motherhood? I wrote down a few things here. I could talk a lot longer about this. The first priority of being a mother is that you be a wife first. You moms, hear me. We've talked a lot about your children and about loving them and caring for them and it being a commendable and an essential work, and it is. But you have to be a wife first.

You'll never be a better mother than you are a wife. Second priority, teach your children the gospel. Love them and give your life for them. Okay? No one's asking you to take up a gun and go die for your country. No one's asking you to jump in front of the bus. Though if your kid was out in front of it, you may well do it, and that's fine. But that's not what primarily is being asked of you. That's not the place you're going to give your life's blood. You're going to give it in service to your husband and to your children. That requires you to give up your own pursuits and your own comforts. Motherhood's a scary thing. It really is. Because we're not growing up in a society, generally, that is encouraging and facilitating. There's not a lot of points of reference for how to do it. You're going to be cutting across the grain. You're going to be swimming upstream. You have to do it. You have to prioritize other people above yourself. It's a very basic priority of motherhood. If you're the most important person in your life, your motherhood's going to suffer.

You should be able to say as your kids grow up and as time goes on, the things that you've given up, that you enjoyed, that you liked, that you even desired for the sake of others. It's woven into the fabric of femininity and motherhood. And we have to reclaim it. And so make it your purpose, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, to talk to each other and figure out what we're going to do to reclaim this. The final thing I'll say is... These things I'm describing are actually what's most attractive and desirable to men. Not to young men when they're getting married because they're foolish. But as you get older, what you're going to want as a husband and as a father is you're going to want the sort of woman that I've just described. You won't be glad that she's got all her hobbies and got all her pursuits and that she lives independently of you. You will despise it. So cultivate her orientation toward you and the priorities of your home and family and church above what the world's putting in front of her. Let's pray.