Mother's Day 2008

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On this Mother’s Day, I want to honor moms and talk a little about what it takes to be a good mom. But first, I thought everyone would get a chuckle out of these questions and answers.
Here's how several elementary school students answered the following questions about moms:
Why did God make mothers?
• She's the only one who knows where the Scotch tape is.
• Mostly to clean the house.
• To help us out of there when we were getting born.
How did God make mothers?
• He used dirt, just like for the rest of us.
• Magic, plus superpowers and a lot of stirring.
• God made my mom just the same like he made me. He just used bigger parts.
What ingredients are mothers made of?
• God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world. . .and one dab of mean.
• They had to get their start from men's bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.
Why did God give you your mother and not some other mom?
• We're related.
• God knew she likes me a lot more than other people's moms like me

Seriously, though, there is no greater ministry than effective parenting. It really is a 24/7 job. You pour your whole life into these little munchkins. You see to it that they’re safe, clothed, housed and well-fed. More importantly, and with great difficulty, you discipline them and train them so that they can be effective participants in our society. In return, you get whined and cried at. You probably get yelled at and occasionally they try to hit you as well. At some point they are sure to go through a phase where they can’t stand even the sight of you. And if you’re effective, they’ll grow up and move out and start the process on their own. But even then it’s a thankless job. One day a year you moms receive the thanks and encouragement you deserve. So enjoy that one day. It’s all you’re gonna get.

Today we live in a culture that devalues parenting. The following statistics are from the Pew Research Center's 2008 survey on marriage and parenting:
Forty-one percent of American adults said children are very important to a good marriage. This represents a sharp decline from the 65 percent who offered the same conviction in a 1990 survey.
By a margin of nearly 3 to 1, Americans say the main purpose of marriage is the "mutual fulfillment" of adults rather than the "bearing and raising of children."
"The popular culture is increasingly oriented to fulfilling the X-rated fantasies and desires of adults," said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University's National Marriage Project. "Child-rearing values—sacrifice, stability, dependability, maturity—seem stale and musty by comparison."

In such a culture, it can be easy to discount the value of motherhood. You might even be tempted to wonder how a mother can really have any significant impact. But scripture makes it clear that God sees great value in moms. Remember that moms generally have the greatest impact on the youngest children. That puts a couple of verses in Proverbs into a different perspective.

You’ll have the most opportunity to impact your children in their early years laying a foundation to support their maturity later on. That’s easier said than done… Imagine if your computer responded as well as your kids. If you were typing an email beginning with Dear Mom, it might actually read “mom dear.” The first word you typed might be the last one to appear on the screen. And sometimes the computer would simply transpose a line for something similar but not quite identical to what you meant. Then when you finished typing and hit send, it might go out or it might not. If your computer reacted that way, you’d probably want somebody to fix it. Even the best programmer would struggle to find the right code to get the computer to do what he wants it to.

So how encouraging that Proverbs 22:6 tells us that if we train up a child when he’s young he’ll return to that training.

Now I want you to imagine something else. Imagine that your child has grown up to be a great pastor. He oversees a church of tens of thousands of people. One day, a letter becomes public that was written by Billy Graham to your son. In the first paragraph, you are shocked to see Billy Graham has attributed your son’s faith to you!! How humbling would that be? That’s basically what we read in Paul’s 2 letter to Timothy (2 Timothy 1:5). That’s the level of influence that scripture tells us you mothers can have.

Now I have a question for you moms out there? How many of you want to have that kind of effect on your kids? Not necessarily that they’ll become world-famous pastors, but that they will be successful and that your influence will be acknowledged as a core part of their success? I’m sure each of you here wants that. And I know that’s God’s intent for a godly mom.

So that begs the question… How do you measure up as a godly mom? And how do you even know what that means?

I wouldn’t recommend asking your husband for his opinion, nothing good can come from that conversation. And asking your parents for input can be touchy as well. Probably the most frightening of all would be to ask your children. It’s likely to depend on how much trouble they’ve been in lately.

I did hear one story about a woman who found the courage to ask her daughter how she was doing as a mom… Jeanne Olsen, a mother of five from Illinois, took her daughter Kirsten, age 9, out for a mother-daughter breakfast. During their meal, Jeanne courageously asked her daughter, "How do you think I could be a better mom?"
Kirsten thought for a moment. "Well, you do yell a lot. I know you've been praying about that, but it isn't really working yet."

The first key to becoming a godly mom is to be a good wife…

In a 2007 edition of the New Oxford Review, Dr. A. Patrick Schneider II, who holds boards in family and geriatric medicine and runs a private practice in Lexington, Kentucky, did a statistical analysis of cohabitation in America, based on the findings of a number of academic resources. Here are five conclusions Schneider draws from his studies:
--Relationships are unstable in cohabitation. One-sixth of cohabiting couples stay together for only three years; one in ten survives five or more years.
--Cohabiting women often end up with the responsibilities of marriage—particularly when it comes to caring for children—without the legal protection. Research has also found that cohabiting women contribute more than 70 percent of the relationship's income.
--Cohabitation brings a greater risk of sexually transmitted diseases, because cohabiting men are four times more likely to be unfaithful than husbands.
--Poverty rates are higher among cohabitors. Those who share a home but never marry have 78 percent less wealth than the continuously married.
--Those who suffer most from cohabitation are the children. The poverty rate among children of cohabiting couples is fivefold greater than the rate among children in married-couple households. Children ages 12–17 with cohabiting parents are six times more likely to exhibit emotional and behavioral problems and 122 percent more likely to be expelled from school.

That makes it pretty obvious that to be a good mother means to be a good wife. If you aren’t putting forth the necessary effort to make your marriage a success, you’re undercutting your child’s chance for success before he even gets started.

That said, I want to take a look at a specific instance in scripture to illustrate how a mom can raise up a child… Let’s take a look at John 2:1-11.

I want to view this from the perspective of Mary, and walk through a few principles. So first, we know that Mary was at the wedding and Jesus and his disciples were invited also. All of the references I checked took this to mean that Mary was in some way related to the bride or groom. So these are people she cares about. When she realized that they were out of wine, which would have been a real embarrassment, she turned to Jesus to help. Jesus, in effect, says “mother!!” with an annoyance in his voice and rolling his eyes. “This isn’t the way I wanted to reveal my identity…” But that didn’t deter her. She knew him as well as anyone on earth did. She knew that he wouldn’t stand idly by and allow someone she cared for be shamed. So she summoned servants and instructed them to follow his direction. Then she walked away and watched what happened.

I think this can be a very clear blueprint for how to help your kids live up to their potential. First, Mary brought the need to Jesus’ attention. Now pay attention to what she did here. She didn’t order him to act. She didn’t guilt him into action. She didn’t badger him. She simply came to him with her concern, asking for his help.

Now notice what else she didn’t do. She didn’t prescribe a “proper course of action.” She simply asked his help with the situation. Like I said, she knew him well. She knew that his compassion for the couple who would otherwise stand to be shamed would lead him to take action.

Next, when Jesus expressed irritation, she didn’t argue with him. Instead, she showed her faith in him. She didn’t just say “I know you’ll do it.” She told some servants to follow his lead. She showed by her actions that she didn’t just know he had the power to help, but she trusted that he would come through.

And lastly, and in some cases most importantly, she walked away. This is the one most moms have trouble with. You see, moms are nurturers. Their nature is to see every situation through to the end. They want to make sure everything comes out ok. Even if they have full faith in their kids, they’re worried that the rest of the world is going to mess things up for them.

That’s a struggle that’s all too real in today’s world. We all want to raise Godly kids, but we also want to protect them from the world. If we take that too far, we isolate them, which is to their own detriment. Tim Kimmel, the author of Grace Based Parenting puts it well… “You may not want to hear this, but raising safe, Christian kids is a spiritual disaster in the making. Your effort will produce shallow faith and wimpy believers. Kids raised in an environment that stresses safety are on track to be Evangelical pushovers.
They will tend to end up either overly critical of the world system to the point where they won't want anything to do with the people in the world system—an idea that comes directly from Satan's playbook. Or, they will become naïve about the world system, which ultimately makes them putty in Satan's hands. He chews up these kinds of people like they are spiritual McNuggets and swallows them whole.
When they are finally confronted with the full thrust of the world system as young adults, few know how to turn it into an opportunity for spiritual impact.”

I’ve seen this happen personally too many times. Whether it’s the boys who grew up without TV who become addicted to it whenever it’s available, or the girls who were home-schooled and their only social contacts are with other church kids who get pregnant as soon as they’re out of their parents’ control. Being overly protective can only lead to problems in the future.

So let’s review that again. First, she made her request. She allowed him to come up with his own way to achieve the end. She expressed confidence in his ability to achieve and faith that he would follow through. Then she watched it all from a distance. What a great model. But as you might have noticed, that’s not a model you can use with young kids.

Proverbs 22:15 says that foolish is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction will drive it from him. That brings us back to the idea of raising a child in morals. So when they’re young we need to use correction to build in the values they need. If we can build them up with the proper morals when they’re young, we can rely on them to respond later on.

Like I said in the opening, parenting is the greatest ministry we can have. More and more I believe that precisely because our society devalues parenting that’s the model for our generation’s church. We have to be the light in the darkness. Our highest calling is to raise up the next generation of God’s family.

We do that by living our lives for them. Like I said, you sacrifice every day for them, teaching them the right values and morals. You pour all that you are and all that you have into that earthen vessel, that imperfect child. Then you stand back and see what they choose to dedicate their lives to. Having done everything we can, we then have to allow them to make their decisions, proud of the good ones and saddened by the bad. And sometimes, as we watch them succeed or fail, we realize something new. At no time are we more like God than in our parenting.

You see, when we parent in a godly fashion, we become nothing but a magnification and personalization of God’s unending, unfathomable love. We become a human reflection, almost an echo, of God himself.

So whenever you see a mom parenting in a healthy manner, you see a glimpse of God. And that’s why we should honor moms today.