Sermon Illustrations on Motherhood — page 2

Motherhood: Oh, the Ebb and Flow of Joy and Sorrow

Proverbs 3:5

Celebrating Mother’s Day was always a peaceful and joy-filled experience as I grew up in a loving, Christian, two-parent home. I remember working diligently on the obligatory homemade gift projects we were given as schoolchildren in order to present something to my mom that would conjure a smile, thanks and a hug. Mother’s Day served as an annual reminder to say, “Thank you.” To be honest, I never thought deeply about the annual celebration until later into my adulthood.

I have since come to discover there can be a lot of pain, heartache and grief associated with this particular holiday. Ignorance is bliss, right?

I had grown up dreaming less about being a mom and more about one day being a wife. I clung to passages of Scripture like Proverbs 3:5-6 that provided instruction to trust God in all things. I just believed that in His time I would be married with the traditional two-and-a-half children, white picket fence and a dog. Since those were the examples I saw around me, it seemed like the natural progression of life.

By age 27, I met my best friend, Tony, and began the journey of marriage. During those first couple of years, we weren’t necessarily trying to get pregnant, but we weren’t avoiding it. Meanwhile, it seemed like everyone around us started getting pregnant.

The awkwardness of being married with no children began to creep in. Well-meaning people would summon a smile and say, “We are praying for you” or comment at a baby shower, “You’re next!”

I knew God was sovereign over the womb, but I wondered what was going on. Was there something wrong with me?

When God began to open our eyes to the fatherless, it was our theology, not our biology, that led us toward international adoption. Seeing in the Scripture that God describes Himself as the Father of the fatherless and calls His people to care for orphans compelled us to ask what we could do for the fatherless.

Two years after initially wrestling with that idea, we found ourselves in a cold, smelly orphanage in the middle of Ukraine.

Our four Ukrainian-born children shuffled into the small office hand-in-hand, cautious and curious. I sometimes try to imagine what must have been going through their minds. Who were these two watery-eyed people smiling at them and asking to become their new mommy and daddy? All I can say is that it was both bizarre and beautiful.

God was working fiercely in my heart. How can a little person made in the image of God, yet not of your flesh and blood, become your son or daughter? This scenario was not what I had in my mind earlier in life. His ways are not our ways; His thoughts are higher.

Six weeks later we came home as a family. Fifteen months after that, we brought our youngest child home from Ethiopia.

“Welcome to the club of motherhood!” others said.

While I appreciated the sentiment, I sensed a prompting in my spirit to caution against assuming a new identity. The reality was, my identity changed at age 12 when, by God’s saving grace, my eyes were opened to the incredible collision of justice and mercy at the cross of Christ. It was then that I was no longer a child of wrath and I became a child of God -- an adopted daughter. So, this new status of motherhood was simply a new role to steward, albeit a weighty one.

“He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children. Praise the Lord!” Psalm 113:9 (ESV) states.

Parenting children from broken pasts can have moments of great joy as well as moments of great heartache. Watching fits of rage dwindle over time and transition to healthier coping behaviors is amazing. The kicking, screaming and clawing slowly transformed into the ability to, through their tears, talk through the issue at hand.

I witnessed giggles and awed faces at the beach as they dipped their toes in the water and watched waves crash for the first time. I heard exclamations like, “This is the best day of my life,” as we fought crowds at Disney World. These moments have filled my heart with incredible joy.

But there are times of great setbacks, challenges and questionings. It breaks my heart to hear these same children say, “What kind of mom just gives her child away!” or “It bothers me when people keep asking if I’m adopted. Why do they want to know?”

Amid defiant, disrespectful and dishonoring behavior, hearing my child scream, “You have no idea what it is like to grow up in an orphanage!” or “You are not my real mother!” has wounded me deeply. It’s tempting to build up walls of protection around my heart.

Sometimes moments of grief come out of nowhere; sometimes my heart feels as if it will burst under the weight of it all. It is a regular fight to rein in my emotions.

Sometimes I even forget we became a family through adoption because I often feel our children were always ours -- but they weren’t. They all came from broken pasts filled with abuse, neglect, death and abandonment.

Oh, the ebb and flow of joy and sorrow.

It is God’s grace that has enabled me to say with great joy and peace that He kept me from being able to have babies so that I could be mom to each of my children. I am so thankful. I would not trade that for the world.

Yet, I praise the Lord that my identity is not found in being a mother, but in being a daughter of the King. That truth gives me hope in the midst of heartache, courage in the midst of trial and thankfulness for the good gifts that come from His hand.

This Mother’s Day, may we remember those who grieve -- those moms in the midst of difficult adoptions, those who battle infertility, stepmoms, and those who have lost a child or mother. May we think of them, pray for them and encourage them to find joy in the Lord.

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Kimberly Merida is a musician and justice advocate who writes at shownmercy.blogspot.com. She and her husband Tony, pastor of Imago Dei Church in Raleigh, N.C., and a faculty member at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, are the parents of five adopted children. This article first appeared at the Biblical Recorder (www.brnow.org), newsjournal of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.

Sermon: Surpassing Sentimentality

Proverbs 6:20

Sermon for Mother's Day, 2010. Proverbs 6:20-24

SURPASSING SENTIMENTALITY

=========================

I. Mother's Day sermons are hard.

A. Most pastors struggle with this one.

B. Emotional minefields.

C. A bigger problem is that Mother's may can be too trite.

II. What mothers want.

A. Gifts can be nice.

B. Most moms want to do it right.

C. The reality always seems to fall short.

III. Mother's Day has roots in serious stuff.

A. Consider the origins of America's Mother's Day.

B. Mother's Day should be about more than sentimentalism.

IV. How do you stack up as a Bible mom?

A. Motherhood has more expectations for Christians.

B. You need to be committed for the long haul.

V. Motherhood will have its reward.

A. It just might not be what you think it is.

B. It can be more.

Mother's Day Doesn't Have To Be Light and Fluffy

John 19:26

My pastor asked me if I had any wisdom to impart as he prepared his Mother’s Day sermon for the coming Sunday. So I did my quick little Mother’s Day thing about how the truth is that most of us just actually want the day OFF, a day AWAY from the children and husbands we love so so much. How the perfect Mother’s Day really requires no mothering. Then I went into my little joke about how I think we really could use another wife in my house. “A good one, though, this time,” I said for the millionth time in my life because I don’t think “Pastor Gregg” had heard my spiel (he’s new). “One who can clean the house and watch the kids.”

Here’s what I really think about Mother’s Day at church. I always get worried that a Mother’s Day sermon will feel forced, or worse, “light.” I just got a catalog from a local Christian book store, featuring all sorts of garbage for Mother’s Day. Tea cups. Stupid plaques. Gift books. Essentially a bunch of Jesus junk that no mom actually needs. Nothing to encourage moms to go deep into their gifts, to focus on their Maker to see how we’re made and who they’re made to be. Nothing to challenge them in to live out faith in daring, dangerous ways. Nothing to get to know God better. Nothing deep, powerful, impactful, moving, meaningful, eternal....

I’m so tired of Mother’s Day being light and fluffy. I think moms should be celebrated — but not coddled. Mother’s Day just perpetuates the lowering-the-standard thing that happens to women when they become moms. Like having children should zap out every other meaningful, challenging thing (including getting deep with God, if we’re honest) in our lives.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #12834]

Great Mothers In Church History

Luke 1:46

Augustine of Hippo is known by Christians the world over for standing against heresy in the fifth century and laying a foundation for the Protestant Reformation a thousand years later. Lesser known is the fact that Augustine might never have become a Christian if not for his mother Monnica, who prayed for his salvation for years before eventually sailing from North Africa to Italy to beg her son to attend church. He honored her wishes and was saved when he heard the Gospel under the preaching of Ambrose of Milan. Monnica -- as her name is spelled on her tomb despite commonly being rendered as “Monica” -- is one of many noteworthy mothers in church history.

“Some of Christian history’s greatest preachers, theologians and missionaries owe the first fruits of their ministries not to their exegetical insights, homiletic abilities or spiritual zeal, but instead to the faithful prayers of their godly mothers,” Christian George, assistant professor of historical theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press in written comments. “In the lives of countless Christians throughout the ages, God has often granted second births as a result of those who gave them their first.”

Susanna Wesley was another Christian mother whose witness and love for her children helped alter the course of church history. Born in England in 1669, Wesley oversaw the spiritual and educational development of her 19 children -- 10 of whom survived to adulthood -- while her husband Samuel was away from home for lengthy periods.

On a rotating basis, each child had a night for individual conversation and prayer with Susanna. She wrote commentaries on the Apostles Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer as curriculum for her children. One of her sons, John, led thousands to Christ and organized what became known after his death as the Methodist Church. Another son, Charles, wrote more than 6,000 hymns, including “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” and “Rejoice, the Lord Is King.”

Susanna has been called the “Mother of Methodism” though she never preached and published very few writings.

“Susanna patterns for us a mother who worked tirelessly to provide for her children,” George said. “She shows us the power and influence that a mother can have over the development of a child’s theology, spirituality and worldview. She proved to be a woman of great resilience in the face of a domestic life riddled with difficulty, illness and loss.”

One of Southern Baptists’ heroes similarly owes part of her success to her mother. When Anna Maria Moon’s husband died of a heart attack in 1852, she was left to manage the Virginia family plantation alone and raise four surviving children, including a daughter named Lottie. Believing strongly in the value of education, Moon sent Lottie to the Baptist-affiliated Virginia Female Institute, where she became one of the first women in the South to earn a master’s degree.

“Anna’s belief that her daughter should receive a higher theological education placed Lottie on a trajectory that, in 1859, would intersect with a revival led by John Broadus at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,” George said. “It was during this revival that Lottie experienced a spiritual awakening that would later result, in 1873, in her decision to move to China and join her older sister Edmonia as a missionary through the Foreign Mission Board.”

The annual Christmas offering for international missions named after Lottie Moon generated $154 million for the International Mission Board in 2013, the most recent year for which a gift total is available.

Two of the earliest inspirational mothers in church history were a Roman noblewoman named Perpetua and her slave Felicity. Both were mothers of infants when they were martyred in A.D. 203 for refusing to recant their faith in Christ. According to an ancient account of their deaths, the women were beaten and thrown to wild animals before finally being killed with the sword.

“Though still nursing her newborn, Perpetua refused to recant despite her father’s pleading,” Rick Durst, professor of historical theology at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press in written comments. “Felicity was pregnant when arrested and thereby temporarily ineligible by Roman law to be put to death in the arena. She prayed that her delivery would come quickly that she might experience martyrdom with her companions, and that is exactly what happened. This story of these courageously faithful young mothers spread rapidly through the churches and encouraged many to stand firm for Christ in times of trial.”

Another ancient Christian mother is responsible for some of the Middle East’s most famous Christian landmarks. Helena met and married a high Roman official named Constantinus who later divorced her to marry another woman. Their son Constantine became the first Roman emperor to profess faith in Christ and granted Christianity newfound acceptance throughout the empire during the fourth century.

Constantine’s loyalty helped lead Helena to faith in Christ, and upon becoming a believer she took an interest in the geography of Jesus’ earthly life.

Constantine “underwrote Helena’s desire to make a pilgrimage to Palestine and to fund the construction of churches at the sites she identified as the birthplace of Christ in Bethlehem and of His ascension in the Garden of Olives,” Durst said. “When the Church of the Holy Sepulcher started construction in A.D. 326, Helena was the architect. She accomplished these journeys in her 70s. Many a modern tourist to Israel owes appreciation to this mother who did much to preserve the sites described in the New Testament.”

These and other believing mothers have “staked out some high ground in Christian history,” Durst said.

“Believing mothers have rocked cradles with their own ‘Magnificats’ of trust and truth in Christ, as did Mary in Luke 1:46-55,” Durst said, referencing the first word in the Latin translation of Mary’s song of praise. “Mothers have been God’s first line of discipleship down through the ages as God raised up the next generation of church leaders.

“Mother’s Day technically may have started in the U.S. in 1910 in West Virginia and then moved nationally in 1914 under President Woodrow Wilson, but God has empowered and honored mothers as His way of providing life, safety and courage in new each generation of children,” Durst said.

'The Noblest and Most Precious Work': Honoring and Encouraging Motherhood

Luke 1:7

On Mother’s Day, most of us take intentional time and effort to show our moms how much we love and appreciate them, and how much we’re thankful for their love and sacrifice. I’m not always as intentional as I should be about honoring the moms in my life, especially the one who gave me life and the one who’s currently doing the really heavy lifting caring for our kids.

But especially in this cultural moment, Christians should be the first, not only to honor current mothers, but also to celebrate and encourage future mothers.

Andrea Burke, writing at For the Church, suggests that we’re not always very good at this. As a result, for too many young Christians, cultural attitudes toward motherhood are setting the tone. And it’s not a positive tone.

Burke calls motherhood “the one life dream that makes a girl blush.” In her work directing her church’s women’s ministry, Burke regularly sits down with single, young women to talk about the future. They often confess that although they could pursue further education or a successful career in any number of fields, what many of them want is to get married and raise a family.

By Burke’s account, these young women are smart and accomplished. They don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Still, they regularly talk as if choosing to be a wife and mom is a silly cop-out — somehow a waste of their lives. “When a 21-year-old sits across the table from me and tells me that she wants to be a mother,” Burke writes, “she blushes and gives a thousand caveats as to why she knows it’s not the optimal choice.”

Where do young women get this low view of motherhood? Well, look around. According to a New York Times article last year, the average age at which women become mothers is now at a record high — 30 or older in some parts of the country. The Times reported this as if it were a good thing, talking up the wonders of a “fulfilling career” and all-but-openly suggesting that the only reason any woman would have children young is because she couldn’t achieve the ideal professional life, and needs a substitute rite of passage to adulthood.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the average birth rate failed to rebound after the Great Recession, and now sits at a rock-bottom 1.77 children per woman on average — that’s down over 16 percent from a decade ago.

So now there’s a gap in our culture between the number of children women want to have, and the number they end up having.

The Times explains, “it’s unlikely any future baby boom will be able to fully offset the baby bust of the last 10 years.” This means that “millennial women are likely to experience the largest shortfall in achieved fertility verses their stated family desires of any generation in a long time...”

What does all this have to do with young women embarrassed about wanting to become mothers? Well, they need honesty from us — specifically from their parents, that whatever society says about the wonders of a successful career, they’re statistically likely to regret prioritizing promotions over parenthood.

At BreakPoint.org, my colleague Shane Morris recently wrote a beautiful letter to his six-year-old daughter, in which he encouraged her to think of marriage and motherhood as callings worth pursuing, not as afterthoughts. Shane described how his daughter already is in the habit of tucking her little brother’s trucks to bed. Shane is right in seeing in those nurturing instincts things worth celebrating and cultivating.

His letter reminded me of Martin Luther’s praise for nurturing tendencies in his commentary on Genesis: “How becomingly even little girls carry infants in their arms,” he wrote. “And how appropriate are the gestures with which mothers dandle the little ones when they hush a crying infant or lay it in the cradle...” Elsewhere he says: “In all the world this is the noblest and most precious work.”

If you’ve got daughters (like I do) or granddaughters or even nieces, proudly tell these young women that if motherhood is their dream, they’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.

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Resources

"The One Life Dream That Makes a Girl Blush," by Andrea Burke, For the Church, March 22, 2019.

"A Letter to My Daughter: Don’t Make Motherhood an Afterthought," by Shane Morris, BreakPoint.org, March 4, 2019.

"The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America," by Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller, August 4, 2018; .

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The Market Value of A Proverbs 31 Mother

1 Timothy 5:1

Scripture attests that the contributions of motherhood to our society extend far beyond the home.

________

As Mother’s Day rolls around again, so do the memes and articles trying to calculate the value of the work that mothers do.

In 2021, for example, Salary.com estimated the median annual salary of a stay-at-home mom to be $184,820, tracking “real-time market prices of all the jobs that moms perform.” Among these jobs, analysts identified roles like chief financial officer, logistics analyst, facilities manager, nutrition director, server, and event planner.

Of course, the irony is that should a mother wish to import these same skills onto her professional résumé, they would be meaningless in the public sector. Even attempting to quantify her domestic work this way would very likely lead to her being deemed an “unserious person.” Like an NFT or cryptocurrency, motherhood has value only for those who already value it.

Part of the reason that the work of motherhood doesn’t easily transfer to the marketplace is because we tend to view it as a private vocation, the extension of our personal lives. In our culture, motherhood is (as debates around abortion imply) a matter of personal choice. It is inherently private and personal.

Consider something as innocuous as where we place the apostrophe in Mother’s Day greetings. This Sunday, we are not celebrating all mothers or the idea of motherhood (“Mothers’ Day”); we’re each celebrating our own individual mother (“Mother’s Day”).

This privatization of motherhood shapes the way that we relate to mothers when they do enter the public sphere. And ironically enough, viewing motherhood as primarily a private vocation may actually lead to our devaluing it.

It hasn’t always been this way, however.

In her book, The Secret History of Home Economics, author Danielle Dreilinger contends that the field of home economics once merged cutting-edge scientific research with domestic arts — elevating homemaking and providing pathways for mothers to pass into the marketplace with their unique skill set. Women trained as home economists were recruited to set nutritional guidelines, educate their communities in new technology, design clothing, write recipes, and act as dietitians.

”Home economics was far more than baking lumpy blueberry muffins, sewing throw pillows, or lugging a bag of flour around in a baby sling to learn the perils of parenting,” Dreilinger writes. “In its purest form, home economics was about changing the world through the household.”

But since the 1960s, motherhood has slowly crept back to the private sphere — and with it, our understanding of the role mothering serves in communal enterprises. This is true even in the church.

Throughout the New Testament, the Epistles liken the church to a family, the household of God in which every member plays a role. In 1 Timothy 5:1–2, the apostle Paul tells his protégé Timothy to treat an older man “as if he were your father” and to “treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.”

But our ability to honor “older women as mothers” in the church hinges a great deal on whether we understand how to honor mothers within broader society. Because while many folks feel strong sentimental ties to their own mothers, what of those who don’t?

And what of those women who are not biological mothers but who act within the rhythms of motherhood, nurturing life and goodness wherever they are? What would it look like to value the impulses behind motherhood?

If nothing else, learning to value motherhood would help us remember that none of us exist without another person. As elementary as this sounds, our “begotteness” is a reality easily lost to modern humans who prefer modes of self-creation.

But the Scripture calls us to the kind of humility Paul recognizes in 1 Corinthians 11:11–12. Discussing male-female dynamics in worship, he writes, “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.”

Without this essential understanding, we lose the basis on which God commands us to honor our fathers and mothers. Honoring our parents is a humble acknowledgement that we did not make ourselves. Generations have come before us and made our lives possible.

But beyond valuing motherhood as the source of life, we must also value the unique wisdom that flows from motherhood, including those insights that could not be learned any other way.

The book of Proverbs opens with a call for young men to seek wisdom, in part by listening to their mothers:

Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction

and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.

They are a garland to grace your head

and a chain to adorn your neck. (1:8–9)

The book of Proverbs ends in chapter 31 with the words of King Lemuel — who recounts the wisdom that “his mother taught him.”

Mature women have many things to teach — not only to their biological children but also to the church and society at large. Because beyond telling Timothy to respect older women as mothers, Paul also reminds him of where his faith originated, that it lived first “in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice” (2 Tim. 1:5).

Proverbs is correct: The degree to which we dismiss the teaching of mothers is the degree to which we are a foolish people.

Learning to value motherhood means learning to value the role that mothering impulses play in forming, building, and defending our communities. At its most basic level, biological motherhood testifies to how women form a community within their own bodies — two individuals living together as one. But a woman’s instinct to protect and care for her community goes beyond bringing children into the world.

Judges 4–5 tells the story of Deborah, a prophetess who judged Israel before the time of the kings. Deborah held court under a palm tree, and “the Israelites went up to her to have their disputes decided” (4:5). Eventually she summons the military leader Barak and tells him that he must confront the enemies of Israel to restore peace and the futures of the nation.

When they sing later of the victory God gives them over their enemies, Deborah frames her role as that of a mother:

In the days of Shamgar son of Anath,

in the days of Jael, the highways were abandoned;

travelers took to winding paths.

Villagers in Israel would not fight;

they held back until I, Deborah arose;

until I arose, a mother in Israel. (5:6–7)

So too, we must understand the role that God is calling mature, godly women to play in the restoration of the church and broader community. Right now, as the evangelical church is struggling to find its way, God is raising up “mothers in Israel” to help rebuild and restore our communities. We must learn to recognize the unique and irreplaceable work God is doing through such women. These women are more than worthy of our praise this Sunday.

To such women, we rise up as their children and call them “blessed.” May we join in declaring the words of King Lemuel to all those who fulfill the biblical role of motherhood in our midst:

“Many women do noble things,

but you surpass them all.”

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;

but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.

Honor her for all that her hands have done,

and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.

God Chose Moms To Carry Out His Plans

Mark 7:24

The Scriptures are full of stories spotlighting the vital role of motherhood in God’s mission.

________

Though the American holiday of Mother’s Day is only about 100 years old, various cultures have set aside time to pay homage to mothers for millennia.

For Christians, this celebration involves honoring motherhood through the lens of God’s revelation at the heart of our faith. Our scriptural narrative discloses the inclusion of mothers in God’s divine purposes from creation to new creation.

God’s original plan is that humans would fill the earth and steward it (Gen. 1:28). That project is unsustainable without mothers who give birth to the humans who will cultivate God’s good creation. Even after the first created woman (and man) tarnishes the goodness, beauty, and simplicity of that plan with disobedience, God never gives up on her or the plan.

It is after their transgression and the entrance of pain, division, and even death that Adam sees evidence of God’s grace in his partner — who is fittingly named Eve (3:20). because she will be mother of the living (Eve and living are closely related in Hebrew). Death will not have the final word, and the hope of God’s plan will continue through her because she will bring forth life. The narrator allows her to proclaim God’s grace in the birth of her children (4:1, 4:25).

Mothers recede into the background as most of the genealogies focus on fathers and sons — but without mothers, of course, these family lines would not continue at all. Over and over again, God invites the participation of women in the divine plan of life.

At times, however, the narrative spotlight of Scripture does fall upon mothers. Time would fail me to recount all the mothers in the Bible who heard and accepted the call to join God’s mission on earth — but some stories are too good not to mention.

Early on, the divine plan for a good creation focuses on one family — and a scandalously imperfect one at that. Abraham and Sarah are admittedly the focus of the drama, but for a while Hagar steals the show.

Not only was she born outside of the chosen family, but she is their slave. As such, she has no rights over her body but is made to play one role of motherhood that Sarah could not. Her story is painful, infuriating, and more complex than I trust myself to navigate, but she belongs in the hall of faithful mothers.

When she and her son are cast out, God sends an angelic messenger directly to her. And as Adam recognized and proclaimed the hopeful truth about Eve by naming her, Hagar recognizes and names the hopeful truth of God’s identity — by declaring God to be El Roi, the God who sees (Gen. 16:13).

God hears her cry and saves her and the boy from death so that he too might multiply and fill the earth. In this act, God sees and cares for a despised Egyptian slave mother.

If we fast forward to the part of the biblical story where the Egyptians are no longer the slaves but the enslavers, another mother grabs our attention.

Jochebed finds herself pregnant in an era of genocide — but instead of throwing her newborn infant into the Nile, she hides him for three months.

In addition to the physical weariness and lack of sleep in the early weeks after giving birth, she shoulders the constant fear for his life. And when she can no longer hide his cries, she again resists the forces of death by placing him in a homemade basket on the banks of the Nile. We know this placement is not haphazard since Pharoah’s daughter often came to that part of the river to bathe.

But Jochebed returns home by this point, leaving her daughter to keep watch. As a mother, I imagine she could not bear to stand by and hear the cries of her increasingly hungry infant. I can also imagine the relief of this breastfeeding mother, emotional and physical, when her daughter Miriam returns with her baby and says, He’s alive! You can feed him, and you will be paid for doing so!

As one who was given the incredible blessing of nursing my own children, I cannot read this story without feeling it in my body. Jochebed protects her baby Moses — whose name sounds like the Hebrew word for “to draw out.” This baby becomes the man God chooses to lead the people of Israel out of slavery. And yet without Jochebed’s ingenuity, care, and grit, God’s deliverance through Moses would not have happened.

At another pivotal moment in the biblical story, the fervent prayers of one woman open the pathway leading to the king of Israel. The book of 1 Samuel opens to Hannah, a barren woman who expresses her longing to be a mother to God with great cries and tears, year by year. While she prays at the temple, she is so earnest in her distress that the priest Eli thinks she is drunk.

When God grants her request and opens her womb, she cares for her son until he is weaned and then delivers him to the temple so that he might serve God. The boy is attentive to the voice of the Lord — a skill befitting the child of a praying woman — and he grows to be the very prophet who anoints the famous shepherd-turned-king-of-Israel David due to a word from the Lord.

Hannah’s prayers were answered by his birth, and her own faithfulness contributed to his discernment. She not only plays a vital role in Samuel’s story, but she also voices a powerful and influential hymn of praise (1 Sam 2:1–10). God ordains the words of this mother as Scripture — in an exhortation for readers to magnify the God who lifts up the downtrodden.

In the New Testament, Jesus interacts with several mothers — including his striking exchange with a Syrophoenician woman.

When the woman, who remains unnamed, hears that Jesus has arrived in her territory, she wastes no time in going to him and begging him to heal her daughter. At first, Jesus seems to rebuff her, disassociating her from the children of Israel and associating her with wild dogs (Mark 7:24–29).

But this mama bear will not be turned away. In fierce commitment to her daughter, she calls him out on his own metaphor. If he really is the Lord who brings abundance, there should be more than enough bread for the dogs to enjoy the crumbs that fall from the table of full-bellied children.

In response, Jesus praises her faith (Matt. 15:28) and heals her daughter. It is her bold humility — both kneeling at Jesus’ feet but also expecting God to be who God is, just as in the psalmist’s laments (Ps. 42) — that gives us a template for the kind of faith that pleases God. Her faith, like that of so many others in the gospel, sets the stage for Christ’s restoration of God’s good creation.

In fact, her words are said weekly by Christians across the globe in the Prayer of Humble Access: “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table, but you are the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.” For herself and countless others, her posture of humble boldness teaches us how to pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

To contemplate and celebrate every mother’s story recounted in Scripture would require far more time than a single day on the calendar. But as intriguing and often important as they are in God’s plan, most of these mothers’ brave deeds were not strictly necessary.

God could have chosen a different person to lead the Exodus than a man who was saved by the wisdom of his mother. God could have communicated the necessity of humbly bold faith through someone other than the persistent mother from Syrophoenicia.

The fact that God freely chose to communicate to and accomplish the divine plan through women tells us that the imago Dei in women is expressed by their participation in building God’s kingdom.

But it is Eve who, as mother of all living human beings, provides the template for every mother who followed. God orchestrated the divine design of biological life such that women are necessary to the continuation of the human race. Mothers give of their bodies, their energy, their time, and their love so that new humans can live and flourish.

The same is true for eternal life.

God chose to redeem an errant and corrupted creation by entering into it as a creature when God became human in the person of Jesus Christ — the foundational act that enabled our redemption. Genesis 3:15 is often called the protoevangelium, the pre-gospel. In it, God says to Eve that the tempter will attack her and her offspring — but that her Son would crush the enemy’s head.

God could have chosen to redeem the world in any way aligned with his divine character but chose Incarnation. He chose to invite Mary, a poor young Jewish woman, to participate in that process. The triune God of heaven chose Mary of Nazareth to be the mother of Jesus, the eternal and only begotten Son. From her body, God took on flesh. From her milk, God received sustenance. Under her instruction, God the Son grew in wisdom and favor with his Father and fellow man (Luke 2:52).

The multifaceted stories of mothers throughout Scripture are tethered to this center. As Jochebed protected her son from the threat of death, so did Mary. As Hannah sang God’s praise, so did Mary. The body-and-soul investment of her motherhood was indispensable to a divine redemptive plan realized in Jesus the Messiah — Son of God and Son of Mary.

Motherhood is not something Christians should regard as a mere cultural or familial issue. Motherhood is the vehicle by which God chose to redeem the world. “Women’s issues” aren’t ancillary to Christian theology — they are at the heart of our story!

Celebrating motherhood is a Christian act. Not only do we give thanks to God for our very lives, made possible by our mothers, but we also praise God for accepting Mary’s tenacious faith — and designating her body to bear the source of our eternal life.

Mothers, God honors you. The silent sacrifices that no one else sees — of your body, soul, and spirit — are seen and celebrated by your Father in heaven. These are the very ingredients the Lord uses to accomplish his ongoing reconciliation of all things.

________

Amy Peeler is associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and associate rector at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Geneva, Illinois.

Quotes On Mothers

John 19:26

“All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.”

-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"No man is poor who has had a godly mother."

-- Abraham Lincoln

“I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.”

-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

“God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.”

-- Jewish proverb

“Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother.”

-- Lin Yutang

“The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”

-- Honore' de Balzac (1799-1850)

“My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.”

-- George Washington (1732-1799)

“By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.”

-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1907- )

“The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.”

-- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

“Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.”

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

“The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

-- Author Unknown

"An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest."

-- Spanish proverb

"The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world."

-- William Ross Wallace

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

-- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for

Serious People, New York: Norton, 1980, p. 33.

“The greatest thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

-- Josh McDowell, sermoncentral.com, 9/15/03

“From my mother I learned the value of prayer, how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true.”

-- Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States; SermonCentral.com