A Place for Mothers

Last week Pastor Frank gave a beautiful and challenging charge to the men in our church to be godly fathers to their biological children as well as to those who need a spiritual father. We are incredibly blessed to have so many men who live their lives faithfully for Christ and I believe that there will be many opportunities for you fathers to continue to love and raise up the next generation of believers for the Kingdom. Paul did not have any biological children. He spent a lot of his time on the road, planting churches, and discipling leaders for those churches. He may not have had any sons in the flesh, but that did not mean that we wasn’t a father.

There are two short letters tucked into the New Testament that are written by Paul to his beloved son Timothy. When we open these letters we read the heart of a father being poured out to his son.

2 Timothy 1:1-5, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, in keeping with the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, 2 To Timothy, my dear son: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

3 I thank God, whom I serve, as my ancestors did, with a clear conscience, as night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers. 4 Recalling your tears, I long to see you, so that I may be filled with joy. 5 I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.”

Timothy may have been Paul’s spiritual son, but he was first the son of a woman name Eunice and the grandson of a woman named Lois. We aren’t given much more about Timothy other than we know that his father was of Greek decent and didn’t share in the faith of his maternal lineage.

Paul honors Timothy’s mother and grandmother by defining their faith as sincere. The Greek word used for sincere means without dissimulation. These women were not playing a game, their faith wasn’t a charade. Their faith had substance. Enough substance to be passed down to Timothy and lay a foundation for his own faith in Jesus.

Eunice was believed to have been a first generation believer. She had been a Jewess who had heard and accepted the good news of Jesus Christ as the Messiah. In her day there weren’t any books entitled, “How to pray for your grandchildren,” or, “Chicken Soup for the grandmother’s soul.” All that Eunice knew to do was to live out her new faith as faithfully as possible and pass down all that she believed to her daughter and grandson.

This gives me hope as a mother. I don’t always have it together. Each child is unique and each child will hear and receive the Gospel in different ways. Even with all of the resources we now have at our fingertips, it can still feel overwhelming to be responsible for these little children that God has entrusted to us. Or, if you don’t have little children or any children of your own, to be entrusted to help others grow in their faith.

It’s a tall order. And nobody is fully equipped to do it. We have to examine our own hearts and lives and allow God to give us the desires, direction, and discernment we need to mother well.

As mothers, we all have many desires for our children. We want them to be healthy, intelligent, and successful. But if we’re not careful, our desires will cause a lot of stress in our own hearts and in our relationship with our children.

Eunice and Lois passed on the most important thing to young Timothy. They passed on their faith in Jesus Christ which was genuine.

1. The greatest desire we can have for our children is that they will love Jesus and choose to be faithful to Him.

Jesus is the one who gives abundant life. He is the one who gives gifts to each person as He sees fit. He is the one who empowers them to use those gifts for His kingdom. He is the one who causes all things to work for the good of those who love Him. All of this sums up our desires for our children to be healthy, intelligent and successful. But only in Christ will they experience the fulfillment of all of those things. Truly living abundant lives.

Our desires need to align with God’s desires for our children. We are given the promise, “Delight yourselves in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4

If we think that we can create the perfect path for our children to follow without consulting God’s desires for their lives, we are in for a lot of heartache and tension in those relationships.

So the question is, how do we pass the faith that we have down to our biological and spiritual children?

2. We pray for them.

Right after identifying Timothy’s sincere faith which he received from his mother and grandmother, Paul reminds him as a loving father to never let that faith grow dim. To remember when he was prayed over and received that gifts God had entrusted to him.

2 Timothy 1:6, “For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands.”

Now ladies, I know that most of us pray for our kids. We might have a nighttime routine where we say the same prayer every night. Or we might fall into a rut of praying for them and we recite the typical mom prayers. What I am talking about right now is getting some skin in the game. We have to be women who lay hands on our children and pray over them. We pray for their salvation, we pray for their struggles, we pray for their protection, not just physically but spiritually. We lead them through confessing their sins and asking for forgiveness. We train them to pray by how we pray.

I cannot count the number of testimonies I have heard of people who know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the prayers of their mothers and grandmothers literally saved their lives. When the Holy Spirit woke up a mother in the middle of the night to pray over her child and God faithfully answered those prayers in ways that only He could.

We have the privilege of praying over our children in ways that others never could. We have insight into their lives and their struggles that others would never know about. And one of the greatest things we can pray for our children is that they would be filled with the Holy Spirit and that God would continue to fan into flame that gift of the Spirit every day of their lives.

In praying over your children, you can use this next verse in our passage to guide you.

“For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.” vs 7

Most children have a natural tendency to be timid. From a young age they hide behind their mothers when placed in a new situation. With my oldest child I used to drag him out from behind me to get him to engage the world around him. And he would reluctantly do so. Now with my fourth I have found that it’s ok for children to be timid in new surroundings and with new people. It’s ok for us to protect them and allow them to hide behind us until they’re comfortable. But at a certain age we want them to be ok on their own. We want them to walk into a room confident in who God created them to be. We want them to be secure in who they are in Christ and not need us to always stand guard over them.

One of the greatest desires I have for my children is that they would be bold in their faith. That they would take the faith they’ve learned from us and own it. To be the kids and the teenagers who would unabashedly pray for their peers, who would take a stand against evil and uphold the righteousness of Christ.

3. We want our children to be empowered by the Holy Spirit.

The world and Satan want to devour our children from conception. They have lied to our children about who they are and what they are capable of. Raising our children up to be men and women of God means that they will need to rely completely on the Spirit of God in their lives. God has not empowered us with the Holy Spirit so we can be timid. “The spirit of power means not that the servant of God must of necessity be a powerful personality, but that he has strength of character to be bold in the exercise of authority. The power of the Holy Spirit within him has enabled many a naturally timid man to develop a boldness not his own when called in the name of God to fulfil a difficult ministry.” Guthrie, D. (1990). Pastoral Epistles: An Introduction and Commentary (Vol. 14, pp. 144–145). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

If our children lack a certain boldness about their faith, their faith will be rocked. As mothers, we are giving our children the example of what a bold faith looks like. If we keep our faith to ourselves and never let our kids be a part of our faith journey, they won’t have a context for their own faith journey. Do not be timid and shy about your own faith in front of your children. Let them see you be empowered by the Holy Spirit to do what He has called you to do.

4. We want our children to function in the spirit of love.

If love is the greatest command and if a true believer will be known by his or her love, then one of our greatest desires for our children should be that they function in the spirit of love. Romans 5:5 says, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

Love is the Spirit’s primary fruit and has its origin in God and is reproduced in the children of God.

Love is reproduced. As mothers our love for our children is fierce. And most of us naturally pour that love out every single day. But we must also be empowered by the love of God in order to love our children well. When we unconditionally love our children then they can take that love and love others well. But we must always point them to the original source of that love.

We love because Christ first loved us. Mothers, when we know that God unconditionally loves us, we can unconditionally love our children. This is pretty easy to do when our children are young, but as they grow and start to make their own decisions, unconditional love can be difficult. We want to still be in control of their lives and their choices.

This happens with our spiritual children as well. They have their own minds, their own thoughts, their own sin. And we have to let them take their own journey, even if it breaks our hearts in the process.

We’re given the perfect example of this in the parable of the prodigal son. The father desperately wanted his son grow up to be a man of integrity and stay in the family. But he let his son go and take his own journey. But he sat on the porch every day and waited for his son to return. He hoped that his son would come back home, he eagerly anticipated his sons return. On the days when his son was blowing his inheritance, his father waited. On the days when his son was living a life dictated by sin, he waited. On the days when his son was living in the pig sty, he waited. And he never gave up hope. And on the day his son came home, the father ran to embrace his son with the unconditional love that could heal the broken heart, and reinstate his son’s identity.

That kind of love is only given by the Spirit and it leads to redemption and reconciliation. If we, as mothers, live with that kind of love, then our children will know their identity in Christ and be able to love people in the same way.

5. We want our children to be self-disciplined.

Paul wraps up that verse in 2 Timothy reminding Timothy that the Spirit he had been given gives him self-discipline. Today our kids have to have Spirit given self-discipline. They have so many things distracting them and trying to consume them every single day. We can’t control how they will respond to temptation, but we can pray that the Holy Spirit will give them self-control. And when our children are living in sin and they don’t want to listen to anything we have to say, we can pray that the Spirit will convict them.

We can’t be everywhere at all times, but the Spirit can. So we entrust the Spirit to do the work that needs to be done in our children’s lives and we love them through the process.

Mothering is an imperfect art. We’re constantly reminded that we aren’t enough. When we see other people’s families we can doubt our own abilities. But here’s a truth I want to leave with you. You will never be enough without Jesus. Lysa TerKeurst put it like this,

“I am not good enough. How recently have you had this thought about yourself? Not good enough is certainly one of Satan’s favorite scripts. We hear it when we try to create. We hear it when we try to be brave and start anything new. We hear it when we try to overcome what has been and step into what could be. Anytime we feel not good enough we deny the powerful truth that we are a glorious work of God in progress. We are imperfect because we are unfinished. So, as unfinished creations, of course everything we touch will have imperfections. Everything we attempt will have imperfections. Everything we accomplish will have imperfections. Let’s stop expectation perfection in ourselves and perfection in others that not even God himself expects. Let’s know that if God is patient with the process, we can be too. And let’s keep bravely showing up for others with His compassion and grace. Because we don’t have to be perfect to offer light and beauty to the world.”

I am blessed with an amazing mother! Our church is blessed with amazing mothers! But none of us are perfect but we are going to keep going for it. We will raise up the next generation with the faith we have been given. We will reach out to younger women who do not have a godly mother in their lives and we will pray over them and help them grow in their faith. We will help the young moms who are weary from long nights by taking their babies off of their hips and placing them on our own for a while. And we will pray for those precious babies the same way we pray for our own children. We all have something to offer. Maybe it’s advice, but more importantly it’s our faith. Even if it’s a work in progress, we will offer it to those around us and let them see Jesus working in us until our last breath, when finally our faith will be made perfect.