Go

Contact Us

  • Phone: (509) 747-3007
  • Email:
  • Mosaic Address:
    606 West 3rd Ave., Spokane, WA 99201

Service Times

  • Sunday:  8:30 am, 10 am, 11:30 am
  • Infant through 5th grade Sunday School classes available
  • FREE Parking!

Sermons

FILTER BY:

Back To List

May 11, 2025

In Gratitude for Motherhood

Preacher: John Repsold

Keywords: culture, children, motherhood, household, guardians

Summary:

Motherhood us under attack from virtually every quarter in our culture. But God has a calling on most women to invest a significant portion of their lives in child rearing, because this is God's plan for godly offspring, generation after generation. This message seeks to affirm this most important yet often depreciated role for many women of being God's presence into the lives of children.

Detail:

In Gratitude for Motherhood

May 11, 2025

 

Fellowship Question:  Tell someone about one of the best qualities of your mom.

Announcements:  History of Mother’s Day in America:

Anna M. Jarvis (1864-1948) first suggested the national observance of an annual day honoring all mothers because she had loved her own mother so dearly. At a memorial service for her mother on May 10, 1908, Miss Jarvis gave a carnation (her mother's favorite flower) to each person who attended. Within the next few years, the idea of a day to honor mothers gained popularity, and Mother's Day was observed in a number of large cities in the U.S. On May 9, 1914, by an act of Congress, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day. He established the day as a time for "public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country." By then it had become customary to wear white carnations to honor departed mothers and red to honor the living.

 

INTRO: You don’t have to look very far to realize that the whole notion of a woman giving many of the prime years of her life to motherhood and childrearing in our culture is under attack.

  • Birthrates are at their lowest in U.S. History and have crossed into negative replacement territory.
  • A recent survey of young adults indicates that roughly 40% of them don’t want to have children.
  • Average age of women having their first child is the highest it has ever been in the U.S., 27.5 (up from 24.9 in less than 30 years).
  • A brief search of recent internet headlines on motherhood comes up with such positive postings from celebs to average women saying, “I feel like I've ruined my life having a baby” [Parenting] and “I regret having children; it has stripped my life of meaning. Everything that made my life what it was has been burnt to ash….”

Ask any mom of multiple children about the comments she gets from people in public, and you may hear something like this that was related from one young mother (Rachel Jankovic):

“A few years ago, when I just had four children and when the oldest was still three, I loaded them all up to go on a walk. After the final sippy cup had found a place and we were ready to go, my two-year-old turned to me and said, “Wow! You have your hands full!”

She could have just as well said, “Don’t you know what causes that?” or “Are they all yours?!”

Everywhere you go, people want to talk about your children. Why you shouldn’t have had them, how you could have prevented them, and why they would never do what you have done. They want to make sure you know that you won’t be smiling anymore when they are teenagers. All this at the grocery store, in line, while your children listen.”  [Found at https://womenofchristianity.com/motherhood-is-a-calling-and-where-your-children-rank-by-rachel-jankovic/ on 5.10.25]

She continues talking about where our culture places children in the grand scheme of things:

“Children rank way below college. Below world travel for sure. Below the ability to go out at night at your leisure. Below honing your body at the gym. Below any job you may have or hope to get. In fact, children rate below your desire to sit around and pick your toes, if that is what you want to do. Below everything. Children are the last thing you should ever spend your time on.

The truth is that, years ago, before this generation of mothers was even born, our society decided where children rank in the list of important things. When abortion was legalized, we wrote it into law.

If you grew up in this culture, it is very hard to get a biblical perspective on motherhood, to think like a free Christian woman about your life, your children. How much have we listened to partial truths and half lies? Do we believe that we want children because there is some biological urge, or the phantom “baby itch”? Are we really in this because of cute little clothes and photo opportunities? Is motherhood a rock-bottom job for those who can’t do more, or those who are satisfied with drudgery? If so, what were we thinking?

Motherhood is not a hobby; it is a calling. You do not collect children because you find them cuter than stamps. It is not something to do if you can squeeze the time in. It is, [for many women,] what God gave you time [and life] for.

Christian mothers carry their children in hostile territory. When you are in public with them, you are standing with, and defending, the objects of cultural dislike. You are publicly testifying that you value what God values, and that you refuse to value what the world values. You stand with the defenseless and in front of the needy. You represent everything that our culture hates, because you represent laying down your life for another — and laying down your life for another represents the gospel.

Our culture is simply afraid of death. [So] laying down your own life, in any way, is terrifying [to most people]. Strangely, it is that fear that drives the abortion industry: fear that your dreams will die, that your future will die, that your freedom will die — [so they try] to escape that death by… running [straight] into the arms of death.”

But a Christian should have a different paradigm. We should run to the cross. To death. So, lay down your hopes. Lay down your future. Lay down your petty annoyances. Lay down your desire to be recognized. Lay down your fussiness at your children. Lay down your perfectly clean house. Lay down your grievances about the life you are living. Lay down the imaginary life you could have had by yourself. Let it go.

“We are to imitate God and take pleasure in our children.”

Death to yourself is not the end of the story. We, of all people, ought to know what follows death. The Christian life is resurrection life, life that cannot be contained by death, the kind of life that is only possible when you have been to the cross and back.”

Moms, every single day, every hour of the day that you engage in the calling of motherhood, you show more faithfully, more consistently, more powerfully the life of Jesus Christ than any other role in society save, perhaps, that of husbands who truly, lovingly and joyfully lay down their lives for their wives. 

To his closest, ambitious and competitive followers, Jesus used children to teach them that the Kingdom of God is not about working with power-hungry adults.  Rather it is about recognizing that loving, cherishing and caring for children is the way to greatness. 

Mark 10:14 “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God. 15 Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.” 16 And He took them up in His arms, laid His hands on them, and blessed them.

Mothers, this is what you do all day long!  When you take the children God has give you in your arms, you are blessing not just them but the entire nation and world that they will inhabit and influence.  When you wipe noses and sooth fevers, when you change diapers and pack lunches, when you go to soccer games and ballet practices, when you do load after load of laundry, when you stay up late, get up in the middle of the night and get up early for your children, you are truly doing these things “as unto Jesus” because you are doing them to those in our society unfortunately too often considered “the least of these.”  (Mt. 25:40, 45)

ILL:  Susanna Wesley, the incomparably brilliant and well-educated mother of sons, John & Charles Wesley, men who shook two continents of the world for Christ, wrote, “I am content to fill a little space if God be glorified.” Boy, was He ever…and the same can be said of you mothers today.

Susanna described her now famous childrearing commitment in these words: “No one can, without renouncing the world, in the most literal sense, observe my method; and there are few, if any, that would entirely devote above twenty years of the prime of life in hopes to save the souls of their children, which they think may be saved without so much ado; for that was my principal intention, however unskillfully and unsuccessfully managed.  [Quoted in the article “The High Calling of Wife and Mother in Biblical Perspective” found on 5.10.25 at https://bible.org/seriespage/high-calling-wife-and-mother-biblical-perspective.]

(By the way, Susanna birthed 19 children, 9 of which died in infancy and of the remaining 10 only 8 of which outlived her.)

Not only is having children under attack; the calling of motherhood itself for those women who have chosen to embrace their unique, God-given privilege of co-creating and forming the next generation of society has been consistently and methodically belittled, disparaged, denigrated and downgraded over the past century in our land.  Whenever it is, you can be sure that the “father of lies”, the devil, is the one behind that attack.  He hates motherhood.  He is doing everything he can to destroy it.  Because he knows that motherhood is the means by which God has established the creation and formation of every generation of humans from the beginning of time and every generation of the people of God world over. 

You see, motherhood is not simply some social construct that was cooked up by some group of women-hating males who wanted to create “the patriarchy.”  It IS God’s first, greatest, oldest and primary calling and even command to the mother of all mankind, Eve. 

Genesis 1:28-- “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it….”

Neither childbearing nor child-rearing as a tangential role for women.  It was meant to be the central role for the majority of women since the beginning of time.  Every one of us here today can thank our mothers for the fact that they embraced that role for a good part of their lives, albeit imperfectly. 

            So, when our culture holds up virtually every other type of career as superior to motherhood, it is playing into the hands of the Enemy of God.  Women, when you’re tempted to think you are somehow wasting precious years of your life by raising a family, don’t you believe it.  That is a temptation from the enemy of your souls. 

  1. K. Chesterton put it well when he asked, “How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children [about math], 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. [Quoted in an article found at https://thefederalist.com/2025/05/06/the-tradwifes-mental-stimulation-paradox/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-tradwifes-mental-stimulation-paradox on 5.11.25.]

            Moms, your calling and task IS enormous!  It is enormously important, enormously influential, enormously strategic, enormously productive, enormously spiritual, and enormously appreciated. 

            Allow me to speak just a bit more to this temptation that is assailing Christian women day in and day out, namely the idea that a career outside the home is worth sacrificing what God has given you inside the home.  I’m not at all opposed to women working outside the home or having highly successful careers in the work-world.  You cannot read Proverbs 31 and advocate that women only work at home. 

But too many women rush headlong into a career outside the home, determined to waste no time or effort on housework or child-tending but rather seeking to achieve position and means by directing all their great and powerful talents and energies toward non-home professional pursuits. It is true that many “perfect jobs” may come and go during the childrearing years, but only one will absolutely never come along again—the job of rearing your own children and allowing them the increasingly rare opportunity to grow up at home.

Speaking of the “rare opportunity to grow up at home,” may I just put to death the notion that institutionalized care of children, what we euphemistically call “day-care”, during the most formative years of a child’s life (years 0-5), does not come close to comparing to the care of a mother for her own children.  Multiple studies over the last four decades in various countries have shown this.  I cite this to encourage those of you who may be trying to decide what to do to juggle parenting and work to make whatever sacrifices possible to follow what God’s call for mothers has always been.

A study of primarily middle-class children was conducted by University of Texas at Dallas researchers (Deborah Lowe Vandell and Mary Anne Corasaniti) some 35 years ago (1988), indicated that full-time child care was associated with poorer study skills, lower grades, diminished self-esteem, and inadequate social interaction in later years. Those who went into full-time care after the first year did not develop as well socially, emotionally, and intellectually as those in part-time care or those whose mothers stayed home with them.  [Sandra Evans, “Study Shows Negative Effects of Full-Time Child Care,” Washington Post, April 23, 1988, p. A10.]

I recently heard an interview with Erica Kamisar—a NY social worker, psychoanalyst, and author of “Being There:  Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First 3 Years Matters”.  Forty years ago, when the HeadStart Program was being pushed as the solution for working moms, she was seeing the rapid rise in behavioral and cognitive challenges of small children. 

Little children are, according to Erica, “neurologically vulnerable.”  From the age of 0-3, children go through “the first critical period of right-brain development,” during which they need the close, bonding contact and care of mothers.  Children are designed to be exposed incrementally to the stresses of non-family, multiple-children, high-stimulation environments.  Settings with lots of noise, activity and crying (think institutional care) make them awash with the stress hormone of cortisol that lead to the fight-or-flight tendencies that manifest as either aggressive or detachment/low-attention (ADHD) behaviors.  Erica saw more and more medication being used to silence children’s pain rather than looking more deeply at the relational or psycho-social stressors children outside the home for hours on end experience.

Which makes it all the more troubling that legislators seem to be constantly looking for more ways and public funding that enables families to send their children to day care rather than looking for ways to enable mothers to stay at home with their children!

Megan Rosenfeld comments, “For the first time it is possible to envision a generation that will have spent the bulk of their childhood in an institution.” Sad but true is the fact that institutions are now completely set up to provide a substitute for mothers—those who for centuries have been the moral backbone, physical comfort and spiritual nurturer for the next generation of adults.

            The N.T. is unequivocal in its support of women choosing to invest their lives in family. 

  • Paul, speaking to the older women in the church about how to mentor younger women, writes in Titus 2 that the older women are to be “teachers of good things—[and then he gives some of those ‘good things’]4 that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 to be discreet, chaste, homemakers….”  That word “homemakers” (Gk: oikourgous) is literally a descriptive adjective meaning “guarding the household” or “home-workers”.  Mom, you aren’t just the security guards for your house; you’re the divine security guard for the souls, hearts and minds of the people in that house.  Nobody has as much constant influence in protecting children from the wiles of the devil and the foolishness of this world as a godly, present, loving mother.  Blessed are the children who see and experience a mom who loves their dad, who loves them and who guards their lives and home with her presence. 

One author has described home as “… a place apart, a walled garden, in which certain virtues too easily crushed by modern life could be preserved.”  The mother in this home was described as “The Angel in the House.”  [Paul Fussell, “What Happened to Mother?” The Wilson Quarterly, vol. xii, no. 5 (Winter 1988), p. 154.]

Few women realize what great service they are doing for mankind and for the kingdom of Christ when they provide a shelter for the family and good mothering—the foundation on which all else is built. A mother builds something far more magnificent than any cathedral when she builds a child.  She builds the dwelling place for an immortal soul (both her child’s fleshly tabernacle and his earthly abode, the home). No professional pursuit so uniquely combines the most menial tasks with the most meaningful opportunities.

  • Paul also writes in 1 Timothy 5:14— In the context of giving counsel to churches about how to help their widows/single women (?), when he says, “So I counsel younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their homes and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander. Again, that verb “to manage their homes” has the clear sense of “to rule, be the master of, manager of” a home.

It's amazing how foreign these words of God can sound in the ears of modern day men and women.  Our culture has so conditioned and indoctrinated particularly women in an anti-marriage, anti-husband, anti-child and anti-home philosophy that we perhaps find ourselves blushing at these commands or hoping we don’t have to say them too loudly in the public square. 

            But these are the words of God for men and woman of all generations.  We are the losers when we substitute them for the empty promises of modernity.  Our culture likes to tell women, “You can have it all!”  Well, you can, ladies… just not all at the same time.  You can have the wonderful blessing of being a mother and having a career, but with each at the proper time.  

               Dorothy Patterson has written, “[Modern] women have been liberated right out of the genuine freedom they enjoyed for centuries to oversee the home, rear the children, and pursue personal creativity; they have been brainwashed to believe that the absence of a titled, payroll occupation enslaves a woman to failure, boredom, and imprisonment within the confines of home. Though feminism speaks of liberation, self-fulfillment, personal rights, and breaking down barriers, these phrases inevitably mean the opposite.”  [Found at https://bible.org/seriespage/high-calling-wife-and-mother-biblical-perspective.]  

There is no greater need for the coming years than a revival of interest in the responsibilities of motherhood. We need mothers who are not only family-oriented but also family-obsessed.  We have seen much about the virtue of determined childlessness and the right to make one’s own place in the sun; yet it is hard to locate an aging mother who believes she made a mistake in pouring her life into her children, and it would certainly be more difficult to find a child to testify that his mother loved him and poured herself into his life to his detriment and demise. 

            I’ll close with a challenge to every husband and father here today:  When you gather your family together today to celebrate Mom, read Proverbs 31.  This is exactly what many Jewish homes do on the eve of Sabbath.  It’s not to put pressure on mothers; it’s to express gratitude for the awesome service she relentlessly and lovingly provides to the family. 

This beautiful and historic ode of praise to motherhood in Proverbs 31 is written as an acrostic with the first word of each verse beginning with one of the twenty-two successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. (Unfortunately we miss that in our English translations.)  To read it as a family, at least once a year, on Mother’s Day, is not to refer to it too frequently. For while moms do their jobs day after day without the enticement of a paycheck, what they do cannot be duplicated for any amount of money by anyone.  Nobody can take the place of Mom, no matter how much money you may have.  As Proverbs 31:10 says, “She is worth far more than rubies.”  If you are fortunate enough to have a mother that is still living, let her know that…today…and always!

PRAYER

[Encourage people to take a red or white flower from the basket.  Red = if your mother is still living; white = deceased.]