Turning the Tide

Holly Elliff: Let me just introduce myself. I’m occasionally on the radio program with Nancy, along with Kim Wagner, and so many of you know my voice but not my face, which is fine with me. It’s just been a joy to get to meet some of you.

 

I am married to a wonderful man; his name is Dr. Bill Elliff, better known as Billy to me. We have eight children. My oldest is 30, my youngest is 12, and I have four girls and four boys. We also have Nana, my mom, in our household who has Alzheimer’s. We just recently moved her to an assisted living close to us because she was roaming the neighborhood, so my life is not simple. I do the things you do.

 

Last week I had six out of my eight kids at home, because my daughter had a new baby and everybody came to see the new baby. Actually, we have five at home all the time right now. Two are married. So last week, instead of really settling in, fasting and praying before the Lord, I was cooking. I was cleaning things. I did maybe eight loads of laundry before I left the house, so I understand where you live. I live there, too. And let me assure you that this is not my normal attire. When Nancy sent out an email about kind of dressing femininely, I emailed her back and said, “You do understand that I’ve had flip flops on since May?” It’s still warm in Arkansas.

 

I am grateful that the Lord has allowed us to be here together. Let’s just go to the Lord as we get started today.

 

Father, I do just thank You that You have brought us together in this place at this moment, and we believe, Lord, that that is not by accident. I believe there are things You want to speak into our lives this weekend, and You have designed this time for us to hear those things. So, Father, I pray that You would make us women who have ears to hear.

 

Lord, may we have a fear of missing what You want to say to us this weekend. And, Lord, we pray that Your Spirit would not stop short of confronting us, of changing us, of convicting us, of wooing us for what You have for us in the future. Because, Lord, a year from now we want to be more true to what You have for us than we are now. So, today we ask Your Spirit to be our interpreter. I pray, Lord, that You would be our teacher by Your Spirit and through Your Word, and we ask that in Jesus’ name. Amen.

 

Do you remember the moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy peeked through the door of her transported farmhouse, where it was black and white, and all of a sudden Dorothy kind of opened the door and it was suddenly beautiful and in color? Do you remember that in the movie? She was in a place she had never been before.

 

Some of us, when we entered motherhood, are suddenly in a place we had never been before. I was one of those women.

 

Let me tell you some parallels I see between my life as a mom and the Wizard of Oz.

 

First of all, most of what Dorothy encountered was unknown. She didn’t know it was coming.

 

She was constantly surrounded by either really cute Munchkins or really nasty flying monkeys.

 

Nothing around her was what she expected.

 

Her journey got more and more surprising the longer she went.

 

Her task was something she could not do alone.

 

Her companions sometimes appeared to be brainless, heartless, or courageously challenged. Now, let me just tell you that this is not male bashing, because my husband added this line.

 

There is an enemy who tries to keep her from accomplishing her task.

 

And there were moments when going back to Kansas sounded really good, but when she needs it, someone wiser than she is always shows up.

 

Now if you’re a mom here today, and I assume you are, or a potential mom, you have your own beautiful but bizarre story. After 30 years of answering to the name “Mom,” I’ve had a few bizarre moments myself. I don’t know if it’s just my family. I actually asked a group of women this one time, and they couldn’t think of bizarre things in their lives, so maybe it’s just me. But let me just share a few of those things with you.

 

There was a moment when my middle children decided to put child number seven in the umbrella stroller, didn’t strap him in, put on their roller blades, and left him at the top of the hill, thinking that they would zoom down at the bottom of the hill and get there before he did. They did not get there before he did, but he did survive.

 

There was the moment when we had this babysitter who, while we were out one night, decided to teach our kids how to escape in case there was a fire by jumping off the balcony that was above our den on to the recliner that happened to be the only decent piece of furniture we had. And when we came home, the recliner was listing to one side.

 

There was the moment when my two-year-old told me that she had been eating naked breadsticks. I pondered for quite a while what would represent naked breadsticks to her. What I discovered later in searching her room was that there were 12 Little Debbie oatmeal cream pie wrappers stuck under her bed and behind her dresser. She ate the entire box, but didn’t know what to call them. So, they were naked breadsticks.

 

Then there was the time when my icemaker wouldn’t work, and I discovered Batman in the shoot as I was trying to fix it.

 

My husband is a pastor, so maybe it was the moment when I cleaned my entire house for a staff dinner. You’ve got kids, so you know what that’s like, right? What I didn’t realize was that while I had been rushing around trying to finish up cleaning the house, several of my children had been decorating every windowsill in the house with permanent magic marker. If you want to know, you can get it off. I will tell you how.

 

Maybe it was the moment when I had set glasses out on the counter, trying to look like Martha Stewart for a luncheon. Right before I poured the tea, I realized that in one of the glasses there was a wad of purple grape bubble gum. No one had ever seen the bubble gum; no one had ever touched the glasses, but it was there.

 

Maybe it was the moment when I was sitting peacefully in my den—which doesn’t happen very often—and all of my children suddenly filed through with underwear on their heads. I don’t think I ever even asked why.

 

Or the moment I pulled out a pitcher of Kool-Aid from the refrigerator, and there was a Barney sock floating in it. The lid was still on the Kool-Aid. No one had ever seen the Kool-Aid or the Barney sock.

 

Or not too long ago when my younger children decided to have a Kool-Aid stand, and I had five plastic cups. After realizing that they had been selling Kool-Aid for a really long time, I looked out the window, and there were people that were putting their quarter in but then were driving away without their Kool-Aid. I thought, What is going on? I realized that they had been reusing the five plastic cups and selling their Kool-Aid along with assorted water bottles and Coke cans—I don’t know where they found those.

 

Or maybe the day that was my very first time to ever be on the radio with Nancy. I was doing something about the joys of motherhood—you know where this is headed—and I got a call from one of my older children saying, “Mom, the younger kids have taken their mattresses outside, and they are sliding down the front yard.” I hung up the phone, and Nancy said, “What was that about?” And I said, “You don’t want to know.”

 

Motherhood is beautiful but also bizarre.

 

I have some things in my house that are also a little bizarre. I have this picture in my kitchen, right behind the table. It’s a beautiful pastoral scene, green trees, green grass, little ducks going out into a pond. On the dock there’s a little pig leaping into the water, and my husband said, “Why did you like that picture?” I said, “I don’t know, it just kind of feels like my life—just a little element of bizarre in there.”

 

I have a sign above my back door that says, “Welcome to the zoo.”

 

I have a sign above my stove that says, “Motherhood is not for wimps.”

 

And then I have a sign that my husband gave me that says, “You can’t scare me—I have kids.”

 

Motherhood is a lifestyle that is an amazing paradox. We’ve laughed about some of the strange components of this calling, but there are a lot of intangible things that I can’t show you, and you know what those are—thousands of hugs, assorted sticky kisses, toothless smiles, hysterical laughter, years of memories of midnight conversations, hours of prayer, unexplainable love for little creatures that God has put in your life that grow up to be adults in a heartbeat, in the blink of an eye.

 

My friend Carolyn McCulley has written a new book called Radical Womanhood. In this book she tells a story by feminist author Ann Crittenden. Motherhood has been under attack, been at the center of a controversy that has been echoing in our culture for decades now. Cultural perspectives on mothering have been under assault far longer than we would ever imagine.

 

Ann Crittenden was a feminist author and publicist, and she decided to have children. She said the first thing that surprised her was how creative she had to be, what a huge task it was, how demanding it was—this was a woman who had spent her life in the secular world, in the work force—and she was appalled at what was required of her to be a mother to her kids.

 

But she said, “The second surprise came when I realized how little my former world seemed to understand or care about the complex reality I was discovering. The dominant culture of which I had been a part considered child rearing unskilled labor, if it considered child rearing at all. No one was stating the obvious. If human abilities are the ultimate fount of economic progress—as many economists now agree—and if those abilities are nurtured or stunted in the early years, then mothers and other caregivers of the young are the most important producers in the economy. They do have, literally, the most important job in the world.” This is a feminist author.

 

She said, “I’ll never forget the moment I realized that almost no one else agreed. It was at a Washington, D.C., cocktail party when someone asked, ‘What do you do?’ I replied that I was a new mother, and they promptly vanished. I was the same person this stranger might have found worthwhile had I said I was a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, a financial reporter for The New York Times, or a Pulitzer Prize nominee, all of which had been true. But as a mother, I had shed status like the skin off a snake. I gradually realized that mothers, and everyone else who spends much time with children, were still in the same boat that women had been in only a few years earlier. After fighting hard to earn respect in the workplace, women had yet to win respect for their work at home.

 

“But the moment of truth came a few years after I resigned from The New York Times in order to have more time for my infant son. I ran into someone who asked, ‘Didn’t you used to be Ann Crittenden?’ and that’s when I knew I had to write this book.”

 

The loss of value associated with the role of wife and mother began to occur in our culture a long, long time ago as we shifted into an industrialized society. The home was no longer the center of a focused family partnership, and by 1870, for the first time, more men were wage earners than independent sources of their own livelihood. By the 1900s, wives and mothers were classified simply as dependents without a job by the U.S. Census Bureau. Feminists in the late 1800s used words like parasites, unproductive, or isolated to describe women who chose the path of mothering.

 

In the early 1900s, a wife and mother of three became the voice of this assault. Her name was Margaret Sanger. With a strong socialistic belief system, she maintained that family size and quality should be controlled, even if that required government intervention. After ten years of activism, at that point divorced and single, Sanger became increasingly radical in her beliefs. In her book Women in the New Race, published in 1920, she penned these words: “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it,” and she believed that.

 

In 1921 Sanger initiated what would eventually become the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America. Her agenda included two major goals: First of all, how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of those who were deemed mentally or physically defective, by her interpretation, including chance and chaotic breeding that had resulted from stupid and cruel sentimentalism. (That would be my husband and I choosing to have eight kids.)

 

Her second goal was to free women from all sexual restraint, and, through birth control, ensure that the only children born were the result of a voluntary motherhood. She desired to abolish Christian concepts of morality and family.

 

Carolyn McCulley states, “Understanding Sanger helps us to understand why children are now considered disposable, seen as inconveniences or parasites instead of being received as gifts from God. Even the daughter of a first-wave feminist has an opinion about the assault on motherhood in this nation.”

 

Trailblazing feminist and author, Alice Walker, who wrote the book The Color Purple, was a first-wave feminist. She argued that motherhood was a form of servitude. One woman didn’t buy into her belief system, and that was her daughter Rebecca who is now 38. Rebecca, although a third-wave feminist, believes in motherhood. She describes why she feels blessed to be what Alice Walker, her mother, despised, because she has chosen to be a mother.

 

She said this in an open letter that was published in an English publication: “My mom taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a fairy tale. My mother’s feminist principles colored every aspect of my life. As a little girl I wasn’t even allowed to play with dolls or toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother and raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, traveling the world, and being independent were what really mattered—according to my mother.

 

“A good mother is attentive, sets boundaries, makes the world safe for her child, but my mother did none of these things. Although I was on the pill, something I arranged at 13, I fell pregnant at 14. I organized an abortion myself. Now I shudder at the memory—I was only a little girl.”

 

She goes on to say—and she is now a mother of a little boy—“I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities, but what about the problems it has caused for our contemporaries? I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD, becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They’ve missed the opportunity, and they’re bereft. Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness, and it is devastating.”

 

A few months ago, I had a problem with a tooth on the side of my face. I went to my dentist, and he took a new x-ray, but you know what he did? He took the new x-ray and he superimposed it on the old x-ray to see if there were any changes. The amazing thing is, if we could take our current belief system, even as Christian women, and superimpose it on the tenets of feminism, we would be very, very surprised at how much we have been influenced by the beliefs of feminism. I was really shocked when I became a student of this to realize how much of my belief system had been colored by the tenets of feminism.

 

Ultimately, there is only one opinion about motherhood that matters—that of God Himself and God Almighty, who Isaiah 40 says, measures the oceans in the palm of His hand, who has weighed the mountains in a balance, who created the stars and calls them all by name. God who sculpted the dry land with His hands, the same God who makes the clouds His chariot and who commands the winds as His messenger, that same God has also created mothers.

 

Now, if we could, for a minute, step into the threshold of heaven and look at our mothering from God’s perspective, I think we would be amazed at what God has entrusted us with. Scripture says that the children placed in our lives are beings that God knew before they were ever conceived. God Himself has already planned the days that they will live on this earth, and He personally crafted and shaped each life, just as He shaped mountains and sculpted the dry land.

 

Acts 17:24–26 says, “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation” (nasb).

 

Do you know that if you are a mom at this particular point in history with the particular children that God has entrusted to you, we would have to totally ignore Scripture to believe that that was by accident? Do you agree with that? Do you believe that God, in His sovereignty, ordained for you to be a mom and ordained the children that you have, that it did not come about by chance?

 

Motherhood is not just a life calling. It is not just a choice. It is a lifelong call to obedience before the Lord. Webster’s defines call as “a divine vocation or a strong inner prompting to a particular course of action.”

 

Jean Fleming, in her book A Mother’s Heart, says, “In every generation, mothers must answer the call to be what no one else can be and to do what no one else can do. It isn’t that mothers can’t do and be many other things, but if they refuse to accept their calling as mothers, then some child will end up short-changed. The empty space that mother leaves echoes for generations. The future of our society depends in part on what we do with the children under our care. What could be more significant or more glorifying to God?”

 

Now one way in which we know that mothering is important to God Himself is that so many mothers are mentioned by name in Scripture. I was really amazed when I started looking at this topic to see how many mothers were named in the Bible.

 

Jochebed was a Hebrew woman who stood against the political climate of her day. Rather than kill her newborn son as commanded by the Pharaoh, she protected him. We have some moms here with brand-new babies. Can you imagine trying to hide that child for three months so that no one knew he existed, so that it would be assumed that he had died at birth, which was the command? Scripture says in Exodus that when she could no longer hide him, she released him into God’s sovereignty.

 

She built a little basket of reeds and covered it with pitch, and she placed him on the water. Did you know that the word for that basket is the same word that describes the ark that Noah sailed in? God ordained that moment in her life as a mother. She listened, and she obeyed, and her cooperation with God’s plan for her life nurtured a child that God would use to free the entire Hebrew race, to deliver His commandments to the nation of Israel.

 

Hannah is one of my favorite moms in Scripture. You know why? Because it didn’t come naturally to her. Hannah had to make some really tough life choices, and when we see Hannah at the beginning of Scripture in 1 Samuel, she does not look like a Proverbs 31 woman. She is miserable, she is unhappy, her marriage is not happy, her home is not happy, she’s not fulfilled, and she is a miserable woman. But you know what? Her circumstances were beyond her control. She waited a long time for God to change them.

 

There was an amazing moment in Hannah’s life recorded in Scripture when she came to the end of herself, and she laid down her desires, she laid down her rights. She came to the point of surrender to God Himself. The Scripture says that nothing in her life had changed, but that she went her way and her face was no longer sad.

 

Some of you this weekend will have moments when you get to the end of yourself, and you go before the Lord, and you lay down your life, and you will go your way, and your face will be changed. It’s the world’s quickest face-lift, and that’s what happened to Hannah.

 

The Lord went on to use her son and her faithfulness as she surrendered him to the Lord to be a Nazarite, took him to the temple even as a young child, left him there, and trusted him to God’s sovereignty. God eventually used the life of her son Samuel to affect two kings, David and Saul, and to change the course of what was happening in the nation of Israel. God’s glory had departed from that place because of the wickedness of the priesthood. Through Samuel, because he was a faithful man, God’s glory returned to the temple at Shiloh.

 

Chapter 2 of 1 Samuel was written by Hannah, and it is an amazing prayer of God’s sovereignty, of giving Him glory. Hannah was a farm wife. She was not a scholar. She didn’t study in the temple, but Hannah knew who God was. How did she learn who He was? She learned during all those years when she was first longing to be a mother and then learning how to be a mother. As she was faithful to her vow to release Samuel to the Lord, she learned who God was.

 

Another woman in Scripture we simply know as the widow of Zarephath. We don’t know her name; we know her circumstances. What happened here was that this was a Gentile town in a time of great famine. The prophet Elijah came into town, and he said to this widow, “I want you to feed me. I need food; I need sustenance.” The widow knew that she only had enough left for one meal for herself and her son, but she made the choice to surrender in faith to that prophet, and because she did you remember the story. God provided for the next three and a half years oil and flour in her containers. Every time she opened them, she had what she needed. What a cool parallel for us as moms. And because of her obedience, she fed Elijah during that famine and never ran out of what she needed.

 

She didn’t know what was coming in the future in her life, but that choice to be faithful was part of God’s provision for her. The way we know that is that her son eventually became sick and died, but because Elijah was still in her household, she went to Elijah. Elijah raised her son from the dead and gave him back to that mom. What if she had ignored the call of God on her life? Would Elijah have been there to raise the life of her son? We don’t know, but I believe God knew three years out what she was going to need eventually.

 

The interesting thing about this account is that Jesus repeats the story of this single mom, a widow, to the Jews in the synagogue in Luke 4. He said this: “There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath (this was a Gentile town), in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow” (esv). God sent Elijah to a Gentile woman who, unlike the people of Israel who were not responding in faith, who were rejecting God, her obedience meant that God’s provision was evident in her life. She had a lifelong testimony of God’s provision, and so did her son.

 

We can’t imagine the impact that our personal walk has on our children and our grandchildren. We cannot get away from it.

 

Second Timothy 1 illustrates that for us in the lives of two women. The grandmother named Lois and the mother named Eunice. The book of Acts tells us that Timothy’s mother was a believing Jew, his father was a Greek, and we know that they lived before Timothy, their son and their grandson, and that he also came to faith. In 2 Timothy 1:5–6, Paul says to Timothy, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well” (esv). These women, these mothers are teaching us even today as we look at the example of their lives.

 

I want you to think for just a minute about the characteristics displayed just in the lives of these four mothers that we’ve mentioned here. Jachobed is a picture of courage and creativity. Somehow she knew how to make a basket out of reeds and pour pitch over it so it would float and keep her son safe. From Hannah we learn surrender and obedience. From the widow we see faith and a servant’s heart, and in Lois and Eunice we see modeled a transparent walk, an ongoing discipleship that affected eventually the nation of Israel as Timothy became a faithful servant of Christ.

 

If we had time, we could camp out right here, and we could peek into the lives of many, many women. Rebekah, Elizabeth, Sarah, Mary, Ruth, Bathsheba, Eve, Rachel, Leah—that’s just a partial list of mothers that are named in Scripture. These were women whose life message in faith left an imprint, not always perfect, on the lives of their children. We know that God highly regards the call to mothering, and in earlier years in our society it was also highly regarded.

 

Hannah Whittal Smith said in the late 1800s, “The mother is and must be, whether she knows it or not, the greatest, strongest, and most lasting teacher that her child will ever have.”

 

Abraham Lincoln said, “All I am or ever hope to be I owe to my angel mother. I remember my mother’s prayers, and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all of my life.”

 

William Ross Wallace in 1865 wrote this poem:

 

They say that man is mighty,

He governs land and sea;

He wields the mighty scepter

O’er lesser powers that be;

But a mightier power and stronger

Man from his throne is hurled,

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

 

We need to ask ourselves this question: What do we really believe about the call of motherhood and about God’s perspective on motherhood? Do we understand and embrace our lives as moms?

 

Romans 12:1–2 urges us to present even our bodies as a living sacrifice before the Lord, to make sure that our thinking is not governed by this world, but as we align ourselves with what God has ordained, we prove that His will is good and acceptable and perfect.

 

Ephesians 5:17 says, “Don’t be foolish—(How sad that would be, right?—just don’t be foolish), but understand what the will of God is.”

 

Does our worldview line up with the plumb line of God’s Word? Are there discrepancies between what we believe about motherhood and what God says about that calling? If we do agree with that, if that answer is “Yes,” then we need to understand that the Lord has two very distinct purposes for us.

 

The first of those is just having children. Now that may be through natural birth, it may be through adoption, it may be through foster care. However God moves children into your life, He is interested in us having children and then raising those children for Christ.

 

When I was younger, I did not understand the importance of this call. A current Christian song makes the statement “I’m not who I was.” It says something like, “If you could see me now, you’d know that I’m not who I was.” You know what? I am so much not who I was at 20. When I was in my 20s, you would never have seen me without makeup. My eyelashes were perfect because I had spent time—I’m embarrassed to say this—separating them with a straight pin before I left my room. Amazing. Breaking my fingernail constituted a small crisis. I’m serious. My goal in life was a degree in clinical speech pathology and a little red sports car—that was on my list.

 

Needless to say, God was gracious to save me from a life I thought I desired and instead to show me little by little the life that He desired for me. Guess what? I am not who I was, and I am so grateful. Are you grateful that God is changing your life as a mom? Because it matters greatly.

 

There were several years after I became a mom that were focused on just learning how to love my kids and keep everybody fed and keep everybody from getting killed. Those were my priorities, and that was as it should be. I didn’t have time to think deeply about why I was doing this; I was just doing it. But you know what? As my understanding of the scope of the importance of choosing to be an intentional mom has broadened the longer I’ve done this, I’ve learned some really sobering facts.

 

Although God’s opinion on children and choosing the calling of motherhood has not changed, the number of women taking that path certainly has. Not only are fewer of us mothers, but we are having fewer children. In 1790 when the first U.S. census was taken, the total fertility rate, or the total number of children born during a woman’s child-bearing years, was almost eight children per women.

 

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Children swarm across the countryside like locusts.” They really did.

 

Demographically now, that number has been shrinking for decades. Currently in America, our birthrates hover just below the 2.1 children that is required to replace ourselves, approximately 1.8 to 2.01, and this trend is occurring across much of the world. In America in the majority of our homes, we have more television sets than we have children, and that’s not to mention gaming systems and computers and IPods and other electronics.

 

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the number of women who have no children by the end of their childbearing years is on the rise. Not only are we not having children, but as believers, our children are walking away from Christ at an alarming rate.

 

Thomas Rainer, who wrote the book The Bridger Generation, did a statistical study here in America on the effect that the evangelical church had on the culture. Before 1951, the evangelical church in America reached 65 percent of the culture for Christ.

 

From 1952 to 1964, 35 percent of the culture was reached for Christ.

 

Between 1965 and 1977, 15 percent of our nation was reached for Christ.

 

And from 1978 to 1994, when this study ended, and that’s been a while ago, 4 percent of our nation was being reached for Christ.

 

That means that approximately 96 percent of my children’s peers will be unbelievers. Ninety-six percent of our future doctors, lawyers, rule makers, politicians, and mothers will be unbelievers.

 

If nothing changes, the influence of Christ in this nation and around the world will shrink—not because the message is impotent, but because there will be so few messengers.

 

We are making life choices that will affect our culture, our world, and God’s kingdom. What we do with the call of God on our lives really does matter, and I want to just suggest some things that I’ve discovered in my journey so far. And let me just mention, this little booklet is on the resource table (Turning the Tide: Having More Children Who Follow Christ), and a lot of what I’m sharing with you right now is recorded in this booklet. Because I wrote it, along with my husband, don’t kill yourself trying to write this down. If you want to, you can pick this up in the resource center. I make no money on this, so I can advertise it.

 

As we’ve already seen, God has a plan for us, but I want to share with you four essentials for our own life. First is we must be women who embrace God’s purposes. God has a plan for blessing the world. It includes couples being fruitful and multiplying or having children through adoption or through foster care, however God fits children in your life. For women, even the design of our bodies is evidence that God intends to use many of us for His purpose in having children according to His plan. As mothers, we are called to teach and train and nurture life, to love, correct, and lead our children. We have the privilege of becoming participants in God’s process of multiplication and giving life as we recognize it and embrace it.

 

Do you know that if you have two children who have two children who have two children, for like ten decades, there will be a thousand offspring, but if you have four children who have four children who have four children, in that same time period, it’s like a million something descendants? It makes a difference what we do with the call of God on our life.

 

Then we must yield to God’s molding process. Now years ago, when I was going through something really tough as a mom, I had an older woman in my life who kept saying to me, “You know this is for you.” When I was dealing with kids being cranky or not sleeping or not eating, or destroying my house, or not being able to keep up with the laundry or feed them, or just the myriad of things that go along with mothering, she would always remind me, “You know, this is not just about your children. This is for you.” Now I did not appreciate that statement back then, I really didn’t. But you know what? I understand it now because motherhood is the greatest tool I know for God to shape me and mold me and chisel me for eternity. As I view life from God’s perspective, from that threshold of heaven, I realize that His purposes are big picture. They are eternal; they are generational.

 

In his book The Treasure Principle, Randy Alcorn challenges us to think about whether we live for the dot or the line. Is my life about this moment, is it about me, or is it about eternity? Motherhood is about eternity. It is not just about this moment.

 

God clearly defines this in Romans 8:28–29. You know that verse, where it says God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. What is His purpose? To be conformed to the image of Christ. Motherhood is one of God’s very best tools for that molding, that conforming in our life.

 

Then we must become women of the Word. Only the Word of God contains the instruction we need to see God’s perfect will accomplished here on earth in the lives of our children. We must settle the issue of the sovereignty of God, of the authority of His Word in our life. It will take a lifetime for us to learn all that is revealed about God in His Word. We will never run out of instruction if we are faithful students of this Book. Just as we feed our children physical food, so we must be spiritually nourished ourselves so we can impart truth to our kids.

 

Proverbs 2:6–7 says, “The Lord gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk in integrity” (nasb).

 

If we will just open the lid on the vat, there will always be what we need—maybe not flour or oil, but God will have the wisdom that we need for every circumstance.

 

And then we need to learn to walk in grace. I am really grateful for grace, because I need it. I could not live the life that God has given me apart from His grace.

 

Second Corinthians 9:8 says, “God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed” (nasb). You could plug in a lot of things right there—so you may have an abundance for that child that is testing you; so that you may have an abundance for the teenagers in your home; so that you may have an abundance for that prodigal child that is breaking your heart. An abundance for every good deed.

 

In the context of motherhood, grace is God enabling that infuses us with the strength and the power we need to desire and accomplish His will. God’s grace is readily available to us if we just have a heart of humility that recognizes and acknowledges our need. Do you know how hard it is to get God’s grace? What do we have to say? All we have to say is “Help. Lord, I cannot do this. I am incapable of what You have placed in my life, but You have everything I need. And so, Lord, I’m going to turn to You.”

 

In a heartbeat, at any moment of my day, I can turn to the Spirit of God within me. I can pick up His Word for wisdom. I can ask a sister to pray for me at a tough moment, and God pours grace into my life. The power and the desire to do what He has called me to do, I do not have to manufacture it. I only have to receive it, and it is always there when I come with a humble heart.

 

Several years ago we took our kids to visit a silver mine in Colorado, and they gave us these helmets with little flashlight things on the front. (We look like a tour group when we go some places. I had to get over the embarrassment of that a little bit.) The mine was totally dark, but around each one of us, there was a little puddle of light so that every time we took a step, there was a new puddle of light. Every time we needed light, it was there, so we could see what was in front of us. That’s the way I like to think about God’s grace.

 

Paul said in Romans 5:1–2 “having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand” (nasb).

 

The next time you’re at a tough parenting moment, a tough mom moment, remember that you are standing in God’s grace. It may not feel like you’re standing in grace, but it is a promise from the Lord Himself. The encircling presence of God’s grace enables us to stand and take the next steps as parents, so that we will have the grace we need for the next moment of our journey as well. Tomorrow we will again have what we need if we walk in God’s provided grace.

 

Then, real quickly, let me just run through ten tips—this is not David Letterman’s top ten list—but in 30 years of parenting, just some things, as Billy and I chatted about what was valuable in our home, some tools that God has given us. Let me just share some of these with you.

 

I’ve been married for more than 35 years. For 30 of those years I’ve been privileged to pursue God’s call to raise our kids for Christ, and I can assure you that we are not perfect parents, and we don’t have perfect children. We do, however, know the One who is perfect and complete and lacking in nothing. There is no magic formula to produce children who have a heart for God.

 

Let me just say a word here to moms who may have a prodigal at this moment—maybe you have a child that is breaking your heart. As we walk through this list, don’t allow the enemy to pile condemnation on you or something that God didn’t intend, because He knows your heart. I have a dear, dear friend who has a prodigal daughter, and she has been a faithful parent, but she still has a prodigal daughter. So, I’m just saying as we walk through this list, you go to the Lord for what you need to hear. Don’t allow the enemy to pile condemnation on you.

 

There is no magic formula to produce children who have a heart for God. However, I believe it is possible, by God’s grace, to cultivate an environment that encourages spiritual growth and fosters tender hearts so that our children will be more inclined to hear when the Lord calls their names. My husband and I have found these practical truths to be helpful in our journey as parents, and I’m going to walk through these real quickly.

 

First of all, pattern right responses. I’m a speech pathologist, or was before I had children. I know from experience that if parents pattern speech for their kids, then their kids are going to talk earlier, and they’re going to understand more of the language that is said to them. In the same way, if we pattern “please” for our kids, they are probably going to say “please.” If we pattern for our children what God intends to be evident in our lives, our kids are going to be quicker to pick up on that.

 

Deuteronomy 4 talks about this. You live before your kids in such a way that as you go, when you wake up, when you lie down, as you walk, you live in a way that pleases the Lord. Don’t forget those things. Don’t let them depart from your heart. Make them known to your sons and your grandsons. He goes on to say these things have to be on your heart. You shall teach them when you talk to your sons. You shall talk of them in your house. When you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up.

 

Now if you’re traveling and the plane experiences altitude issues, what happens? The mask drops down, right? What does the stewardess tell you? “First put the mask on yourself, and then place it on your child.” We are, likewise, to teach by first living out what we expect from our children, and in turn, they will mirror what they are learning from us. That’s also a good thing to look at if you’re seeing some things in that mirror you don’t like—look here. Look here first.

 

And then we are to seize teachable moments. These verses from Deuteronomy that we just read encourage us to teach as we go all the time. Be intentional about your motherhood. We need to be alert to moments, some large, some small, when our kids will have ears to hear the truth. We could end up being the most organized mom, the best soccer mom around, the most efficient mother in every way, but we could find out too late that we exchanged temporal values for eternal ones. Our kids will determine their priorities by what they’ve seen in our life. If they see you picking up the Bible, then that’s a value that they will absorb. If your Bible sits on the shelf from Sunday to Sunday, they’ll notice that, too. There are truths we can teach when our child is ten years old that might not be heard when that child is 15. Be intentional about what you teach. Encourage your children to think, to talk about what they hear and read. Don’t expect your Sunday school teachers to do that.

 

Proverbs 1:7–9 reminds us, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. Hear, my son, your father’s instruction and don’t forsake your mother’s teaching; indeed, they are a graceful wreath to your head and ornaments about your neck” (nasb). You see, our children’s responsibility is to listen, but our responsibility is to teach and to do it intentionally whenever and wherever possible.

 

Then we are to become students of our children. When Scripture talks about kids, it refers to them as olive plants. Olive plants have to be planted separated. They are totally separate plants, and they are distinct and different. They have to be treated differently. In the same way, in any size family, every child is separate and unique. The Lord says that child was fashioned by Him, that He knew him before he was even created, and God knows what that child needs. Create an environment at home that is safe and warm and inviting. Our kids are never too old to need affection.

 

The other night my 17-year-old came and sat in my lap. He’s six feet tall, so that was quite an experience. Our kids are never too old to need affection. There are moments when they get too old to be kissed in front of their friends—they don’t want to be embarrassed, but they still want appropriate physical touch at appropriate moments. Every child needs a place where wounds can heal, where truth is available, where grace is evident. We want our kids to believe as Dorothy did in the Wizard of Oz that there’s no place like home. You want your kids to believe that there’s no place like your home.

 

We need to know our kids so we can apply what we know of God to their current life circumstances. I have one daughter who can only really have a deep conversation if we are at Sonic getting milkshakes. I don’t know why that is, but the Lord showed that to me one day about her. Sure enough, if I go buy her a hot fudge shake at Sonic, she’ll talk about anything. We have to ask the Lord for wisdom to discern the key to each child’s heart. Now the tragedy is, if we’re not going to the Lord for wisdom, for instruction, what if God is trying to show us the key to that child’s heart and we miss it? What if we’re just not listening, and we miss what God has in that moment for that child?

 

And then keep them talking. Open, warm relationships are possible even during teenage years. We’re now on teenager number seven out of eight, so I’ve been doing this thing for a long time. I’ve lived with teenagers for most of my adult life. The foundation for that kind of connection is laid well before hormones make life more challenging. You wait until they’re 15, you’re in trouble.

 

Openness and honesty are essential family values in our home. Teach your children beginning when they’re young, or now if you didn’t do it then, to talk about what concerns them. Talk to them on appropriate levels about how you deal with struggles, about how you pray for other people, about how you go to the Lord when you don’t know what to do, about how you handle difficulty in your own life. They’re going to learn by watching and listening to you as you talk with them about those things. Make meal times or times in the car very intentional.

 

Ask questions of your kids. These don’t all have to be serious. They can be funny, silly things. They can be things that just encourage conversation, but what happens is, if you start that early, if they are talkers when they are younger, when they hit teenage years, you can still talk to them. (You can even start that now—they’ll think you’re weird at first, but it’s never too late.) Encourage open conversation. They’re not so quick to retreat. We don’t let our kids run in the room and slam the door. We go get them out, and we talk about what the issue is, and we talk until we get to the bottom of it. I’ve had so many 2:00 a.m. conversations I can’t tell you, but encourage your kids to talk and be honest.

 

When Christ appointed the 12, it was so they would be with Him. He knew He only had three years of ministry on earth. We have our children for a very short appointed time. I know it seems long now if you have little ones, but trust me, it is not long. It is not long at all, and it will be a heartbeat before they are grown.

 

We need to have the same relational intentionality to our time with our children that Christ had with His disciples. He knew how short the time was. We don’t know that, but we need to be intentional about the time with our children.

 

And then balance truth and grace. Paul says “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ” (Eph. 4:15, nasb). As moms, sometimes we have to grow up, right? It’s hard sometimes, because we want to still be free. My daughter, who just had her second baby, said to me the other day, “You know what? This is really hard. I was used to taking a nap in the afternoons, and that’s kind of gone now. Oh, man, this is really hard.” We have to grow up sometimes into Christ.  Truth and love need to be balanced in our teaching and our discipline, so we don’t provoke our children to wrath—Ephesians 6:4 warns us that that is critical. Love without truth fosters indulgence and selfishness. Truth without love breeds legalism and resentment. It’s so dangerous to have truth without love. You will have kids who walk away when they hit teenage years if all they have known is truth not balanced by grace and love.

 

We must continually ask God to help us know how to keep that see-saw parallel. It is not always easy, and that’s why if God has given you a husband, lots of times our husband is a contrast to us. Don’t tell your husband he doesn’t know what he’s doing in relationship to the kids, because you know what? God put him there to help keep that see-saw parallel, so that you balance truth and love.

 

Now, if you’re a single mom here today, I would encourage you to find some godly people, friends at church, some family members that are godly. Ask them to help you stay balanced in your parenting. It’s critical.

 

Distinguish between defiance and crazy kid things. You heard my list at the beginning, right? There’s a big difference between foolishness that is just bound up in the heart of a child, because they’re foolish, Proverbs says, and outright disobedience. Our kids are going to do crazy things because they’re kids. When my daughter put her shorts in the dryer with her pockets full of crayons, I had actually never said to her, “If you put your shorts in the dryer with a pocketful of crayons, it will ruin an entire load of laundry.” I’d never told her that. That was a crazy kid thing.

 

We call those at our house CKTs—crazy kid things. CKTs, although annoying, are not the same thing as disobedience. Now the second time that the shorts go in the dryer full of crayons after I’ve given instruction, that would qualify as disobedience. So, while CKTs need intervention and training, disobedience needs correction. Willful, intentional disobedience that doesn’t get attention will become outright rebellion by the time a child enters his preteen years. We have to learn early on to distinguish the difference between crazy kid things and rebellion.

 

Watch for a spirit in your child that says, “I will not.” When you see that, ask the Lord to give you discernment about that child’s intent. Ultimately, you must be the parent. If the issue is about who’s in charge, you have to win or dad has to win. Hebrews talks about this when it says discipline sometimes seems to be sorrowful, but in the end we are trained by it and it yields righteousness.

 

Then we are to teach internal control versus external control. Proverbs talks about the importance of self-control in our children’s lives. “Like a city that is broken into without walls is a man who has no control over his spirit” (Prov. 25:28, nasb). “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city” (Prov. 16:32, nasb).

 

As our children grow up, they can more and more govern themselves so they learn the difference between internal control and external control. Internal control means when I go to my four-year old and say to him, “I want you to sit down on this bench,” he makes a decision whether or not to sit down on the bench. If he does it himself, that’s internal control, but if he doesn’t do it, then I have to help him sit down on the bench. Sometimes it might just mean leading him over and sitting him on the bench. Sometimes it means something more serious than that. So, teach your children the difference between internal control and external control. Even young children quickly realize that internal control is a lot less costly than external control.

 

Then encourage kids to be the age they are. We live in a culture that markets adult sensuality to young children, and I know those of you who were with Susan a minute ago understand that our culture is about being cool. It is not about being godly. It is not about being Christ-like, and that will be marketed to our children any way possible. It’s important to our kids to realize that if they’re three, we want them to look and act and behave like a three-year-old. If they’re 15, we want them to look and act and behave like a 15-year-old, and not anything earlier than that or later than that.

 

Paul said, “Don’t be conformed to the world, but be transformed as you renew your mind.” We need children who are wholly non-conformists.

 

Then guard their hearts. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on that. We’ve talked about that some, but we need to be sure that our kids become saturated with God’s value system, not with the value system of this world. Sensuality and materialism are imbedded in everything we see around us.

 

Proverbs 4:23 says, “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life” (nasb).

 

We cannot be too cautious. Encourage your kids to come to you when they have questions about moral issues. Know who their friends are. Have their friends in your house so you can look for red flag things that ought to be indicating there is a problem.

 

Above all, listen to your kids. Listen to what they’re thinking; listen to what they’re saying; listen to what they’re not saying. Check your computer. Check their emails. Check their Facebook page. Don’t be naive. We want to be wise women in regard to our children.

 

And then be purposeful in prayer. There are moments in parenting when our children’s needs are just too great for us. Sometimes we not only don’t have the answer, we can’t even identify the problem. Sometimes we just need to be grateful that God has given us access to His endless wisdom.

 

As Fern said this morning, prayer can happen anywhere and at any time. Don’t stop short of praying for your kids. How tragic it would be if they had the right kind of tennis shoes but not a praying mom. Think about what they really need.

 

Years ago I wrote this quote in the back of a book: “Treat your children as though you won’t have them next year. Train your children as though they won’t have you next year.”

 

Ask yourself, “Am I being intentional about training my children for Christ?” Identify the areas of training that you know need attention in your home. Lift those things to the Lord one at a time in prayer, and then write out what God is prompting your heart to change in relationship to your kids.

 

My desire today for us as women is that God would call out women who, like Hannah, would embrace the gift of children, who will consecrate their children to God for His kingdom purposes, women who are courageous enough to live counter to their culture. If you love your kids, and you raise them for Christ, you will be odd. You will not look like the rest of the women around you. That is how it should be if we’re going to be women called out by God, women who base their understanding of their purpose as wives and mothers, not on the prevailing philosophy of this world, but on the Word of God, women who have a heart to please the Father, women who understand the call that God has given us to nurture and train our own children.

 

But our call does not end there, because I am to nurture and train my own children, but then I am to turn around to those behind me, and I am to help them nurture and train their children so that their children can nurture and train future children.

 

Psalm 78 is such a neat description of this, and we’re going to end with this. “Tell the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and His strength and His wondrous works that He has done. For He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers that they should teach them to their children, that the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, that they may arise and tell them to their children, that they should put their confidence in God and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments” (vv. 4–7, nasb).

 

Let me just pray for you before we go.

 

Father, I want to lift up each mom represented in this room, each child represented in this room. Father, would You by Your grace make us faithful moms who stand against our culture, who model for our children what it looks like to walk in Christ? And then, Lord, would You raise our children up behind us to carry into the next generation the name of Christ?

 

Lord, I pray that we would be women who receive any child You desire to give us, and we ask, Lord, that through us You would establish a testimony in our nation and around this world. We ask that, by faith, in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.

 

Woman: This message was presented at True Woman ’08 in Chicago. Check out all of the messages delivered there and more by visiting www.TrueWoman.com. There you’ll find even more ways to connect from books and resources you can order for yourself, your friends, or your life group to on-demand multi-media to ongoing conversations you can be a part of, and we’re updating it all the time.

 

True Woman ’08 is a ministry of Revive Our Hearts, helping you become God’s true woman.