Fruitful in Motherhood

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"How Mothers Present a Picture of Jesus.

"You'll Like Mom Math"

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Dannah Gresh: I’m calling all the moms today!

Do you ever feel like the work you’re doing is thankless? You pour your heart out in caring for someone. Your days are full of unseen moments—diaper changes to picking up the toys again, reading another book before naptime. Car pool! Driving your kid's soccer cleats back after car pool because, well, they forgot them! And in-between,  you’re starting the umpteenth load of laundry and spending hours in the kitchen. It can get overwhelming, and it’s easy to forget why you really do it.

You might wonder if you’re actually making a difference. Does the work you’re doing matter? I’m here to tell you yes! Yes, it does matter. 

I am so glad you’re joining me for this episode of Revive Our Hearts Weekend. I’m Dannah Gresh, and today we’re talking about how to be fruitful in motherhood, even when you don’t see the fruit . . . yet!

We have a great lineup today, including the Risen Motherhood moms, Erin Davis, and their conversations with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Plus, I have some thoughts about how to circumnavigate the mom-guilt when you don’t feel like a fruitful mom.

Let’s start with Emily Jensen and Laura Wifler, the women (and moms) behind Risen Motherhood. They dive right in, talking about something everyone deals with, but especially moms with little ones—the ordinary, everyday moments that don’t seem meaningful. Here’s Laura Wifler. 

Laura Wifler: As I look at those mundane moments I so often have the thought, Oh, when will I be done with these? or Will there ever be a day when this will come to an end? I think culture perpetuates that by saying, “You were made for more! You were made for something more extraordinary, more amazing. You need the mountaintop moments of life!”

Nancy: The Instagram moments!

Laura: Exactly! That’s the stuff that we’re taking pictures of. We don’t really take a picture of folding the laundry, and if we do, it comes with some extraordinary words or life lessons, you know.

Nancy: Right. If you taught your two-year-old to fold the laundry . . .

Laura: Yeah! Some amazing thing. I’m folding laundry and there are kids running around, and I just kind of feel like, “No one sees this! What difference does this make?” You know, “I’m putting laundry away in the drawers, and I’m just going to be doing the same thing tomorrow!” It can feel incredibly disheartening and sort of pointless, “Why am I even doing these things!?”

I was chatting with a friend not too long ago, and she had just moved into a new home. Something she talked about was, “I just want to be settled in my home so that I can get on to the better work. I can start having people over, and we can start hosting. I’m just ready to be done with all this unpacking and all this mundane stuff!”

As we were chatting, it came out that actually the Lord is doing a work in her life right now. She doesn’t have to wait until she’s able to host and have people over and do all these amazing things that can, on the outside, can make her look like she’s got it all together. 

Actually, it’s in those quiet places, in those moments that are very unseen, that maybe only our children see or maybe no one sees, it is just us and God. But knowing that He sees those things and He is changing our hearts in the midst of that. Those are the moments that I think some of the most extraordinary heart work can be done! And they matter! 

You think about Adam and Eve in the garden. They probably did mundane work. They tilled and cared for the garden, but for them it was all worship. Everything that they did was worshiping the Lord and was focused on God as He walked in the garden with them. I think, so often, that’s what I want my mundane work to look like—every single moment to be worship.

Emily Jensen: Yes, it’s interesting to look at the paradox in the life of Christ for this. I think that’s something that encourages me when I am picking up the shoes off the floor for the hundredth time. (They just spring off the shelves! I don’t know what happens! I know that I put those things back a million times a day.) 

Or something like, I’ve walked into the pantry a dozen times because someone needs a snack again. As soon as they saw that their sibling had a snack, “Well, I’m going back in!” Somebody needed an extra snack or a drink or whatever it is. Those things just feel incredibly repetitive. 

But what we see in the life of Christ is that God did an extraordinary work of redemption through something very ordinary and quiet, even. If we think about the moments of His childhood that weren’t recorded. He grew up in an ordinary home, but He did it through this extraordinary virgin birth.

And then we see in His ministry. He was a carpenter. He goes to parties. He’s dining with people and traveling around. Those are things that we all do, and yet God was working in that to reveal the plan that He had for His Son . . . and to carry this out all the way to the Cross. And so, for us, what’s extraordinary about our lives is Christ in us in the midst of whatever thing it is that we’re doing.

It’s just really neat that this is a picture of God’s kingdom! Right? We all say it’s like the “upside-down kingdom.” It doesn’t make sense! It’s the tiny, tiny seed that produces all this fruit! It’s the hidden, unseen thing that God uses with faithfulness. It’s His Spirit in us, His Son in us that really multiplies that and makes it fruitful.

Sometimes we look back and we don’t even see when or how that happened!

Nancy: Because you’re not seeing in the incremental moments of the day the ordinariness, the faithfulness to the tasks of running a home, managing a home, that you’re building lives. God is building lives as you faithfully tend to your garden, to your domain. 

You women are the fruit today of a lot of mundane, faithful acts of obedience of some older women—including your own moms!—who did a gazillion things to make it possible for you to grow up in safe homes and to be fed and clothed and to be in a context where you could want to pursue Christ and the gospel. 

Nobody knows who your moms are. But they’re hearing the fruit of your moms’ faithfulness in ordinary things, today.

Laura and Emily: Yes! So true! 

Nancy: Even though I’m not a mom, so much of my life women come to me and they’ll say, “I want to do what you do! I want to write books and have a ministry.” I’m going, “You know what? Ministry—whether it’s the ministry of raising children, or doing Revive Our Hearts, or leading a small group in your church, whatever—it’s the fruit of a thousand times a thousand times a thousand of daily repetitive faithful acts wherever God has put you!”

Emily: So true.

Dannah: As a mom, or in any calling God has given you right now, the fruit comes from those little moments of obedience to the Lord. He is at work in the mundane . . . and the busy! You know, according to a survey taken by Risen Motherhood, 49 percent of Christian moms feel stressed about spending quality time with their children.*

That’ll impact fruitfulness real fast!

Recently, I was feeling the mom guilt when it comes to not having enough time to invest in the lives of each of my young adult children. I deeply desire to be a legacy-leaving woman of God, but looming deadlines and financial crunch pull at me. 

This isn’t new. It’s a familiar tug-of-war that I have felt since my children were babies. 

The fact is, the hours we have are finite. If you google “busy moms,” you’ll come up with lots of practical self-help ideas. “Practice self-care.” “Put your own oxygen mask on first.” “Keep a family calendar.” “Hire a teenage role model for your kids.” All of these ideas are reasonable; none of them is sufficient.

But through the years, I’ve practiced one idea that is sufficient. I was reminded of it when I was studying the life of Mary, the mother of our Lord Jesus. 

Now, Mary was a very young mom. She had to move from place to place with Joseph to keep her baby safe. I can guess that she felt the stress of being a busy mom with not enough time and money, but I don’t have to hypothesize. It’s written down for us.

Let me show you.

According to the gospels, Mary and Joseph took the baby Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after His birth to complete Mary's ritual purification after childbirth, and to perform the redemption of the firstborn, in obedience to the Law of Moses (see Lev 12, Ex 13:12–15) In Luke 2, we read that Mary and Joseph offered the sacrifice required in the law of the Lord—“either a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.” 

Full stop!

That is some very important information. Do you know what it meant that they brought birds as an offering? It meant that Mary was probably feeling the full sting of “not enough.” Usually, the sacrifice offered was a lamb. Leviticus 5:7 instructed, “If you cannot afford to bring a sheep, you may bring to the Lord two turtledoves or two young pigeons.” 

Mary and Joseph were poor. 

I find myself drawing comfort from this little nugget of information in God’s Word. And, within this narrative of their coming to the Temple with Jesus, I also discover the courage to do two things that truly do sustain me when I feel too busy or become aware of my own “not enough-ness.” 

Obey the Lord

Mary was obeying God’s Word when she came to the Temple. We can do the same. We can practice Sabbath when we feel like we have to keep the world spinning. Our mouths can practice gentleness even if we feel stressed. Our hands can practice helpfulness in spite of our own need. As we obey the Lord, He will bring clarity to what we should and should not be doing. And guess what? Obeying the Lord brings peace. (Job 22:21) 

Bring what you do have.

Mary and Joseph didn’t have a lamb to bring as a sacrifice. (Ironically, though, they did have the Lamb of God in their arms.) But they didn’t let that keep them from bringing to God what they did have: itty, bitty birds. (These would have been an announcement of their poverty to all who saw them.) Mary and Joseph brought what they did have.

It’s tempting to fixate on our shortcomings. But let’s not forget, our God can make something out of nothing. Imagine what He can do with our little. So, bring what you do have.

Last week, I had a mere thirty minutes to string together on a Sunday afternoon. And two kids with very different and rather complex challenges. I knew I could not possibly fix these two big problems in the time I had, but I could dedicate that time to the Lord. So I prayed, “Lord, this half-hour is Yours. Do with it what You will to accomplish what You want.” Two quick phone calls later, I’d advised those children. Within the week, God moved in ways I never could and did some seemingly impossible things. 

Feel free to address your mom-stress with the self-help and practice tid-bits of advice that you find online. They aren’t bad ideas and sometimes they are downright useful. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that they are the ultimate solution—only Jesus is that. So, walk in obedience and bring Him what you do have! 

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Erin Davis is a mom of four boys, and she knows that motherhood isn’t glamorous. But she has some great insight on how God uses the seemingly insignificant pieces of motherhood in big ways. Here she is talking about that with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. 

Erin Davis: Listen, if you’re a mom, nobody is going to put you up on their missionary bulletin board. Nobody is going to write you a check every month. Nobody is going to ask you for a Power Point presentation or a monthly newsletter.

So if you’re a mom, you can start to feel like you’re the least important member of the body and that nobody notices you and that you’re not contributing to the greater functioning of what God is using your church to do.

I think that's because motherhood is made up of a lot of little things. We drive them around in our minivans. We wash their tiny clothes. We take them on little trips to school, little trips to soccer practice, little trips to church. For moms with young children, we think in the smallest increments of time—two-minute time outs and thirty-second showers and five more minutes of sleep. So all that littleness can reduce motherhood to make it feel like something small. And I think we often think of small things as insignificant things.

Nancy: And yet you look in the Scripture, and you see that God chooses and uses so often things that are tiny.

Erin: There are so many examples of that in Scripture. One of them I found was the story of the little boy with the loaves and the fishes.

The story is that a boy comes to hear Jesus teach, and he has the barley loaves and the fish. We know the disciples find him and Jesus multiplies them, but, can I make an assumption? A mom packed that lunch. I think it’s very likely that a conversation went down where the little boy was getting ready to leave, and the mom said, “Oh, wait. Let me pack you a lunch. You won’t be able to hear or learn on an empty stomach.”

So if we trace that little lunch all the way through, that seems like a little thing—mom packs a lunch; boy carries the lunch; disciples recognize the lunch; Jesus multiplies the lunch, and thousands of people are fed. But it doesn’t stop there. I mean, that story’s been told and retold and retold as an example of what a powerful God that we serve, as an example of the fact that Jesus was divine. He was able to take this small thing and multiply and multiply and multiply it to the point that they had baskets left over.

Nancy: Not to speak of being a parable of Himself, that He is Himself the bread of life, so it all points to Him.

Erin: Right. It's an example of who Jesus is and what He can mean to our lives. And it all gets traced back to that little lunch. So God’s very much in the business of taking little things and multiplying them. I like to call it “Mom Math.” I’m not very good at the normal kind of math, but I like mom math—this idea that my small mom offerings, God’s going to multiply them exponentially to do big things.

Nancy: And you really have to exercise faith when you’re in the middle of "momming"—motherhood, and doing those little things because you can’t see the exponential outcome of it when you’re in the middle of it.

Erin: Right. Jesus gives us such a great example. Jesus loved to meet the physical needs of people before meeting the spiritual needs of people. That’s what you’re doing with your little flock. It gets redundant, and it gets boring, and it feels like a lot of little things, but you have to know that God’s going to multiply those little things.

You loving those little ones well day after day after day after day gives you a foundation to speak life and truth about who God is to you, who He can be to them, and that’s why motherhood really can be a ministry. Your children are an unreached people group. They come to earth without an understanding of God. They don’t automatically know Him as their Savior. Someone has to teach them. Someone has to train them. They’re your mission field. They’re a little flock of people who don’t know about Jesus unless you tell them, and so how can that be a small thing?

Nancy: You have to envision down the road what God will do with those seeds that are planted, with that lunch that is packed.

I think we need to help each other realize that it’s not just motherhood for motherhood sake. It’s motherhood for the eternal sake of how we can, by God’s grace, impact generations to come and reach those unreached people groups with the gospel by means of inculcating the gospel into the next generation.

So I think it’s important for all of us to value that and to make sure that those moms know they’re not alone, that what they’re doing really is significant.

Erin: Those words might be just what she needs for you to speak to her to keep doing the mundane and to see it as ministry. I don’t know how to erase the mundane tasks from motherhood. There’s no way to do it. But if you can get the bigger picture, if you can help a mom have a panoramic view of the role instead of so having tunnel vision over the small stuff, I think you can move mountains—of laundry and other kinds of mountains in life.

Nancy: And I know that’s true in every calling of life.

Erin: Sure.

Nancy: I don’t have any biological children—I’m single—and have a different kind of ministry calling, but my life, as with anybody who’s listening to our voices today, has a lot of mundane aspects about it. I’m burning the candle at both ends right now editing a book, trying to get the word count just right, and it feels very mundane as I’m trying to get to the right number of characters and slicing syllables. Nobody’s seeing. Nobody’s applauding. When the book comes out, nobody will realize the hours and hours and hours and hours that went into it behind the scenes.

And it does feel tedious, monotonous, a lot of routine, not a lot of excitement or glamour, but I have to keep reminding myself what you have to keep reminding yourself, and that is: This is done for the glory of God, with a glad heart as a servant of Christ, then it has value. It has meaning. It is an act of worship. It is worthwhile. And God in His time and in His way will make it fruitful and productive.

Erin: It’s not our job to tell Him what to do with the offering.

Nancy: That’s right.

Erin: It’s our job to give the offering, and the good news is that He’s going to multiply it in ways you never dreamed. But if you’re doing it for Him and for His glory, make it your offering, and then sit back and watch and see what He does.

Nancy: I think we have to keep in mind, too, that it’s not just about the impact of mothering on the lives of your children or the impact of my mundane tasks on the lives of others. It’s also about how God is using faithfulness in those mundane acts to sanctify us, to mold and shape us, and make us more like Christ.

Erin: This idea that our children is a mission field, I think, is going to be profound to a lot of women. But there’s a flip side in that you are a mission field. Their hearts aren’t the only ones in need of the message of the gospel. Your heart needs the gospel, too.

I have learned that my children play such a key role in reminding me of my need for the gospel. In my sanctification I am not a woman who has self-control on my own. They make that really, really obvious to me.

As I’m teaching them about the principles of faith, of obedience, of self-control, of speaking with kindness, of loving your neighbor as yourself, as they’re learning these things—they’re not intuitively known . . . They don’t know why they need a church family. It’s my job to teach them that. They don’t know God’s principles on money or marriage. It’s my job to teach them that. And as I’m teaching those lessons, I’m learning them.

I used to be a teacher, and my teaching mantra was, “Whoever’s doing the work is doing the learning,” and that’s true in motherhood. Whoever is doing the work is doing the learning. As I’m doing the work to teach them those things, I’m learning, but also, their disobedience shows me the ugliness of my disobedience.

Nancy: They’re kind of like little mirrors, really.

Erin: That’s so true. But you know what? They also pray for me. My son Elisha is a great prayer. I said something the other day about having a headache, and he said, “I’m going to talk to Jesus about that later.” 

Nancy: You can talk to Him now.

Erin: Yes. That’s what I said. I said, “You don’t have to wait.”

I’m his mission field. I’m the one he’s praying for. I’ve seen him and heard him pray for me and for his daddy on numerous occasions.

So your role is to point your children toward Christ, and their role is to make you more like Him. So you’re working together on an important mission field indeed.

Dannah: Yes, we need that perspective of motherhood. The work you’re doing as a mom matters, even down to the wiping faces and washing bottles. It’s producing fruit in your own life and your children’s (whether you see it or not). 

We talked a lot about motherhood today, but the same is true even if you’re not a mom. God has purpose in your season, even when the days or tasks feel monotonous. 

I hope this episode has been a fresh encouragement for you as you keep doing the faithful work God has called you to do. At Revive Our Hearts this month, we’ve been talking about fruitfulness in Christ when it comes to different areas of our lives. 

If this episode,or any teachings or resources from this ministry have helped you experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ, would you consider giving a gift of any amount? The month of December is an important time as we wrap up this calendar year and prepare for what the Lord has for us next year. 

When you give between now and December 31, your gift will be doubled thanks to some generous friends of the ministry. Your donation means so much to us as we continue helping women thrive in Christ. You can give a gift by calling 1-800-569-5959, or go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode. 

How is Christmas almost here? Join us as we celebrate with a special Christmas episode next weekend. 

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Revive Our Hearts Weekend is calling you to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

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