Introduction
Since late September, Karen and I have had the joy of the morning school routine with our foster son, Angel. Each morning Angel has to wake up, shower, dress, eat breakfast, and get his things together — things that his snooze button sometimes forces him to accomplish at blinding speeds! He does a good job, though. For our part, Karen and I have responsibilities, too. I make the coffee to rouse Karen from her beauty sleep, she makes Angel’s lunch, I shower and dress, and we have a short devotional time before I take Angel to school. This is, of course, a routine that is similar to what many of you do each morning, and sometimes it takes its toll on parents and children alike.
Until this school year, I really only experienced this routine from the child’s perspective. My mom would make sure my sister and I got ready for school, day in and day out. I remember one morning when I was around seven years old, and this routine had apparently taken its toll on my mom. She was still in bed, while I was ready for breakfast. Wanting a break, she simply told me to go into the kitchen and find something to eat on my own. I did just that. A few minutes later I came back to her to ask a simple question: “Mom, what is the best way to clean whipped cream off the floor?” Needless to say, she was back into the routine the next day!
Stories like this remind us of the critical, daily role that parents play in family life. There is a regular, daily grind that requires constant involvement. When parents let up, even for a moment, they often find the need to “clean whipped cream off the floor,” so to speak.
This role is often a thankless job, so on Mother’s Day today, we want to give special attention to parents, focusing of course on mothers. In doing this, we will look at a few “snapshots” of mothers in Scripture, to see the example God has left us in their stories. Before we do that, let’s pray.
Father, I thank You for the many examples of godly parents throughout history and even in our church. I especially thank You for a day like today, when we can honor mothers and other ladies who fill those roles. Open our eyes to hear from You, we ask. Amen.
The Proverbs 31 Woman
Our “snapshots” of mothers will be viewed from a special lens. This lens is a template that the Bible gives us for a godly wife. Turn in your Bibles with me if you would to Proverbs 31. As we read the passage, men, I want to encourage you in the strongest of terms not to elbow your wives during this; no underlining verses in their Bibles, no “looks.” Absolutely NOTHING good can come of it! Actually, whether you are man or woman, young or old, parent or grandparent, the principles we will look at today are applicable to everyone. So the focus is on mothers, but the message is for all of us. At the end of this wonderful book on wisdom we find an epilogue of sorts, and it praises a woman of wise character. If you do not have your Bibles, you can follow along with the words on the screens behind me. We’ll read Proverbs 31:10-31
A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands. She is like the merchant ships, bringing her food from afar. She gets up while it is still dark; she provides food for her family and portions for her servant girls. She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard. She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks. She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night. In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers. She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy. When it snows, she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet. She makes coverings for her bed; she is clothed in fine linen and purple. Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes. She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come. She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue. She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.
And this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
When Karen and I got married, I gave her a Bible as a wedding gift. Engraved on the cover was her name this Proverbs passage we just read. There are several important parts in this passage, and we won’t have time to look at them all. It is worth knowing, that the book of Proverbs is concerns wisdom. According to Warren Wiersbe, “We’re living in the ‘information age,’ but we certainly aren’t living in the ‘age of wisdom’…The book of Proverbs is about godly wisdom, how to get it and how to use it…It tells you, not how to make a living, but how to be skillful in the lost art of making a life.”[1] So when we get to Proverbs 31, verses 10-31 become an epilogue, or an end-cap, to this theme of living a wise life. So it is understandable that much of what is mentioned refers back to earlier parts of the book. For example, the “wife of noble character” in verse 10 is also mentioned in chapter 12, verse 4, where it says, “A wife of noble character is her husband’s crown…” And in verse 12, where is says “she brings him good, not harm,” corresponds with similar statements in 18:22 and 19:14.
Commentators note that this woman is actually the personification, the embodiment, of the wisdom described in the book of Proverbs, especially in the way it corresponds to the beginning of the book.[2] I also think she personifies June Cleaver, but that could just be me.
You should also know that this passage in the original language was written as an acrostic. Each of the 22 verses begins with one of the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Translating that from one language into another is nearly impossible, but if it were, verse 10 would begin with A, verse 11 with B, verse 12 with C, and so on. Acrostics like these were attention-getters, and they served to call the reader to special attention or to help with memorization.[3] As this passage got my attention, I noticed a few key principles that a wise mother — or any wise woman, for that matter — exhibits.
A Wise Mother (or woman) is Diligent
The first principle is that she is diligent. This woman works hard! Here is a list of some of what she does: She spins thread and makes clothing for her family; she provides linens for her bed and for the marketplace. She is an enterprising person and gets up early. She provides food for her family, buys a field, plants a vineyard, and sells in the marketplace. In verse 17 it says, “She sets about her work vigorously,” and verse 27 says, “She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.” It reminds me of a commercial I once saw that involved an idle mom…[Rice Krispies video]. It can be easy to look busy and play a game, so to speak, so that others think you’re busy.
Ruth
When I think of diligent characters in the Bible, Ruth is always near the top of my list, making her our first snapshot. Ruth was diligent. She was a Moabite who married into an Israelite family that migrated into the land of Moab. In this Israelite family both the father and his two sons died. The three widows — Ruth, her sister-in-law, and her mother-in-law — were in quite a difficult position, as they had no one to provide for them. Naomi, the mother-in-law, told the women to leave her and marry someone else. It was too late for Naomi to find another husband, she reasoned, but Ruth and Orpah stood a good chance at remarriage in their homeland. Ruth 1 tells us that Orpah took Naomi’s advice, but “Ruth clung to her.” She refused to leave Naomi, saying quite firmly in verses 16-17, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”
These powerful words convey Ruth’s diligent dedication to Naomi, as they travelled back to Israel in poverty and shame. But Ruth was not content to simply stick with Naomi. She insisted on providing for her. Normally the men in the family were almost always the bread-winners, often in a quite literal sense. But seeing a gap that needed to be filled, Ruth decided to go about the process of gleaning in the grain fields. Gleaning meant that as the paid laborers harvested the grain — barley, in this case — people were allowed to come behind them and grab what they missed. A good parallel is when you’re mowing the lawn and accidentally miss a few spots or even a narrow strip. If your grass were a field of grain, gleaners could come through and pick up what you left. Now for any teens here today who mow the lawn, if your parents tell you that you missed some spots in the yard, I doubt the leaving-it-for-the-gleaners excuse will fly, but it’s worth a shot.
So Ruth is gathering the leftover barley during harvest time. And this is where her diligence really shines. In the harvest foreman’s words, “She went into the field and has worked steadily from morning till now, except for a short rest in the shelter.” If anyone can appreciate a hard worker, it’s always the foreman. As a matter of fact, that day Ruth worked all the way until evening, and then she threshed it. Finally she came home with 3/5 of a bushel, which would make for about eleven 2-liter bottles filled with barley. This type of diligent work was done through both the barley and wheat harvests, lasting about nine weeks.[4]
You might have noted that at this point in her life Ruth was not even a mother. I actually think this point makes her a good first example, because mothers don’t miraculously develop important character facets when they give birth. Rather, character is developed on a daily basis. It isn’t glamorous. It is the result of consistently making progress over time. This applies to all people. What we see in Ruth’s life is God blessing her for her diligence by giving her both a husband and a child. Through her offspring we find the lines of King David and ultimately Christ. So I strongly encourage ladies who may one day become moms to begin working on a Proverbs 31 lifestyle now to become the woman of God they are called to be.
This also leads into the point that we have several “moms” in our midst who are not actual mothers, physically speaking. Karen and I have so far been unable to have children of our own, which has been difficult on us. Even so, we are happy that God has allowed us to be foster parents. Also we get to have a sort of extended parental role in the lives of the young people in church. We’re committed to messing up with your kids so we can one day get it right with our own! But just as Karen gets to be a mom in this way, we have many others who fill a motherly role, and that is something we should not overlook. It is also a reason why these principles we are discussing apply to all of us.
A Wise Mother is Discerning
And there is another important principle that we find in Proverbs 31. A wise mother is discerning. There are several examples of this in our passage. She brings her husband good and not harm in verse 12, indicating discernment between good and harm. In verse 16 she makes a wise purchase of a field on which to plant a vineyard. She has the foresight to plan ahead and not worry about the future. This idea comes from verse 21 and especially in 25. It says, “She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come.” She also fears the Lord, we read, which according to Proverbs 1:7 is “the beginning of wisdom.”
Abigail
We find a snapshot of this type of discernment in the life of Abigail. Her story is set in 1 Samuel 25, when David is on the run from King Saul. Abigail was married to a rich but cruel man named Nabal. David and his men had been protecting Nabal’s shepherds and sheep for a while, and now that it was sheep-shearing time, David asked if he and his hungry men could share in the celebration feast. Nabal’s harsh, insulting response convinced David to take his men and kill Nabal.
Fortunately, Abigail, who is described as intelligent and beautiful, heard about the insult and stepped in to intervene. While Nabal was in a drunken stupor, unaware of the looming danger, Abigail prepared a feast of bread and wine, sheep and grain, cakes and figs. She put this impromptu catering order on donkeys and met David and his men on the way. Partly because of the food and mostly because of her humble response, David relented and did not attack. As he says, “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, who has sent you today to meet me. May you be blessed for your good judgment and for keeping me from bloodshed…” (1 Sam. 25:32-33a).
Friends, God uses discernment like Abigail’s to avoid trouble and to promote good. I am thankful for the discernment God gives our mothers to constantly look ahead. A lot of times Karen sees things that I don’t, especially with needs that Angel has. There are days that I’m convinced she’s just looking for a chance to go to the store, but the reality is that she uses discernment to fix needs and see opportunities.
A Wise Mother is Developing
Our third principle is that a wise mother is developing. Her skills and character are growing, constantly improving. This is crucial, because reading Proverbs 31 might easily leave you with the feeling that you don’t measure up. It is easy to wonder why that woman can be so successful and find time to do so much when the issue of unending laundry remains unsolved in your home. Let me remind you that the woman in the passage is the embodiment of wisdom. Also, God never makes mistakes, so whatever position you are in, He has you there on purpose. There is a saying that “God loves you just the way you are, but He loves you too much to let you stay that way.” No mother or person simply “arrives.” We need to be ready for what God wants to teach us. Those lessons may come from His Word, from friends, from fellow believers, or from family. I came across an example of this in a book called Extreme Devotion, which tells the stories of various Christian martyrs. The account is of a mother and daughter in Romania and is worth reading verbatim:
All the prisoners were upset to see the little girl in prison with her mother. Even the prison director said, “Why don’t you take pity on your daughter? If you will give up being a Christian, you both can go home.” The woman was understandably torn inside. She had been imprisoned with her child after protesting the arrest of her pastor, but she agreed to deny her faith to keep her daughter from suffering. Two weeks later, the Communists forced her to shout from a stage in front of ten thousand people: “I am no longer a Christian.”
On their return home, the little girl turned to her mother and said, “Mommy, today Jesus is not satisfied with you.” The mother tried to explain that she did this out of love. The little girl looked at her mother with conviction beyond her years and said, “I promise if we go to prison again for Jesus, I will not cry.”
Her mother wept, overcome with pride and love for her daughter and conviction for her own weakness. As she cried out to God for strength in a difficult decision, she went back to the prison director and said, “You convinced me to deny my faith for my daughter’s sake, but she has more courage than me.” They both returned to prison, and the little girl kept her promise.[5]
Friends, we need the humility to learn and grow, even from our own children.
Moses’ Mother
I think of how Moses’ mother needed to develop skills and trust after she gave birth to him. He was a healthy baby, but he was hidden for the first three months of his life. The Israelites were slaves to the Egyptians, and the latest form of oppression was a particularly gruesome form of population control: Every boy who was born had to be thrown into the Nile river to drown. This had to have been particularly frightening for a family with no real rights living in a time without insulated windows or doors. Every time the infant cried must have made his mother shake with fear.
After three months, when she knew she could hide him no longer, she placed him in a tar coated basket to float in the river. The Bible makes no mention of her praying, but I don’t see how she could NOT have been praying all the time. She was aware of her inability in the situation, but for perhaps a year, counting the time of her pregnancy, she had been contemplating her predicament.
When we are honest about our inabilities, we can ask God to give us His ability. James says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask of God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him” (Jam. 1:5). In Colossians, Paul writes, “For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Col. 1:29, ESV). We see in 2 Corinthians 12:9 a special promise from God: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” We all need to be developing ourselves to be more like Christ. This is less about skill and more about identity; it is more about being than doing. Our world needs capable moms, and it needs competent moms; but mostly it needs Christlike moms. Are you developing yourself to be more and more like Jesus?
When Moses’ mother acknowledged her inability and placed Moses in that basket — essentially entrusting him into God’s care — God intervened. With Moses’ sister, Miriam, watching in the distance, the boy in the basket was picked up by the daughter of Pharaoh, who decided to raise him as her own. At Miriam’s suggestion, Moses’ mother was able to wean Moses until he was old enough to live with Pharaoh’s daughter. It is a reminder that God is always in control.
A Wise Mother is Deserving
We have several moms in our midst who are developing themselves to be more Christlike, and who are also both diligent and discerning. That is something to celebrate, because our final point today is that a wise mother is deserving. She deserves our love, our gratitude, our encouragement, and our praise. Proverbs 31:28 says, “Her children arise and call her blessed.” Let’s stop right there. Now moms, how many of you regularly experience your children hopping out of bed, eager to tell you how much they appreciate you? The scene in my mind also contains cartoon bluebirds chirping in the background. The hard truth is that a lot of what we do goes unnoticed, unfortunately. The verse continues: “Her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women to noble things, but you surpass them all.’” Our mothers who embody the biblical principles of motherhood deserve praise. I hope that throughout this message, different people have come to mind. Perhaps they are your own mothers or wives or daughters.
It is a sad truth that there are too many bad examples of mothers all around us. Just this week a mother in Connecticut was arrested after her 5-year-old daughter ingested the drug PCP, which had been in the same sauce pot used in family dinners.[6] We hear horror stories of mothers who drown their children or do other sorts of sick, twisted things. These are extreme examples of bad moms, but there are more common yet more subtle maternal failings as well.
Some mothers push their kids too hard in an effort to gain notoriety for themselves or cover up their own problems. The result is that these kids constantly need to perform for approval. You may have heard of Amy Chua’s recent book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she listed all the reasons why Chinese mothers are superior to Western moms. Here is an excerpt:
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, “You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.[7]
Well Chua’s approach is by far too extreme. In addition to the way she insults her daughters with regularity, she also “once threw a hand-made birthday card back to a daughter because it was not good enough.”[8]
Her extremism does prove one point. Some think that loving their children means letting them dictate everything they want to do. Consequently, many kids do not get the discipline they need and are unmotivated to succeed in life. The primary motivation in raising children should not be that they are happy. You won’t find that in the Bible. Happiness is the result of an individual who has learned to follow the biblical principles of hard work, integrity, honoring God, loving others, and being content. It is not a goal; rather, it is the by-product of the goal.
This is why we must celebrate our mothers who do such a good job. The concluding verses in our chapter say, “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate” (Prov. 31:30-31).
Moms, you deserve our praise. But even when we fail, I want to remind you that your hard work does not go unnoticed. God sees all that you do. Psalm 33:18 says, “the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him…” In 1 Peter 3:12 we read that “the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer…” God’s eyes, we read from 2 Chronicles 16:9, “run to and fro throughout the whole earth to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to Him” (NKJV). Motherhood is a gift from God, and ultimately God is the one to glorify through it. The rest of us need to encourage the moms in our lives. Build them up and appreciate them — not just today but each and every day.
As we move to our invitation time, I want to encourage the moms among us. Many of you exhibit the diligence, discernment, and continual development found in Proverbs 31. We appreciate you! It’s also very possible that the stress and busyness of daily life has caused you to neglect one of those areas. If so, I urge you today to re-commit yourself to the task of being a diligent, discerning, and developing mother. And for the rest of us, these three D’s apply to everyone, not just moms. After we pray, perhaps it is time for you to do some business with God. It can be from where you are standing, or Pastor Bobby and I are available to pray with you here at the front. We’re happy to pray with you regarding any need you may have, and we would love to talk with you about becoming a member of Redland Baptist Church or getting to know this great God who gave us mothers. Let’s pray together.
Dear Father, thank you for our mothers, for the many godly examples we see in Scripture and even all around us. Help us to encourage them today and also continually. We ask that You would be glorified during this invitation time. Amen.
Works Cited
Bullinger, E. W. Figures of Speech used in the Bible. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1968.
The Voice of the Martyrs. Extreme Devotion. Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2001.
Wiersbe, Warren W. Be Skillful. Colorado Springs: Chariot Victor Publishing, 1995.
Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible. n.d.
[1](Wiersbe 1995, 7)
[2] (Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible n.d.) Electronic commentary source on Prov. 31:10-31.
[3] (Bullinger 1968, 184-185)
[4] (Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible n.d.) Electronic commentary source on Harvest.
[5] (The Voice of the Martyrs 2001, 113)
[6] http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/crime/mom-arrested-after-child-eats-pcp, accessed 5/5/11.
[7] http://www.albertmohler.com/2011/03/29/the-misplaced-aims-of-the-tiger-mother/, accessed 5/5/11.
[8] Ibid.