Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, May 7th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. There is a lot that a woman learns about herself and about God when she becomes a mother. Stay tuned.
And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Thursday edition. We're going to provide some encouragement for moms today.
Dennis: We are.
Bob: Before we do that, we want to encourage our listeners to help us out, Dennis.
Dennis: I do. In fact, I just want to bring a brief report of how things ended up last December when I came to them and asked for some help in raising some funds to keep this ministry on this station, and many of you helped out, and I want to say thanks for that. But here we are in May and, Bob, as you know, we are facing some pretty stiff challenges. We are down nearly $1 million in donations from where we were this time last year, and I am pleased that our leadership here at FamilyLife has addressed the issue by making some hard decisions.
We've reduced staff by 14 percent. We've instituted pay cuts of 5 percent to 10 percent. We, as a ministry, have no debt, and I'm really encouraged by that. Debt today is killing a lot of families, ministries, organizations, and obviously businesses. And even though we're in tough times, our commitment is to stay out of debt.
Bob: Yes. One of the encouraging things that has happened recently is we've had some friends of the ministry who have come along and said, "We want to help you in the midst of these tough times." So they have agreed, during the month of May, to match every donation that we receive on a dollar-for-dollar basis up to a total of $356,000, which is a wonderful opportunity for us and a great opportunity for listeners to partner with us and to see their donations doubled during the month of May.
So anytime you make a donation this month, it's going to be doubled on a dollar-for-dollar basis, and we're hoping we're going to be able to take full advantage of that special matching gift.
Dennis: We are. In fact, the reason we're coming here at the beginning of the broadcast is I just wanted to let our listeners know because I know some of them are struggling in their own marriages and families from a financial standpoint. We're not the only ones struggling, but I need your help right now. And if you could stand with us and just do what you can do, I think everybody, Bob, can do something. And we're not asking you to do it all, but just step up and say, "You know what? I believe in what you're doing. The life change that is occurring through this ministry, and we want to be a part of that."
Bob: Yes, we're hoping you will do whatever it is you can do, and you can make a donation online at FamilyLifeToday.com or you can call us at 1-800-FLTODAY to make a donation. Again, it's 1-800-FLTODAY, and we just want to say thanks in advance for your financial support of the ministry of FamilyLife Today.
Dennis: And I just want you to know that I really want to be here to strengthen your marriage and family through our radio broadcasts, conferences, materials, resources, but to do that, I need your help, and this really isn't a time for retreat for a ministry like ours, so I just ask you – would you help us right now with a generous gift?
Bob: That's right. You can make a donation online at FamilyLifeToday.com or call 1-800-FLTODAY.
Now, we want to remind our listeners as well that Mother's Day is this Sunday, and I hope you have made arrangements to properly honor your mother. Do you give Barbara a Mother's Day gift for Mother's Day? I mean, your kids are gone. Do you buy anything for her for Mother's Day.
Dennis: Yes, I do. But, generally, I've left that to the children to do.
Bob: Uh-huh, and how have they done?
Dennis: So-so. I would say, in terms of gifts, in terms of appreciating their mom, I think they've …
Bob: They get an A on that.
Dennis: I think they've hit it out of the ballpark, but they don't always buy gifts and don't always send cards. I think the key issue is that a mother be appreciate for what she did and the sacrifices she made.
Bob: And I'm just sending a message for my own kids, Mother's Day is this Sunday. Call your mother. You don't have to get her a gift, necessarily, but call her, express your appreciation. That's really what matters.
Dennis: It really is what matters. And today on our broadcast, we're going to feature Mark Driscoll who is the pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington. I've been by there. My son, Samuel, lives not a long distance from the church, and I've wanted to go to that church for a number of years because I like Mark's preaching style and just his fresh approach to the Scriptures.
But Mark is talking about an interesting passage of Scripture, and as I was listening to this message I was thinking I'm not sure I've ever heard another message from 1 Timothy 2:15 ever. And there is a reason for that. I think a lot of pastors would kind of avoid this passage like maybe a coiled rattlesnake.
Bob: This is the one about mothers being saved through childbirth, right?
Dennis: Yes, there are a lot of different ways you can interpret this passage, and I like the way Mark goes on this. So some of our listeners who differ with Mark can write me and tell me why they believe differently, but, in all honesty, I like the way he treats this for a couple of reasons. One is I think he nails what it means but, secondly, I like the way he practically applies this for mothers and esteems them in the process.
Bob: He actually preached this message on Mother's Day at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. So let's listen together – here is Pastor Mark Driscoll.
[from audiotape]
Mark: On a Mother's Day, usually the focus is to convince you of that children are a blessing, which they are; to convince you that marriage is a good thing, which it is, Scripture is clear on those points; or the sermon focuses on the issue of how to raise children, which is exceedingly important and books of the Bible, like Proverbs, are, in large part, dedicated to that task.
What I would like to do today rather than just looking at the importance of marriage, which we adhere to, the blessing that children are, which we agree with, or even the ways in which to raise a child. I want to look at it from a little different perspective today, and what I would like to articulate is that God uses the children to sanctify the parents, in general, and the mother, in particular.
And the text I will use for that is 1 Timothy, chapter 2, verse 15. Before this, Paul has a lot to say to different groups – to men, to women, here he is speaking, in particular, to mothers. And it begins by saying, "Yet she" – speaking of the woman – "will be saved through childbearing if they continue" – so if the women continue – "in faith and love and holiness with self-control."
A huge debate on this verse because it says you will be saved by making babies. How many of you women believe if you get pregnant, you get to go to heaven because God looks down and say, "Look, she's earned it."
[laughter]
"I know she doesn't love me, but look what she's been through. We owe her something here." That's not what it is saying. Some commentators will say that here it is speaking of our first mother, Eve, and that through Eve would come a line and a family and through that family would come the Lord Jesus, and the Lord Jesus would be the means by which our sins are forgiven through His death, burial and Resurrection and our salvation is given. I don't think that's right.
Others, then, would argue that somehow in the act of accepting a role as a wife and a mother, which Scripture declare to be good, and in accepting the position of humility as a mom, that through that, God loves to save mothers. It may be inferring that. Here is what I believe he is saying. The word "saved" there does not necessarily mean that you die and automatically get to go to heaven.
If you read elsewhere in Scripture, there are actually three aspects of our salvation. Paul speaks of justification, which is where we are sinners who stand guilty before God, because He is holy, righteous, and good, and we are disobedient and sinful. And there is nothing that we can do to merit our righteousness or our declaration of cleanness before God, so the Lord Jesus lives a life without sin in our place. He goes to the cross, He dies for our sins. Three days later He rises for our salvation, and He exchanges our sin for His righteousness. 2 Corinthinans 5:21 says that "God made Him who knew no sin to become sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God." That's how we're justified; nothing that we do solely by what Jesus has done.
Paul then goes on at other points to talk about glorification, which is the end of our salvation; that one day we will die, we will be with God forever in heaven if we, in fact, belong to and love the Lord Jesus; that we get a resurrected body that is liberated from sickness and sin and death and the curse, and that we will enjoy God's grace with him in perfection forever.
Well, the issue is what happens in the middle? If you're justified in this life, and you're glorified at the end of this life, the question then begs to be answered – what do you do with life? The life in the middle? Between your justification and your glorification, Paul says is your sanctification, which means that God is using everything in your life to change you. He uses every relationship, He uses every success and failure, every friend and foe, to make us more like Jesus – to shape us, to change us, to mold us.
When you begin your relationship with Jesus, that means that God has now begun a good work in you, and Scripture says that He will be faithful to see it through to completion until that day of glorification with the Lord Jesus. That's your life. The purpose of your life is multiple, but one of the great purposes of our life is sanctification; that we were saved, justified, we will be saved, glorified, but every day we are being sanctified, we are getting saved. Our process of salvation is working itself out.
I believe here what he is saying is this – one of the greatest means by which God sanctifies a woman is motherhood; that a woman is justified by the Lord Jesus; that she will be glorified with the Lord Jesus, and in the middle her children will be the means by which God chooses to sanctify her, to mold her, to make her to be ever-increasingly conformed to the image of the character of Jesus.
How many of you mothers are here, and you would say being a mother is the most difficult, hard thing that you have ever experienced in your whole life – from getting married to then having a desire to be a mother and wrestling with that desire – maybe walking away from your career so you can stay home and be a mom, struggling with infertility and miscarriage, and I know some of you know that Mother's Day is very hard because you struggle with infertility or miscarriage, or you long to be a mother, and marriage has not yet been made available to you.
Then you have a child, the child is sick, or there are concerns about health, premature birth, birth defects, the child is growing up and now there are issues of safety and care and provision and feeding and loving and instructing and disciplining. In the middle of all of that, sometimes the mother can become obsessed with being the perfect mother to raise the perfect child. We want to encourage you to be good mothers and to really do the hard work that it takes to be a good mother, but in the middle of that, according to what Paul is saying, being a mother is not just about you pouring into the child and shaping them to be a certain kind of person. It's also about God using the child to shape you into a certain kind of person. Does that make any sense to a mom? Okay?
I asked my wife this. I said, "It says you will be saved through childbearing. You will be sanctified through childbearing." I would ask the mothers today – how is God using your child or children or your infertility or singleness – and can expand and broaden this concept to sanctify you? I asked my wife, "Honey, how does God use the children to sanctify you?" And she laughed, it was cute, she's got this grin like "How do they not sanctify me?" And she listed a few things, and I wrote them down. I said "These will be my points."
So the first – so I ripped my wife off today. I'll pay her an honorarium. The first thing she said is that with your children, one of the ways that God sanctifies you and grows you is that in your children you see your own depravity sort of mirrored and echoed. How many of you have become very frustrated with your children because they say something, and then as you hear it, you say that is horrible. I say that.
[laughter]
That's where they go that. You realize, "Oh, I'm evil, and I say things I shouldn't, and my children echo what I say." In Luke, chapter 6, verse 40, the Lord Jesus says that when fully trained, a student is just like their teacher. You see, a mother is a teacher, and a student includes the child or children, and they say what Mom says, they do what Mom does, they believe what Mom believes, and in a lot of ways they mimic the very actions of Mom.
And so, in that, Mom can see her own depravity sort of echoed and reflected in the child, and then that exposes to the mom all kinds of things that she realizes, "I can't just discipline the child for saying this or doing this or thinking this, I then also need to repent, and I need to be sanctified myself, and I need to set a better example, and I need to be a better teacher because it's not just what I want the children to pick up, but they pick up everything, good and bad."
It's something to pray about, I'll move on.
A second thing my wife said is that it also brings about humility; that God sanctifies a woman by putting her in a position of humility. How many of you women who are mothers, the things you do for your children, you would never do for anyone else, period? You have no choice, because you are the mother. It humbles us, and it reminds us of the humility of the Lord Jesus who said "I did not come to be served but to serve."
It reminds us of texts like Philippians 2, where it says that Jesus Christ took upon Himself the form of a servant, and He humbled Himself and lived in a way of humble obedience even to the point of death on a cross.
A third thing my wife said is it teaches a woman to be sanctified in terms of endurance. Being a mother is not a job you can quit. Some of you have tried. You say, "Yeah, I know, I tried. I wrote out a resignation in crayon hoping the children would appreciate that, and they couldn't read, so they didn't understand."
See, most of the time when you and I have a job, particularly for those of you ladies who had been in the workforce for a bit before becoming mothers, you know the joy of having the opportunity to quit the job. At least it's always there. The opportunity is always there to just walk in one day and say, "I quit." As a mother, you can't. As a mother, you must endure. There must be perseverance. The children need to be raised, life continues on, and just because the children become adults, it doesn't mean, necessarily, that even at that point some of the work of mothering and caring and shaping comes to an end. It just transitions, and then it also expands to grandchildren.
There is an endurance that is required to be a mom; that, otherwise, I'm convinced most women would simply quit if it were a normal job. In addition, my wife says that it teaches patience. I think this is probably the obvious one. How many of you women find yourselves, as mothers, continually coming back to that great discipline of patience? That one child learns at a slower rate than the others; it requires patience to raise that child. That one child's heart more easily hardens and more slowly thaws, and to shape that child requires patience.
It also requires great patience as a mother not to just tell the children what to do but to explain to them why those rules are made, those activities, friends, beliefs, are forbidden; why certain things are unwise, dangerous, foolish. Impatient mothers just tend to tell their kids what to do and expect compliance and obedience. Which, to a minimal degree, works when the children are small, but when they grow older, parents that raise children with impatience see those children be very naïve and gullible, and that's where the impatience of the mother can show up in a very dangerous and devastating way.
Some of you grew up in those Christian homes. It wasn't the way your mother told you it was wrong, she just never explained to you why because she didn't have the patience to really make a disciple.
[end of audiotape]
Bob: Well, that's Pastor Mark Driscoll from a message on Mother's Day at Mars Hill Church talking about how God works through our children to make us more like Jesus, and we can tell there were some moms in the audience, because you could hear their children.
Dennis: You could hear the babies. You know, as I was listening to Mark, I thought, I think I could add a couple to his list. He's got a great list here, but I just want to throw in – no extra charge here for the moms who are listening – one, and he hinted at this one on the first one – I think children say Moms – and Dads, I might add, although that's not what the Scripture is teaching here – but I think children save a mother from her own toxic self-absorption – selfishness. You can't raise children, a whole herd or crop, a covey of children and do it successfully and be really selfish simultaneously, and I think children at that point save us from ourselves.
A second thing that children save us from is I think they help save us from a life of mediocrity living on the fence. And he hinted at this one in the last one that he mentioned when he talked about patience, but I think children help us determine what we believe and therefore how we are going to live. Because we know those beady little eyes, those little radar units, are looking up at us, and they're going, "What's Mom doing? How does she respond to Dad? What does she do when she gets a flat tire or is running late? What does she say in traffic?"
And so, as a result, she's got to determine what she believes about her behavior at that point; goes on to issues like what kind of movies she's going to watch, music she is going to listen to; behaviors in her life.
Bob: Well, it goes back to what he talked about first – your children will imitate your behavior, and so what you do is what you're going to be raising.
Dennis: And our children, at that point, sanctify us because they force us to land and say, "Here is where I stand in my life, and here is how I am going to live."
Bob: Mm-hm. I've heard you say many times that God gives us children, in part, for the purpose of finishing the job of growing us up, and I think that's true. We get pressed in all kinds of areas as parents that we would never go to if we didn't have to care for and superintend and raise our children.
And I want to let our listeners know that the message that we are featuring this week from Mark Driscoll is available online if you'd like to hear the entire message. We've had to edit portions of it for time purposes here on FamilyLife Today, but you can listen to the entire message by coming to our website, FamilyLifeToday.com, and we'll link you to the spot on Mark's church website, where you can listen to the entire message. Again, come to FamilyLifeToday.com if you'd like to hear this entire message or if you'd like to download it.
Let me also let you know about a key resource that we have been making available to moms and dads that is designed to help you press spiritual truth into the lives of your children. It's a resource called "Just Add Family," and it's ready-made, creative ways for families to engage together, have some fun and, at the same time, engage in some spiritual dialog and press home some spiritual truth in the lives of their children.
There is information on our website, FamilyLifeToday.com, about "Just Add Family," and you can order form us directly, if you'd like, or call 1-800-FLTODAY, 1-800-358-6329, that's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and we'll make arrangements to have one of these resources sent out to you.
Let me remind you of something that Dennis mentioned at the beginning of today's program. This has been a particularly challenging year for us here at FamilyLife as it has been for many ministries and for many families as well. Currently, we are about $1 million behind where we were last year in donations to FamilyLife, and we have had to respond to that by reducing the size of our staff. We've laid off about 14 percent of our staff. We have had to institute salary reductions as well. We have had to make the necessary adjustments that a lot of businesses are having to make and that a lot of families are having to make.
Now, in the midst of all of this, we've had some friends come along and say, "We want to help." And so during the month of May, they are offering to match every donation we receive here at FamilyLife on a dollar-for-dollar basis. If you are able to make a donation of $10 or $20 or $50, $100, they will match that dollar-for-dollar up to a total of $356,000. Now, that is a very generous offer on their part. It's a very great opportunity for us, as a ministry, to be able to hopefully make some ground against the shortfall that we've been experiencing and as a great opportunity for you to see your donation dollars expand.
So I want to encourage you to simply do whatever it is you can do, as a family. If it's a $10 donation or $20, $25, $50 – whatever it is you can do, go to our website, FamilyLifeToday.com, or call 1-800-FLTODAY, make a donation and let us know that you are standing with us and that you want to support the ministry during this challenging time. Please don't take anything away from your donations to your local church. That needs to be your first priority but, beyond that, if you are able to help us with a donation of any amount, we would love to hear from you, and we want to say thanks in advance for your partnership with us in this ministry. Again, you can donate online at FamilyLifeToday.com or by calling 1-800-FLTODAY.
Now, tomorrow we'll hear Part 2 of Mark Driscoll's message on what it means that a mother is saved through childbirth. I hope you can be back with us for that.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas – help for today; hope for tomorrow.
