Inland Empire: Riverside
Mother's Day 2012 - Audio
How? What a good mother. She's still taking care of me. It was very encouraging to see Lynn Herrera up here at the beginning. I love her a lot and just kind of reconfront for me something that I've known for a long time. That is that all mothers carry a common trait. They are all somewhat delusional. What is one of the first things that a mother says after a child is born? Isn't it beautiful? No, it is not. Most babies that I know look a little bit like dried raisins with eyes. They smell funky and they're really irritating. But there's something about a mother's perspective that can change all that. Justin was sharing about Mary being in the manger and that she was going to treasure all those memories. She was very gracious and kind when he described the conditions. Jesus was not a desired pregnancy. It wasn't like Mary was sitting around thinking I'd really like to be an unwed mother at a time when that would have gotten her killed. Yet all those circumstances ceased to matter when he was born. It all became about him for her. Lynn said as she was welcoming the mothers that she was the mother of four beautiful children. I thought I knew her children. But she might have a family I'm not aware of. That's possible too. That's not pre-owned. And Sylvia was up here talking about how beautiful and intelligent out of me is. I thought, man, I know out of me. Now I'm not being ugly. I thought my own kids were ugly. But it did tell me that most mothers not all are delusional. I was fortunately reared by a mother who was not delusional. She was more of a realist. And the day I was born, she just cried and said, who is this? My mother died 15 years ago. And I think about it all the time. While she was alive, there was not a single day in probably the last 20 years of her life that I didn't talk to her. I called her. I would go see her. And after she died, I found myself continuing to do that. And about five years after she died one mother's day, I woke up early. And I called her phone number and got a recording that the number had been disconnected. And the emptiness that I felt as an adult, I can't even begin to describe to you. And I know so many of you have lost your mothers as well. I wish more than anything in the world that I could sit beside her today and share in her delusions. There is something about a mother that not only gives life, but is meant to produce life. And so tragically in this world, there are so many mothers that are so not what God intended for a mother to be. They're so self-consumed that their child isn't the most precious thing in the world to them. And yet that's not what God wants for us. That's not what God intended for us to have. And so I'm so thankful to be in a church where we can see such phenomenal examples of what it is to be a mother. Emily Dickinson once said, "A mother is the one whom you hurry to when you're troubled. But when you're hurting, it's amazing to me how much kids still want to be with their mom. There's something about a mother that is meant to be a very special bond. My mom was a very unique woman. Her mother died when she was ten of an topic pregnancy. She wasn't even aware that she was pregnant. And her flopium tubes burst in the middle of the night and she bled out and her husband woke up in the morning to find her dead. And he was the foreman of a traveling construction crew that went all around the country building national Jewish hospitals. And they lived in tents. And he took my mother from that point on to be with him. So she grew up from the time she was ten on traveling around the country with a bunch of construction workers. She was the only female in the camp. She was tougher than most men I knew. But she was my mother. And there was nothing she wouldn't do for me. She wasn't the most affectionate person I've actually had to develop my own sensitive sense of affection on my own. But she taught me so much and so much of who I am and so much of who you are always will go back to your mama. Abraham Lincoln said I regard no man as poor who is a godly mother. In the church we grow up and our children grow up surrounded by a vision of motherhood that most people in the world will never experience. And I hope that we appreciate all the moms that we have in the church and what they offer all the people in the church. Amen. In John chapter 16 verse 21 John says a woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come. But when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born in the world. There is nothing more uncomfortable looking to me in the world than a pregnant woman. I mean you're almost by nature going to feel bad for him. And they suffer. They go through all kinds of emotion and chemical and hormonal shifts during that time. But the moment that child is out they forget all that suffering. I remember the day that Jake was born Libby wanted so badly to have natural childbirth. And her children are much like her. They're kind of contentious by nature and don't always get along. The day before, the week before, Jake was in the right position. He was ready at the door. You could almost see him waiting to come out. And something happened and he became diagonal breach in the last week. Turned around, stuck his hands on one end of the wall, put his feet out on the other. And he wasn't coming out for nobody. He liked that environment. It was warm. It was safe. It was comforting. He didn't have to go anywhere for food. And when the doctor told us that she was going to have a C-section, I thought, "Cool!" I was psyched to be able to watch that and to be able to be in there in the surgery. But it didn't take me very long to figure out we needed drugs and we needed a lot of them. Producing a child is a painful experience. But any amount of pain is worth something that you love that much. Psalms 113.9 says, "He settles the barren women in her home as a happy mother of children prays the Lord. It's interesting to me as you go through the Old Testament how many women in the Old Testament were barren and that was the greatest agony in their life and their single greatest desire was for God to allow them to have a child." Justin quoted from Paul's letter to Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 2. Verse 15 says, "When women will be saved through childbearing if they continue in the faith, love, holiness, and propriety, that there's something about giving birth to a baby that makes you all of a sudden start thinking about someone else more than yourself. And instead of being so egocentric, we become others-centered." And then that process is something that helps us in our own relationship here and later on in chapter 5. In verse 14, Paul counsels the younger women to get married and to have children white so that the enemies of righteousness have no reason for slander. He's saying, "Be good mothers!" I want to look today at an example of a phenomenal mother in the Bible. Turn over to Exodus chapter 2 and we're going to look at the story of Moses' mother. And I want to talk about four specific things and then we're going to wrap it up and let you go take special time to honor your moms. Exodus chapter 2 and verse 1, "Now man of the house of Levi married a Levi woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, there's that delusion again, she hid it for three months. When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. The reason she was hiding him was because Pharaoh had put out an edict to put to death all of the male children. Then she placed the child in it, put it in the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying and she felt sorry for him. "This is one of the Hebrew babies," she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh's daughter, "shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?" "Yes, go," she answered, and the girl went, "got the baby's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said her, 'Take this baby, nurse him for me, and I will pay you.'" So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses saying, "I drew him out of the water." It's an interesting story. Not only were the circumstances under which Moses was born, not the best, but the fact that his mother had to hide him and after that age, give him up to save his life. Then the baby's found by Pharaoh's daughter, the daughter of the man who has consigned the baby's to death. She's not delusional. She knows this is one of the Hebrew babies, but even though that was the case, there's something about a baby that even moves the hardest heart. She chose to take that child in, and as God would have it, she paid Moses' own mother to raise the child. So Moses grew up in his earliest years, his formative years, with his mother, and then as he got older, she sent him back to live in Pharaoh's palace. From the very beginning of time to now, one of the things that stands out about all mothers, as it stood out about this mother, is that a mother always has great dreams for her child. It's funny to me to watch now that Jake and Kelsey are born. One of the things that I am mortified about is that they're going to be around people with babies and catch the infection. I'm too young to be a grandfather, and I'm really, really get nervous when some of their friends start talking about babies. When I see the mothers that come in here bringing their babies in, I do what I can to kind of distance them from my son and daughter-in-law. I'm not worried about them infecting the baby. I'm worried about the baby infecting them. I remember when Libby and I first got married. It didn't take her very long to get the baby butt. She was into all kinds of children's activities. She took classes called games and rhythmic activities. Her education was centered around doing stuff with kids. I wasn't ready for being a dad yet. I'm sure that surprises everybody. She and I were talking about it and I said, "You know what? As soon as you can discipline a puppy, I will consider it." I got her a puppy and she couldn't spank the puppy. She wasn't going to spank the puppy. I had a pretty good idea. She wasn't going to spank my kids and I knew and had to know my kids were going to need a lot of spanking. They still do. She began dreaming about those two long before we ever started trying to find those two. Mothers are that way. When they see that child, they see a universe of potential. In Genesis 21, you have the story of Abraham and Sarah. It's very interesting to me that from the very beginning of his covenant relationship with Abraham, God promises Abraham that he will father many children even though Sarah was barren. Yet Sarah would have a child. Sarah would just take decades for that to come true. I guarantee you during that entire time, that longing didn't dissipate. She may have stopped believing it would actually happen, but there was something inside of her that wanted that so desperately. It is that longing and that desire that God uses to describe the desire he has for a relationship with you. They got dreams like a mother dreaming for her child about what you and I can be. He can sleep past how ugly we are. All of our wrinkles, all the nasty things that we do. He sees what we can be. He sees it in ways that we can't even ask or imagine. In Genesis 25, verse 21 says, Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife because she was barren and the Lord answered his prayer and his wife, Rebecca, became pregnant over and over and over our story after story after story of women who dreamed of having a baby and what that baby could be. Probably one of the most common prayers that you see in the Old Testament are prayers about mothers, having children. The second thing that you see in the story of Moses and his mother is how much a mother loves her child. You can imagine how incredibly difficult it would be for her to decide for his sake to give him up to let him go because she wanted to be a mother. She wanted to have him near her. She had no idea that Pharaoh's daughter would decide to let her be the wet nurse and raise him. No way that she could have known that. This wasn't a plan that she had seen how it was going to lay out. It was literally a mother who wanted so desperately for her child to have a chance. She was willing to give up her own life for the sake of a child. Jesus later on would say there is no greater love than this that a man would lay down his life for his friend. He understood that because he had a mother who had laid down her life day in and day out. I appreciate it so much. Not only what Lynn shared but what Sylvia shared because Sylvia said I loved being a mother. I dreamt of being a mother. It's tragic to me that today we don't honor that desire the way that we should honor it. We live in a society that is so diminished that role and it's become a role that we don't see the value in the way that we should. I can tell you right now as E.J. as the guys were singing the song and I don't know what the name of the song is but my boys do because they sing it all the time to their mama. And as these guys were singing my guys silently thank God we're singing it to their mother. Why? Because their mother has loved them when they were absolutely unlovable which may have been this morning. I mean she's loved them at the best and at the worst because that's what a mother does. A mother a mother is literally able to care so much that they can change a child's destiny. In 1st Thessalonians chapter 2 verse 7 in the English standard version Paul uses a mother nursing her baby as an example of how he was among the Thessalonians that he wanted them to know that when he was with them he was much like a mother nursing a baby to describe the amount of love for them that he had. But the third thing that I want us to see in this is that a mother will always protect her child that child's well-being and benefit has got to be more important than the desires of the mother. Several years ago I was backpacking up in the St. Graded Christmas in the San Juan mountain range and I was on this remote lake it was 20 some miles from anywhere and it was early in the morning and as I was fishing out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement just a little waste from me and out of the woods came a bear cub and it was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. It just came in and started splashing around and the shore didn't see me but then its mother came out and I can tell you there been a few times in my life I've been terrified I was absolutely mortified because there is nothing more dangerous in all the world than getting between a mother and her child and when you're standing in front of a seven or eight hundred pound salad and her cub it is absolutely not the place you want to be. I can remember so many times in my life that my mother, little bitty thing, less than a hundred pounds dripping wet which stand up to anybody for my sake. I think it was part of what helped me to grow up secure. I knew that you don't mess with my mother because she may be small but she will hunt you down and she will make your suffering unlike anything man has ever begun to imagine. I like pulling her out at opportune moments when someone would get in my face and say you met my mama. God wants us to know that that's how he feels about us and he gave mothers that intense protective spirit so that we could understand in a very personal way that God does all things for the good of those that love him and that everything that goes on he's using it to help us be what he dreams of us becoming. In the text that we read from Exodus 2 verse 2 it said when she saw that he was a fine child she hid him for three months but when she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket form colored with tar and pitch she placed the child in it put him among the reason of the denial and then sent his sister to watch him to make sure he'd be okay. I wish I could pull my mama out now. I'd love to have you meet her you'd probably terrified. She was one of the most unique women I've ever met. She adored Libby like nobody's business she was more protective of Libby maybe because she knew what I could be. If she didn't like something I said to Libby she would just haul off and smack me. I'm 35 years old and I'm bigger than she is she's like I said four foot nothing and I said to Libby and she just haul off and slug me in the stomach and I remember looking at her I said mother you've got to stop doing that. I never questioned what link she was willing to go through for the people that she loved because she demonstrated every day of my life. I thank God that he gave us mothers that we didn't just appear because he's given us a living example of the links to which God will go for you and I to have every opportunity that he created for us to have. The other thing that I think God wants us to learn from our mothers is the concept of sacrifice. A mother will starve herself to death a good mother will starve herself to death to feed her child. A mother will give up normal things that any woman should have to clothe her child. A good mother will give up whatever she has to give up to provide opportunities for her child. Just as God showed us his love by letting Jesus sacrifice himself for us to be here. One of the greatest examples we have of God's love is the woman that bore us and I pray that each and every one of you mothers out there feels incredibly special today. But maybe more than that I pray that each and one of you children has the heart and the eyes to recognize what you have in your mother and that you do everything in your power to make her feel special. To recognize the gifts that we've been given is one of the most important gifts that we have from God. And one of the best illustrations of that he's given us is the relationship that we have with our mothers. So, Mom's Happy Mother's Day. We hope that today is everything it could be for you. And I am excited that we're going to be able to close out our mothers day service this way. We're going to have the baptism of Miguel Martin's mother. And what's so awesome about this is when I was in the back talking with Miguel, he's literally just sobbing in tears. And he was telling me, he said, I don't know what to think. I do know what to feel. He's got so many different emotions because he and his mother didn't have the best relationship for a long time. But for 20 years he's prayed consistently that she would get a relationship with God so he could have a relationship with her. And today we're going to get to watch that take place. Happy Mother's Day. Hey man, it's been a great service today. Has it not? Oh, I got a moving podium here. Mother's, I do hope that you feel very special. You're very, very grateful for all of you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Mother's Day Service.