Every Christian Can Arise as a Mother

When you hear the word "Mom," what comes to mind? Some of us think of a bowl of hot soup. Some think of a pair of rough hands. Some think of a back that was always busy and rarely turned around to hold us. And for some, the heart tightens, because there's a wound there.

I think of my own mom. She was always busy, she couldn't stop, she just kept cooking good food for us, until in old age her knees were about as bad as knees can get. She was a praying mother. When she died she left behind three thick diaries, and there was nothing else in them, only prayers. She wrote down the names of more than ten people in our family, and she prayed for us every day. If I can stand here and share today, I really have my mom to thank.

A Mother's Influence

The Christian psychologist Henry Cloud (one of the authors of Boundaries) also wrote a book with a colleague called The Mom Factor. He says no one shapes us more than our mother: how she responded to our needs as children shapes how we see ourselves, how we trust people, even how we handle our marriages and our work.

But I'm not here to teach that book today. I want to start from there and give you some hope: if you never received a mother's love, God can make up what you lacked back then, through other people, through his family.

Men and Women, Young and Old

This message is for every Christian: whether you're a brother or a sister, married or not, with children or without, young or old, even if you yourself were once a wounded child.

Brothers may ask: what does a spiritual mother have to do with me? The Bible tells us that a mother's heart comes first from God himself:

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.

Isaiah 66:13

When the Lord Jesus wept over Jerusalem, he said how often he would have gathered them, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. The apostle Paul was a man, yet twice he used a mother to describe his own ministry. So when I say "spiritual mother," I don't mean a gender. I mean a heart: gentle, walking alongside, nurturing, keeping watch. God wants to give this heart to every Christian. In actually walking alongside people, though, we still have brothers walk alongside brothers and sisters walk alongside sisters. That keeps us most united, and it's also safest.

Deborah Arose a Mother

The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.

Judges 5:7

It was a desolate time. No one even walked the roads. Deborah didn't call herself a general or a queen. She called herself a "mother." Barak said, "If thou wilt go with me, then I will go." And she went with him. She didn't fight Barak's battle for him. She went with him and encouraged him to stand up. A spiritual mother rises in a desolate time, not to replace anyone, but to help others stand up.