Mom: Wisdom Personified Series

Some time ago, Peg Beukema of Nyack, New York, collected the responses of several elementary school children to some questions about moms. I got a kick out of reading them this last week, and I thought you’d enjoy them too, especially on this Mother’s Day.

Why did God make mothers?

• She’s the only one who knows where the Scotch tape is.

• Mostly to clean the house.

• To help us out of there when we were getting born.

How did God make mothers?

• He used dirt, just like for the rest of us.

• Magic, plus superpowers and a lot of stirring.

• God made my mom just the same like he made me. He just used bigger parts.

What ingredients are mothers made of?

• God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world... and one dab of mean.

• They had to get their start from men’s bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.

Why did God give you your mother and not some other mom?

• We’re related.

• God knew she likes me a lot more than other people’s moms like me. (www.PreachingToday.com)

Moms are great! In fact, when God wanted to give us a picture of what real wisdom looks like, He chose the portrait of a mom. The book of Proverbs is jammed packed with wise advice. It has hundreds of short, pithy sayings that tell us what a wise person does to make his life go a whole lot smoother. In fact, there is so much advice that we can get lost in the details. So at the end of the book of Proverbs, God brings it all together into a single portrait to help us see the nature of true wisdom.

If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Proverbs 31, Proverbs 31, where we see wisdom personified in a mom and learn what all of us must do to be truly wise.

Proverbs 31:10 A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. (NIV)

If we want to be truly wise, then we must…

BE WORTHY LIKE A MOM.

We must live lives of value. In other words, we must live in such a way that we’re assets to our relationships, not liabilities. We must find ways to give to those around us, not take from them.

A mom is “worth more than rubies,” because she is a “wife of noble character,” verse 10 says; literally, she is a “woman of strength.” She has strength of character that takes her and her family through the hard times.

It’s the same word used of Ruth in Ruth 3:11. There when Ruth proposes marriage to Boaz, Boaz responds by calling her a woman of “noble character – i.e., a woman of strength. This was the same Ruth who earlier determined to follow Naomi’s God even if it meant leaving her country and her people and remaining single and poor the rest of her life. She had the strength of character to trust the Lord and take care of her mother-in-law even at great personal sacrifice.

That’s a picture of real wisdom. Wise people are morally tough like a mom, so much so that they are assets to the people around them.

More than that, they are trustworthy teammates in a relationship. And they can be counted on to help, not hurt those relationships.

Proverbs 31:11-12 Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. (NIV)

She makes her husband look good. She does him good and not evil. In other words, she is an asset to her husband, not a liability. She is his team-mate, not his opponent. She is not belittling him. She is not berating him. She is not getting laughs at his expense. She is on his team, doing whatever she can to help him be his best. Someone once said, “Behind every great man is a greater woman,” someone he depends on, someone he can trust.

Who can forget 18-year-old Kerri Strug in the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. As the team competition neared its end, Kerri was up last on vault. She needed to nail the vault in order for her team to win gold over Russia, but on her first attempt, she fell and injured her ankle. She was her team’s last hope to win the gold, so she decided to go for a second vault and risk further injury. On her second attempt, she managed to stick the landing before collapsing in pain, but she secured the gold for her American team. She was an unselfish team player, whose personal sacrifice kept her from the individual gymnastic events where she was favored to win. (www.strug.org)