"A Major Force In This Child's Life"

"But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Tim. 3:14-17 NIV).

On May 9, 1993 the Deseret News ran this article by Erma Bombeck:

"For the first four or five years after I had children, I considered motherhood a temporary condition – not a calling. It was a time of my life set aside for exhaustion and long hours. It would pass.

Then one afternoon with three kids in tow, I came out of the supermarket pushing a cart (with four wheels that went in opposite directions) when my toddler son got away from me. Just outside the door, he ran toward a machine holding bubble gum in a glass dome. In a voice that shattered glass, he shouted, “Gimme! Gimme!” I told him I would gimme him what-for if he didn’t stop shouting and get in the car.

As I physically tried to pry his body from around the bubble gum machine, he pulled the entire thing over. Glass and balls of bubble gum went all over the parking lot. We had now attracted a crowd.

Donna Reed would have brushed away his tears and granted him absolution on the spot. I wasn’t Donna Reed. I told him he would never see another cartoon as long as he lived, and if he didn’t control his temper he was going to be making license plates for the state.

He tried to stifle his sobs as he looked around at the staring crowd. Then he did something that I was to remember the rest of my life. In his helpless quest for comfort, he turned to the only one he trusted his emotions with – me. He threw his arms around my knees and held on for dear life.

I had humiliated him, chastised him and berated him, but I was still all he had. That single incident defined my role. I was a major force in this child’s life."

“I was a major force in this child’s life.”

That’s quite a profound statement, brethren. Profound, not just for the role that mothers play in a child’s life (as major as that is!), but as a reminder that there are a lot of major forces in a child’s life.

As we know, our heavenly Father designed the family, physically and spiritually, to be a major force in raising our children and grandchildren to put their confidence in God (Ps. 78:7) and to put their faith in Jesus Christ (2 Tim. 3:15).

The Apostle Paul told Timothy that in a world of evil men and impostors who will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived, that he was to remember what he had learned from his mother, Eunice and his grandmother, Lois. As an infant, they had taught him the Holy Scriptures that led him to a saving faith in Jesus Christ (2 Tim. 3:14-15).

There is no greater accomplishment!

But it takes a “family”!

I couldn’t have been more than five years old, but I still remember a little, grey-haired woman named Polly Lowry who taught me the Bible stories that are still with me today. Of course, my parents were the front-line major force in my life as well as in the lives of my two sisters; and that’s as it should be. Throughout the history of God’s people we see the active influence that parents exerted over and over again.

To realize that Moses’ parents, Amram and Jochebed risked their lives to save their son from the king’s death order…is the stuff of heroic tales. Seeing how God worked out the details of floating baby Moses down the Nile in a basket, only to be found by Pharaoh’s daughter and then to be nursed by his own mother for next several years…that is the stuff of spiritual legends – but, brethren, spiritual legends are the product of providence and parental guidance.

In 1 Samuel we hear Hannah pray for a baby boy and then watch her raise him in the ways of the Lord, only to give him back. As she stood before Eli, the high priest, she explained why she was there with her little boy: “For this boy I prayed, and the Lord has given me my petition which I asked of Him. So I have also dedicated him to the Lord; as long as he lives he is dedicated to the Lord…” (1 Sam. 1:27-28).