Ideal Mother Series

A young man went into a bookstore in Boston and asked the clerk if she had the book

Man, The Master Of Women. The pretty salesgirl merely tossed her head and said, "You'll

have to look for that in the fiction department." In the battle of the sexes modern women

feel they are gaining victories. In spite of all the negative and derogatory remarks on the

inferiority of women by men in history, they have risen to places of leadership in almost

every field. Many women are now ordained clergy, and there are mothers who are right now

straight A students in theological seminaries.

I am keenly conscious of the sharpness of the feminine mind because I graduated from

Bethel College third from the top because 2 girls had superior grades. Plato said, "All the

pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a

man." The facts, however, show that Plato, one of the greatest thinkers in history, was dead

wrong. Women can match men both as sinners and as saints. Women can now follow the

path of folly just as freely and openly as men. According to the world this is progress, and

there cheer is, "You've come along way baby." We cannot argue with the fact that they have

come along way, but the tragedy is that for many it has been the wrong way. Women have

been blind to their potential, and they have been grasping for that which weakens and

destroys their place and power in God's plan. Women are equal with men, but their role is

different. God the Father and God the Son are equal, but their roles are also different.

Most women play two major roles in life, and they are being a wife and being a mother.

In the role of wife she is to be submissive to her husband, and in the role of mother she is to

be sovereign over her children. She is to be both a follower and a leader, and when she plays

both roles well she is the masterpiece of God's creation. However, when she gets her wires

crossed she brings misery upon herself and those she loves. Women lose out on their

effectiveness almost always in the wife relationship rather than the mother relationship.

Almost all the negative literature against women is aimed at the wife. Such literature does

not even exist against mothers. It is harder to be a good wife than it is to be a good mother.

More women fail at being wives than at being mothers. Many men desert their wives, but

few ever desert their mother. Men divorce their wives, but they love their mothers to the

end. It is just a fact that husbands are harder to please than children. It is not valid to

assume that he was joking when a husband wrote this poem to his wife:

When you're away, I'm restless, lonely,

Wretched, bored, dejected, only

Here's the rub, my darling dear,

I feel the same when you are here.

A woman's hardest task in life is to be a good wife, and that is why, even from a woman's

lips, we read in verse 10 that a good wife is rare and hard to find. Good mothers, on the

other hand, are abundant. It is hard to fail as a mother. Women have been slandered with

every name imaginable as wives, but these same women have stimulated floods of poetry as

mothers. How can it be that the same person can be seen from opposite perspectives? It is

because she obeys God's will for her by nature in her relationship to her children, but her

nature resists obedience to God's will in relationship to her husband.

It takes the grace of God to be a good wife, but motherhood and its virtues are common

even among pagans. The feminine qualities of a mother's nature come to her naturally as a

part of God's creation. Motherhood is a part of God's very nature, and He expressed that in

creation. In the second verse of the Bible, Gen. 1:2, we read that the Spirit of God moved,

hovered, or brooded over the waters. The picture is of, "That tremulous motion made by

the hen while either hatching her eggs or fostering her young." From this picture some

ancients got the idea that the world came from an egg. This word has the Spirit of God

fulfilling the female function in the incubation of life, and the word came to be used to

express the idea of loving, warming and cherishing.

Had this been the only time such a picture was used to describe God and His actions we

would not dare read much into it, but the fact is, God's motherhood is described elsewhere in