Mothers Called To Look Like God

Mothers Called To Look Like God by Rick Gillespie-Mobley

Proverbs 31:10-31

Called To Look Like God

NLF 5/9/2004 Proverbs 31:29-32 2 Timothy 1:1-6*

One picture that Pastor Toby and I use to enjoy watching on TV was Quantum Leap. The show was about a man who had been trying to invent a machine to travel in time. But something went wrong and when he tested the machine on himself, he went back into time, but he would be in someone else’s body. He had to remain in that person’s body until he fixed something that went wrong in somebody’s life.

It would take him the whole show to do this, and that at the end of the show just as he made whatever was wrong right, without warning he would leap out of that person’ body and into another body in a whole different environment and circumstances.

He did not know whose body he was in or what he would look like to others. Sometimes he was white, sometimes he was black, sometimes he was a woman, sometimes he was young and sometimes he was old. Whenever he came to a mirror, he would very slowly lean his head over to look into the mirror to see what others saw when they looked at him. Usually he would cry out, “Oh My God.”

Today is Mother’s Day, and we are all being looked at by others. If we could see ourselves as others see us, what would we cry out. In our New Testament reading, when Paul is looking at Timothy, Paul does not see Timothy only, but he sees the faith that was once in Timothy’s Mother Eunice, and his grandmother Lois. These two women, Eunice And Lois, have passed on to Timothy something much more valuable than their looks. The sincere faith they had in Christ has been passed on to Timothy.

In Christ, every mother becomes capable of living a life so that when others see her, they see God looking back on them. I have known mothers who have given birth to 1, 5, and even 13 children. Yet I have known of many other mothers who have never given birth to any children at all, yet they have more children than most.

How many of us have ever claimed special women in our lives as our mothers because of their willingness to invest themselves in our lives. Why do so many of you call Lay Pastor Helen Britt, Mother Britt? You know she is the kind of woman who invests herself into making you better in whatever area you will allow her to help you. Yes, when we have looked at women who know how to invest themselves, we’ve seen God peeking back at us.

It is an honor and a privilege to be a mother and it does not matter if being a mother comes through a birth process, or a choice to simply invest yourself in someone’s life for the cause of Christ. In a day of families breaking apart, kids being abused and killed by parents, and some parents thinking more about drugs than love, the church is being called upon to show children what a mother is all about.

The challenge for the women of the church, is to become mothers to these children who on the outside appear to have it together, but inside their lives are already wrecked with little understanding of what it is to be loved. Do you realize if you do not choose to love that little one that everybody else is calling trouble, then nobody might. Until we have tried to love a child or a teen, then there is no use complaining about what they are.

Women you are in a special and unique place in God’s creation. God has put something in you, that all the rest of creation needs. When God wanted to express compassion and instill hope into the broken nation of Isreal, God assigned to himself the role of a mother saying, "As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you."

When Jesus cried over the pitiful state of the people of Jerusalem, he said, Luke 13:34 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings"!

This morning we are going to consider several ways in which a loving mother reveals to us the heart and the nature of God so that when we look at women we can see God peeking at us through their faces, their smiles, their eyes.

When I think of Mothers, I think of sacrifice. Who here can think of one or two sacrifices your mother or a woman in the role of a mother made in your life? Very few groups give as much and as often, and receives so little in return. There are so many thank you’s that are never given, so many appreciations never spoken, and so many things that seemed to be unnoticed. Those of you who are single mothers really know what financial sacrifices you are making, yet your kids never stop wanting even more.