God’s Call, God’s Choice Mother’s Day
Judges 4:1-10 Luke 7:36-8:3 May 9th 2021
We want to say Happy Mother’s Day to all of you women who have made a difference in the lives of others as Mothers, Aunts, Grandmothers, Daughters, Sisters, Cousins, nieces, Great Grandmothers, foster Moms, teachers, nurses, cashiers, social workers, cooks, politicians, pastors, office workers, supervisors, co-workers, youth workers and servants of Jesus Christ. Without you none of us would be here today.
I’m so glad that God created the woman last, because you often see things we do not see and correct them before we knew they needed correcting. When God created humanity, God’s word specifically says, in the image of God, God created them, male and female God created them.
God had a specific purpose in mind when God created us male and female. That purpose goes much deeper than just the physical distinctions in our bodies. God has made us different in some ways and the same in others.
Women should not have to try to become more like men and men should not have to try to become more like women. The goal should be to ask what is God requiring of me and to seek after that call.
We should be able to celebrate our differences while recognizing we are equal in the eyes of God. We should be free to respond to the call of God upon our lives, because God’s choice for us, may not be the choice of others.
There are differences among those of the same sex which should also be celebrated. The woman who remains at home with her children, is just as valuable in the eyes of God as the woman who becomes CEO of a company. At the end of the day, its not how much money did I make, but how much love did I show to those I encountered.
We must allow for God to be God with each of His children for each of them to reach their full potential. It is important for us to know the word of God, because it teaches us that God has never overlooked the talents and capabilities of women.
We may want to limit boys and girls and men and women to play certain roles in society, but that’s not because of God’s word. It’s because of our prejudices. There was a time when if boy wanted to be a liturgical dancer, we made him feel ashamed yet from the very beginning God assigned male and female dancers as a part of praise and worship.
As believers in Christ, with a heritage from the Old Testament, we have already had our first Woman President. It happened about a thousand years before Jesus was born. God had led his people into the land of Canaan which is where God promised to bless them.
God kept his end of the deal ,but the people did not. Unfortunately, the people disobeyed God and turned to the worship of idols. God left them to their own devices, and they discovered doing your own thing is not always the best thing.
There was a powerful king named Jabin who had taken over the land of Canaan. King Jabin was cruelly oppressing God’s people. The king had a massive army with nine hundred chariots, led by a general named Sisera. Chariots would be the equivalents of tanks in our day in a land battle. That would be like sending foot soldiers against tanks with just rifles to fight with.
God’s people had known a lot of misery and suffering for 20 years under King Jabin. The people cried out to God for help. God chose a new president for his people. He sent his call to Deborah. We know that Deborah had been a prophet and a judge, but now she is elevated to the highest office. We know that she was married to Lappidoth. The people trusted her wisdom and her counsel because they knew she was in touch with God.
Deborah calls a man named Barak to tell him what the Lord has said. Deborah says to Barak, “Take 10,000 men and go to Mount Tabor. I will lead General Sisera to the Kishon River with his chariots and troops and deliver them into your hand.”
Think about this for a moment, Sisera and his men are a standing army, trained for battle and have been doing maneuvers for years, and not only that, they have iron chariots. Yet God is somehow going to defeat them.
President Deborah is offering you the job of taking a bunch of untrained farmers and merchants into battle against Sisera’s army on foot. What would your response be?
Barak, replies to her, “I will go if you go with me, but if you don’t go, I won’t go.” Notice that Deborah didn’t choose Barak, but God did.” You can have God’s call, and you can be God’s choice, and you can still miss out on what God wants to give you if you start to put stipulations on what you will and will not do with God’s will.
What was there about Deborah that caused everyone to recognize that she was in touch with God? Why did Barak feel this woman’s presence was absolutely critical to his success? What did she have that Barak knew he was lacking?
“How many presidents do you know are willing to go out on the battlefield with the troops and lead them into battle? Yet, this woman had greater courage than her general. She said,” I will go with you in battle, but because you have acted this way, the real hero at the end of the fight is going to be a woman.”
If you want to know who the woman was and how Sisera was overcome by a woman, read Judges chapter 4. God was not limited by roles that men or women could play in getting God’s work done. It’s two women that overthrow King Jabin and Sisera the commander of the army.
When Jesus came along a 1,000 years later, the culture had rejected the reality that both men and women were created equally in the image of God. Jesus’ acceptance of women into his ministry was a very unpopular stance. Jesus would not have been close to being politically correct with the religious leaders of his day.
As we can see from our new Testament reading in Luke 7:38-8:1, not only did Jesus accept women, he embraced women who had been prostitutes. He was publicly seen having his feet kissed by a woman with a notorious reputation and she was pouring perfume on his feet. He acknowledged, “Yes this lady does have a lot of sins, but they are forgiven.”
The men with all their degrees, their training, and their brilliant minds were unable to recognize who Jesus was, but this woman knew exactly who He was. When Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven, your faith has saved you go in peace,” that’s all that she needed to hear.
She knew that she was right with the Lord. She knew Jesus was from the Father. It’s interesting that in all four gospels, you never find a woman who is listed in opposition to Jesus.
Have you ever wondered how Jesus and the disciples got money when they were going from town to town? We never see them taking up an offering and we never read about them having a job.
Do you think each day Jesus did a miracle for them to eat, or that he made their clothes grow supernaturally, or he told them where people had lost money and for them to go and find it. Although he could have done these things, Jesus did not. God actually called a group of people to assist with this, and God’s choice was not whom you might have thought.
Sometimes when we are reading the Scriptures, we read over things that are important to get to things that are familiar. In between the story of Jesus, Simon the Pharisee, and the Woman Forgiven by Jesus and the story of the parable of the sower, we see something radical taking place in just 3 short verses. We rarely look at them closely
Verse 1 says, “After this, Jesus traveled from town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, the twelve were with him”. If Jesus has not yet been crucified and hasn’t risen from the dead, what is the good news of the kingdom of God that Jesus is preaching?
The kingdom of God means that God is setting up a new system in which God is going to reign and God wants you to be a part of that kingdom. This kingdom will last indefinitely. In this kingdom, sin will not have control over our lives, and we will be free to enjoy the life that God wants to give to us. It will be natural for us to do what’s right because God is going to change us from the inside out.
Can you imagine how different things would be in the church if we naturally did the things that were right? Can you imagine how different things would be this afternoon if at home if everybody naturally did what was right? Wouldn’t you want to be a part of that kind of a kingdom for eternity?
The amazing thing about this kingdom of God is that it is an invitation to all people. The immoral, the religious, the old, the young, the good, the bad, the Jew the Gentile, the man the woman, the addict the worshipper, the famous and the no name.
Jesus wants to go from village to village to let people know that they have been invited. No matter they have done, who they are, or what their background is, God is not angry with them. All they have to do is to repent and believe the good news that the kingdom is near. Jesus death and resurrection is going to bring the kingdom even closer.
You know every election season, our politicians promise us a new kind of a kingdom. But but all of them fail us, because they don’t require us to repent. We want others to change their ways, but we don’t want to change our own. What we condemn in others, we excuse in ourselves.
We can’t have righteous kingdoms with unrepentant hearts. God’s call to come and be a part of God’s kingdom goes out to all of us. God has chosen a spot for each of us in the kingdom, but like Barak told Deborah, “I will only come on my terms.” But the kingdom doesn’t operate like that.
The reality of the coming of the kingdom of God is seen in Jesus’ treatment toward women. During Jesus’ times, a rabbi (a teacher or group leader) with followers would not have allowed women to travel with him and his group. Rabbis refused to teach women, and they were generally considered inferior to men.
Jesus moved beyond that way of thinking and invested himself in both men and women. By allowing women to travel with him, Jesus was once again declaring the equality of men and women in the image of God.
Luke 8:2 provides us with some details about the women that were with Jesus. They were also with the disciples and Jesus as they traveled from town to town with the message, repent and believe the good news of the kingdom.
These were women who had had a first hand touch of the power of Jesus Christ upon their lives. Verse 2 says, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases. Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out.
Luke wants us to know that the women came from all walks of life. Mary Magdalene had had seven demons inside of her. Even though she is often called a prostitute, the bible never says that she was.
To many of us Mary Magdalene would have seemed deranged and out of her mind. This woman probably had unbelievable physical strength and terrorized those who came into contact with her. She appears to be a single woman because no man is never mentioned in connection with her name.
But then one day she ran into Jesus. Here was a man that wasn’t running away from her. Instead Jesus came toward her, and she found compassion, healing and deliverance. She knew what Jesus was talking about when he said, “the kingdom of God is near.
She knew what is was like to be under the authority of Satan and his demons. But now she knew what it was like to be under the reign of God. God’s call was upon her life, and she was God’s chosen child. When we see that wild looking person upon the street, start to pray because that might me God’s next preacher in the pulpit and you prayers may helpt to set them free..
Here was a disciple that was there with Jesus while he was preaching. She was there with Jesus while he was dying on the cross. She was there with Jesus when he rose up from the dead. Thank God for all you single women who will stand with Jesus no matter what, and you don’t mind taking a risk to do so.
Luke tells us that Joanna was another woman with the disciples. This woman was married and committed to Jesus. She was the wife of Cuza, the manager’s of Herod’s household. It sounds like Joanna had come from the upper middle class background. Herod was a king, and if you had a job managing one of his estates, you had some money.
Joanna was there with Jesus as he was preaching. Since she was married, she may have had other responsibilities to her husband and maybe her children at the time Jesus was crucified.
But after she found out about the crucifixion, we do know she held firmly to her faith. Joanna is mentioned in the scriptures as one of the women along with Mary Magdalene, who told the disciples the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. Thank God for all you married women who will stand with Jesus no matter what.
The third woman that Luke tells us was with group was Susanna. We don’t know anything about Susanna anywhere else in the Scriptures, but we do know she was a follower of Jesus with a heart to serve. We know that she accepted Mary Magdalene and Joanna as her sisters in Christ even though their backgrounds were different from hers.
I think she represents all of you other women who know how to make other women feel loved and accepted in the church. I think she represents all of you other women who want to be with Jesus because of what He’s done for you. Luke says, “It wasn’t just Mary, Joanna, and Susanna, but there were many other women. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.”
Do you realize that a portion of Jesus’ ministry was being financed by a large group of women who were making sacrifices of their own out of their own pockets? Not only do we owe our physical bodies and lives to women from the past, we owe some of our spiritual lives to women who helped to get the gospel message out into the world. It was the testimony of women that Jesus has risen from the dead.
We do not even know the names of all the women here in Luke 8:3, but God does. There are so many of you women here and online who have made sacrifices for the kingdom of God to give help to give birth to new daughters and sons in the kingdom of God.
God sees your work and knows that your labor and your sacrifices are not in vain. The spiritual children you are producing makes you a proud Mother in every since of the word. We thank God for every woman who has voluntarily chosen to be a mother in the kingdom of God.
This Mother’s day, let us all recognize that God created us in God’s image, male and female God created us. God created us because God wants us to be in a right relationship with Him so that we could also be in a right relationship with each other. That’s what the kingdom of God is all about. Without us first repenting and yielding our hearts to God, we will never that place we are all seeking.
Jesus has a plan for all of us. Why not humble yourself and repent, so that you can see what God can do in and through you.
