SERMONIC THEME
Opening Statement: I have often told the kids: “If you ever get lost in a crowd and separated from us, there is one thing that you must do. You find a mother with children or pushing a stroller and you go ask her to help you find your mother and 99% of the time, you’ll be safe and OK.” Why? There is great safety in a mother’s love.
Transition: Today, we celebrate a mother’s love but we do so from an unconventional Mother’s Day passage.
Title: A Mother’s Love
Text: 1 Kings 3:16-28
Proposition: If you are a mother or would like to express the love of a mother, I want you to know something. The love that you express or withhold is a life-changing influence that impacts your children for the rest of their lives.
SERMON
Background: There is an interesting passage that that underscores a mother’s love. While the main theme is the wisdom of King Solomon, it also shows us how he wisely appealed to a mother’s love. Listen to the story.
Recitation: The very next thing, two prostitutes showed up before the king. The one woman said, “My master, this woman and I live in the same house. While we were living together, I had a baby. Three days after I gave birth, this woman also had a baby. We were alone – there wasn’t anyone else in the house except for the two of us. [The is an important detail. Otherwise, someone else could have done the deed.] The infant son of this woman died one night when she rolled over on him in her sleep. She got up in the middle of the night and took my son – I was sound asleep, mind you! – and put him at her breast and put her dead son at my breast. When I got up in the morning to nurse my son, here was this dead baby! But when I looked at him in the morning light, I saw immediately that he wasn’t my baby. [You cannot fool a mother. I tried to do it as a child and succeeded very few times. No, a mother knows her child.] “Not so!” said the other woman. “The living one’s mine; the dead one’s yours.” The first woman countered, “No!” Your son’s the dead one; mine’s the living one.” They went back and forth this way in front of the king. The king said, “What are we to do? This woman says, ‘The living son is mine and the dead one is yours,’ and this woman says, ‘No, the dead one’s yours and the living one’s mine.’”
[The king is in a dilemma. It is impossible to prove by conventional means which of the women had a just case. There were no witnesses and DNA testing was not available to the king. What is a king to do? He came up with an idea. His method would probably be illegal today, but nevertheless, let’s see what happened.]
After a moment the king said, “Bring me a sword.” [When the true mother saw the sword, Solomon knew that it would present her with an emergency situation. Her response to the very thought of what he might do to her child would create emotions that only a mother could express.] They brought the sword to the king. Then he said, “Cut the living baby in two – give half to one and half to the other.” The real mother of the living baby was overcome with emotion [the Hebrew word means to “grow hot or get excited”] for her son and said, “Oh no, master! Give her the whole baby alive; don’t kill him!” But the other one said, “If I can’t have him, you can’t have him – cut away!” The king gave his decision: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Nobody is going to kill this baby. She is the real mother.” The word got around – everyone in Israel heard of the king’s judgment. They were I awe of the king, realizing that it was God’s wisdom that enabled him to judge truly.” [The implication is that God must have answered Solomon’s prayer for wisdom. If Solomon is this wise and caring about a dispute involving two social outcasts, imagine what he will do for the rest of his subjects.] (The Message)
Observation: This passage doesn’t moralize about harlotry. It doesn’t moralize about the wretched behavior of the woman who stole the other woman’s baby and lied about it to the king. It doesn’t moralize about the summary execution of a helpless innocent child. What it does do is show us a king who is smart enough to appeal to the loving maternal instinct in order to find the truth.
Key Word: In this process, this passage recognizes TWO KINDS OF MOTHERS.
Exposition:
1. There are Mothers who are characterized by the spirit of selfishness and heartless cruelty. These are the mothers who you can never please. They are bitter with life. Hateful and armed with a thousand reasons why life is unfair, they pour out their vengeance on their friends and families. These are the mothers who walk out when things get hard. They leave the family high and dry. They don’t care who they hurt, just so long that others close to them aren’t happy either. They project on to the significant people in their lives all of the hurt that has accumulated over the years.
2. There are Mothers who are characterized by the spirit of self-sacrificing love. No price is too great. Here’s a woman who had a child. The child had no father that was in the home, but she is committed to loving this child dearly. Think about what she had been through. At first, she was bereaved. Imagine waking up and finding your baby lifeless. Then, she discovered that she had been robbed as well! We don’t know how long the woman had been living with this lady who had taken her child! Solomon was wise enough to use one of the most powerful forces in the universe to get to the truth – a mothers love. Solomon knew that the love of a mother for her child – even if it meant separation from her child – would remedy this dilemma. You see it’s a great love that is willing to suffer an even greater loss in order to give a child what they need. Mothers don’t offer perfection; they offer sacrifice.
Quotation: Sydney J. Harris (1917-1986) said, “Real mothers are not perfect because they usually start out young. The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes one a mother-which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.” “The most important occupation on earth for a woman is to be a real mother to her children. It does not have much glory to it; there is a lot of grit and grime. But there is no greater place of ministry, position, or power than that of a mother. Phil Whisenhunt - Edy, Draper’s Book of Quotations for the Christian World (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1992).”
Illustration: I recently came across a true story that happened during the Holocaust. Solomon Rosenberg, his wife and their two sons were arrested and placed in a concentration camp. The rules were simple. As long as they did their work, they were permitted to live. When they became too weak to work, they would be exterminated. Rosenberg watched as his own father and mother were marched off to their deaths and he knew that his youngest son David would be next because he had always been a frail child. Every evening Rosenberg came back into the barracks after his hours of hard labor and searched for the faces of his family. When he found them they would huddle together, embrace one another and thank God for another day of life. One day he came back and didn’t see those familiar faces. He finally discovered his oldest son, Joshua, in a corner sobbing and praying. “Josh, tell me it’s not true.” Joshua turned to his dad and said, “It’s true. Today David was not strong enough to do his work and so they took him away.” Mr. Rosenberg then asked, “But where is your mother?” Joshua could barely speak and finally uttered, “When they came for David, he was afraid and cried and so mom took his hand and went with him.”
Conclusion: Thank you mothers, for holding our hands and walking with us in our darkest hours – for sacrificing convenience and ease so that we might have companionship. Thank you for overcoming the bitter and negative life experiences and instead of projecting that on to us, you have shown us only gentleness and kindness. And for this, we owe to you a great debt.
CONCLUSION
Personal Testimony: Growing up, there was one person who always pursued a relationship with me. There was one person who always prayed for me. There was one person who always read Bible stories to me. There was one person who cared enough about how my character was shaping up to discipline me and teach me to do right. Growing up in my home, there was one person I could always count on. I don’t know where I would be today or who I would be today if it had not been for the loving influence of my mother. And today, I want to personally say “Thank you” to someone who has made my life possible.
“Mom, after being gone from home now for about 17 years, I’ve come to realize that I owe you so much. I owe you for lying awake late into the night, listening for a cough, a cry, the cracking of a floorboard. I owe you for being a short-order cook, for great Sunday afternoon meals, for making “leftovers” taste even better the second time around. I owe you for somehow losing your appetite when there were only a few hot rolls left and many more hungry mouths. I owe you for getting me better when I was sick. I owe you for making sure that I had new basketball shoes when we barely had enough to get food. I owe you for laundry services, for hundreds of phone calls, and for a wonderful example of a focused God-centered life. I owe you for wise insights on life. I owe you for cementing the family together with your love and we all love one another today because we had a great teacher. I owe you for not only bearing your own problems, but everybody else’s problems in the family too. I owe you today and yet somehow I can still hear you say, ‘You don’t owe me anything.’”
Illustration: Mary Ann Bird wrote a short story entitled "The Whisper Test." It is a true story from her life. I’ve shared it before but I think it’s so fitting that I share it again today.
"I grew up knowing I was different, and I hated it. I was born with a cleft palate, and when I started school, my classmates made it clear to me how I must look to others: a little girl with a misshapen lip, crooked nose, lopsided teeth and garbled speech.” When schoolmates would ask, ’What happened to your lip?’ I’d tell them I’d fallen and cut it on a piece of glass. Somehow it seemed more acceptable to have suffered an accident than to have been born different. I was convinced that no one outside my family could love me.
"There was, however, a teacher in the second grade that we all adored -- Mrs. Leonard by name. She was short, round, happy -- a sparkling lady. Annually, we would have a hearing test. I was virtually deaf in one of my ears; but when I had taken the test in past years, I discovered that if I did not press my hand as tightly upon my ears as I was instructed to do, I could pass the test. Mrs. Leonard gave the test to everyone in the class, and finally it was my turn. I knew from past years that as we stood against the door and covered one ear, the teacher sitting at her desk would whisper something and we would have to repeat it back ... things like, ’The sky is blue’ or ’Do you have new shoes?’ I waited there for those words that God must have put into her mouth, those seven words which changed my life. Mrs. Leonard said, in her whisper, ’I wish you were my little girl (as told by Spencer Morgan Rice, "The Drama of God," Trinity Church, Boston).’"
Application: Perhaps today, on this day when we celebrate a mother’s loving influence, you’re more torn up inside than joyful because you’ve had some experiences along the way that have hurt you deeply. There have been some painful things that have happened in your life and Mother’s Day brings all of that back. Well maybe you can hear the Spirit say, “I wish you were my little girl.”
And if you are a mother, and you would like to get your family as well as your own life on track spiritually today, I would like to extend to you the Savior. By believing in him you receive from him an enablement to begin living life and parenting children and running a home according to his life-giving teachings.
