I called my mother last night to verify this story but it seems that when she was pregnant with me she was accidentally hit in the stomach by a line drive baseball. It hurt her but apparently I was no worse off for the incident. (Some today might argue that!) I was snug and safe in my little world inside my mother’s body.

The following piece came to me anonymously. I do not know the identity of the author:

We salute the mothers among us today. You play a key roll among us in both the church and the world. Your task is indispensable. Happy Mother’s Day!

To honor the occasion of Mother’s Day I want to take a brief look at Four Characteristics of Godly Mothers. We’ll illustrate each characteristic with a well-known mother from the Bible. The first characteristic of godly mothers is:

Jocabed was the mother of Moses. Certainly her contribution in both protecting and raising her son during his earliest years has blessed the world. There is probably no greater gift she could have given for the benefit of mankind than to protect her little baby from the satanically inspired genocide of her day.

Jocabed and her husband Amram were Hebrew slaves who lived out their lives under the heel of a brutal monarch who called himself the Pharaoh of Egypt. The ancestors of Amram and Jocabed had come to live in Egypt by special invitation of another Pharaoh during the days of Joseph. In those brighter days they prospered greatly to the point that a subsequent Egyptian king who did not remember Joseph began to perceive them as a threat to his power. To reduce their numbers and dull the perceived risk, he put them into slavery. When that did not cut their numbers he ordered the systematic and pitiless destruction of newborn infants. The last verse of Exodus 1 holds Pharaoh’s decree:

"Every son who is born you are to cast into the Nile, and every daughter you are to keep alive."

Jocabed disobeyed the order and protected her little son.

Exodus 2:2-4 says,

We haven’t time for the whole story here. Many of you know it anyway. What I want to highlight is Jocabed’s bold protection of her little boy – which wasn’t easy. The text said she hid him for three months. Could any of us do that amid the probable frequent raids and "bed checks" of the agents of Pharaoh?

One of the earliest roles of motherhood is protection. In fact, a mother is a child’s first primary protector. Her own body provides the warm, soft, protective environment during gestation.

I called my mother last night to verify this story but it seems that when she was pregnant with me she was accidentally hit in the stomach by a line drive baseball. It hurt her but apparently I was no worse off for the incident. (Some today might argue that!) I was snug and safe in my little world inside my mother’s body.

This early protection was designed by the Creator Himself and if things are allowed to run their natural course, this time in the womb is one of the safest periods in a person’s life.

Of course we know that isn’t always true today. A mother can choose to kill her child in the safety of the womb – something that was never a part of the plan of God and something that flies in the face of God’s design for every child.

Mothers hold the key vote on this issue in countries like ours. She decides whether her child lives or dies during this critical time. A Christian mother protects her child, in this stage and beyond, even when things are tough. It was certainly tough for Jocabed, but she did it at the risk of her own life.

Even when she could hide little Moses no longer (how do you hide a three month old?) knowing that her baby would soon be found and would put the rest of the family at risk, she still could not bring herself to cast him into the crocodile infested Nile. She carefully fashioned a watertight little basket and lovingly placed her precious baby into it and "set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile."

One of the things I hope to ask this dear woman when we get to heaven is whether or not she knew that this was the spot where Pharaoh’s daughter took her bath. I cannot help but wonder. If it is true that she knew we see her making the ultimate sacrifice of giving up her son so that he could continue to be protected.

A mother is a child’s earliest human protector. Jocabed illustrates that protectiveness. The next characteristic of godly mothers is:

Hannah and her husband Elkanah were unable to have children together. Year after year as they went up to the temple to worship the Lord Hannah would weep and not eat. She so desperately wanted a child! To his credit, Elkanah tried to comfort his wife but his efforts seemed only to make matters worse. At one point in what might be considered a typically masculine effort to console a feminine need that fails miserably (Take note of this, guys. Though it might seem to make sense to you, this is definitely not the way to comfort your wife!) Elkanah said to Hannah in 1 Samuel 1:8, "Hannah, why do you weep and why do you not eat and why is your heart sad? Am I not better to you than ten sons?" (Well, it made perfect sense to him!)

As you read her story in 1 Samuel 1, you find her in the temple weeping and praying with great fervor. She told God that if He would give her a child she would dedicate him to the Lord’s service under the vow of a Nazirite. Her fervency was mistaken by Eli the priest as drunkenness. After she explained her predicament however, Eli blessed her. She returned home from that trip and God allowed her to conceive. Nine months later she gave birth to little Samuel and nurtured him, God’s gift to her, until he was weaned. Then she went with her husband on their annual pilgrimage to the temple and dedicated young Samuel to the service of the Lord.

In 1 Samuel 1:26-28 we find her conversing again with Eli the priest, this time with a little boy at her side.

When she and her husband returned home, the young boy Samuel stayed behind to be trained for the priesthood. But Hannah didn’t forget her boy. Every year as they went to the temple she would make a new robe for him and take it to him. Oh, the conversations they must have had!

Christians today do not dedicate their children under the vows of the Nazirite. But we can certainly dedicate ourselves to raising them to be servants of God. A mother has a special role in that regard. She can provide the love, the instruction, and the human example so that her dedication is passed along to them. Many solid Christians today credit their faithfulness and dedication to the examples of their Christian mothers.

Samuel’s dedication, which first resided in his mother Hannah, would bless the nation of Israel for many years.

We’re talking about characteristics of Godly mothers. We’ve looked at the protectiveness of Jocabed and the dedication of Hannah. A third characteristic to consider is:

Eunice was the mother of Timothy, the young man who became a Christian under the teaching of the apostle Paul and later was an evangelist to whom the apostle wrote two of the letters in your New Testament. We don’t know very much about Eunice. She was a Jewess, but her husband was a Greek. Acts 16:1 seems to imply that Timothy’s father was not a believer. This "mixed marriage" situation provides more questions than it does answers about Timothy’s background, but one thing we do know for sure is that there was instruction about God in Timothy’s home and it came primarily from the women – Timothy’s mother and his grandmother.

In 2 Timothy 1:5-6 Paul wrote:

Paul portrays faith here as a living thing that gets passed from person to person. It resided first in Lois, then in Eunice, then in Timothy.

In Paul’s second letter to Timothy, in 2 Timothy 3:14-15 we read:

Note that Timothy’s religious instruction started in his childhood. "From childhood," Paul says, Timothy had "known the sacred writings."

A mother, and sometimes a grandmother is typically a child’s earliest instructor. In a home where the husband isn’t a believer this training may be the child’s only exposure to the things of God. Lois and Eunice were faithful to God in this matter. They saw to it that the Scriptures were taught in Timothy’s home. This is a powerful testimony to the effectiveness of a mother’s teaching.

Mothers today can do the same. Begin religious instruction with your children when they are young and impressionable. If you don’t teach them God’s ways at this early time you can be sure that the world will teach them its ways.

We’ve seen protectiveness in Jocabed, dedication in Hannah, instruction in Eunice. Finally we’ll consider:

What a joyous time it was when Joseph and Mary brought their tiny son Jesus to the temple for his dedication under the law of Moses!

Luke 2:22 says, "And when the days for their purification according to the law of Moses were completed, they brought Him up to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord."

On that day an old priest, a man named Simeon, serving his course in the temple, took baby Jesus into his arms and announced that he could now die in piece because, just as God had promised him, he had lived to see the coming of Messiah – the glory of Israel! Mary and Joseph stood there amazed at the words coming from the lips of Simeon.

"Behold," he said in Luke 2:34, "this Child is appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel…."

But their joy was tempered by something else the old priest said. Apparently to Mary, Simeon said in Luke 2:35: "…and a sword will pierce even your own soul-- to the end that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed." Unless God explained the meaning of these words to Mary in some special way, she couldn’t possibly have known ahead of time the pain they predicted. That piercing of Mary’s soul was fully realized when they took her innocent Son and crucified Him.

John 19:23-25 contains a portion of the crucifixion account. Notice that Mary was present for the entire time as Jesus was dying on the cross. Imagine the agony this mother felt as that pre-announced sword stabbed her soul! She wanted to help her son. She wished she could deliver him. Surely she would have traded places with Him. But she was powerless to stop it from happening.

From this pain filled account we see that Mary was not a woman who thought that loyalty to her son ended when He physically left home. For her to stand there helplessly and watch them abuse and torture her firstborn must have been the toughest thing she ever had to do. Jesus was just 33 years old. That would probably put Mary somewhere in her 50’s. Many believe that her husband Joseph had probably died by that time, since he disappears from the Biblical narrative sometime after Jesus turned 12 and confounded the doctors of the law in the temple. One can easily imagine a lesser person shrinking from the horrific scene and saying, "I cannot bear to watch this." But Mary wasn’t concerned for herself. She was there for her son. She didn’t leave and hide herself – as heart wrenching as it must have been for her to stay. She continued right there with Jesus to the end and probably even assisted when Joseph and Nicodemus took his body down from the cross and laid it in the tomb.

Mary understood loyalty to her children. She was loyal even to the point of exposing herself to painful hurt and emotion.

Loyalty to our children doesn’t end when they leave our homes. Neither does the pain we feel for them when they are harmed or engage in behavior that harms them. Though a mother will understand that she cannot run the lives of her grown children, she will maintain her loyalty.

It has been said more than once by grieving fathers and mothers that parents should never outlive their children. Whether that saying was around in Mary’s day I do not know, but I can tell you that she knew, in the first person, the emotion that prompted the saying.

Sometimes too, our grown children go astray from the Lord. Sometimes they involve themselves in things that bring pain to us and them. Some might find it easy to simply turn their backs on their grown children to be spared the pain. But loyal mothers like Mary don’t shrink away.

Don’t misunderstand. Loyalty to grown children does not condone their wrongdoing. A mother cannot support the sin of her grown child. But she can still be loyal. She can be ready to advise them should the opportunity present itself. She can be prepared to be the first to welcome them back if and when they come to their senses and turn around. Mary never had to assist her firstborn son in waywardness as some of us have. But she was loyal right up until the end of his earthly life.

Indeed, she did.

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

Copyright © 1996-2008 by The Preacher's Study. Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

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