PASTOR’S MESSAGE FOR MOTHERS

If you ask people today who had the most positive influence on their religious life, most would answer “my mother”. This is according to the result of a survey by the Research Institute of Minneapolis. Mothers have the most important influence in the person’s prayer life.

As we observe Mother’s Day all these set me thinking of the mother’s love that God has for us. We often think of fatherhood of God because of things we find in the gospel, like phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, we say “our Father who are in Heaven” and we address God with “Our Father”. We usually think of the father as representing God, and how God relates to us.

But God also has an attribute of a mother’s love. In fact, motherhood maybe more descriptive of God’s love than fatherhood. God can best be explained like a mother.

The text from 1 Peter 2:1-10 is a statement about Christians as newborn babes who crave pure mother’s milk. As the mother feeds the new baby, milk from her body. God feeds us with the milk of the gospel of salvation. More than that God has fed us his own son and said “you have tasted the kindness of the Lord”

In ancient times, a Christian new convert received baptism and there was a ceremony in which a cup of water, a cup of milk with honey, and a cup of wine were given to a new convert. The milk and honey symbolizes the nourishing power of the gospel to help the new convert grow and mature in faith.

But the main ingredient of motherhood is not filling our need for food and drink. The main ingredient of motherhood is mother’s love, an undying love that will never quit, a mother’s refusal to quit loving when we don’t deserve love. It is loving us when we deserve rejection and condemnation.

Mothers know about loving a child no matter what the conditions and no matter how bad the situation is. To every mother, God has endowed a special capacity to love and endure trials. The woman in the home has always been a symbol of strength which should be manifested in her virtue of lasting endurance and sobriety of every crisis. For when a mother is easily carried away by the temper and impatience of her family then overcoming life’s anxieties  and obstacles becomes more elusive or an impossible reality. And if a woman is bereft of firm trust and fails to uphold the virtue of humble endurance, then certainly the home is doomed to fail and sorrows will soon multiply.

God loves us like a mother. God loves us with that same unending love that no matter how bad we were, God loves us, no matter how much we deserved condemnation and judgment. Even when we deserve death and pain and curse God keeps on giving, loving us and nurturing us. God’s love never quits. God’s love endures even in the face of rebellion just as mother’s love endures. God loves us like mothers do.  Happy Mother’s Day!

Pastor Romy