God's Gift of Motherhood

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I invite you to remain standing and turn in your Bibles with me to the 139th psalm.
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Psalm 139, verses 13-16 will be our passage to begin our study today.
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For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
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I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
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Wonderful are your works.
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My soul knows it very well.
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My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
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Your eyes saw my unformed substance.
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And in the book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me when as yet there was none of them.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your word.
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I pray even now as I seek to give an exposition of the word that you would keep me from error as I am a fallible man incapable of error and I pray for the sake of my conscience and the sake of the people that hear my voice that you would keep me from that.
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Lord, I pray that you would help me to articulate the truth of this passage and the others we will look at as well as the gospel this morning.
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I pray, Lord, that those who have come who are believers will be encouraged and edified and challenged and I pray that those who have come today who are not in Christ that they would recognize the need for repentance and faith and that you would use it, Lord, to save their soul.
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I pray all this in Jesus' name, Amen.
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Childbirth is one of the most exciting and scary experiences that we get to have in this life.
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As many of you know, as I'm sure all of you know, my wife is currently pregnant with our fifth child.
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So many of you, several of you, are also looking forward to new children this year.
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And what I have come to find out that as this being our fifth child, our third pregnancy, Jennifer has become quite the expert about what happens during pregnancy.
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And every week she tells me, hey, this week the baby's this or this week the baby's that.
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And she's always very excited about the growth that's happening.
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And this week, as I was studying for my message, I began to just sort of look into the science of of childbirth.
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And it really is an amazing thing.
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From the moment the baby is conceived, it has a newly established genetic code that is unique and distinct from its mother or its father.
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It's absolutely a new life from the moment of conception.
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In the first four weeks of the baby in the womb, it begins to develop a spinal cord, a nervous system, a heart and lungs.
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And by the eighth week, the baby's face is starting to form eyes, ears and a mouth.
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The arms are already moving.
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The brain is already forming and a heartbeat is detectable through an ultrasound.
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We had a little bit of a scare early on in this pregnancy and Jennifer knew she was pregnant.
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And we went to the doctor and he couldn't find a heartbeat and he prepared us for the worst, sent us to the hospital.
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And when we got to the hospital, they had a machine that's much more powerful than the one he had in his office and they were able to find a heartbeat.
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But what she said was, well, the reason why the doctor couldn't find a heartbeat in the office is because she's only six weeks along.
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But it was amazing to me that even at six weeks, a heartbeat is because she showed me when with their very powerful sonogram machine, a little flicker of light and it was a beating heart.
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By 12 weeks, which is the end of the first trimester, the baby can move her fingers and toes, the fingers themselves even have fingerprints, the baby can smile, frown, suck and swallow.
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And at this point, it can even be seen whether or not it is a he or a she.
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At 16 weeks, the baby is rolling over in the amniotic fluid, has a strong heartbeat, is about six inches long, even beginning to have fingernails and toes.
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At 20 weeks, the heartbeat of the baby can be heard without a sonogram machine, but with an ordinary stethoscope.
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The baby sucks her thumb, can hiccup, has hair, eyelashes, eyebrows, all those things.
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And at 24 weeks, the eyes are open.
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The ability to grip and hold things is present and her bowels have even begun to collect waste.
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And at 28 weeks, she's 16 inches long and she's beginning the process of participating or practicing to breathe.
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She's adding body fat, body fat and beginning to prepare for the upcoming arrival.
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At 32 weeks, she's responding to sounds.
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She's four to five pounds and may even be able to now move into the birthing position.
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And between 36 and 38 weeks, she's at full term.
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Skin is slightly less wrinkled than it had been before and is steady gaining immunities from her mother to prepare for the exposure to the outside world.
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And the sheer science of that is amazing.
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If you look at the photographs that are now being able to be seen from within the womb, it's absolutely astonishing.
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But mothers understand that that is more than a scientific process.
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It is a process of the heart.
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It is a process of emotions.
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From the moment she realizes that her body has begun this journey, she begins a unique experience of connection with her baby and herself, which extends well beyond the time that the baby is delivered.
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She's the first to feel the fluttering movement of new life.
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She's the first to whisper love, words that no one else can hear.
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And she's the first voice the baby will be able to recognize.
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And in this sense, motherhood is a miraculous and special gift from Almighty God.
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Today, we celebrate Mother's Day and motherhood, and it might surprise you to know that this is a relatively recent holiday.
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Mother's Day was never celebrated by Abraham Lincoln or George Washington.
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Mother's Day was not part of the American tradition until the early 1900s.
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It was in 1908 that it was first celebrated and not until 1914 that it was put into the National Registry as one of the national holidays of our country.
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Of the several holidays we celebrate in America, Mother's Day is among those that have a special biblical significance, not because like Christmas or Easter, they celebrate a particular time in the life of Jesus Christ, but rather because the Bible tells us that we are to honor our father and our mother.
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And so we have this day, and albeit it's not a biblical holiday, there is no feast of motherhood or anything in the scripture, but there's a command that sort of rises above by being placed in the Ten Commandments, rises above the normal sort of mundanity of life and says, here is something that you are to do always, and that is to honor your parents.
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Unfortunately, in our world today, the value of motherhood and the importance of this role has never been more diminished than it is now.
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It has never been more put asunder than it is today.
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Some have even gone as far as to say that we shouldn't celebrate Mother's Day, we shouldn't celebrate Father's Day, because we shouldn't distinguish between mothers and fathers.
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There should be no distinction between what a father does and what a mother does.
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In fact, one school in Canada made news this past week, it was an elementary school, made news because it announced that it would no longer allow any celebration of Mother's Day in the classroom, because they did not want to offend children from non-traditional households that may not have a mother and a father, or perhaps have two fathers or something like that.
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But the Bible unashamedly establishes the nobility and the distinction of both the role of the father and the mother.
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And that's important to consider because a lot of times we are accused of being a patriarchal movement.
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Christianity is accused sociologically as being part of the great evil patriarchy.
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And I don't know if you've ever heard of that in the news or anything like that.
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It's a social argument that everything's about men and everything's about the man and women are put aside and put asunder and put away as being unimportant.
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But the reality is the Bible gives a distinction to honor father and mother, not just one, but both, and not the same, but distinct from one another.
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Beloved, do you understand that fathers are not mothers? Isn't it weird that I even have to say that? Fathers have a different role than mothers and mothers have a different role than fathers and they're distinct and they're different.
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And so we can distinguish and we can make something for a father, we make something for a mother, we can say something about both as having a role because the Bible focuses a distinction upon mothers.
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And so today that's what we're celebrating.
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It's OK.
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And I know some people, especially in the reformed tradition, get upset because I'm not doing a I'm not staying in our verse by verse study.
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I'm allowing the culture to to move my my preaching into somewhat of a topical message today.
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And if there's nothing more evil in the reformed church than a topical sermon.
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And so I do I do ask for your at least a little bit of grace, because.
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When I see the Bible focusing on a role of a mother, when I see the Bible focusing on a role of the importance and value of motherhood, it makes me understand that it's not wrong to talk about this.
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It's not wrong to set aside a day.
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The only thing I say is wrong about Mother's Day is I think it should be every day.
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I mean, I don't see I don't see why I understand it's sort of like a birthday or anything else.
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We take a special day to give a gift or something, but every day our mother should be honored and every day our mothers should have value in our lives.
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So today, what I want to do, I want to outline a few truths regarding motherhood that we find in the Bible.
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As I said, this is a somewhat of more of a topical message, but we are going to be looking at scripture.
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And I want to begin with what I've already mentioned, and that is the from the Ten Commandments.
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And this is my first point today, the Bible has ten commandments and the fourth commandment is to honor your father and your mother.
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And we know the command to honor our parents is there and it continues on not only throughout the Old Covenant, but into the New Covenant as well as well.
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Jesus honored his mother throughout her life.
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We don't know much of the role between Jesus and his father, but we do know that Joseph cared for Jesus.
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We believe that he likely passed away at some point after he was 12 years old, simply because he's not mentioned anywhere else in the text after that.
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However, we know that Jesus's mom not only lived throughout his life, but into his adulthood and even at his death, Jesus cared so much for his earthly mother.
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And I know much, much ado has been made about this in the Roman Catholic tradition, but I think too much.
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But there is an important part of what Jesus did when he's on the cross.
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One of the seven sayings of Jesus on the cross, you know how hard it is to talk from a cross, you're hanging by nails and your lungs are being filled with fluid and every breath you take is closer and closer to the last breath that you're going to take.
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And it's a it's a very grim and difficult way to die.
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And yet Jesus made statements and he did so by having to put his feet on the nail that was through his feet and press the weight down upon that nail so as to lift the weight off of his chest so that he could breathe in and speak.
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And one of the things Jesus said through excruciating pain was, Mother, behold, thy son.
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And she looked at John, John, Jesus's disciple, and he said, Son, behold, thy mother.
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Basically, what Jesus was doing was saying, this woman was under my care, but I'm dying.
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Now she's under your care.
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Now you're going to take care of her as I did.
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What a what an awesome honoring of a mother by our Savior.
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In Exodus chapter 20, verse 12, we are given the command in the Dakilog, Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord is giving you.
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Some people have questions about why that particular command comes with a promise.
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Because it says, honor your father and mother that your days may be long.
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And you say, now, wait a minute, does that mean if if you don't honor your parents, you're going to die young? Well, there is a sense in which you could take a crass literalism and say in the Old Testament, if you dishonored your parents, they could have you stoned.
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And so that could very well be the interpretation of that text.
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By the way, young people, just keep that in mind that there was a time in history where God said that if a child dishonored their parents or his parents, that child was under the condemnation of death.
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But I don't believe that's what the text is referring to here.
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I think that the honoring of the mother and the father here relates to the covenant that God had made with Israel and that with every successive generation, there would be a new revival of their relationship with God.
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And part of our relationship with God is honoring our parents.
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And what is one of the things that we see that is most dishonoring to a parent is when a child abandons the faith in which they were raised.
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And what happens to the nation of Israel when the people abandon their faith? They no longer live long in the land.
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They are put out into exile.
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The northern kingdom is exiled to Assyria in 722.
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The southern kingdom is exiled to Babylon in 586 B.C.
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We know of these things.
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You see, I want to tell you something, children.
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If you're here today, if your parents are raising you in the Lord, you are under a blessing of God just being in their house.
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You realize the Bible says that even if a person is married to an unbeliever, if that person is a believer, they sanctify their spouse and their children.
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It doesn't mean they save them.
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You can't save your spouse.
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If your spouse is an unbeliever, you can pray for them, you can present Christ to them, and you can live out Christ before them, but you can't save them.
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But what you do is by your influence in the home, you sanctify the home.
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You sanctify your children through your faith.
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There's a special blessing.
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If you're raised in a house that loves the Lord, there is a special blessing for that child.
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If that is you today, if your mother loves the Lord, if your father loves the Lord, you are blessed.
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You may not even realize how blessed, but you are blessed.
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So we are told, honor our mother.
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What does the word honor mean? The word honor in the Hebrew is kabed.
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Kabed means, literally means to be heavy.
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That sounds kind of weird, because why would you say be heavy? Well the word heavy, the kabed word in Hebrew dialect could mean be heavily good or heavily bad.
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You ever hear somebody tell you something and say, man, that's heavy.
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Now I know that's a modern dialect, and maybe I'm stretching the linguistics here a little bit, but you understand if somebody comes to you with something bad, you say, that's really heavy.
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That's a lot to take.
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Well the same idea in Hebrew could be expressed to the good.
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You could be heavily bad and heavily good.
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And so the idea of honor was a heavy goodness or a heavy respect, a heavy reverence to the mother and to the father.
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It was a heaviness.
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It was a weightiness of reverence that is to be given to the father and to the mother.
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And I have a question for you, and this is a very important question, because some of you have asked me this question.
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And I hope that I've answered you well in the past, but I'm going to maybe answer it again today, because I've been asked, does the command to honor our father and our mother ever expire? You've heard that before? Have you ever heard somebody ask the question, do I still have to honor my father and my mother now that I am an adult? Well let me, I want to answer that.
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I see some of you shaking your head, and yes, like this of course.
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But let me talk about that, because it's important.
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Because generally, when somebody thinks of honoring your father and mother, the thing you're thinking of is obedience.
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And when you have small children, that's one of the ways they honor their parents, is through obedience.
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If, if, I hate to use you on the front row, so I'll pull you, and you know, if Christopher, hey Chris, if Christopher was told to do something by his mother, and he said, no, I'm not going to do that, then that would dishonor her, because he has a responsibility as a child to obey his parents.
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In fact, the Bible says in Ephesians 6, children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.
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Honor your father and mother.
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This is the first commandment with a promise.
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It actually uses this commandment to address obedience in children.
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So I can say to my child, if my child disrespects or disobeys my wife, I can say, not only have you broken the law of this house, and the rule of the house, and not only have you incurred the wrath of me, which is, you don't want that, you know, not only have you got my wrath, but now you've sinned.
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Because the Bible commands obedience for children to their parents, and if not, you're not honoring your parents.
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However, there does come a point in a child's life where he or she is no longer under the authority of the parent.
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Now, in America, we say the legal age is 18.
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The Bible doesn't say there's a specific age.
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What the Bible does point to as the distinction is generally marriage.
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It says, for this reason, a man shall leave his father, mother, and cleave unto his wife, the two shall become one flesh.
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That's the distinction of when the authority change happens.
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But ultimately, the key to all of this is there does come a point where the relationship between father and child, mother and child, changes to an understanding of now they have a responsibility to make their decisions.
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Now they have a responsibility of not necessarily obedience, but now they have a responsibility still of honor.
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Can you honor someone without being obedient to them? Yes, because, I mean, I love my dad, I love my stepmom, I love my mother, and they all can tell me what to do, but I ain't gotta listen.
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I can still love them, and I can still honor them, but I have now a responsibility toward God as an adult man, and my wife and I have a responsibility to one another first.
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I'll tell you this, one of the biggest problems in many marriages is when there's an outside person, and sometimes it is a parent who wants to exercise the same authority in the house that the mother and the father, the husband and wife, should exercise in that house.
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The father has a role as a leader in the house, the mother has a role as his helpmate, and together they are the authority in the home.
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Someone from outside may give advice, someone from outside may give a direction, but no one from outside has authority in that home.
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Y'all understand what I'm saying? Because this causes problems.
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I mean, I've sat in on many counseling sessions where there needed to be a third person, and it was mom or dad or someone else.
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So ultimately, my point in all this, can you honor your parent without necessarily having to give them obedience? In this sense, yes, because there comes a point where obedience is not the necessary part of honoring.
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So how do you honor them? How do you honor your parent? You honor your parent by demonstrating respect for them.
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You honor your parent by respecting not only them, but the name in which they have given you.
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You represent them as their child, and also you honor them as they age by providing unto them that which they provided unto you.
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You see, you came into this world with nothing.
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You were naked and unashamed.
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You had nothing.
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And they clothed you, and they bathed you, and they took care of you.
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And as they age, that relationship switches.
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And now you get to be the one who cares for them.
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You know, the Bible says that a person who does not care for his own is worse than what? An unbeliever.
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You know, the context of that is not your children.
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The context of that is your parents.
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If we don't care for our parents, we're worse than unbelievers.
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We have a responsibility.
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I really believe that.
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I believe that as my parents age, it's up to myself and my wife and my siblings to take care of them.
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Some parents don't want that, and I know pride can become strong, and I don't want to be taken care of.
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That's our job.
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We want to, because we love you.
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That is how the relationship changes, and that's how it goes from honoring as obedience to honoring as respect and love and care.
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So it never expires.
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Mind that.
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The command never expires.
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It simply changes with age.
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The second point I want to make today, that's my first.
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Mothers are to be honored.
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My second point today, and here I want to speak directly to mothers.
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Mothers are given a responsibility to teach.
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Mothers are given a responsibility, and I'll say, and an authority to teach.
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Now, I realize, and sometimes our churches, some people take issue with us because we don't believe in women elders.
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Because the Bible says that a woman is not to teach or have authority over a man in the assembly of God's people.
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First Timothy chapter 2 verse 12 says that very clearly, and it goes on to say that the elders should be the husband of one wife, the leader and head of his household.
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So the argument is whether or not a woman should be an elder, it's clearly biblical.
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However, that doesn't mean that a woman can't teach.
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Women do teach.
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And mothers are some of the greatest teachers that we have in the assembly because mothers have that role of influencing their children from the very earliest of age to the gospel and to the scriptures.
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Look at the book of Timothy, when Paul talks about Timothy and he talks about who had great influence on him as a child, right? Who was it? Your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice.
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These two women, his grandmother and his mother, had from birth taught him the holy scriptures.
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And so here is, and what else do we know about Timothy? His father was a Greek, didn't believe the word.
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But his mother and his grandmother taught him the word and he became one of the great pastors and missionaries of the early church.
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Mothers don't ever take an inability to be an elder as some type of a slight against God's call to you as a teacher.
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You have a role.
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In fact, we've already looked, earlier this morning I gave a gift and on that gift was Titus 2, 3, 4, and 5.
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Titus 2, 3, 4, and 5 says this, older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine.
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They're to teach what is good.
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And so train the young women, and it goes on to say what they're to train.
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To love their husbands, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, submissive to their husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
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But the key in here is that you're to teach and to train those who are the generations that have come after you.
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Understand this, nobody gets to retire from ministry.
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If you're older in the ministry, you have so much value because the younger people, the younger women need the older women to teach them.
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You have value.
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I know sometimes we feel like with age we get less valuable, but from a biblical perspective it's not true.
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With age, there's more value because that wisdom that you've earned through experience and pain, you now get to share.
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Charles Spurgeon said this, I am sure that in my early youth no teaching ever made such an impression upon my mind as the instruction of my mother.
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Neither can I see that to any child there can be one who will have such influence over the heart as the mother who has so tenderly cared for her offspring.
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He goes on to say never could it be possible for any man to estimate what he owes to a godly mother.
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To mothers, women, you have a role and it's a role of ministry.
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If you're a believing woman, you're one of two.
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You're a discipler or being discipled and sometimes you can be both.
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I know in my life I'm both.
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I have men who disciple me and I have men whom I disciple.
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Likewise women.
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Again, you will have women who teach you and women whom you teach.
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But there's value in that.
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Third and finally, mothers, and this is going to sound like it might sound strange so let me make sure I'm clear.
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My third point and I know these may seem kind of disjointed but they all deal with the same subject of motherhood.
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Mothers are not always the ones who give birth.
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In my opening today, I looked at Psalm 139 and I talked about when the Bible says God is making us in the womb and I talked about all the miracle things that happen during that nine month period.
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But beloved, there are women who are not part of our physical birth who still fill in the role of motherhood.
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There are adoptive parents, there are foster parents and you know what I love about the Bible? I love everything about the Bible but you know one of the things I love most about the Bible is the Bible makes a clear point to teach that adoption and physical birth give the same blessings.
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That adoption and physical birth create the same relationship.
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Do you know that that's not that way in Islam? If you study Islam, you will find that according to Sharia law, there is no legal way to adopt a child and make them your legal heir.
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It is considered forbidden.
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Now you can take a child in, you can care for that child but it cannot become your legal heir, however in scripture.
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Whereas in Islam, a child that is not a genuine heir can never become a true legal heir and in the Bible, the exact opposite is true.
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Adoption creates the same benefits for the adopted child as it does for the naturally born child.
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In fact the same, that role of adoption is what God uses to describe the relationship between him and his believers.
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He says that Jesus is his only, his monogamistos, the only begotten God, he is the only begotten son of God but we are his sons and daughters through what? Adoption.
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But what do we get to do through adoption? We get to call him Abba Father.
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We gain the relationship through adoption.
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So an adopted child biblically is just as much a genuine member of a family as is a naturally born child.
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But there are other parents who are significant, there are step parents.
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The Bible doesn't use the term step parent but it's in the Bible.
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The concept is there, probably the most obvious is that of Joseph.
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Joseph was not Jesus' physical father but he cared for him, loved him and took him as his own.
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A step father and a step mother can have great value.
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In fact a step parent can and often does have a profound influence on the growth of a child.
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Sometimes they can be the very means by which God leads them to faith.
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And I know you all know this but I wouldn't be in this church were I not a step son.
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As it was my step mother who brought me to this church as a young boy.
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And there are spiritual surrogates.
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A spiritual surrogate is a term for a woman, because we're talking about Mother's Day, I use this, a woman who in a motherly fashion nurtures young women in the faith as Titus tells us.
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Some women have mothers who are not believers and that makes it hard.
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But they have other women who have come into their life and in a mothering way have ministered to them as gospel parents and have loved them as mothers and fathers in the faith.
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You know what, one of the most precious parts of the scripture is when Timothy is told by Paul that you are my son in the faith.
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This doesn't mean some crass thing like we see where we call the priest father or something.
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That's not what Paul was identifying.
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He was saying I nurtured you, I brought you up and yes you have a real father, but I'm your father in the faith because you are my true son in the faith.
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I imagine there are women here today who look to others as their genuine daughters in the faith and some who look as mother figures in the church.
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So mothers are not always the ones who give birth.
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Motherhood is so much more than just that process.
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Though that process is powerful and though that process is miraculous, that process is only part of motherhood and motherhood is so much more.
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There's so much more that I could say and would like to say, but suffice it to say simply this, the importance of godly mothers cannot be overstated.
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And I encourage everyone who is here today, first, honor your mothers.
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Second, if you are a mother, remember your responsibility and authority as teachers in the home and teachers among other women, especially if God has given you the age wherein have you have gained wisdom and have something to share.
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And I encourage all who are mothers, even if you've not given birth, to recognize the value that God has placed you in the position that you are in.
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Happy Mother's Day to you all.
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May God bless you and may God help us to recognize and value his commandment to honor our father and our mothers.
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Let's pray.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your word.
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I pray that it has been truly preached and I pray, Lord, that we would look to the example of Christ and honoring his mother as something that we also can do today.
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I know that today is a difficult day, Lord, for so many, some who have lost, some who have experienced pain and turmoil in a family, some who have dealt with difficulty, Lord, and I just pray for ministry for them in their heart and soul today.
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I pray, Lord, that we would understand the great value that you have given motherhood.
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Lord, help us to cherish it and to understand the blessing therein.
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I pray this in Jesus name and for his sake.
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Amen.