Proverbs 6:20: The Glory Of Motherhood

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. We pray that as we declare the word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word. And may the Lord be with you. G .K. Chesterton once said this, the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. And I think that that's right, but I actually think that it doesn't go far enough.

The Glory of Godly Motherhood Beyond Cultural Slogans

I think the truth that the scriptures proclaim about godly motherhood is more significant and deeper and even better than that. If I had to rearrange what G .K. Chesterton said, I would say the hand that catechizes the cradle shapes eternity.

And this is incredibly important because in a world that mocks true biblical feminine strength, that celebrates the sterilization of the womb, that rejoices at the death of the fruit of her body, that treats motherhood and biblical femininity like it is a detour from her self-actualization and fulfillment, the Bible speaks a word that I believe we need now more than ever.

Today, I don't wanna talk only about the honoring of mothers, which is the fifth commandment, and you must honor your mother even if she is not a great mother. But I wanna build on that to say, what does it look like for a woman to have a glorious motherhood?

What does motherhood in its heights and in its glory look like? That's what I want us to talk about today. And we will do that from Proverbs 6, 20. And I just wanna say how grateful I am for the word of God and for God's providence.

Do you know what God's providence means? It means his sovereignty in action. So now I just gave you another word I need to define. What is sovereignty? Sovereignty is that God is in control. So how God's control, his power, and his ability intersect in our daily lives is providence.

So for instance, I am an expositional preacher. I preach verse by verse through the Bible. And the very next verses are about the adulterous woman. And I said to myself this week, Proverbs 6, 24, well, the Lord has chosen this passage for us on Mother's Day.

And I will be faithful. But then I looked at the very passage that I preached last week. And right in the center of it, in verse 20, is this glorious small little phrase about motherhood. And I was so thankful to the Lord that he put that there.

Not just so that I don't have to preach the adulterous woman this week, but so that we actually can start talking about a positive vision for what makes motherhood glorious. So today, I want us to look at that.

The text says this, do not forsake the teaching, that word there is Torah, Torah, of your mother. On this morning, I want us to recover a biblical vision for glorious motherhood. I want us to see her, not as the world sees her, as a tired, trapped, undervalued, put on the shelf of the home, kept away from the world, suppressed even, but I wanna see her in all of her splendor, crowned, commissioned, and radiant with covenant glory.

I wanna see woman as God intended her to be through the lens of motherhood. And I wanna see how God advances his kingdom.

Through the womb.

I wanna see how God cultivates his kingdom at the bedside and at the cradle. And I wanna see how God equips his kingdom through her particular feminine, glorious teaching. So if you will, turn with me to Proverbs 6, verse 20.

We are going to read the entire passage that we read last week for context, then we'll pray, and then we will dive in. So this is the word of the Lord. My son, observe the commandments of your father, and do not forsake the teaching of your mother.

Bind them continually on your heart. Tie them around your neck. When you walk about, they will guide you. When you sleep, they will watch over you. And when you awake, they will talk to you. For the commandment is a lamp, and the teaching is a light, and reproof for discipline are the ways of life.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you. We thank you for the way that you have designed the cosmos around the family. How in Genesis 1, 28, out of all the things that you made good, you said very good when Eve was joined to Adam.

You said very good at the fruitful, multiplying family. And you said very good at the commission given to the family, which is to rule over, subdue the world, and fill it with image bearers, who will then fill your world with the glory of God.

Your very good plan involves godly, faithful, healthy, holy father, mother, and children. And Lord, I pray that as we stand upon the word of God, that we would no longer, as a church, be conformed to culture, but we would be the ones conforming it to the vision of scripture.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. The first thing I wanna talk about is the glory of her teaching. Solomon says, do not forsake the teaching of your mother. And again, in Hebrew, this word is Torah. This doesn't mean a command, it doesn't mean a suggestion, it doesn't mean that kind of situation where mom tells the children what to do and the children don't listen until the dad says,.

What are you doing?

This word Torah means law of God. It's not a suggestion, it's revelation, it's not helpful advice from mom or funny anecdotes from mother or things that we can simply overlook because she has a less threatening voice than dad.

It's the law of God. It's instruction for life and direction from God. In this way, the godly mother, and I'm not talking about all mothers at this point, I'm talking about the godly mother, the one who is right in the centrality of who God called her to be, the one who is doing what God called her to do, that woman carries the law of God on her nips.

And when she speaks that way, she cannot and should not and ought not ever be forsaken. When a mother speaks the word of God, she speaks the law of God. When she communicates his word, she's speaking at the very heights of her feminine station and what she was made to do.

She was made to receive the commands from Adam and make them living in her home. And in that way, she is greater than any king or any pope. The pope claims at times to speak ex cathedra, and yet she, when she speaks scripture, actually speaks the law of God to her people.

Not platitudes, but precepts, because she's speaking God's word. Now, the expectation here is that not everything mother speaks is Torah. It must actually align with scripture. The biblical expectation for womanhood, the purpose for which woman was made is that she would teach in such a way that her teaching is synonymous with the word of God, whatever she teaches.

And that does not mean that she has a theology degree. It doesn't mean that she's independently a theologian or that all she ever does is read from a systematic theology. But what it means is that everything she does, whether it's the food that she makes for her family, or whether it's the ways that she serves in her home, everything must be infused with biblical fidelity.

And it must, in her actions, in her life, in her love, in her care, it must scream the law of God. Again, this is not her doing a homeschool study on A .A. Hodges' four-volume commentary. This is her living both verbally and visibly and physically and with beauty in such a way that not only her lips declare the law of God, but her life declares the law of God.

She teaches her children the law in the way that she disciplines them in love. She teaches her children the law of God in the way that she sings psalms at the table and as she's folding laundry, even if it's off-key.

She teaches when she opens up her Bible at the breakfast table and shows her children who her Savior is. And when she confesses her sins in front of her children, she's showing to them how to approach this God with joy coming to the throne of grace.

She doesn't just teach theology, she embodies theology. She is theology in its most living form. She is theology with a sweet-smelling fragrance. And in that, she is the one who is forming and molding and shaping the little hearts that will shape the future.

Motherhood isn't just a ministry of maintenance. It is a mission of accomplishing the dominion of the world. Because as she shapes new little daughters and sons in the teaching, the Torah, where she's teaching them to love and worship God and love his word, she is actually forming the future.

Men, we go out and we procure resources and she makes them living. We go out and get a paycheck and she makes it into an economy. And what a stupid lie it is from our culture to say that a woman finds her value in going out into the world to compete with men.

What a silly, stupid degradation of her glory that that is. And I'll say it this way. The devil does not fear a butch lesbian feminist in work boots and a YouTube platform. The devil does not fear a CEO woman type or a politician wicked in all her ways in a pantsuit.

He fears a woman with a Bible and her family and a commitment to her God. That is dangerous to the world, not those other perversions of biblical femininity. To reject a woman's role is to accept cultural suicide because what we're doing is we're, have you ever heard the phrase to cut off your nose to spite your face?

What we're doing in promoting the death of biblical femininity is actually, is we're trying to preserve some kind of lie in the present in order to destroy our future. That's what we're doing. We're cutting off our nose to spite our face.

What makes a woman glorious is her commitment to her God and the realm by which God has given her to bring her feminine Torah and that is in her home. That's why Paul says in Titus 2 .5 that she is made to be a worker in the home.

The word actually is oikos ergos. It's Paul taking two words, worker and home and shoving them together in the most awkward Greek that he could invent.

It's not even a real word.

He put them together to make you stop, make you pause and say, huh. If you were a Greek reader, you would have been like, that's interesting. It's kind of like the Germans when they, the word for roller skates is wheelie shoes.

Did you know that?

That's what it is.

The Germans are kind of like Paul in that way. They're putting two words together that you're just like, I get what it means but that's a little awkward. In the same way that gasoline actually brings the engine to rumbling when it's in the tank.

But if it's sitting beside the tank, it does nothing. Take the woman out of her home and you've crucified her telos and her purpose and she loses her ability to bring great glory to her home or at least greatly is diminished.

Her home is her cathedral. Her home is where she brings her law and liturgy to life for children when caring for them. Every faithful mother is building a cathedral, one commandment at a time in the soul and life of her family.

And in that sense, she's bringing life to her family when she rebukes them for their sinfulness and waywardness in her feminine way. Hell trembles when a mother prays and has submitted herself to the Lordship of Christ.

Hell trembles when a mother opens her Bible and prays aloud in her children's hearing. She is potent and she is powerful and not in competing with men but in being who she was made to be. Don't miss the distinction here.

There is a distinction. The Bible doesn't androgynize male and female. It says that the father brings mitzvah. The father brings discipline. Mitzvah is a kind of binding of the law to you. So there's power and there's discipline there.

The mother brings Torah. She brings nurturing instruction. She brings formation to the soul. She brings life with the law. Her teaching gives warmth and brings both peace and harmony to a home if she is rooted in the Word of God.

And many children, the first theologian that they will ever hear is not Abraham Kuyper and it is not John Calvin. It is mom in the living room of her home. The first echo of Eden on their ears will be through the feminine voice of their mother and she will teach them how to live for God through lullabies that become her liturgy and through her faithful presence that communicates so much.

Her work doesn't just raise kids. She's forging kingdoms. The government may never thank her for that. The culture may never notice her for that, but heaven will never forget her and the earth will never be the same because of her for that.

You think about even the way that the tabernacle was designed. You have the outer courtyard where everyone could see and then as you go deeper into the tabernacle, things become more precious. A woman at home out of the spotlight and doing her faithful duty is not less than.

In fact, if you think about it from a tabernacle analogy, the glory actually becomes more concentrated the more it moves deeper in. That's why the woman is called the glory of man, not because she's inferior to man, because she is the glory of the glory, a more concentrated dose, a potent, powerful representative that if we get biblical womanhood wrong, then we ruin actually our future.

In that sense, Solomon is not telling us just to appreciate her. He's not telling us just on this day to take her out to her favorite restaurant and get her her favorite campuchana torta, for instance.

It's not just saying to frame her wisdom in nostalgia and then move on. It's actually telling us to the degree that she declares God's word, you cannot and you must not forsake her. I think about my own mother.

Love you, Mom, if you're listening. My mom was not a perfect mother as any of your mothers were not perfect mothers. But you know the thing that I remember about my mom? It was not her mistakes necessarily and it was not her idiosyncrasies.

I remember that my mom told me at 10 years old that I needed to read my Bible. And she sent me off to my room as hyperactive ADHD kid that I was bouncing off the walls. She gave me a Bible and she said, I want you to read three chapters and then come back and talk to me about it.

And then the next day and then the next day and before I knew it, I was halfway through the Old Testament. And then at the end of that year, she had me on a year long Bible reading plan but she didn't tell me.

And by the end of the year, she had me read the entire Bible. I finished at 11 years old. And now I can quibble with my mother on the translation. It wasn't a good one. It was a paraphrastic translation and now I would say, Mom, that wasn't great.

You should have given me the ESV or KJV or something. But anyway, my point is, what I remember about my mom is she inculcated in me a desire to read the Bible. And that legacy continues to speak in my life.

So to the degree that a mother will actually give you, give her children God's word, the message becomes unforsakable. The message becomes eternal. The message will actually lead and last two generations.

When Solomon says, do not forsake the teaching of your mother, he's not giving us an optional command. He's not saying consider her teaching, appreciate it, frame it on the wall and forget it. He's saying, do not forsake it.

And he's saying Torah. So to the degree that mother gives her children, that is to the degree that it cannot be forsaken. And her words, as I said, just a second ago, echo into the generations. It doesn't die when you grow up.

It doesn't have an expiration sticker when you turn 18. A mother who gives her children the word of God will haunt her children until they repent and follow him. It will be the echo that becomes deafening until they come to the Lord and bow the knee to Christ.

And in that sense, a godly mother never retires. Her faithfulness ripples on through eternity in her children from one generation to the next and to the next and to the next. Ladies, make your teaching un-forsakable.

Make your teaching incapable of being forsaken. And the only way to do that is to make sure that your teaching is the word of God. It doesn't have to be verse by verse and that's all you ever speak, but make everything you do, whether you eat or whether you drink or whether you fold laundry or whether you make dinner or whether whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God so that in everything your children see, they see God's word permeating it.

And as you do that, you teach your children how to live like Christians, how to think like Christians, how to walk like Christians, how to feel and subdue your emotions like Christians, how to work like Christians and how to be conformed to the will of God in every circumstance like Christians.

And that is un-forsakable.

And why?

Because her teaching is not her own. Her teaching belongs to God. That's what makes a woman's teaching un-forsakable. Not because it is so attuned to her personality that and because she's so special that she can't be forsaken.

That's not true. Not true of anyone. What makes it un-forsakable is that it conforms to the will of God and to the word of God and to the law of God. That's what makes it un-forsakable. The best memorial that you can give your children is thus saith the Lord.

And children, the best memorial that you can give your mother is not a $200 lunch after church and it's not a note and it's not even a poem. It's not one of those greeting cards that you paid $5 for. Good for you.

You should do that, I guess, and make Hallmark rich. Sorry, you hear my love for these companies. The best memorial you can build as a child and as an adult is to imitate your mother in her obedience to God.

To honor her is to honor God. God says, honor your mother.

Honor your father and mother.

That's great.

But if you had a mother that gave you the word of God, the greatest thing you can do is imitate her in that. The best way I honor my mother today is by sitting down as a 41-year-old man and reading my Bible like she taught me to when I was 10 years old.

That's the best way I keep her legacy alive because that is the best part of her legacy to me. Not the sweet tea, not the biscuits and gravy, and my mom didn't really do gravy well. My mom one time made a pot of gravy and if you ever have seen it, it was too much flour and it looked like a gravy-shaped basketball by the end of it and we just decided to go out to eat.

The best part of my mother's legacy though is that she pointed me to scripture and that's worth imitating. Mothers, build your teaching, build your life. And what is your teaching? It's not just when you sit down and you communicate something.

Your teaching is your life, bringing all of your life to bear in your home. What is that? Make sure that it points to the word of God. Make sure that it points to his gospel. Don't teach your personality, teach his precepts.

Don't raise them to have your peculiarities. Raise them to love his word. Raise them to read it, to memorize it, to speak it, to sing it, to pray it. Show them how to repent, show them how to obey, show them how to worship, show them how to have that kind of joy that Paul talks about in Titus 2 when he says that the wife is the lover of her husband and the lover of her children and the word that he uses there is not sacrificial.

There's two words that I'd like to point out to you. There's a lot of Greek words for love. There's agape and there's phileo. Phileo, in Titus 2, the woman is not told to give agape to her husband and agape to her children.

Why?

She already does it. She sacrifices, that's what women do.

My wife, I can't tell you how many times.

Dealing with my foolishness has went and sacrificed for me, went and did something kind for me, made a sandwich with a begrudging smile on her face because she's sacrificing. Women do that naturally. Men are told to agape your wives because we don't do that naturally.

We're not as sacrificial as women are. So that's where we're commanded to repent of our selfishness and our compartmentalized thinking and to remember to sacrifice for our wives. Women are commanded to phileo their husbands and their families, which means to bring a kind of joy and a friendliness and a beauty.

Phileo is the kind of playful, joyful love that is shared between best friends. She is going to sacrifice in her home. What Paul is saying, bring a joyful, playful, fun love because the woman, and I think this is what Paul's getting at, the woman is the one who brings life to obedience.

She's the one who makes it living. She's the one who saturates her home with culture and makes it alive. And in that way, a woman can tear down or build up her home like no one else. Solomon does not say for us just to remember, he tells us to replicate.

He tells us to act out the things that our mother has taught us where she has spoken with either the word of God on her lips or the word of God on her life, to remember and to replicate that. That's the second thing.

The third thing, well, it's the same thing, imitating her. Our calling is not just to preserve memories of our mother, but our call is to wear what she gave us, to walk in what she gave us and for us to transfer it to the next generation.

We're to walk on the path that she paved and culture despises this. I saw a commercial last night and it's supposed to be funny, but it infuriated me. It's an insurance commercial and the tagline is don't become your parents.

And there's this guy who now is a homeowner who now dresses with high water pants and he's standing at the gas pump and he's being awkward and it's don't become your parents. It's this way of mocking your father and your mother and saying, don't do that.

But isn't that the point?

That if we have godly parents, that's exactly who we should wanna be? If you have a godly father, wouldn't you want two men become like him? If you have a godly mother, wouldn't you want to become like her?

Daughters, wouldn't you want to embody her glorious feminine character in the way that she perseveres under trials and prays to the father and brings her joyful sacrifice in the home? Sons, wouldn't you wanna marry women that if your mother is faithful to the Lord, that wouldn't you wanna marry women who look like her?

And mothers, what do we give our children? We have to recognize this. Your sons are going to end up marrying women who look and act like you. So what kind of you are you giving them? And what kind of woman are you probably helping them marry one day based off of the imitation of you?

And what kind of daughters are you gonna raise up for future men? To have as their wives based off of the imitation of you. And there's plenty of grace here because none of us, none of us are perfect and all of us have fallen short.

And you know what? The Bible never talks about obedience as being a future-oriented thing or even a past thing that shackles you with shame. The Bible talks about obedience as today is today. You may have failed a million times, but today is the day to repent.

Today is the day to come to the throne of grace. Today is the day to begin modeling for your children the kind of woman that Scripture calls for. For your sons, one day, the kind of wives that they ought to marry.

For your daughters, the kind of women that they ought to become as pillars in their home. Today is the day. And it's not perfection, it's direction. Where are you aimed at? If you're aimed at anything other than Christ, you are not giving your children a legacy, you're giving them something else.

And maybe you say to yourself, I didn't have that as a, I didn't have a mother like that. Mother's Day is a hard day. In some ways, I've always appreciated being an expositional preacher because I don't have to preach on Mother's Day, a Mother's Day sermon.

Because there's so many different stories in this room. There's men and women who've had wonderful, godly mothers who gave them a legacy of faithfulness. And then there's men and women in this room who had really painful and really hard and really broken homes that you came out of.

And you can look at it and say, there's almost nothing that I would imitate. I understand. To the degree that you can imitate your mother, imitate her, always honor her because the Lord commands it. And if you have nothing at all whatsoever of virtue that you can look to in your mother to say, yeah, I would imitate that, then the Lord has many mothers that he can give you to imitate.

There's many women in this congregation that you could look to and say, that's a godly woman. The Lord is gracious. And maybe, just maybe, your job and your family is to start a new legacy that has never existed.

Maybe your job is to give your daughters and your sons something that you never had. Maybe your job is to begin a legacy of faithfulness. We prayed earlier for parents who don't know the Lord.

Okay.

Then your family starts with you. The legacy of faithfulness of Christ and his gospel starts with you. And you're not gonna do it perfectly, but do it faithfully and do it ardently and do it to the glory of God.

Because what we're seeing here in this passage is that faithfulness in the home actually produces legacies. And that's where I wanna end. All of us one day are going to see our mothers and our fathers and ourselves die and pass away.

Because we are not, at least at this point in redemptive history, in our incorruptible body. Every year, I feel it more and more. I was swinging a golf club yesterday and I walked back to the car like an 80 year old man.

If you saw the way that I swing a golf club, you would realize probably why that is the case. There's a lot of pent up energy coming out of that swing. But your mother will one day pass away. Maybe you're here today and your mother's already passed away.

This holiday is painful for that reason. I think of our sister Pam. Pam is in the hospital with her mother right now on Mother's Day. And if her mother were to pass away today, then that would almost certainly define how she views this day.

But here's what I wanna remind us of. Though her body may die and though all of our mother's bodies will die, what lives on is the body of teaching that she gave us that pointed us to Christ. The womb is her most effective pulpit.

The cradle is her little congregation. And her legacy preaches long after she is gone. So women, ladies, fight to give your children that. Repent when you fall short. Be joyful because that's the legacy that you're going to give to your generations.

And men, men do everything you can to support her in that work. If you have to work two jobs to keep her in that home, work until you fall over and then wake up and do it again. Put her in a place where she can bring glory and where she can bring generations.

Fight because you're made of dust. Fight for her. Work so that she can do that work because that work is going to directly affect your lineage and your legacy. So if someone has to be broken, let it be you.

Fight so that she can be home to do that work and give your children maybe perhaps what you didn't have. And do it to the glory of Jesus Christ who did that work faithfully for us. And that while we were yet sinners, He died for us.

He sacrificed for us and gave us what we did not deserve. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that in your gospel even we see the heart of a mother who for the love for her own children would sacrifice herself.

And Lord, in your sacrifice for your own children, for your people, you died. To give us life, to give us a legacy, to give us a standing, to put your word in our hearts. Lord, thank you for the office of mother.

Thank you for the station that she occupies at the center of reality. Thank you for the power that she has in shaping the future. And Lord, I pray for our ladies that you would protect them, that you would invigorate them, that you would pour out your spirit onto them, that you would rejuvenate them, excite them, give them grace for themselves.

Lord, often the most painful aspect of womanhood is just not even giving yourself grace. Lord, help our ladies to do this work well. Help our grandchildren to be blessed by her faithfulness. And help our men to work and to labor so that she can do her work.

Lord, we thank you. We praise you. And we thank you for every mother in this room. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. If you will stand with me as we continue and as we sing.