A Legacy of Motherly Faithfulness

In this Mother's Day message, we turn to Exodus 2:1–10 and the story of Jochebed — a mother whose courage and trust in God changed the course of history. Her willingness to defy Pharaoh and entrust her son to God's providence points us forward to Jesus, who embodied that same courage and trust on the cross. Whether you are a biological mother or called to invest spiritually in others, this message is a reminder that faithful women have always played an essential role in God's saving work — and that your ordinary obedience matters more than you know.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

The sermon text reading for today is Exodus chapter 2, verses 1 through 10. And you can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page 82. Right by the beginning. But please listen as I read God's word. Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she couldn't hide him any longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. This is one of the Hebrew babies, she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you? Yes, go, she answered. So the girl went and got the baby's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you. So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, I drew him out of the water. Here ends the reading.

Pastor John Stromberg 1:54

My name is John, and I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood. If I have not yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do so this morning. I'd love to connect with you. I'll be out in the main foyer after the service, and I would love to just get to know you and meet you. As we come to these verses this morning, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer. For different women, it means different things. And Lord, we ask that as we think about that this morning, as we think about mothers and the women in our lives, we ask God that you would give us your grace. Lord, we ask that you would uh help us to see a picture of Jesus in the women of our lives, and that you would help us to leave here today with a greater sense of love and appreciation, both for the women and the mothers, as well as for your son Jesus. So we look to you for all this, and we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, as Dave mentioned earlier, today is Mother's Day, and in all 13 years of my pastoral experience, I have never done a dedicated Mother's Day message. And that is in part because I haven't been preaching on all of those Sundays, and in part because if you know me, you know that I'm a like a slight bit of a contrarian, and so I resist the urge to let Hallmark holidays determine what we do on Sunday morning. Uh but with that being said, today we are taking a break from the series that we have been in in the book of 1 Corinthians, and I'm doing my first ever Mother's Day message. And I'm doing this not because I feel compelled to recognize the modern holiday as it is, but because the Bible talks about the fact that women are amazing. So I'm just using Mother's Day as an excuse to talk about what the Bible has been talking about for thousands of years. Long before Mother's Day ever existed in our culture as it is today, the Bible has been talking about and has been promoting the dignity and the value and the worth and the essential role that women play, and particularly that mothers play in our world. So that's what we're gonna be thinking about today. Here's what I hope to accomplish. For the women who are here, my hope is that you leave here today feeling wildly encouraged by the unique and beautiful and really essential role that you play in our world. God has called some of you, women, to be biological mothers, and for even those who have not been called or have not yet been called to be biological mothers, each one of you are called to something we could call spiritual mothering. This is, I think, what uh Paul gets at in the letter that he wrote to Titus, where he says, Teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, and he goes on and says more things after this. But I think that Paul's vision here is that mothers and that women in general would be investing in the next generation of Jesus followers. And so whether you're a biological mother or you play some other mother type role, there is an application for you in all this. And my hope is that you leave here today encouraged and uh thankful for that unique role that God has called you to play. And for the men who might be thinking to themselves, okay, this is a good time for me to like tune out, because this is gonna be, you know, about mothers and not about me, uh, please don't tune out. And the reason is because uh what I hope for you is that you would leave here today filled with gratitude for the women that God has placed into your life. I hope that you leave with a renewed sense of thankfulness for the amazing women who are a part of this local church community. So let's uh turn to these verses in the book of Exodus, chapter two, and as we turn here, the first thing that we see that we can observe in this passage is we can see this. Uh, can you go back to the beginning of the sermon slides, please? As he gets there, the first thing that we see is Jacobed's example of faithful mothering. So first thing we see in these verses here today is Jacobed's Moses' mother, her example of faithful mothering. Now, there's a lot that we could say about her example from these verses. There's lots of different things we could draw out and pick out from this, but I want to spend just a few minutes exploring two of these character traits that we see in her. So the first is this that Jacobed is an example to us of courage. Jacobed is an example of courage, and we see this in that she defied the genocidal edict of Pharaoh. So let's just pull back for a moment and remember where this story that you just heard read fits into the larger story of the Bible. So if we read the end of the book of Genesis into the beginning of Exodus, what we see is that Abraham's descendants, who are the Hebrew people, they uh have moved from the land of Canaan and they're now living in Egypt. And it says that they were uh fruitful and they were multiplying and they were increasing in number, and God was causing them to be fruitful in so much of a degree that Pharaoh was afraid of them, that Pharaoh was paranoid about this quickly growing immigrant population. And so what he does is he commanded the Hebrew midwives who were in charge of delivering all these Hebrew baby boys that were being born into the world, he commands that these Hebrew midwives kill these baby boys as soon as they're born. And of course, these midwives say no, and they defied Pharaoh as they ought to have. And they come to him with all these excuses as to, well, why they can't kill these baby boys who are born. And so the next step that Pharaoh takes is he says, okay, we're just gonna take all the Hebrew baby boys and we're gonna throw them into the Nile River and drown them to death. So he sends out an edict that this was to be done. And this is this is the larger story in which this little story you heard read this morning fits. And I think it's it's so hard for us to really grasp, to truly understand the horror and the grief and the pain and the loss that the Hebrew people, especially these Hebrew women, are experiencing at this moment in their history. Like the Hebrew midwives that we read about in Exodus chapter 1, Jacobed, Moses' mother had the courage to say no to Pharaoh. Dina and I have been through the newborn phase twice. And one of the things that I find so amazing about this account of what uh Jacobed did here is that she kept a child hidden for three months. I don't know if you know this, but babies cry and they cry a lot. And they cry when they want, not when you want them to cry. Okay, so some of you know exactly what it's like to be in a public space, maybe like this, and you're holding a baby, and you can't just say to them, uh, please stop like we're in church now, can you please cry later? That's not how it works. They cry when they want, for as long as they want, as loud as they want. And Jacob had kept a child alive and hidden for a full three months of his life. And this was done at huge risk to herself. Think about this. If if Pharaoh was so paranoid that he was going to have all these baby boys killed, what do you think he would do to one of these Hebrew mothers who defied him? So what she did in preserving and keeping Moses alive for those three months was a remarkable act of courage. And that's the first thing that we can see, uh, that we can see modeled in her is that she's an example of courage. But the second thing we can see modeled here in her life is that she is an example of trust. She's an example of trust. We see that in that she entrusted her child's life to the providential hand of God. So she defied Pharaoh, kept this baby boy alive for three months, and it says that when she couldn't keep it hidden any longer, she got a basket, and she took that basket and covered it in tar and pitch and these things to make it watertight, and then she put her son in this basket, and she put him in the reeds along the edge of the Nile River, and she left him there. Now, ironically, she put her baby boy exactly where Pharaoh wanted her to. She just didn't do it the way that he wanted her to do it. So she puts her son in the river, and one of the things that I think is easy for us to lose sight of is the fact that this is a picture of Jacobed acting out of complete and utter desperation. She's kept this child alive for as long as she can and kept him hidden for as long as she can. And now she puts him in a basket and puts him in the weeds. And now what? You know, the the question is, what's the next play? What's your next move, Jacobed? What's your end goal with this? What are you gonna do? If you think about this logically, this doesn't make any sense what she's doing. But that's kind of the point, is that she's not acting logically. She's acting on instinct, and she's acting out of love for her child like any good mother would. And so she does the only thing she can think of at the time is I'm gonna put him in this basket and find a way to hide him in the Nile. Simply, she just said, No, I will not hand my son over to be killed. I will not hand my son over to die. Her only option was to put him in this little makeshift boat and entrust him to the providential hand of God. It's the only thing she can do. All she can do is let go of the life of her son and entrust him to God. And that's what she does. So she's this amazing example of both courage and trust. And these these character traits that we see modeled in Jacobet here are required for all kinds of mothering. Every kind of mothering requires this sort of courage and trust. Both biological and spiritual mothering. It takes courage to bring a child into this world in the first place. In part because this world is a messed up place. And you can be certain of this that you are introducing your child into a world where they will experience pain and difficulty and hardship, and you have no idea what awaits them in the future. It takes courage to bring a child into this world because you have no idea what future you are opting them into even long after you're gone. It takes courage to do the right thing as a mother, right? To mother and to parent in a way that maybe is uh goes against the grain of the culture around us and the beliefs and the values that are uh that we're told or expected that we would put into the lives of our children. It takes courage to raise your child in a way that they don't understand or appreciate right now in this moment. It takes courage to parent for their good, not just for their in-the-moment happiness. It takes trust because of how little you can control your child's life. And the older your child gets, the less control you have over them. The older they get, you cannot control where they go, you cannot control what friends they choose, what choices they make, you can control none of it. And so biological mothering requires both courage, it requires trust, but so does spiritual mothering. It takes courage to engage in transparent and self-giving relationships with others. It takes courage to be honest and to sometimes say hard things to people that you love because there's a risk of the relationship being damaged. It requires trust. You can, like your own child, you can pour yourself into someone and you can give them all the grace and all the encouragement and all the coaching and all the wise counsel you have, and you can control none of what they do with those things. You can give them the best coaching and wisdom, and they say, no thanks, I'll do it my own way. And all you can do in that spiritual mothering role is entrust that person to the providential hand of God. In these verses, Jacobed provides us with this example of faithful mothering, is what she shows us. And we should, as we have been already this morning, we should look to her example and we should look to her life, and we should do everything we can to emulate her courage and to emulate her trust in God. But we can't become so narrowly focused on trying to be like Jacobed that we miss the one to whom her life points. Because this story ultimately is not about Jacobed. This story ultimately is not about Moses, it's not about Miriam, his sister. So, yes, we have to see Jacobed's example of faithful mothering, but we also have to see the one to whom Jacobed's life points. Her life points ultimately past herself to someone else. What we come to find out as we read the rest of this story and the rest of the book of Exodus, and then the rest of the book of the rest of the Bible, is that Jacobed's boy, this son that was born to her in this moment, and that she hid for those three months and then handed over to Pharaoh's daughter to raise, Jacobed's boy was the one who would deliver God's people out of Egypt. That's who that little boy was. And thousands of years later, an even greater deliverer would come. Jesus, his life and ministry was characterized by the same kind of courage and the same kind of trust we see in Jacobed. Except Jesus embodied those things perfectly in a way that Jacobed never could. So you look at the ministry of Jesus and you see that he had the courage to stand up to the religious leaders. These were the most wealthy, the most powerful, the most elite group of religious leaders in the first century world, and Jesus had no problem going toe-to-toe with them, saying things he knew would make them upset, and he did so, knowing that standing up against those religious leaders would lead to his death. He knew that it would get him killed to do it, and he did it anyways. He had the courage to, during his trial, before his execution, stand before Pilate and say, You have no authority over me except that which has been given to you from God. Stop thinking that you're as important as you think you are. You don't actually have the control you have. That takes courage to do that. He had the courage to stand before his accusers and to remain silent. He had the courage to face death and to face hell and to face the justice and the judgment of God, and he did so without flinching. He embodied the courage that we see in Jacobed, but in a way that Jacobed never could. We also see that he was a person of great trust. On the night before he was executed, Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he's laboring and agonizing in prayer, and he's asking, he's pleading with the Father that if there's any way for the cup of judgment that is going to come upon him at the cross, he's pleading that if there's any way for that to be taken away, please do it. And his prayer in the end is not what I want, not what I will, but what you will. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, as well as in every moment of his life leading up to that point, he entrusted himself to the providential hand of his father. And unlike Jacobed, he knew exactly what it meant for him to do that. He knew exactly what it would cost him to do that. And so as we look at the life of Jesus, we see that he is the one to whom Jacobed's life points. His courage and his trust resulted in our salvation. Or to put it a different way, without his courage in the face of danger and death, and without his trust in the Father and His willing submission to the plan of the Father, we would still be lost and dead in our sin. Jacobed was an incredible woman who demonstrated incredible faith, and she's still a marvelous example for us. But remember where her life points her life points past herself to someone who embodied those things in an even greater way. In the rest of our time together, let me offer two words of encouragement for the women and for the mothers who are here today. First encouragement is this: never forget that faithful women always have and always will play an essential role in God's saving work. Faithful women always have, since the very beginning, and always will, to the very end, will play an essential role in God's saving work. And we see this all throughout the Bible. It's cover to cover. So we see it in the Hebrew midwives in Exodus chapter 1 who refuse to bow to the desires of Pharaoh to kill all these Hebrew baby boys. We see it in Jacobed, Moses' mother and his sister, who come up with this plan to ask to ask for Jacobed to be the one who nurses Moses until he's taken away by Pharaoh's daughter. And ironically, Pharaoh's daughter in this passage is also an example of a faithful woman who played a role in God's saving work. Think about this. She didn't know the Lord. At that time. We don't know if she ever did, but what we know is that she opened up this basket and saw a Hebrew baby boy, and she felt compassion. She felt sorry for him, which is the exact opposite of her father. And the other times that we read in the book of Exodus about someone hearing someone cry and feeling compassion is we see that in the Lord. Where when the people, it says that he heard their groaning, he heard their cries and he had compassion on them. And so in that way, even Pharaoh's daughter modeled and reflected something of the nature and the character of God as someone who hears the cries of his people and has compassion on them and rescues them. So we see it in the midwives and Jacobed and Miriam and Pharaoh's daughter. We see it as the story of the Bible unfolds to the judges and other leaders in the nation of Israel, like Deborah. We see it in the women who in Jesus' own ministry. Especially in the book of Luke, Luke draws a special attention to the women who supported Jesus from their own finances, who cared for Jesus. They took care of his needs. And in a way, all those women in Jesus' life, they all mothered him. We see it in the many women that Paul names as he writes his letters and as he gives greetings and he says, Hey, say hello to Priscilla. And say hello to Junior, and say hello to all these women, some of whom have churches that meet in their homes, and they're hosting and helping to lead these churches that meet in their homes. And Paul names all these women as faithful ministry partners, the ones through whom God's work is going forward in the world. And that's the point, that the whole Bible from start to finish is full of examples of women and faithful mothers, and their ordinary obedience is the way that God's plans are moving forward in the world. Not the only way, but one of the main ways that God works in our world is through faithful women and faithful mothers. Faithful women always have and always will play an essential role in God's saving work. Don't forget that. As a woman, as a mother, never underestimate the importance and the impact of your ordinary obedience. Unless you're reading this story for the first time in Exodus 2, you probably likely know the end, how the story ends, don't you? We know who Moses was. We know who Moses would become. We know what Moses would accomplish. But do you know who had no idea about any of that? Jacobed. She had no clue what would become of her son. All she knows is that she will not hand her son over to death. That's all she knows. And she puts him in the basket. She didn't put him in that basket because she had some vision of the future and knew that somehow God was going to make the sun turn out to deliver his people. She had no idea. She just did the next right thing, the only thing she knew how to do. We are sitting here today because of Jacobed's one act of obedience. She put her son in a boat and stuck him in the river. And that's why we're sitting here today. Because God used that. We are here today because she entrusted her son to the providential hand of God. She had no idea how God would use that act of obedience. And the same exact thing is true of your mothering as well. One day someone will look back on a conversation that you had. And you won't even remember this conversation. Because that's how this works, isn't it? One day someone will look back and will remember a conversation that you had, and they will say, that's the moment when it all changed for me. They will say, that's the moment where this really clicked. They will say, That was the word of encouragement that I needed. That was the word of challenge that I needed at that moment in my life. That was the word of counsel or wisdom that I needed, and God used that to change my life. There will be other people in your life for whom that is true, and it's all because of one small act of obedience that in the moment might feel like it's too small to be important at all. And yet God will use that to change someone's life forever. Never underestimate what you can accomplish, what God can do through you in those small acts of obedience. Now, sometimes the impact is through that one small thing, right? The one conversation, the one act of kindness, the one act of love, the one thing. And God used that to have a huge impact. Sometimes how it works is that the impact is through not one small act, but is through many small acts that are combined together into a lifetime of faithful obedience. Sometimes the impact is the accumulation of all those small little things over time. This is at the heart of what parenting is. Parenting is a whole bunch of stuff that feels too small to really be important. It's a whole bunch of stuff that all these little things here and there that by themselves don't seem like they're going to move the needle at all in your child's life. But we all know that the accumulation of those things can have a profound effect for positive or for negative in your child's life. It's the accumulation of all those things together. They become something together that they can't be individually. Taken as a whole, these small acts of obedience, whether it's providing or nurturing or loving or forgiving or the patience or the grace or the prayer, the conversations, the availability that you have to your children, it's all of those things. Together, those small acts of obedience become something that they cannot be singularly on their own. God will take all of your faithful mothering. Whether it is biological mothering, whether it is spiritual mothering in some way. God can and does take those acts of faithful mothering and he uses them to advance his plans and his purposes in the world. So never forget that faithful women always have and always will play an essential role in God's saving work. Never underestimate the impact of your ordinary obedience. As we seek to follow Jacobed's example and ultimately the example of Jesus, we will fail. We will fail. And the good news that is available not just for those who are women, not just for those who are mothers, is that we are not judged on our ability to be really courageous all the time. We are not judged by God based on our own ability to muster up more trust and more faith than we have right now. What we celebrate at the communion table is that what Jesus accomplished through his perfect courage and his perfect trust is given to us by faith. So the invitation for all of us here today is to come and receive from Christ what you could never earn on your own. And if you're here today and you have not yet made a decision to follow Jesus, uh why not make today the day that you come to know who he is and what he's done for you in a way that you never have before? As we come to the comedian table, let me invite you to take a few moments for silence and confession, and then we will come and receive Christ together.