5-10-26 Love with a Plan (Mother's Day)

Join Pastor Ken as he celebrates Mother's Day and looks at Moses and what it means to love with a plan.

Transcript

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This is Mother's Day, and let's just uh take a moment to celebrate our mothers and especially welcome those that are here to be with their kids, and let's give them a hand today. We appreciate our mothers and those that play the role of mothers. My mother, Glenora Hutchins, has passed on, but she is not forgotten, I tell you that much. And I'm going to share with you the top five embarrassing moments growing up that my mother created for me. My brother's probably got his own list. Number five, when she showed up at my school when I was in eighth grade carrying my belt, and one of the kids in my class, a girl no less, said, Oh, I thought you were going to come give him a spanking. And she said, he forgot it, and I was afraid his pants would fall down. Number four, when she would tell complete strangers the latest success that I had had and embellish it with me standing there, feeling very embarrassed by it. Number three, when she smacked me in the face with a dirty mop after I had back talked her in front of the kids at our daycare. Number two, when she would haul me and my brother to Granny's house to show her the latest rash, no matter where embarrassing place it was to get the granny diagnosis. And number one, I need a drum roll for this one. The worst one, I was a senior in high school, and I stayed out past my curfew, and she came looking for me with a pink night robe on and her hair in curlers. And she kept stopping my friends and asking them where they where I was, and they kept rushing to me and saying, Your mom's looking for you, and you're in big trouble. At this point in life, I realized that all of those embarrassing moments were a part of her love with a plan to get me and my brother to the point in life where we were hopefully contributing citizens and wouldn't destroy ourselves or others in the process. Let's take a look at our scripture today. If you would please stand as you're able, we're going to look at Exodus 122 to 210 and then a verse from Hebrews. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live. Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him for three months. When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. This must be one of the Hebrew children, she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you? Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Yes. So the girl went and called the child's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages. So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses because she said, I drew him out of the water. And then Hebrews 11 and 23. By faith Moses was hidden by his parents for three months after his birth, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king's edict. This is the word of God for the people of God. Please be seated. Moses' parents live in dangerous times. There is a Pharaoh who is in command of Egypt while his people are, while the Israelites are slaves there, and he is intent on genocide by killing all the Hebrew boys. He passes a law that they are to be thrown into the Nile. Now you think about the pressure that the parents in those days that had a boy must have felt under that. There must have been those that said, we have no other choice. We can't risk our entire family for that. And it must have been easy for some to rationalize giving in. Amran and Jochebed, that's the names that we get elsewhere in the Hebrew for Moses' parents, already had two kids. They have Aaron, an older brother, and Miriam, a sister. It must have been a lot of pressure for them to think, how can we risk our current children? How can we risk our whole family for this new baby boy? Who would blame them if they didn't do what the Pharaoh commanded? But love allows no compromise and they take the risk. You know, parents do incredible things to protect their kids. One of my favorite movies, and I understand the book's good too, but I haven't read the book, is The Road that tells about a father trying to protect and train his son in an apocalyptic time when everything around seems to be dangerous and get him to a better place. Moms show incredible love protecting their kids. There's moms, and you can find the videos on YouTube, fighting bears and fighting off rabid raccoons and doing all kinds of things in order to save their children, the things that are dangerous for themselves and for others. When I was in fifth grade, there was a kid in the school that was bullying me. He was a couple years older than me, and my mom was working in the cafeteria there, and finally it all erupted after lunch, and we were in a huge fight. And I had him down at this point, and my mom comes running in, grabs a kid, pulls him out from under me, and says, You leave my son alone. That almost made the top five list, by the way. But you know, it takes more than love to get a child through all the things that a parent has to get them through. Amoran and Jacobed have to have a plan, too. So the mom, Jacobed, hides Moses for three months. Time for him to get stronger. Time for him to bond with her, to make that connection, to make him feel like he is loved and cared for. She takes the risk for the whole family to do that. And then she obeys Pharaoh, kind of. They do cast him into the Nile River, but they prepare a little boat for him. The Hebrew word is the exact same word that's used for Noah's Ark. Can you imagine the care that was placed into putting together that boat for this little three-month-old baby? Papyrus, sticky stuff, tarred to make it waterproof. And then when it's time, they launch him into a river that's full of all kinds of dangerous things. Crocodile nasties and snakes, and of course they say hippos are the worst, most dangerous creature in the Nile for humans. Well, that is other than other humans, who are by far the most dangerous creatures for humans to have to be safe from. And they send his older sister to see what happens and to be there. And Pharaoh's own daughter undermines Pharaoh's plan. Her heart is melted by this baby child. When she sees him crying, that motherly instinct, even though she, by every indication, is not a mother yet, causes her to play the role of a mother, and she has pity on him and thwarts her father's rule. Pharaoh might be in command of all of Egypt, but he doesn't rule his family. And she calls the little girl who asks her if she wants to get help and says, yes, find somebody to nurse this baby. And Jacobed, Moses' mother, gets paid to do what she most wants to do: to care for her own child, to be with him, to spend time. Imagine how valuable that time was. The time she has to train Moses, to guide him, to imprint upon him the importance of who he is. And it works because later as an adult, even though he's living in the palace of Pharaoh, he remembers his people and goes out and tries to help them. Her time is limited and she knows it. But folks, here's the fact: as a parent, your time is always limited to make an imprint upon your children, to train them, to care for them, to help them to understand what's right and what's wrong, to show them the reality of the world around us. And love with a plan is required today just as much as it was in the time of Moses. Raising a child takes a lot of sacrificial love. You have to get up at night when you're so tired from a long day that you just can't imagine getting up again. You have to clean up nasty stuff. Oh, Lord. And sometimes, the worst time is when you're also sick and you got to clean up the nasty stuff, and all you want to do is run away from it. You have to love them when they're sick, when they are tromping on your absolute last nerve. When they become a teenager and get attitude, or a pre-teenager and get attitude, and decide that you are the stupidest person on the face of the world. You have to keep reaching out. And as a parent, you have to balance providing financially for your kids, nurturing your kids, disciplining their kids, loving your kids. No wonder moms are tired. Even when they don't have a newborn or not getting sleep through the night. It is an incredibly demanding role. And parents face many threats beyond an evil pharaoh. There are threats to the safety of our kids. Accidents, people that they shouldn't be around, illness themselves. I have about a, I don't know, two, three-inch scar on my hand because when I was about five years old, we were catching fireflies. And while my parents were outside, I decided to go get a mason jar for the fireflies. And you know you've got to put holes on the top of that metal thing. So I get the biggest butcher knife in the kitchen, and I missed. And I come out with this huge hole in my hand, and my parents flipped out. Sometimes it's hardest to protect kids from themselves. There are threats to their minds. Hate, perversion, social media, drugs, all the things in our society, the pressures that they feel, the shame, the bullying, the contrived pressures that are put on them. And I think the pressures now are much worse than when I was a kid. There are threats to the faith that you want to pass on to them. Cults, radicalization, Satan's lies, hate, and yes, sometimes love, as in the falling in love version, when they are really too young to understand falling in love, but they're convinced that this person that everybody around them can tell is not the right person for them, is absolutely the right person for them. And you have to deal with that. Love with a clear plan is required. You have to help kids see the threats that they don't see, things that they don't understand that they can't picture because they don't have the experience that you do as a parent. You have to help them to understand there are good choices and bad choices, and they have consequences. Like the time I crawled into a car with a guy that was already drunk, and we ended up in a snowbank, thankfully, instead of hitting another car or a wall and stranded in the middle of winter. You need to show your kids good from evil, to expose the lies around them, to show them the importance of right choices, of discipline, of focusing on the good things and avoiding the bad things. You need to help them to put God first in their life. And you do that by not only your words, but by your example, your actions. You try to pass on to them that faith, knowing full well that they too will make their own decision, as all of us do, but trying to give them as much of a help with that as possible. It always drives me crazy when parents tell me, we don't take our kids to church because we want them to make the right decision about it or make their own decision about it. Do you send them to school? Well, yeah, we'd get in trouble if we didn't do that. So you don't let them make their own decision about public school, but you do about loving God. Sometimes as a parent, you have to be the parent and step up and do those things. And guess what, folks? As you know well, if you're my age, parenting doesn't stop when they turn 18 or when they come of age. Often they need you as much or more as adults as they do when they're younger. One of the difficult, tragic things of my wife passing so young was her daughter, who got married a couple years later, telling me, there's so many times I wanted my mom here to give me some guidance. I wanted to just be able to talk to her about things. And then when they have kids of their own, you often find yourself being that trusted one to help guide their parenting as well. It's a tough job being a mom, being a parent, and moms and parents need support and help to succeed. The power of God is vital to parenting. You know, we have an option to have a baby dedication, or we have an option to have your baby baptized. In both cases, that is a pledge of the parents to raise that child so that they can make a good choice, they can know about God, they can have information about serving God, but it's also a mobilization of God's community to help with that goal of parenting, to help and bless them with that child's life. We have Ezra here this morning, who is our latest child to be baptized. And you guys remember, and if you don't, I'll remind you that there's that pledge that we make as a church when a child comes forth to support, to care, to provide, to be there, to encourage. That's when you run into those people who maybe never gave birth, but they're just as much moms as the others. The ones that are there to help the mom, the ones that are there to provide the guidance. I have somebody that reminds me every once in a while that I have several moms in this church. And it's true. And all through life, I've had those who have stepped into my life and provided that role that my mom couldn't provide at the moment because she was busy, she was away, she was whatever. Those secondary moms that mean so much. We need the spiritual resources that God offers for parenting. The incredible wisdom of the Bible. Human nature does not change, folks. That wisdom is just as important today as it was before. And that's not even getting into the spiritual aspects of that wisdom and God's guidance that is a part of our heritage. Prayer. Oh Lord, do we ever need prayer for our kids and for our parenting and for the strength to get through? Wisdom that the Spirit gives us, the model of good people, faith shown to those. And as a church, we want to parent or partner with our parents in helping you with your kids. It's important to do that. You know, one of the decisions that let me rephrase that. One of the understandings that it was hard for me to grasp, but it was in the context of not being able to protect my kids from a situation that I wanted to protect them from was the realization that as much as I love my kids, God loves them even more. God sent his son to die for them. He wants the best for my kids and for your kids. And being able to lay them in God's hands and trust that God will be there for them and teach them that God will be there for them. And it showed me how important it is for us as a community, as a church, to prioritize our children. That's why we put a lot of resources into vacation Bible school and made for this and jam and uh the various youth ministries and kids things. These are important. That's why we're looking at adding on this building. A large part of that is because of our dedication to our future generation, our children, and our youth, that we see how important it is for us to pass that on. You know, one of the things I benefited from over and over again when I had kids was all these extra grandmas and grandpas in the church. All these extra folks that were there for my kids, that surrounded them with love, that gave them good vibes, patted them on the back, or examples for them. I was that kid who was at church alone when I was a boy. I got to know Christ when I was 10 at church camp, and I went by myself. And my parents and my brother never went with me the whole time I was growing up through high school. My parents later came to faith, but at that point they were busy with life and were distracted with other things. And my family was the church family. They were the ones that nurtured me in spiritual things. They were the ones that gave me opportunities to serve. They were the ones that encouraged me. They were the ones that gave me a break from the chaos that was often present at home. They were the ones that made faith and spirituality a part of my life because I wasn't seeing that at home. They were my family, and I want to, and I hope I have been in that role for others as well. And I know you feel the same way of how important it is to be there for our young people and help parents that are being pulled in every direction, and moms that are already so tired they can't add another thing on. So today is a day to honor moms by birth and by playing that role. But you know what? Parenting is an all-year role. You don't get a day off, that much a season off. It's something that's there from the time they're born on. And the parental support need continues to be there all year long. We have to continue to be there for our kids and our grandkids all the year long. And my hope is that this church will always be a place where you can come as a family, as a single parent, as a parent of whatever role, and find support and love for your kids and your grandkids. A place where you can come and make a difference in kids and grandkids' life as an older person. You can make an impact in their life because of the devotion that you show towards them. You never know what kid you are training for leadership for a future generation. You know, Moses' parents didn't know what his future role was going to be. All they knew was that they loved him and they needed to develop a plan for his future. And then they put their trust in God to go from that point on. We don't know what impact our kids will have, but we know that it's important for us to tell them the gospel story, to do all we can to help guide them through their formative years, and to give them the best possible chance not only to embrace God's future, but to thrive in it. Will you pray with me, please? Heavenly Father, thank you for your incredible love. Thank you for all the ways you show us, most of all, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lived for us and died for us and is raised to eternal life, that we might become your children, that we might become the family of God. Father, teach us how to love one another. Another, especially our kids, our teens. Teach us how to be there for one another, support one another, be your people. Help us to see the need and be able to respond to it with the same kind of love with a plan that Moses' parents had. And be with our parents and bless them in that, especially. For I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.