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Mothering Sunday.
Return to your mother church where you remember your salvation.
Time to celebrate
Character of God
How do you picture God?
Father. Austere. Loving, but protective.
Commanding.
Needs sacrifice
God is love. Love is......
God’s good news is that he loves you on your good days as much as he loves you on your bad days. He loves you when you can feel his love, and he loves you when you can’t seem to feel his love. He loves you whether or not you think you deserve his love. Rick warren
Creative
Who is creative?
He made them, in his image, male and female. So he must have both characteristics
Deuteronomy 32:11
Like an eagle that rouses her chicks and hovers over her young, so he spread his wings to take them up and carried them safely on his pinions.
Luke 15:8-10
“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and sweep the entire house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she will call in her friends and neighbours and say, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, there is joy in the presence of God’s angels when even one sinner repents.”
Psalms 22:9-10
Yet you brought me safely from my mother’s womb and led me to trust you at my mother’s breast. I was thrust into your arms at my birth. You have been my God from the moment I was born.
Psalms 71:6
Yes, you have been with me from birth; from my mother’s womb you have cared for me. No wonder I am always praising you!
The Bible shows that Jesus was full of gentleness, tenderness, kindness, compassion, peace, courage, and patience.
Holy spirit, the comforter and counsellor.
Peace, dove
The image of God as mother may sound radical to some, but it's not new. The prophet Isaiah describes God as a woman in labour
Isaiah 42:14
For a long time I have held my peace; I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labour; I will gasp and pant.
and as a mother who nurses and comforts her child (66:10-13).
Isaiah 66:9-13
Moses reminds God that he is the mother of the people he is leading. He is the one who conceived them, gave them birth, and carried them, and nursed them.
Numbers 11:11-12
Moses said to the Lord, “Why have you dealt ill with your servant? And why have I not found favour in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give them birth, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing child,’ to the land that you swore to give their fathers?
John 3:3–8 – Jesus points to imagery that the God the Spirit gives birth to us. Only those who are born by the Spirit (and of water) are able to come into the Kingdom.
Today we remember the value of our mothers
But it's also important that we remember the motherhood nature of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This is not as outrageous as it may first seem.
If we don't focus on the motherhood nature of God we miss out on half of his characteristics.
1 Peter 2:2–3 – “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.