The Love of Mothering, Defined by God
Mothering and love do not automagically exist together . . . .
God commands you mothers to do with you kids what you were already designed to do: Titus 2:4, to love them. But the great need implied in that passage and in mothers today is for your love to be “of the Lord,” just as fathers are to bring their children up in the discipline and instruction “of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). After all, the tiger mom, the helicopter mom, and the day-drinking mom would each say that they love their children. But is it love? The great battles of our day are over the dictionary, over how we define things.
Unless a mother’s love is coupled to God, unless it is tethered to the Word, it can become very destructive. Women have a tremendous capacity for empathy. And . . . it is out of empathy that some mothers give their sons dresses and puberty blockers. A woman’s capacity for love can be good, but it can be really bad, too. Mothers will either build up their house or tear it down, based on whether their love is defined by God or their feelings, whether their empathy is tethered to the Word and their husband, or to the rootless ethos of the culture.
The work of mothering is often quiet and unnoticed. But God takes your simple faith, and your simple, quiet obedience out of that faith to let your love be defined by Him, and He turns it into something glorious: the very cradle of civilization itself. Thus you have great reason for optimism and confidence in God, that would propel you to talk about the Lord with your children; to bring them before God on the Lord’s Day; and to do the countless little things that motherhood and keeping a home requires. For our God is a covenant-keeping God, to thousands of generations. Who knows whether you will save not only your family, but countless generations after you?