Discipleship in the Home

So it's Mother's Day.

We're gonna be in Proverbs.

So if you have a Bible, Proverbs is almost like dead middle of your Bible.

You can open it up and get to the book of Proverbs.

We're gonna be in chapter one.

If you don't have a Bible, a couple things.

We've got an app.

You can download the app and follow along in some sermon notes through our app.

We also have free Bibles at the back.

If you don't have one, we'd love to give you a Bible.

We think every family should have a Bible at their home that they study and read.

And we also will have the words on the screen so that you can really easily follow along with what's happening that way as well.

But we're gonna be in Proverbs chapter one.

And we're gonna be looking at verses seven through nine.

And so as we open here, let us read verses seven through nine together as we dive in this morning.

Says this Proverbs chapter one, verses seven through nine.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching, for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck.

This is the word of the Lord.

May God bless the reading and the proclamation of his promises.

So this morning it's Mother's Day, right?

And like what a landmine of a day at times, especially for preachers and for churches, because the waters of womanhood in our culture are extremely difficult to navigate right now.

And for you women in the congregation, I want to try and create empathy of what you have to go through in the culture today to navigate and understand what womanhood is.

You're being attacked from every angle, whether it's like that great aunt who gives you the advice you never asked for constantly, right?

Or the Facebook warriors who get on there because I saw one time a mom post that she gave her kid a peanut butter sandwich at Kroger, and you should have seen the calm, it was almost like death threats from women of comments.

How dare you ever bring peanut butter into Kroger?

I don't know if they know that they sell peanut butter at Kroger or not.

And I understand the sympathy.

They were trying to protect children with allergies.

I totally understand.

But listen, you are being told from every angle and vantage point who you should be, how you should act.

When you wake up, this is what you should do during the day.

This is what you should do.

At lunchtime, this is what you should do.

And then at dinner, here's how you should do this as well.

Every single angle.

And so to navigate the cultures of womanhood, to navigate uh to understand who you are as a woman, uniquely and distinctly designed and created by God to serve distinct and unique purposes within his kingdom.

I mean, we're in some of the toughest times.

And we talked about this a while ago when we looked at 1 Timothy.

We've been preaching out of 1 Timothy and the role of women in the church, that not only is culture pressuring you to be everything, but culture itself is trying to strip of you what womanhood really is.

They're trying to take it from you and say, well, men can be women too.

Anybody can be a woman.

In fact, a woman is so subjective in the culture that we really can't seek to understand it through a lens of the world.

We have to go to the Bible.

And then you hand that responsibility to a bearded, bald man to try and tell you about motherhood.

So I pray for your grace this morning as I'm gonna humbly present to you what I believe is a role and a responsibility of mothers within the church.

And this is what I understand.

Motherhood evokes, Mother's Day specifically evokes a ton of different emotions.

Some of you are crazy happy about today.

You're crazy happy about today because you've got a quiver full of children.

You've got your mom and your grandma and your great grandma all alive, and you're going to brunch after this, and this is a celebration, and it's going to be wonderful and exciting.

Some of you, today is tougher.

It's harder.

Maybe you don't have a mom to go to and celebrate after this.

Maybe you yourself aren't a mother and you've desired to be for so long.

Maybe some women here have been mothering alone for so long that it's just hard and it's burdensome.

We want you to understand that we realize brokenness, we realize the effects of sin, but even greater, we realize the hope of Jesus Christ.

And so my hope is not that I push you towards some realization of womanhood that's completely removed from Christ, but that in Christ you might recognize true power and role of a mother.

And so here is what we see in Proverbs 1.

It starts off in verse 7 that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, and fools despise wisdom and instruction.

You see, all wisdom and instruction is rooted in God's holiness.

Our fear of the Lord is not rooted in his wrath.

Our fear of the Lord is not rooted in his love, it is rooted in his holiness, not in his justice or his mercy.

It's not rooted in his power or his kindness.

You see, the fear of the Lord is rooted in his holiness because it is in his holiness that every other attribute of who he is is suspended perfectly.

God is perfectly love because he is holy.

God is perfectly just because he is holy.

God is perfectly wrath because he is holy.

God is perfectly all things that we admire about him or that we uh have reverence of him about because he is holy.

The holiness of God makes him so transcendently other than us, that he can be every attribute of himself fully and perfectly underneath of it.

And his holiness should create within us an awe-struck wonder of his personhood.

When we think about the way that our culture, the world, wants to talk about God, they want to talk about him so singularly through one aspect or through one character trait of who he is, and it's the one that brings them so much comfort.

God is love, right?

That's what we hear the culture proclaim and preach, but what they don't understand is that God's love is submitted to his holiness.

And that can be terrifying.

God's love is submitted to his holiness.

When we see the portrait of heaven and the angels that are flying around the throne of God, they are not declaring love, love, love.

They are not declaring justice, mercy, grace, kindness, power, wrath.

No, they are flying around his throne for all of eternity, declaring holy.

Holy.

Some theologians say that it is because as every time an angel makes its way around the throne of God, it discovers a new attribute and character to his personhood that they had never seen before.

And it is so massive that for all of eternity they are able to discover new wonders and respond wholly.

That is the fear of the Lord.

The fear of the Lord is not to be acquainted with fearing the fist of a tyrant who can never be pleased.

You know, the fear of the Lord is like a child who is afraid of offending the one that he loves, not out of fear of punishment, but out of a fear of displeasure.

Martin Luther struggled with the fear of God.

He was a uh a monk and theologian and priest in the 1500s, and he kickstarted the Reformation in 1517.

And as Martin Luther was coming to know God, he was moved by fear of God.

In the beginning of his Christian life, it was the fear of a tyrant whose fist he feared because he could never be pleased.

Luther strived to please God through his works.

He strived to please God through obedience, and he in turn began to hate God.

How could you ever be pleased?

How could I ever be removed from this fist?

But it wasn't until the Spirit opened his eyes and his heart to see the depths of grace in Christ Jesus that Luther turned his fear of God from something of trying to work to please him, of being captivated by the riches of Jesus, to where he feared displeasing him out of a love for who he was.

You see, it Luther turned from working to earn God's love to working from the deep love of God that he had for him.

And so he saw that the fear of the Lord was nothing to be uh to be terrified of in the sense of an angry tyrant, but it was something to keep Luther in awe-struck wonder as he sought to please him and his service toward him.

You see, we see in the second half, fools despise wisdom and instruction.

To disregard God's holiness is to provoke his cursing.

A fool despises wisdom, and that wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

Without cultivating the fear of the Lord in our life, we'll be left to cultivate his judgment.

Because ultimately it is God's blessing to not allow us to remain foolish.

God's blessing for us is to fear him.

You see, when we fear him, when we reverence him, when we have all of his personhood, then his law becomes sweet to us.

We actually desire to obey it.

We actually desire to serve him and worship him in a proper place than we did before, when we were in rebellion and when we had no reverence for him, and we just sought to serve our own gods in our own ways, to seek after our own self-righteousness.

But God in his blessing is that when we think wicked, we feel wicked.

To not allow us to remain in our foolishness, but because we come to an understanding of his holiness and it results in a fear of him, oh, we can become children.

Verse 8 says, This hear, my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching.

So what does all this have to do with mothers, right?

The fear of the Lord.

Well, see, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom, and then the book of Proverbs says immediately following that that it is our job as parents to teach that to our children.

You see, the family is God's ultimate way for his image to fill the earth.

Genesis shows us that God's purpose and plan for his glory to fill the earth is through family.

It was to be done and accomplished through family.

Right?

We see this immediately as he creates Adam and sees that Adam needs a helper for the mission that he's called him on.

So he creates Eve to be this perfect helper, and they are joined together as one in marriage.

And then he says, Now be fruitful and multiply.

And it was that family was to advance the kingdom and spread the image of God's glory throughout the earth.

But sin came in.

And sin has not only affected us as individuals, but it has affected us in our families, in God's design and purposes.

And so we operate and function from a broken system.

We operate and function from a marred place.

Family was, family is, and we'll work through that tension in just a moment, but it is the primary way for God's image to fill the earth so that his glory might fill the earth.

Now, the fact of sin should not cause us to outright reject family.

We don't look at sin and its effects in our world and in our lives and our families and outright reject it or its role in kingdom.

But it should cause us to see it redeemed through the finished work of Jesus and the power of the Spirit.

And we have we have an op we have a tendency to do that, right?

We have a tendency to reject that which sin has caused.

And we'll I was talking to a couple of brothers this week about that, where we see the effects of certain things, and so we reject those things automatically.

Maybe it's the abuse of alcohol, and the church adopts a theology to reject alcohol altogether.

Maybe it's abuse of the spiritual gifts, and so then the church rejects that because they don't want to see it abused anymore.

What we do is we throw out the things of which God has given us.

These good gifts, when abused, when seeing as sin affects them, we try to shut them out instead of deal with the heart issue of why they were abused in the first place.

You see, we have to see the family redeemed because the family inherently, as God stepped back from all that he made and declared, this is very good, the family unit stood in the midst of that proclamation.

And so we have to see that redeemed.

Yes, it's been broken.

Yes, it's been marred by sin, even the sin of our own hands, but we don't reject it because of that.

The family is the primary infrastructure of which the fear of the Lord is cultivated in the hearts of its members.

The family is the primary infrastructure of which the fear of the Lord is cultivated in the hearts of its members.

There is a responsibility and role that parents have to teach this to their children.

Discipleship starts in the home, for every home should be like a little church.

Too long we have relied on the church to cultivate this in the hearts of ourselves and in the hearts of our children.

That's not our role.

That's not our primary job.

We are to preach the gospel, we are to teach doctrine, we are to pray, we are to care for you.

But the primary place, as we can see throughout the scriptures, even in the Deuteronomy passage we just read for child dedication, parents teach your children my word.

Your home should be like a little church.

Theology, doctrine, the proclamation of the gospel, prayer, worship should happen in the living room before it happens in this gathering place because the family is the lead disciplers.

We are called to cultivate this fear.

Children for us, the Bible says, are like arrows going forth from a warrior, but an arrow is only as good as the archer, and many of us are not training ourselves in battle, and we have children who show the effects of that.

How can we train up children?

How can we raise them in a house to fear God when we're not cultivating it in our own lives?

We have to know God's word to be able to give God's word.

We have to know God in His holiness to be able to shepherd their hearts to know Him in His.

Many of us, instead of pulling an arrow ready for battle out of our quiver, look like we pulled some rugged, crooked weed from the ground and tried to shoot it.

We must be first warriors who train up our children to be ones themselves.

And in this family unit of discipleship, fathers and mothers play distinct but vital roles to the discipleship of the family.

It is not only the responsibility or the role of the father to see that the family is discipled.

Mothers are called to also share in this glorious privilege.

When we often think of teaching and discipling children in the home, we might think first of the father.

We believe at Missio that all men are called to be pastors.

You are either going to be a pastor of your home or you're going to be a pastor of the local church as well.

But all men are called to be pastors in their homes, to shepherd the hearts of their wives, to shepherd the hearts of their children.

You have a responsibility to make sure that that's happening, but you don't hold the only responsibility or role in having it happen within your home.

Women, you don't have to wait on your husband to disciple your children.

You can disciple them, you can read them the scriptures, you can tell them about the beauty and richness of the gospel.

You see, it's not only the responsibility mothers are called to share in this glorious privilege.

We too often overlook how vital the gift of the mother is to the health of the home.

While it is the main responsibility of the father to function as the pastor of the home, it is not without the active presence of a mother.

Sometimes our view of motherhood reflects the views of the Corinthian church in regards to spiritual gifts.

As you study the church at Corinth when Paul is writing to them, what's happening?

They are celebrating these things that they see as the higher gifts.

They're celebrating gifts like speaking in tongues and word of prophecy, and Paul's battling them, saying, Look, you're dismissing, you're throwing out all these other supernaturally instilled gifts by the Holy Spirit for the building of the church.

You're rejecting them, you're dismissing them, you're oppressing them so that you might pursue these other gifts.

And the fruit of that heart is chaos.

Right?

What about the gift of administration?

What about the gift of hospitality?

What about the gift of teaching?

What about the gift of care?

These are gifts that are not drawn or kind of stirred up from within us.

They are supernaturally given to the church through the Holy Spirit for her good.

And yet we do the same thing to women and mothers in the home, where we kind of diminish their role or displace the vital place that they have in the home because we're seeking after these higher things.

And they're not higher things.

We understand this, right?

If you let men just have control and do everything, women, what happens?

Chaos, right?

Just like the Corinthian church.

You got somebody writing a letter, like, look, you got to clean up your yard, you got to make sure that stuff's going on, or else we're gonna come in and do some business.

But we do this all the time.

We have the same heart posture where we kind of uh emphasize or elevate these giftings to the place that they were never supposed to be, and we overlook and dismiss the beautiful gifts that keep order, structure, that keep fruit and health thriving.

You see, we need to see the gift and power a mother brings to the home.

We need to see and work to see the gift and power a mother brings to the home.

A man might mill the lumber to build the house, but the power of a woman makes it a home.

A man might harvest or hunt for the ingredients, but a woman makes it a meal that her family can gather around.

There is distinct and unique, but equally powerful and vital roles that women and mothers play in the home.

Equal in power, equal in worth, but distinct in role and responsibility.

Women, while you are created equal in dignity, value, and worth, the distinct aspect of God's image you are made to reflect to the world are that of his life-giving power, his nurturing grace, and his never-ceasing help.

You see, men and women are created equal in dignity and worth in the image of God.

But you are created distinct in the ways that you reflect him in his image.

We see this in the creation story, and I love talking about this because it's just so beautiful to see the purpose of marriage, to see the purpose of family, to see the purpose of gender.

When we have the Adam created in Genesis, we see this gender neutralness, right?

This Adam language in the original Hebrew is gender neutral, and it's not until he is put to sleep and from his rib is made woman do we have.

First, male and female, the Esh and the Isha.

In Adam, the image of God was whole.

In Adam and Eve, the image of God was separated.

So they distinctly reflected different characters and different aspects of who God was.

And that's why the Bible tells us that when the two become one flesh again, we see this as the purpose and mystery of marriage.

That husband and wife coming together to make one flesh again is to fully reflect and resemble the beauty and person of who God is.

But men, you reflect distinct aspects of his glory and majesty, and women, you do too.

Timothy, who got a huge chunk of the New Testament writing of our inspired text, we see that he gets mentioned and talked about and personal letters written to him.

And who does he have to credit for where he is in God's family?

It's his mother.

And his grandmother.

These two women who bore and took seriously the role and responsibility to cultivate in Timothy the fear of the Lord places him as a pastor in Ephesus to lead God's ever-expanding church.

How powerful is that?

How beautiful is that?

What if they just didn't take seriously that role and responsibility?

What if they waited for a man to do it for them?

You see, as far as we know, Timothy's father was never saved.

As far as we know, he was a Greek who never came to know the salvation of the Lord.

If his mother and his grandmother waited for a man to do it for them, we don't know what the future of Timothy would have been.

But they didn't.

They understand the power that was given to them through the Spirit, and they understood their role and responsibility to their son and grandson, and they cultivated the fear of the Lord in his heart.

Then it talks about this kind of teaching versus instruction.

Same in verse 8.

It says, Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching.

There's a subtle difference of instruction and teaching.

Instruction is the equipping of an individual with specific tools for a specific task.

Teaching is the building of an individual through concepts, ideas, and guiding principles.

You can kind of think of it like this: a father is typically going to instruct a child on how to change an oil, how to change your oil, how to build a fence, how to do these specific kinds of tests, right?

How to throw a spiral, all these types of things that a father instructs.

He gets down dirty, he has the specific tools to accomplish the specific task.

But when you think about your mother's guidance, right?

While she instructs at times, most of us can understand our mother's guidance through these big life concepts.

How to choose your friends, how to be kind, how to be patient, how to live your life as a human being.

And this is interesting for this phrase because he says, to hear one and not forsake the other.

One of these speaks to a child at home, and the other is for the child who is away.

The instruction is primarily for the child at home.

Here is specific tools to accomplish the specific task, but he says specifically of the mother's guiding teaching.

Do not, as you leave, forsake these things.

When you become older, when you leave the nest, as you are living life in the way that God has designed you to, do not forsake what your mother instilled in you through her teaching.

Verse 9 says, For they are graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck.

We have to see that in this time that to be to be placed upon you these uh adorning uh rewards was something of a high and royal calling.

It was something of great praise and honor.

Children are to submit to the instruction of their parents.

This is the only command in Exodus that to honor your father and mother comes with an actual reward.

This is something that we're called to do because we are given reward if we do it as children.

And the submissive posture of the child will ensure for them a great reward.

Children, adult children, young children, to listen to your parents, to hear the instruction of your father, to let not forsake the teaching of your mother will be to you a great reward.

Our main idea this morning is this that the home is the primary place for discipleship and mothers play a vital role in it.

The home is the primary place for discipleship, and mothers play a vital role in it.

We need mothers in the home to be able to disciple the children.

We need mothers who are just beast theologians, right?

Who intimidate weak, ignorant men who won't study the scriptures for themselves.

We need mothers who are prayer warriors, who step out in the morning empty because they laid it all before the altar of God.

We need mothers who read the word, who pray over their children, who teach their children the fear of the Lord to see it cultivated because you play a vital role in your child's life that will extend beyond their presence in the home with you.

We need the power of mothers.

We need the power of women to see the fear of the Lord cultivated in the hearts of its members.

And this is the beauty of the gospel.

It's this Jesus creates an eternal family where all women are empowered to walk as true mothers.

Every woman in this building, no matter your circumstance, are empowered because of Jesus Christ to walk as a true mother.

You see, we don't want to reject the biological family.

We don't want to reject family by blood.

But here's the truth you belong to a truer, more eternal family than your physical one.

And it is bought and paid for by the blood of Jesus.

By God's grace, your spouse, by God's grace, your babies will be with you in heaven, but by his justice, they may not.

We belong to a truer family.

We belong to an eternal family that's been bought by the finished work of Christ, and it empowers every single woman in this room to walk as a mother.

To the broken women, because of Christ, you're made whole.

And you work to teach and cultivate the wholeness of Christ in the children of the church.

To the weak women, you're made strong.

As through the Spirit, you're empowered to live in accordance with his design and intentions.

To the barren woman, you're brought into a family where you can give birth to a multitude of eternal spiritual children.

To the single woman, you're united to Christ, where you work with him to see the children of the church mature in his likeness.

And to the motherless woman, you are brought into the eternal mother, where you're able to nurture off of her the church for your good and your joy.

In Christ, all women can and should operate in their call to mother.

Isn't that good news?

No matter what sin has done to you, no matter what your sin has done to yourself, Christ is greater.

Christ is greater, and he redeems every woman to walk in a manner of which he has called them.

And so what is my encouragement to you this morning?

How do we live this out?

It's simple.

Work as mothers in the home and in the church.

Work as mothers in the home and in the church.

We need you.

We just had a young family who has no idea what it means to raise a child.

They need you.

We have a ton of young families who are losing their mind and their hair over trying to raise these babies.

We need you.

We have people who are yet to be added to this church, who will come from broken homes, who will be absent of mothers, who will desire to be mothers but never be one themselves, who are trying to figure out what it means to be a woman in this world, in this culture, and every single woman can play a vital role and part into shepherding them into the gospel of Jesus and what he's accomplished for them.

Every single woman here.

We need you to work in the home.

Be relentless, be tireless in your efforts and your toils to see the fear of the Lord be brought up into the hearts of God's children.

Mothers, you bring beauty, you bring power, and you bring distinct glory that we men could never even imagine of obtaining.

We love you and we're thankful for you to be here.