A Mother's Legacy with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

All right, welcome to Mother's Day at MetaCurch.

How's everybody doing?

Yeah.

Uh moms, your job is unbelievably unique.

God created you and hardwired you to be a protector, a nurturer, an educator, and so so much more.

And we know that motherhood often feels like a thankless job.

Kids are often ungrateful if we're honest.

Husbands can be a little bit distracted.

It can be really difficult to measure the progress that your kids are or are not making.

But you matter so much more than you know.

And before I go any further, uh would you guys all please help me show some love for all of our moms here at MetaChur?

Science has proven in the last few decades just how critical a mother's love is to their child.

Did you know that a mother's love in the earliest stages of life actually affects the physical development of the brain?

Studies have shown that kids who had that consistent maternal love end up with, on average, about a 10% larger hippocampus.

This is the area of the brain largely responsible for learning, for memory, and for emotional mitigation and emotional management.

Did you know there's over a decade of research that kids respond uniquely to their mother's voice in a way that they don't respond to anyone else?

Not only does a mother's voice fire up the auditory processing part of the brain, but it also triggers the parts of the brain related to emotion, reward processing, facial recognition, and social functioning.

This means your love physically changes your kids' minds, and that your voice alone can trigger parts of your kid's psychology and their emotions that are often the hardest to access.

There's a well-known saying that behind every successful man there stands a strong woman, and often that woman is his mom.

Abraham Lincoln said this about his mother.

All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

Abraham Lincoln, one of the most consequential figures, certainly in American history, probably in all of human history, he said he owes all that he is and all that he had become to his mom.

And here's what's wild his mom, Nancy Lincoln, died when Abe was only nine years old.

In those few short years she left that big of a mark on his life.

Thomas Edison, who through his inventions, completely changed the way that the world operates.

When he was in elementary school, his teacher thought that he was mentally ill or mentally handicapped and refused to teach him any longer.

And so Thomas Edison's mother, Nancy Elliott, pulled him from school and actually homeschooled one of the greatest geniuses in history.

A powerful mom affects everyone, including her husband.

I recently heard a really amazing story about Clementine Churchill, the wife of Winston Churchill, the famous prime minister.

One time the Churchills were walking in London, and she was pulled aside by a street sweeper and talked to for quite some time.

And when she finally rejoined her husband, Winston wanted to know what was going on there.

And she said, Well, it's kind of weird, but that guy was in love with me for a really long time.

And Winston Churchill kind of smiled very proud of himself and said, Well, it's a good thing you married me, or today you would be the wife of a street sweeper, to which she looked back at amazement and said, Oh, darling, if I would have married him, today he'd be the prime minister.

A strong mother has strong effects on everyone around them.

And today I want to talk about that in a message called A Mother's Legacy.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we are here seeking you.

Um, this is a message for mothers, but I believe it's much more than that.

I believe it will speak to all of us who are parents, maybe future parents, grandparents.

For those of us who are nowhere near that stage in our life, but want to know what it means to build a resilient spiritual life for ourselves.

God, I do want to take a moment and lift up especially any grieving hearts in the room, anyone who has lost their mother and doesn't get to celebrate them today, or mothers who have lost their children, or anyone else who is going through a hard time, I pray that you would give them your peace today and that you would speak to us in a strong way.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, and if you're ready to get going, say amen.

Amen.

Motherhood is amazing, uh, parenting is amazing.

However, the truth is, parenting is often the biggest and most consistent challenge that anyone undertakes.

And one of the things that makes parenting, especially for mothers, very difficult today specifically, is the culture of perfection that we live in.

No longer is it good enough to be a good mother or even a great mother.

Now you have to be an Instagram perfect filtered mother.

You know, because we just post the parts that we want people to see.

The one picture where everyone is smiling and everyone is getting along and all of the kids love each other and everyone's shirts are tucked in.

We don't show any of the evidence from the drive there where there was World War III in our van, and we maybe threatened to throw one of the children out of the car.

We don't talk about how one of the siblings threatened the other one to literally kill you.

No, I'm not joking.

I'm actually going to kill you because they made fun of them.

When we post our meals, right, we pick the one meal that's like hand-baked bread and preservative-free butter and farm-raised bottle-fed chicken.

Now, the last 30 meals were Domino's delivery and Taco Bell takeout.

Y'all don't need to know that, right?

We're just gonna kind of curate and filter and put out this perfect aspect of who our family is.

It reminds me of the saying: never let them see you sweat, right?

Unless it's a gym selfie, because they need to know that mom goes to the gym too.

Never let them see you struggle.

Never let them see you suffer.

Never let them see the tension.

Never let them see the reality.

And what will your legacy be that you leave behind?

Will your true legacy be how well you portrayed some idealized version of being a parent on social media?

What will your kids actually care about?

Will they care how much influence you had or how many followers you had?

Will your kids' ultimate concern be how much money you made or how elaborate your vacations were?

If you're looking for a way to measure your motherhood, the world is going to give you plenty of metrics to go by.

My problem is that almost none of those metrics show up in the pages of Scripture.

And so, how do you measure a good mother?

And more importantly, how do you measure a godly mother?

Today I want to look at two women who are, to be quite honest, pretty obscure.

As a matter of fact, I would bet a good deal of money that you haven't heard of them in scripture, and if you have, you couldn't tell me the context.

They are really, really obscure, but they do an amazing job of laying out a template for us in broad strokes to have a conversation about what it means to leave a legacy behind us as parents.

Today we're gonna talk about Lois and Eunice.

And I know that sounds like a sitcom from the 90s, Lois and Eunice.

Lois and Eunice, they're from the New Testament of our Bibles.

Eunice was the mother of, and Lois was the grandmother of, a young man named Timothy.

Eunice was the mother of, and Lois was the grandmother of Timothy.

There are two letters in the Christian scriptures called 1st and 2nd Timothy.

These are letters written by the Apostle Paul to this young man, and Timothy shows up in many of Paul's other letters that we also have in the Christian scriptures.

Here's something that Paul wrote about him to the church in Philippi.

In Philippians 2, Paul says, Now I hope in the Lord to send Timothy to you as soon, to send Timothy to you soon, so that I too may be encouraged by news about you.

For I have no one else like-minded who will genuinely care about your interests.

All seek their own interests, but not those of Jesus Christ.

But you know Timothy's proven character, because he has served with me in the gospel ministry like a son with a father.

Therefore, I hope to send him as soon as I see how things go with me.

Every time Timothy is talked about by Paul, he raves about him.

He genuinely cares about the people in Philippi.

Everyone else seeks their own interest, not Timothy.

He genuinely seeks the interest of Christ.

He has proven character.

Paul implicitly trusts him.

As a young man, like really young, Paul was put in charge of the church of Ephesus, which is where we get our letter from Paul to the Ephesians in Scripture.

All this to say, Timothy was a son that any mother would be proud to have.

A young man with impeccable character, clarity of mission, a purposeful, powerful, godly life.

And so how did he get there?

How did he get to this incredible life?

Because that is the actual goal.

If you're here and you're a Jesus follower, that is the actual goal.

Yes, you want your kids to be successful.

Yes, you want them to be educated.

Yes, you want them to be financially secure.

But more than anything, as Christ's followers, we want spiritually resilient, godly kids when they get out from under our control and out into the real world.

How do they pull this off?

I want us to look at how Paul opens the second letter that he wrote to Timothy.

In 2 Timothy 1, he says, I thank God, whom I serve with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did, when I constantly remember you in my prayers night and day.

He's writing to Timothy saying, I thank God for you.

Bro, I pray for you all of the time.

In verse 4, remembering your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy.

And here's our call out.

In verse 5, I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother, Lois, and in your mother, Eunice.

And now I am convinced it is in you also.

This is Paul writing to Timothy.

I recall your sincere faith, your steadfast, genuine, unwavering faith.

And where did that faith come from?

Did it just spring up in Timothy?

Is he solely responsible for it?

No.

It comes from a mother's legacy.

Your faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice.

And now, largely because of the line that you come from, I am also convinced that it resides in you.

There are 66 books that make up the Bible.

And if you think about it, in those 66 books, not a lot of people get shout outs by name.

And because of the time and place 2,000 years ago, you take a very small number of people who get a shout-out, and a small percentage of that is women who get directly shouted out by name.

And Eunice and Lois get multiple shout-outs throughout the pages of Scripture.

Paul is so clear on where Timothy's faith comes from.

And part of how he had so much faith in Eunice and in Lois is the circumstance of their conversion.

Scholars agree that they began to believe in Jesus during Paul's first missionary journey when he traveled through an area named Lystra.

The story is kind of odd.

It's found in the book of Acts, chapter 14.

Acts 14 · chapter mention

In Acts 14, it says that they, Paul and Barnabas, found out about it and fled to the Lyconian towns of Lystra and Derb and to the surrounding countryside, and there they continued preaching the gospel.

And this is what Paul did on his missionary journeys.

He went from town to town to town.

He showed up and he preached the gospel.

And if you're new to the faith and you're new to this idea of church, what we call the gospel is the good news of Jesus.

The good news that the God of the universe loved you enough that when you couldn't work your way to him, he came down to us.

That he put on flesh and bones, he lived a perfect life as the man Jesus Christ died, exchanging his life for ours and paying the price for us to be back in relationship with our Heavenly Father.

That's what we call the good news.

And Paul would show up and he would preach what is called a scandalous message that God would do that for us, that God would die to take our place.

And eventually he would be either beaten or stoned or put under threat of persecution, and so he would travel on to the next place.

And he ends up in Lystra, and it's here that Timothy's mom hears the gospel and believes.

And it was kind of a weird trip because the power of God was displayed through Paul and Barnabas, specifically in a man who had a lame leg.

And God used Paul to heal this man, and they were in an area, a Greek area, where people were largely pagans, and they began to worship Paul and worship Barnabas.

They believed that they were the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes.

And they worshiped them and they wanted to offer sacrifices to them.

They began to treat them as gods.

And Paul and Barnabas correct the record really quick in pretty dramatic fashion and let people know there is only one true God.

They worship him, and his power is being displayed among them, and many people believe.

In verse 19, some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, and when they went over the crowds, they stoned Paul and they dragged him out of the city, thinking he was dead.

And after the disciples gathered around him, he got up and he went into the town, and the next day he left with Barnabas for dirt.

So, Lois and Eunice come to faith by watching a missionary get beaten and stoned so badly that everyone plausibly believed he was dead.

This is the part of the presentation where you go, I'm not so sure I want to be a part of what's going on here.

Like, if I did convince you to put your faith in God, and because of it, I was dragged onto Petranko and beaten to death, the point of that would be to dissuade you from following after Jesus.

And if we're really honest, it might work.

You see, the call here in the West, in America, while we are seeing evidence of some forms of persecution for our faith, it pales in comparison to the call that Lois and Eunice took up 2,000 years ago.

The call to believe in the gospel is the call to put your faith in Jesus, who did all of the work for you, to have eternal life, to have hope for eternity and hope right now.

Your next step is to get baptized in a super cool service with a professional band and a light show playing behind you, and then you get to come every single Sunday and sit in cushioned seats and join a life team where you eat really good food.

And we love those things, and we thank God for those things, but it's a different call than putting your faith in Jesus and immediately seeing the preacher get beaten to death.

Lois and Eunice knew if we continue on this journey and we hold on to our faith, it could very well cost us our life.

And for many people, that would be enough to walk away, but not for Timothy's mama.

She was all in on her faith.

She was convinced of who God was, and she continued to follow Jesus, knowing the risk that were involved.

That's one part of what made Eunice her life very difficult.

It's not the only part.

As a matter of fact, we learned something very interesting as Paul comes through Lystra on his second missionary journey sometime later.

It says this Paul went on to Durb in Lystra, where there was a disciple named Timothy, the son of a believing Jewish woman.

That's another shout-out for Eunice.

But his father was a Greek.

And the brothers and sisters at Lystra in Iconium spoke highly of Timothy.

And Paul wanted Timothy to go with them, so he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places, since they all knew that his father was a Greek.

Now, if you're here or you're watching online, there's nothing wrong with being Greek, okay?

What they're meaning by this in context is he is not a believer.

Timothy was taught the faith, that's the result of his believing mom, but he was not circumcised.

That's the result of his non-believing father.

And some of you live in this situation today.

You are a believer, but your spouse is not.

And you're wondering exactly what that means for how you raise your kids.

And look, parenting is plenty tough all on its own.

And then when you and your spouse are not on the same page about the very ground of reality itself, it can be very, very difficult.

And this is happening 2,000 years ago when women had very little influence in the culture.

And yet, what do we see Paul say about Timothy's mom?

Remember, he said, I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and now, and now because I have seen the faith of women who watched me get stoned almost to death and are still following Jesus and still raising their kids in that way, and now I am also convinced that that faith, Timothy, is in you, so convinced that Paul is gonna do something a little bit unusual for him and give an incredible amount of authority and power to this very, very young man.

Paul's confidence in Timothy, which was extraordinary, he made him the pastor of the Ephesians.

He spoke incredibly highly of him, he considered Timothy a spiritual son.

Paul's confidence was rooted first and foremost in his mother's legacy.

And so, for those of us who are parents in the room, or who might be parents in the room someday, or who are the children in the room and want to understand our parents a little bit better, how can we follow the example that Timothy's mom, Eunice, sets out for us?

How can we raise spiritually resilient children?

I want to give two broad categories and an application step.

The first is that spirituality is taught.

Spirituality is taught.

It is incumbent on us as parents to be teaching the deep spiritual truths to our children.

Look at what Paul says to Timothy two chapters later.

We started in 2 Timothy 1, now two chapters later, 2 Timothy 3.

He says, But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed.

You know those who taught you, if you're keeping score, another shout out for Eunice.

And you know that from infancy you have known the sacred scriptures, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

We should have consistent spiritual conversations with our children.

We should use the deeper concepts of spirituality and scripture to correct them and guide them.

And look, when it comes to our kids, parenting is a full-time job.

There are so many issues and there's so many problems and there's so many behaviors to correct, and there's so many conversations to have, and we're all so busy that oftentimes we only end up dealing with the symptoms and not digging down to the roots and helping our kids connect their real actions with their spiritual lives.

When your kid is having difficulty with a classmate, we have to go deeper as Christian parents than just helping our kids stay out of the principal's classroom.

We have to teach them about why we love people and what it looks like to model Jesus' kind of sacrificial love and how to love our enemies and why it actually will impact them and the people around them.

When your kids get old enough to start talking about sex, number one, as a parent, it's your job to teach your kids about sex.

And they need to hear something from you that is deeper than what they're gonna get in their health class.

It's your job to teach them that God has a design for sex that it matters not just at a physical level, but at a spiritual level, and why it matters that they steward that well.

Every conversation is an opportunity to go deeper.

And when your kids get older, they go through a period where it's hard to get them to say anything to you.

You know?

You guys know how this goes?

You pick your kid up, how was it?

Good, you know?

Same five questions, anything cool happened?

No, you know that same routine?

I was that way at that age, right?

And then I just fall asleep, you know.

You know when your kids want to talk to you?

I mean, from like four years old to 18, you know when they want to talk?

Right when they're supposed to go to bed.

That's when they want to talk.

In other words, they want to talk when I don't want to talk, you know?

And man, parenting is hard, and there's a lot that I can look at that we haven't done all that well.

But one thing that Katie and I have always tried to prioritize is when they want to have that conversation, right, as we're turning the light off, and when they have that deep question about their faith, or when they finally bring up the thing that's bothering them, we've done a pretty good job of prioritizing.

Slowing down and having those conversations when they're ready to have them.

And somebody has to have them.

Somebody has to be teaching them.

Somebody has to be digging down and helping them to connect, not just to your wisdom, not just to your experience, but to the ancient wisdom of Scripture that has guided our movement for thousands and thousands of years.

The book of Proverbs says, Listen, my son, to your father's instruction and don't reject your mother's teaching, for they will be a garland of favor on your head and pendants around your neck.

Eunice, Timothy's mother, she stood up for what she believed in in a home where her husband did not believe.

She was bold at teaching the scriptures, teaching spirituality, and it paid dividends in Timothy's life.

You know, the churches I grew up in, they actually did a pretty good job of this.

They really drilled the Bible and its message into you.

We had actual Bible drill, and we had awanas, and we had royal ambassadors.

But at a certain point, as parents, our job is much more than just transmitting information to our kids.

Spirituality is taught, and it must be.

But more importantly, spirituality is caught.

Spirituality is taught, that's our job, and spirituality is caught.

The largest sociological study ever performed, it followed kids from kindergarten all the way into their 30s.

Thousands of kids.

And there are all kinds of interesting findings that came out of this, but the biggest correlation they found, undisputable from this study, is that your kids become not what you say, your kids become what they see.

Your kids don't just become what you say, they become what they see.

Our actions truly do speak louder than our words.

Even on the educational and intelligence front, this study found that it made zero statistical difference whether your kid read a book every single night before bed, or always sat in front of a television on whether or not they grew up to be readers.

The difference was whether or not mom and dad read books in the home.

More is caught than is taught.

And this comes to our faith as well.

It is our job not just to transmit biblical information, spiritual information to our kids.

It is more important that we actually model our faith and model our spirituality and model the difference that Jesus is making in our life.

Eunice, Timothy's mother, her faith was not just taught through educational lessons, she lived it out.

She chose a faith that at any moment might cost her her life and lived that faith boldly anyway.

Timothy was taught from infancy.

He was taught the scriptures.

But he also caught what was modeled for him.

Look at what Paul wrote right before he talked about the importance of scripture.

He says in 2 Timothy 3, but you have followed my teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience, love, and endurance, along with the persecutions and sufferings that came to me in Antioch, Iconium in Lystra, what persecutions I endured, and yet the Lord rescued me from them all.

And this next verse we should really pay attention to.

Paul says to Timothy, in fact, all who want to live a godly life in Jesus will be persecuted.

Jesus said the same thing before he left the earth.

In this world, you will have trouble.

That is a promise from Scripture, which means it's a promise from God.

You can take it to the bank, you will suffer in life.

And this is so critical because look at where we started.

We started with this Instagram, perfect culture, just filtered, smiling, fake, everyone happy all the time.

But the truth is much different than that.

The truth is that there is pain in life and trials in life and suffering in life.

And this is so critical.

Because if you want your kids to have an enduring faith, a resilient spirituality, they have to see your faith played out in your life.

And what is the greatest opportunity for them to see your faith in action?

Your kids will see your faith most clearly in the seasons of your most obvious suffering.

You want your kids to actually see the difference that Jesus makes in your life, then drop the facade that you're always perfect, always have it together, nothing bothers you, you're invincible, you're Wonder Woman, you're Captain America, you can do it all by yourself all of the time.

Be real with your kids.

Now be real appropriately.

Your kid should not become your psychiatrist, okay?

Those of you who have been through or are going through divorce, your kid is not your sounding board for how much you hate your ex-spouse.

It's the worst thing you can do for your kid.

What your kid needs to see is that there is pain in life and there is suffering in life, and your faith in Jesus actually makes a difference in those seasons in your life.

And sometimes we feel like we have failed because our kids' lives get hard or get harder.

And the truth is that every season of suffering is your greatest gift for showing your kids the actual practical difference Jesus makes in your life.

And if there is no suffering in your life, if you have cushioned yourself off and mitigated all risk and all suffering, all trials, I would ask you to consider intentionally finding ways to give your life away for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom.

Paul says everyone who wants to actually follow after Jesus, to do things that are bold and audacious for the kingdom, you will suffer.

You will struggle.

And more than your kids just seeing you suffer because you're bad with your money or bad with relationships or have a bad temper and hurt people and ruin friendships, your kids need to see the kind of suffering that comes from you intentionally following after Jesus.

The kind of suffering that Timothy saw in his mother, Eunice, and his grandmother Lois, that shaped him in to the world changer that God created our children to be.

And the world says, never let them see you sweat.

And God says, Let them see you sweat and the difference that your faith makes in the middle of it.

To raise kids who are spiritually resilient, who are faithful, they must be taught spirituality and they must catch that spirituality from how you've modeled it in their life.

Who our kids become will be far more caught than it is taught.

And if all you do is inject them with Bible story after scripture, after anecdote, after spiritual illustration, and they never see evidence of it actually affecting your life, then more than likely you will raise a kid that sees the whole spiritual enterprise as nothing but hypocrisy.

Who your kid becomes will be far more caught than it is taught.

Spirituality is caught and taught, and then here's our application step.

Eventually it must be lived.

Eunice, Timothy's mother, did something that may be the hardest thing for parents to do, and specifically the hardest thing for mothers to do.

She let her son go.

In Acts 16, 3, it says Paul wanted Timothy to go with him.

Timothy's a very young man.

He's strong in his faith, he's resilient spiritually.

But it's hard to let our kids go.

We're living through this.

We have an incredible 18-year-old son getting ready to live his life.

It's hard to let your kids go.

I'm sending my kid to a dorm at Texas AM, you know?

Gigumer, you know, we're learning.

I don't know.

Eunice is sending Timothy with the man that a few years earlier she had watched, beaten almost to death.

Sending Timothy with the man she saw almost beaten to death to go do the thing that got him almost beaten to death.

And she lets him go.

And it is not our job to wrap a bubble around our kids, to helicopter around our kids.

And we have become convinced of this at some level that our job is to make sure for the 18 years that we have them, that they never experience pain and they never go through any suffering and there's never any hardships.

And if there's a kid that's even a little bit mean to them, we will cut that kid out, or we might be tempted to cut that kid, you know?

Like we're gonna protect our baby at all costs, and they're never gonna suffer.

And then they leave our house at 17 or 18 or 19 or 25, and they've never built a single skill set to be able to endure a world that is almost nothing but suffering and trial and pain.

At some point, your kid is going to develop their own faith, not your faith, that maybe you have strongly suggested or forced on them, they will develop their own faith.

And if you have not modeled what that faith looks like in a real and relevant way, and if you have not allowed them opportunity to develop their own faith over time to actually live it out, then you may not have the equity necessary for them to allow you to be the guide on their journey to their own faith.

The opportunity that we have for the 18 or so years that the kids are in our house is the opportunity to be their guide as they learn to live their faith on their own.

Eunice, her faith was forged through suffering.

She willingly let her son go and serve Jesus, even though it could easily cost him his life.

A mother's legacy and a parent's legacy more generally might be best measured by how well we model following after the world.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Man, the world's different than the world I was a kid in.

The world's different than the world I was a teenager in.

It is so divided and so angry and so confused.

And now with social media and the platforms these kids are on and all the information they have access to, it can be really scary thinking about bringing your kids up in this world right now.

I want to suggest there's also an advantage.

Because I grew up in a world where you could be a lukewarm, nominal, Sunday-only Christian, and very few things were gonna actually test your faith from Monday to Saturday.

That world is gone.

Your kids are gonna be resilient in their faith or they are going to stray.

There is no in-between ground, which means we now have an opportunity in a divided, angry, confused world every single day to demonstrate the reality of what a faith-filled life actually looks like.

And when your kids get in the world and see people who don't have peace in their life, who don't have hope for their future, who don't love everyone, including their enemies, they will see that there is an actual difference that Jesus has made in their life.

And over time, I believe they will choose Jesus because of it.

Yes, it's a scary world to bring kids up in, but it is a world that will make strong young men and women if they are taught and modeled and allowed to live out their faith as we are bringing them up.

And before we close, I want to talk to what might be a large group of parents, both here and online, who have kids that are older or maybe even out of the house.

And as you reflect on this, you're aware either you didn't do this very well, you didn't connect your kids to their spirituality, you didn't model faith for them.

And for some of you, you didn't know Jesus yet when you were bringing up your kids.

For some of you, you put your faith in Jesus late in life when your kids were already pretty much developed and on their way out.

Similarly, there are some of you who did this to the absolute best of your ability, and we all do it very imperfectly.

Some of you really tried and really tried to teach him and tried your best to model it and tried to let him live it out.

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

And they get to make their own decisions, they can turn to their own ways and be swallowed up by the world and all that it offers.

It happens, it happens a lot, and it is heartbreaking.

And I need you to hear as we close this out that as long as there is God, there is hope, and there is always God, so there is always hope.

And listen, your baby boy might be 37 now, you know?

Your little princess might be 25 with minds of their own, have walked away from their faith and want nothing to do with the spiritual life that you lead.

But God is still God, and you are still their parent.

Parenting does not end at 18 years old.

And so let me be real with you.

If your kid has grown and walked away from their faith, you are probably not going to be given many opportunities to teach them.

They probably don't want to hear it.

And if they do want to hear it, they probably don't want to hear it from you.

And I know that's painful, but it's real.

However, every single day you have an opportunity to model the difference that Jesus actually makes in your life.

And I know your kid is 20-something or 30-something or 40-something and you don't think they're watching, they are watching.

What does your faith actually mean?

In a world that is divided, do you actually still have peace?

In a world that feels hopeless, are you filled with the hope of eternity in a world where there is so much anger and hatred?

Do you love, even love your enemies, love your political opponents?

Do you love sincerely and selflessly your kids' friends who are leading them down the wrong paths that you can't hardly stand?

Your kids are watching, and here's what we know life lived apart from God will devolve into chaos eventually.

And when the bottom falls out, if every day you have taken the opportunity to model the difference that Jesus can make in your life, when the bottom falls out, and it will at some point.

And maybe, just maybe, your little boy or little girl will be ready to come and hear what you have to say.

You live in love like Eunice lived and loved her son Timothy.

You live in love like Jesus.

And here's a promise I want all of us parents to hang on to, all of the mothers to hang on to.

Even if you can't see it, even if you can't measure it, you live in love like Jesus, and you will leave behind a legacy.

Let me pray for you.

Jesus, I lift up our mothers today, everyone in this room and online.

I thank you for their care.

God, for giving of themselves, for sacrificing, loving their children in a way that God, honestly, probably you alone can understand.

I pray for peace in the midst of hardship.

God, I pray for hope in the hopeless days where it feels like kids are only moving backwards and they're not figuring it out, and we don't know how we're gonna get through.

I pray for strength to continue to teach the deeper truths of your word strength, to model their faith in the midst of suffering and trials and strength, to allow our children opportunity to actually live out and develop a real faith of their own.

And I believe, God, that through that we will see many of our children grow into the world changers that you created them to be.

We love you.

We pray all these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.