Realistic Mothering

So with all of this meditating on motherhood and attempting to prepare myself for the months ahead, I managed to get myself pretty keyed up (surprise, surprise). The Lord certainly does search me and know me, however, and is familiar with all my ways because both the morning sermon and the evening devotional a few Sundays ago spoke directly to my state of heart and mind.

Somewhere along the line, my (perpetual) tendency towards self-sufficiency and achievement crept into my mental preparations. Through both sermons the Lord reminded me of this certain fact--I am going to fail. The Lord knows that truly coming to grips with this certain truth is THE most fundamental thing I need to do to prepare for the months to come.

Ourpastor was finishing up a series through the Book of Jude and was preaching on that awesome benediction:

"To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy—to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen."

One of the applications he made from this passage was to entrust your failures to God. Jude wrote this letter with full awareness that the people to whom he wrote were not yet glorified and would struggle as Christians on this side of heaven. In fact, the majority of his letter is warning them against stumbling in major ways--because they were being seriously tempted to do so. But he ends the letter with a massive dose of encouragment: "Even though you are facing tremendous trials and temptations, God is committed to you! He will present you before his glorious presence without fault." In other words, your failure is not the end of the story. God's faithfulness to you and to His promises is the end of the story, and that is what you should put your hope in, not in your ability to perform perfectly every day of your life.

And just in case I didn't get God's message to me that morning, the Sunday evening devotional was on Luke 22:31-32:

"Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers."

Wow. As Piper likes to say, "It is sentences that change lives, not books." And what sentences we read in Luke 22:31-32. Look closely at what Jesus says. First, Jesus tells Peter that He has prayed that his faith would not fail. And yet the very next thing Jesus says ("When you have turned back") implies that Peter's faith will fail. Yet it is also clear that Peter's faith will not fail in an ultimate way because Jesus says that he will turn back and then tells him what to do when he has done so.

Interestingly, immediately after Jesus says this to Peter, Peter vows that he will follow Jesus to the death. Jesus then informs Peter that, in fact, he will betray him three times that very night. As we know, Peter does deny Jesus that night, even within Jesus' earshot ("Just as [Peter] was speaking, the rooster crowed. The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him...And he went outside and wept bitterly." Luke 22:60-62). But as we also know, this is not the end of the story. In John 21 we find Jesus going to great lengths to "reinstate" Peter, and the Book of Acts shows us a Peter who is an entirely changed man following Jesus' resurrection and the filling of the Spirit.

So what can we as mothers glean from this? First, as I said before, we (like Peter) will fail, and the Lord knows this. In the coming weeks I will snap at my husband, I will be annoyed with my three year old, I will groan when I hear the baby crying, I will panic about some baby issue, and I will complain about sleeplessness. For all my good intentions and mental preparation, I am still going to sin! But just as failure wasn't the end of Peter's story, it's not the end of my story! For Jesus not only prayed for Peter, but He has promised to pray for us: "Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them." Hebrews 7:25

Peter's mistake in Luke 22 was that he put his confidence in his own ability to keep from stumbling. What Jesus was telling Peter and what Peter eventually learned is that the only safe place in which we can place our confidence is in Jesus' own promise to preserve us. And so, my goal now in these last 10 days is to prepare myself to depend--not on my own strength or ability but on the promise and power of my Savior.

Tomorrow's post is entitled Preparing to Depend, and in it I hope to share some of the ways in which I am seeking to do so. And believe me, this entire series of blogposts has been more for my own sake than for anyone else's!