5.11.25 - Which First Dwelt In Your Grandmother Lois And Your Mother Eunice

Now motherhood is an interesting topic because it's something we talk about a lot and focus on a lot around here. Manhood, womanhood, motherhood, marriage, children, training children, these types of things. The reason we focus on them is because we understand those to be the areas that our society is, getting wrong and messing up. Another way of saying that is, is we see these to be areas where Satan is a tie, and where God's people are being led astray and being consumed for lack of instruction, for lack of discipline, for lack of training. And so we've made it our goal to focus on these things.

When we come to a day like Mother's Day, we don't, stop for many holidays and decide to preach a sermon on the holiday of the of the week. But with motherhood and with fatherhood, it's always been our practice to take a week and to focus and to preach specifically on that topic. And what I find is that motherhood and fatherhood are something that the Bible doesn't talk a ton about in great detail. It doesn't we don't have long lists of this is what a mother is and it's this and it's this and it's this and here's how you do it and here's the priorities and here's what's good. We have passages that speak to femininity to godly, to godly femininity and these types of things.

Proverbs 31, Ephesians five, first Peter three, they talk to wives. We have instructions somewhat to mothers, but by and large, it's something that's that's assumed or, intrinsic to man. And so we find ourselves at a time in history where something that is foundational to our creation, man and woman, father and mother, husband and wife, these types of things. That these foundational things are being attacked by Satan. And so we're having to come back and to rebuild the foundations much like Nehemiah, Ezra did in their time.

They went back and said, we have to fix the foundations. And so that's what we're doing. This morning, as I said, we're going to be focusing on the topic of motherhood. That doesn't mean that this sermon won't have any bearing on men or husbands or or children or those without children. When we read scripture, you have to remember scriptures own exhortation that all scripture is profitable and not just for some people in certain seasons of life, but that all scriptures inspired by God and is profitable to all of us at every time.

Single man, this morning's topic should be a guiding light in choosing a wife. Okay? Every young man has priorities in how to choose a wife, but that doesn't assure that they're godly ones. If you're a single woman, our topic this morning should set your due north. It should give you what you ought to aspire to, what sort of woman you ought to to want to become.

There's not more to being a woman than what God has to say about it. And as I said earlier, our society is not teaching you godly femininity. Quite the opposite. Motherhood for women is not required for them to be a Christian, but it is the principle means by which God sanctifies women. This is what God tells us.

Women will be will be saved through the bearing of children if they persevere in love and sanctity and self restraint. And so this is the thing that makes women most like Jesus. It's hard. It's the battlefield that women fight on. Throughout their whole lives.

Some fight to get onto it. Through marriage. Some fight to and desire it, due to infertility. And then some many most fight once they're on the field and don't know what to do. But it is a fight.

It is a very much a battlefield. And so you men from the very beginning ought to understand all of your affinity for war and competition and victory that you have wherever you express it. Motherhood is where your wife is doing that same work. And it's just as intense for her there as it is for you in the workplace or wherever it is you compete. And so my hope this morning is that God will help each of us, men, women, mothers, fathers, reclaiming it, first in our homes and families, and to teach our children to do it about it as well, so that we might actually be salt and light, salt and light at this point in society where what is a woman real and where their motherhood is is noble or worthwhile for a woman to pursue is something that not everyone has an answer to or a good answer or a godly read the word of the Lord?

Paul says this, For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice. And I am sure that it is in you as well. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated.

Now you might be wondering how is he gonna preach a whole sermon about motherhood from this? You're gonna find out. In this verse, we start with Paul speaking to his spiritual son, Timothy, and about Timothy's faith. For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you. So he's talking about Timothy.

He's talking about Timothy's faith, and he's describing Timothy's faith as being sincere. In first Timothy one five, in the first letter that Paul wrote to Timothy, he said this, the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Supposed to produce. When Paul says the goal of our instruction is, he's saying the reason we proclaim the gospel or the fruit that we expect the gospel to produce in people's lives instruction. Here he says where it came from or who else has it.

I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother, Lois, and your mother. Was his father was a Greek and he didn't grow up as a Jew, he had both a mother and a grandmother who believed. We We know that Timothy's dad was not a Jew. His mother was a Jew, but his father was not. His father was a Greek.

And so you have to think for a moment about the sort of house that Timothy grew up. Question about our society. Whose faith is the most important? With regard to children becoming Christians, whose faith is most important? It's the fathers.

Okay? But, Timothy, stands in as as not as an exception to that rule, but as a manifestation of that not being the only way. Timothy's faith is connected to both his mother and his grandmother's faith. And so I bring that up to say to you mothers, listen, I don't want you to think that because that you have no influence over your children and even your sons. You have a great influence over them.

Okay? And ideally in a perfect world, the mom and the dad are unified about these things, they're agreed about these things, and they together raise their children up in the nurture and admonition of the law. But it wouldn't be strange for you to be to your work of motherhood, your work of love, your work of service, your work of care, the sleeplust, the worry, though the worry is not the right thing to do, love expressed as worry is an as a thing mothers do. It would be understandable for you to think that it doesn't really matter. And I mean to tell you from the very beginning, in fact, it does matter.

There's a lot of talk today about what's important for children. Our mother's important. Our father's important. Which one is more important? Which one's more important?

Which one can you do without? Well, it depends on what we what we want the outcome to be. Can someone live to adulthood without a father? Can they grow to that stage of life? Yes.

Can someone grow up without a mother who's involved in their life? Mothers need to not shirk that responsibility. Your kids need you.

There's not something more important for you to be

doing with your there's not and there's not something that will be more profitable in God's sight than you giving your life for your children. It's a train them and raise them up. They as they cons as they consider the prospect of marriage or having children. They feel like, well, everything I want what do I want? And they'll ask other people, maybe not explicitly, what should I want?

Like, what should my priorities be? But everyone's telling them what their priorities should be. This is what should be important to you. This is what you should organize your life around. Other things should get in line behind these things.

And what you find in society is the thing that's never on the list is becoming a wife and a mother. If you ask the girl when she's little, five or six, young, and she's playing with her dolls, and she's doing mom things, and she's playing with her kitchen, and that type of stuff. We'd say that's a natural thing. But as they get older, they start to question whether those desires and those, expressions of of femininity and whether that is a sufficient mission. Or by the time they get to middle school or into high school age, if you were to ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Go

to college. I want

to get a degree. I want to make money. I want to help people. But not her own people, not her family. I'm not saying this to badger you or to beat you up, but I am saying this so that you all we all on this we're all on the same page about the pressures that women face in our society.

And it's not just pressure from out in the world or from their school counselors. It's pressures they face from their own family, from their own mothers. It's not just the kids who are subject to these these pressures and these, expectations. This is what we know about them. This is what we know about them.

This is what we know about them. And I I mean to tell you, if I could have if I could go back or if I could have my name recorded in scripture and be commended, I would consider it a great honor. And that's what you find with Lois and Eunice. The only thing we know about them is that they were Timothy's mother and grandmother. And that the thing that defined them, that characterized them was their sincere faith.

It wasn't Timothy's father or his grandfather, but his mother and his grandmother who loves Jesus. When did Lois and Eunice come to faith? Have you ever wondered that? I think we just kind of assumed that they were just like there's just this heritage of belief. Grandmother passed down to mother passed down to son.

I don't think that's actually the case. I think actually they became, Christians not long before Timothy did. If you were to look at Paul's missionary journeys, you would find that, he went through the cities they lived in. Iconium and Derby and Lystra. This is the area that they lived in.

That Paul on his on his way back to Antioch on his first missionary journey, he came through there. And that on his second missionary journey, he goes, he sort of reverses course and goes back the way he came. And this is what it says in acts twelve sixteen verses one and two. It says Paul also came to Derbe and to Lystra and a disciple was there named Timothy. So what do we learn?

We go, okay. So before Paul got there, there was a guy named Timothy, this Timothy that's, being being written to here at second Timothy, that he was a disciple. So he had become a Christian sometime before that, sometime before Paul's passed through there on his second missionary journey. And Timothy is the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer but his father was a Greek. And he was well spoken of, he being Timothy.

He was well spoken of by the brethren who were from Lystra and Iconium. And so if we were to suck out of that the marrow about Timothy's life, we know that Timothy has become a Christian or a believer. And it's happened sometime before Paul goes through on his second journey. If you carried on in in, Acts 16, what you'd find is that because of Paul, Timothy's reputation, Paul wants to take him along with him and does in fact take him along with him to train him further. So at some point before then, he became a believer.

And had been a believer long enough or had done enough to develop a good reputation among the brethren. And if we put that together with second Timothy one five our passage, we realized that that faith that Timothy has, that Paul commends first dwell in his grandmother and his mother Eunice. I suspect that you that Lois and Eunice were converts of Paul's first missionary journey through there just a few years previous. And that the sincere faith that God wrought in them was bearing its fruit in Timothy. Another way of saying this is I don't think this is actually a passage primarily about covenant succession.

The subject of this of this text is the quality of their faith. It's described as being sincere.

Faith?

So what is sincere faith? What does sincere mean? It means genuine or honest or heartfelt, true faith. A true sincere faith that's open and willing to be known. It's not a hypocritical faith.

Last week, I talked about hypocrisy, but that being being a great danger here. And and and Lois and Eunice and and and Timothy are set up in juxtaposition to hypocritical faith. They have a sincere faith, a humble faith, an honest faith, a faith that answers and serves Christ. And so if we ask where did Timothy get his sincere faith or from whom did he learn it? We would be right to assume or to attribute that that lesson to his mother and his marked difference in them as they came to faith in Jesus Christ and believed on him.

They changed. They came they became faithful, full of faith and a sincere faith. And that ministered to him. God used that to minister to him and to bring him to faith. Now whether he was there when they were, when on that first missionary journey or we're just not told.

Whether Timothy was with them or not or or not. But we know that they were believed first and that Tim Timothy believed after them and that the common thread between all of them was a sincere faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So mothers. You ought to aspire to have a sincere faith in Jesus Christ. And it's not the sort of thing that's going to get you likes and clicks and follows and make you popular in by the world in the world.

It's just not. And it shouldn't be your aspiration anyway. And it's not the sort of thing that's going to get you likes and clicks and follows and make you popular in by the world in the world. It's just not. And it shouldn't be your aspiration anyway.

And it And it shouldn't be your aspiration anyway. But it is precious in the sight of God and it is essential to your children that you have a sincere faith that you seek after it. And so I don't want you to teach your children to lie or to be hypocrites by moderating your behavior and speech according to who's around. Okay? I'm of the opinion

spouse,

your parents, when you were a child. There's a small circle of people who've who've seen the unfiltered version. But out in public, we have the filtered version. We have the the the curated version. We have, you know, we moderate ourselves.

But those people who see who see you with your hair down, without your makeup, first thing in the morning, they ought to see really not of any benefit for you to project sincere faith to everyone else. If your children aren't the primary beneficiaries, and your husband's not the primary beneficiaries of a sincere faith.

They're the ones who needed the most.

They're the ones who needed the the most. So mothers, be honest. If you want to have a sincere Close the distance between how you speak and behave and act in public and at home. Is he telling me to be more loud and and boisterous and fearful and obnoxious in public? For you're not fooling anybody.

We just know you're trying real hard in public. Like just be you and work from there because at least now we're honest in public and in private and we can we can now make strides towards sincere faith. Good What I find with with with women is that they tend to care a lot about relationships and they tend to do a lot in effort to serve or cultivate or protect relationships. And And what I want to tell you is relationships are the result of your sincere faith or your hypocritical faith. They're not what produce it.

You serving God and living and desiring and and cultivating a sincere faith is more important than your relationships. And you'll never have good relationships, which I understand that God's wired you to care about. You'll never have them the way you want them if they're the end yours desire. You have to seek after Christ. You have to humble yourself before him.

You have to humble yourself before him. Yeah. You have to humble yourself before him. Yeah. You have to humble yourself before him.

Yeah. You have to humble You have to humble yourself before him. And entrust the relationships to his care, honesty and heartfelt faith do produce better relationships than manipulation and guilt tripping. Better than silence when you're upset. So sincere faith is genuine and honest.

It's heartfelt. What else is it? Sincere faith is not shaken by trials or by suffering or by sin. Do you feel the bar going up? Can you still reach it?

Do you still feel like you can grab it? Get over like I can still get a hold of what sincere faith is. First, it was honest and it was open and it was heartfelt. Now it's not now it's it's it's sturdy. It's it's it's immovable.

It's it's not shaken around by trials or suffering or sin. And you think, man, that's a high bar. You mean my fear. You mean my control. You mean my worry.

Those things don't mix with sincere faith. No. They don't mix with it. So are you saying I have to be perfect and that I can never if ever I'm worried for a second that I have that I that everything is destroyed and ruined and all is lost? That I that everything is destroyed and ruined and all is lost?

No. That's not what I said. But I would ask you, do you do you feel in your bones is they peel off our masks. That's what they do. The masks that we put on and the and the ideals that we aspire to, all suffering does is peel them off.

Until at some point, we've gotten down to the the real article. What is here? And I'm saying, at that point, when all of the the aspirations and all of the the the hopes and wishes are are set aside and you say what is actually here at the core, that's the faith I'm talking about. Is there faith when all of the other stuff is taken away or is there not? Is there faith when when it's about your kids?

Is it faith? Is there faith when it's about your health? Is there faith when it's about your marriage? Some of you will face trials in your life that are acute. That are tragic.

They're enormous and overwhelmed. You'll also face some trials and sufferings that are chronic and that just last over years and decades. And they're just always there.

And they're just always there. And they're just always there. And they're just always there. And they're just always there. And they're just always there.

And they're just always there. And they're

just always there. And they're just always there. And they bear up under them, as they overwhelm you, you ought to aspire to having a sincere faith. A gentle and quiet spirit. You ought to hope in God.

I mean to move the bar up a little more now, okay? There's more to what a sincere faith is. A sincere faith is an expressed faith. It's not sufficient for you to believe in Jesus and have your own little quiet time all by yourself.

Communicate to other people.

First and foremost, the ones that have your name, that live in your house. Faith is not something that's private we keep to ourselves. It's also not something that's intellectual that we store up in our heads. Remember, a sincere faith is first a heartfelt faith, which means that's where it's rooted. It has to do with our affections.

Heart, as well as the hearts of your children. Wouldn't you like to know what Lois and Eunice said to Timothy as he was growing up? I would love to know. Sometimes it's really discouraging because you're like, oh, nothing like that. But God, it's faithful.

So maybe he'll make me like that. But wouldn't you like to know what their sincere faith actually looked like in the life of Wouldn't it be sweet? Yeah. But is there any question that they spoke to him? That they corrected him, that they served him and cared for him.

A sincere faith is an expressed faith. We are to share what we believe. A lot easier, I find, for women to talk about their desires, or as they get older, their fears and their regrets. But they're not as concrete with the things they believe. You ought to be clear in what you believe, both by what you say and by what you do.

So you and by what you and by what you and if someone were to come in the future and ask your kids when they were growing up, what did your mom teach you? You would have some confidence. Not a pride proud confidence, but a humble Christ honoring confidence that you taught them the gospel. That you taught them what forgiveness was, what mercy was, what sacrifice was, what forgiveness was. What forgiveness was.

Many other things you'd like for them to learn from you and many other things you ought to teach them in the in preparation for them, becoming adults. But that, if we teach them the whole world, work undone. And I don't mean that you teach them the facts of the gospel. I mean you teach them the heart of the gospel because it's in your heart. We can teach them the doctrines of grace and you can catechize them and you can teach them to pray and you can teach them, all kinds of true things.

And that's a part of it. But as they're taught, you've all had teachers that you could tell that what they were teaching you wasn't just something that lived in their head, it was something they cared about. It was important to them. They believed it was true. That's what it means to have a sincere expressed faith.

That your children would learn from you at your knee, So that you can teach them. Impact on your kids greater than you know. And the danger is never that they won't love what you love. The dangers that they will, and it won't be jesus. Or maybe it won't be Jesus as the first priority.

So there's work for mothers, and there's help for mothers. Lois and Eunice were, I want you to know that they weren't special women. They weren't the best of the best. They were children of God who and he helped them be what they were. And so if you find yourself deficient, if you find yourself

weak, if you find the things I'm saying to be to

be discouraging or lamentable, to be discouraging or lamentable, I want you to trust God right now that he'll help you become a godly mother. Don't be protective of your motherhood in such a way that no one can tell you that you have room yet to grow. Don't be upset that it's a man who's saying it instead of a woman in the privacy of your own home, worried about how you feel all the time. Do you want to be like Lois and Eunice? Do you want to have children like Timothy?

These are the questions. And so from very a very early age, you have to talk to your children and you have to relate to them about God. Consequential. Even if it's not big and seen by everybody, there's nothing else that, will have more of an impact on

your children. And it's not your husband's job alone. And it's not your husband's

job alone. And not your husband's job. A lot of the

A lot of the A lot of the stories.

A lot of the stories. A lot of the stories. A lot of the stories. A lot of the stories. A lot of the stories.

A lot

of the stories. A lot of the stories. A lot of the stories. A lot of the stories. A lot of the stories.

A lot of the stories. A If we believe in a division of labor and a difference between men and women, all I'm getting at is part one of the essential parts of what it means to be a woman, a wife and a mother. It's right at the top of the list. Now you husbands, is that what you want to be at the top of your wife's list? Do you want her love for your children getting in the way of your priorities?

And and pray for them and and teach them? Does that bother you? It shouldn't bother you. It does bother us, but it shouldn't bother us. That's our sin in relation to it.

Want all that stuff. And I'm like, man, this is not far behind to ask whether you want that stuff. For your family. I think one of the difficulties that men face is that we want our wives to be very godly, very competent, very faithful. But we think that their their capacity is never is is just never ending.

That they never run out of time or energy. They never actually get overwhelmed or they shouldn't anyway. And then when we stay home with the kids for a few hours, half a day, all of a sudden we're like, ready to pull our hair out. And yet somehow we're not able to connect with the fact that our wife does that all day and at night, And we still think they should have more to give to us. It's pretty foolish when you think about it.

Guilty is charged. Then if you want your wife to be the kind of woman I'm talking about, you have to figure out how to make room in your life for her to be this. You have to take burdens off of her. Your priorities have to revolve around this. As I say, if I'm talking, I'm saying, this is what women should aspire to and this should be their priorities.

They can't do it if their husbands aren't agreed to having it be a priority of their home. If you think that her job is to be all of these things and to provide for the family financially, you're putting your wife in a really difficult feel the weight of it. If she knows that you you think she could do more perpetually, could always just do a little bit more. It doesn't really matter if she's actually working outside the home or actually involved in this thing or that thing or the other. And yet you do all have to realize both husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, that our time and energy are a limited resource and we will only spend what we have on the things that are most important to us.

And if this is not what's most important to you, it will bear the fruit of it not being the most important thing to you throughout your life. And all I want is for you not to scratch your heads at the end of it and wonder why is it that our kids behave this way or act this way? Why is it that our marriage isn't that my wife and I are not close? Why is it that we function better as business partners and we can get a lot of work done together but we don't love each other, relate to each other? Why is it?

Take a step back and ask yourself, is this what you want your wife or women? Is this what you want to be the priority? You can't do it all. You can't do it all. When you're young, you think you can do it all.

You have a lot of energy when you're young. But as you get older, you can't do it all. And when you're young, you make lots of mistakes and the benefit of having lots of energy is you have lots of that energy is to be spent cleaning up the messes that you make. But you won't always have all the energy or the free time or the bandwidth to to do that. And so all the things you practice when you're young serve you well or serve you poorly when you're older.

So spend your early years prioritizing these things. So that when you get older and are more busy and are more tired and have more responsibilities, you've trained these priorities into your heart and into your life. So I want to read to you now I want to read to you a quote from GK Chesterton from a book he wrote called What's Wrong with the World? There's a lot in the book and not all of it's about men and women, but there's there's an extended section in the middle of it, where he just talks about the differences between men and women. And GK Chesterton is, an adamant cast like he despises protestants.

He despises with a perfect hatred Puritans. He's against it. And so don't get your theology from GK Chesterton. Okay? The quote I'm gonna read to you is not a a, a theological statement.

It's a statement about the differences between men and women and particularly about motherhood. And he's also a Brit. And so a lot of his references of the way he speaks, have to do with, with England. And so some of the references in this quote have to do with England. If you don't know what some of them are, that's okay.

You'll know what some of it you will know what you know you all know who Queen Elizabeth is. Right? Okay. Well, so she's in this quote. So think about her work.

Alright. This is what, Chesterton says. And this is this is, in his his his diagnosis of what's wrong with the world as relates to men and women pertaining to motherhood. He says babies need not be taught a trade, but be introduced to the world. Right?

Who needs to be taught a trade? Men do. Right? Men need babies need not be taught a trade, but be introduced to the world. House with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there are.

Have you

ever gotten tired of your why? Why? How come? Mommy? What do you know about?

Can we How about the other thing? And it's like, are you serious? That's what he's getting at here. Okay? Some questions that All the questions there are and some that there aren't.

It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. And here this idea of specialist. He says men have to specialize in their work. They have to be good at a thing, but women are generalists. They have to be good at everything.

But they don't have to be as good at everything as a specialist, because they have so much to do. They don't just have one task. They have a thousand tasks. And so he says it would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that the duty of general enlightenment is itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view.

I can only answer that our race has thought it worthwhile to cast this burden on women in order to keep common sense in the world. Do you wives ever get fed up with your husband's stupid conversations? Theoretical conversations about sports, or about politics, or about theology. It's like, seriously, like, there's kids here that need you, and you want to talk about this. What's the point?

That's what he's getting at. That the work of training children and introducing them to the world is given to women because they have common sense and it turns out actually that women are more practical than men. When it comes to the necessities of life and what's needs to be done, they are more practical than men. Men are happy to sit and think and talk and wonder and waste time and do their thing. Women don't understand it.

If you were to read the book, he also talks about the necessity of that for men. But in the in the issue of raising children, he says, we have women do the work because they're more more practical. They have common sense and we all need it. Carrying on. But when people begin to talk about this domestic domestic duty as not nearly difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the for I cannot.

With the utmost energy of imagination, conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery. All the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit that the woman drudges in the home as a man might drudge at the Cathedral Of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at trial. Motherhood is hard is what he's saying.

But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling and colorless, and it's of small import to the soul, then I say I give it up. I do not know what words mean. To Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, to be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays. To be Whitley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, and cakes, and books. To be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals and manners and theology and hygiene.

I can understand how this might exhaust the mind. You know, if you had to focus yourself on one task and just pour yourself into it, I can understand how that would exhaust the mind. But I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the rule of three and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone?

No. A woman's function is laborious but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. Never pity her for its smallness. So if we were to strain out everything he said about motherhood, what did he say? And that women are given to it, given this work by God, for the preservation of, of man, Men, we go to work every day and we do the same things.

Right? You don't go to work one day and and you're an IT guy, and then you go to the next day and you're a construction worker, and then you go the next day and you're an English teacher, and then the next day you're Like, you don't do that. You go to work and you pretty much do the same thing or or the same things, you know, within a fairly narrow range. You just go do the same thing every day. And if you had to If someone was like, hey, why don't you go do this today?

You'd be terrible at it because you weren't trained in it. But you should know that your wife's life is is is as wide as the world is big in the things that she has to do. This is motherhood. These are the kind of women that Lois and Eunice were toward Timothy. And so we ought not to despise it and look down on the work of motherhood.

We ought to honor it. We ought to make room for it. It's a terribly inefficient endeavor. Okay. Maybe you men need to hear this.

Motherhood is is notoriously inefficient. And that's by design and nothing's wrong when things don't get done as efficiently as if you were doing it. And the reason you would get it done more quickly is because you don't care about the things that your wife does. Things she cares about are important. So make room and time and space for her to pursue them and to cultivate them.

Take the dinner table for example. If you went to a bachelor's house for dinner, what would it be like? What would the food be like? Pizza out

of boxes. Pizza out of boxes.

Probably eaten off of paper plates. Maybe just off of napkins. Right? When you put your arm on the table, not your elbows because those don't belong on tables, but your arm. What would the table be like?

Well, you might think, well, there wouldn't be a table. There wouldn't brighten like but we can know a couple of things. All of the, all of the, the trappings of a nice meal would be absent. They'd be absent. There might not even be a table.

There wouldn't be silverware. There would not be any home cooked food. Everything would be out of plastic and cardboard. Now, if you went to the house of a young lady, how would it differ? Well, there'd be a table.

It would be clean. There'd be real dishes on it. They would have made the food. They would have thought about whether they would have done this thing men never do. They would have asked, are you allergic to anything or is there any type of food you don't like?

Men, we just order the kind of pizza we like and if you don't like meat lovers, too bad for you. Oh, you have a gluten allergy? Bring your own food. That really is the difference between men and women. But the men would have he would have got he would have gotten dinner all prepared and taken care of, and it would take him like seven minutes, plus the time to go pick up the pizza.

Right? Because he's efficient. But the quality of what's produced, inefficiency and, motherhood and in caring for the home and in caring for the children, nothing's wrong with it. It's much more pleasant and enjoyable. To your wife's love and care and support for you.

To the point that when she leaves, you're kind of like We're Well, how am I supposed to do this? It's good for you to need your wife. And if you need your wife to do these things and be these things, do not punish her for it. Let her be a woman. Let her be a mother.

It'll be important to her if it's important to you. Or maybe a better way to say is, it has to be important for you first. Then she can learn to have it be a priority for her. And the reason I say it that way is because most young women have not been trained in any of the stuff I've talked about. They've never been taught how to do what I just described.

As I was describing the bachelorette's house, I'm well aware of the fact that many bachelorette's houses would function just like the bachelor's house today. And that's a shame. It's a shame. It's a lack of femininity. It's a flattening of the differences between men and women.

That woman will not be a good mother, if I can just put it plainly. And she will be very upset about the fact that she realizes when she realizes she's not a good mother, she will be very upset about it and disappointed about it. That doesn't mean that she'll then commit herself to learning how to do it. She may just double down on her work or her or her other pursuits, but she's missing something that the society has stolen from her that we as Christians ought to give back to our women and train them to be. They can be women when we become men and when we honor the things that God made them and intended for our wives and our mothers and our sisters to do and to be.

If your wife is is is depressed and has mommy guilt, it's a real problem. You should sort it out with her and figure out what pressure she's feeling and what expectations of yours she's trying to meet that are getting in the way of her loving her children the way God intended her to do. And then you should take those hurdles out of her way. Longer about this. The first priority of being a mother is that you be a wife first.

Your moms hear me. We talked a lot about your children and about loving them and caring for them and and it being a commendable and an essential work and it is. But you have to be a wife first. You'll never be a better mother than you are a wife. Second priority, teach your children the gospel.

Love them and give your life for them. Okay? No one's asking you to take up a gun and go die for your country. No one's asking you to jump in front of the of the bus. Though if your kid was out in front of it, you may well do it and that's fine.

But that's not what's primarily is being asked to you. That's not the place you're going to give your life's blood. You're going to give it in service to your husband and to your children. That requires you to give up your own pursuits and your own comforts. Motherhood's a scary thing.

It really is. Because we're not growing up in a society, generally, that is encouraging and facilitating. There's not a lot of points of reference for how to do it. You're gonna be cutting cutting across the grain. You're gonna be swimming upstream.

You have to do it. You have to prioritize other people above yourself. It's a very basic priority of motherhood. If you're the most important person in your life, your motherhood is gonna suffer. You should be able to say as your kids grow up and as your time as time goes on, the things that you've given up, that you enjoyed, that you liked, that you even desired for the sake of others.

It's it's woven into the fabric of of femininity and motherhood, and we have to reclaim it. And so make it your purpose, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, to talk to each other and figure out how what we're gonna do to reclaim this. Talk to each other and figure out how what we're gonna do to reclaim this. The final thing I'll say is, these things I'm describing are actually what's most attractive and desirable to men. Not to young men when they're getting married because they're foolish.

But as you get older, what you're gonna want as a husband and as a father is you're going to want the sort of woman that I've just described. You won't be glad that she's got all her hobbies and got all her pursuits and that she lives independently of you. You will despise it. So cultivate her orientation toward you and the priorities of your home and family and church above what the world's putting in front of her. Let's pray.