I see it on the television every time I see some mother in the inner city standing on a sidewalk crying her eyes out because her children were killed in some kind of a drug thing or some kind of a drive-by gang shooting, and you just know the mother’s heart is cut out of her. And these women, who have more and more and more children, just have more and more and more of that pain. How can a woman ever be relieved of that? She can be saved through childbearing.
She can actually be saved, delivered from this curse, delivered from this pain, delivered from this sorrow at the very point of childbearing, the very point of the curse. The pain of childbearing is the punishment for the sin. But in that very childbearing, she can find deliverance from that pain. How does she do that? Here it is:
“If they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.” “They” means the women. If a woman will live a godly life and “continue in faith and love” and holiness and self-control, if she will be what Verse 10 says, “A godly woman,” then, you know what? She’ll raise a godly generation. And her children will continue in the same thing. So if you women have been sitting out there tonight saying, you know, I’m not sure I identify with what you’re saying; I don’t have a lot of pain with my children. They’re a sheer joy to me. Do you know why? Because you have been delivered through childbearing. Because you have continued to live your life in “faith and love and sanctity and self-control.”
You are in the church, which is the context here. You are living a godly life and, therefore, your children are being raised to love the Savior, and the curse is mitigated, and you are delivered from its impact. That’s the point. That’s the point. It’s the only way. I look at my children. They are an incessant joy to me. They are an incessant joy to their mother. I look at my grandchildren. I watch them being raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And we find in them the greatest delight. And yet, there are fears there, and there are worries there, about the things that can take the life of our children and the influences that can corrupt their minds. But there is joy there.
Certainly, Patricia and any Christian mother is delivered from that tremendous weight of the curse, when she lives a godly life and sees the fruit of that godly life in the faith and the love and the sanctity and the self-control of her children. All is joy. And then we realize that even if their life is lost, even if they become ill, we have nothing to fear. Because where are they going? Going
to heaven. So that in Christ, through salvation, the curse is reversed. And the children become a heritage from the Lord, a blessing, a gift from God, given back to Him, and the source of our greatest joy.
Well, so much for the children. Next week, we’re getting on you husbands; show how a woman can survive her man. That’ll be good, because it’s Father’s Day.
Let’s pray. Scripture says the entrance of your Word gives light and, indeed, it does, our Father. We are illuminated. We know now things we didn’t know. We understand things we didn’t understand, and our worldview continues to be clarified. We see things the way they are. Thank you, Lord, for saving women in this church and all over the earth. Thank you for sweet mothers, for whom all the pain of children is softened and wiped away because their children love Jesus Christ. And therefore, in the end, all is joy because all is settled forever. And women are delivered from the stigma of sin and from the curse of it by living godly lives and raising godly children. Oh, Father, how we pray that women who name the name of Jesus Christ, even as those precious mothers came tonight to dedicate those little babies, may they do all they need to do in their lives to live in such a way as to be delivered, rescued, saved from this curse, and to have the kind of relationship with their children that is a little bit like paradise before it was lost. Thank you again for your word to us. In Christ’s name, Amen.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
