Here’s a little recap from our evening study for moms tonight.
God gives moms a huge amount of natural love for their children. Even unbelieving moms love their children sacrificially. But that is not enough. That creaturely love is wonderful, but it runs out eventually. It gets used up, so moms find they can’t overlook an annoyance, or they just can’t read one more story or give one more glass of water. What mothers need is supernatural love, the kind that only God has. If we ask, He can fill us with His kind of love. That is the kind our children need.
Sometimes we ask God for supernatural love when we have a neighbor or a co-worker or friend who is unlovely. They get on our nerves. We want to love them, but we find we have no natural love for them, so we ask God for some of His supernatural love to fill us to love these unlovely people. So they get the really good stuff, and our children get the natural stuff.
We need to get the supernatural love to love our own children, because it is far higher octane than that natural love that we have. And the supply is limitless. We just have to ask and keep asking. Then we can love our children the way God wants us to love them. The kind of love that suffers long, is kind, doesn’t envy or parade itself, is not puffed up, doesn’t behave rudely, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, and thinks no evil. The kind of love that doesn’t rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth, that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and never fails.
This is the greatest thing, and we are to pursue it.
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Thanks for sharing this with us, Nancy. I’ve been reading for a few weeks now and have been greatly blessed by your posts! Thanks for this reminder…
Thanks for the great post! It was just what I needed to hear today.
Thank you for this wonderful reminder. I needed to hear this this morning as I enter into day number 3 of potty training my twins!
Thank you for posting these!
This is so true and helpful. I also pursue this by reflecting on 1 Cor. 13 when extended family and in-laws are visiting.
Thank you – very true – applies to how we love our husbands too, I think.
Thanks, Mrs. Wilson! Such a good reminder.
Do you have any helpful thoughts on how we should “think no evil, hope all things, believe all things” of our children? I always took this as an injunction not to be a suspicious (evil thinking) person–effectively saying that love gives the benefit of the doubt, thinks charitably. But when it comes to our kids, it seems we also have a responsibility to be a little suspicious. When the little shifty-eyed person who has already lied twice that morning edges past me guiltily, that’s clearly not the time to think no evil in the sense in which I had been taking it!
Claire Roise
Certainly, Claire, I agree with you that we ought not be suspicious of evil intent in every little thing, or attribute evil motives to any one without clear grounds for doing so. This means that a mother should not take it personally when her son argues with her or when her daughter disobeys her. She should “think no evil” in that sense. And there are probably many other examples where a mom ought not “think evil” of her children.
However, I think your example of mothering falls into another category all together. A wise mother who is on the lookout will be mighty suspicious in a very loving way of her little brood of busy bees! I remember my son running out of the bathroom with a dart gun announcing that he didn’t need a spanking. My husband went in to see what the guilty party had done, and he found a dart on the bottom of the toilet! (And no, he didn’t get a spanking for that!) Another time when the house seemed “suspiciously” quiet, I dashed to the bedroom to find that my two-year-old had removed his little sister from the moses basket, and she had been (very lovingly, not doubt) placed on my bed. Yikes! You can’t trust those little people for a moment. Then there was the time two of my granddaughters opened the tap on my 5-gallon jug of drinking water and were dancing and splashing around in the laundry room….and then…but I had better restrain myself! I raise my glass to suspicious mothers (and grandmothers)!
Laughing out loud at your stories!
Nancy, your point is very well taken. I do forget to pray for supernatural love for my children, although I remember dutifully to seek it for the public school children and teachers I work with (for my eldest’s vision services). I work daily to suffer long with my children, but it’s not always in love. Thank you so much for the warning and encouragement.
Recently I have been reflecting on the gospel accounts of Jesus going from town to town teaching the crowds. At one point he wants to go off to a quiet place alone (no doubt exhausted) and the crowd follows him. Instead of yelling that he needs some “alone time”, and can’t they see he’s busy, “he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like a sheep without a shepherd.” I need to pray more for this kind of love for my kids at 4:00 in the afternoon when it’s time to pick up the house, naps are wearing off, my 2-year old decided to experiment with scissors on her hair, and the baby just slugged her sister!
Hah! Thanks for the fun stories. They remind me of the time we had the pastor and his wife over (not you, the Leitharts) and just as the steaks were coming off the grill and the company was arriving, I found baby Lewis on the ground in the kitchen with my 5 liter olive oil, and he had just learned to unscrew. Oh, so sad. We had to warn anyone who wanted to walk through the kitchen that night, to walk slowly and with great aplomb.
My little brother did that with a gallon of maple syrup! We only noticed him when he started crying because he couldn’t stand up, he kept slipping and falling.
I know we’re not supposed to cry over spilt milk, but I think I’d cry over the olive oil or the maple syrup!
Isn’t supernatural love and natural love one and the same thing? Jesus rose from the dead and we will be resurreccted in the body. Surely to distinguish between the divine and the instinctive love is to diminish both aspects of God’s nature (God is love, after all).
Surely the difficult person at work benefits in no way from any high octane spiritual ‘love’ – they can see right through it! Surely it’s an insult, not a blessing to be ‘loved’ in this manner.
Surely true love is sincere above all else. As it is from God surely we can’t just turn it on and off like it was a hose, directing it in the direction we please. Surely it’s more like a light shining from within us on anything that comes into contact, spraying love out in all directions, like God loves and like the sun shines on the bad and the good.
Love Deborah