Treasuring Christ When Your Hands Are Full: Gospel Meditations for Busy Moms

The highest aim of womanhood is not motherhood; the highest aim of womanhood is being conformed to the image of Christ.

By God’s grace I can resist the temptation to treat my children as interruptions to my will for my life. Instead, God enables me to treat my children as precious gifts he is using to shape me into his image according to his will for my life.

When we acknowledge our inability to mother our children apart from the Lord’s provision and strength, we honor God. Of course we are not able to do this work of raising children and training them in the instruction of the Lord. That’s why we desperately need the Lord!

Because of the gospel -- the news about what Jesus did on the cross to save sinners -- mothers who make Christ their treasure can rejoice in their work as God works in them.

Loving like Jesus loved is a dying to self a thousand deaths a day. There are times when we are not motivated by the love of Christ, and we fume at our children not because they break God’s law but because they break ours.

Preaching the gospel to myself each day is the best way to remind myself that my life in Christ is the prevailing, permanent reality in my life.

When I view motherhood not as a gift from God to make me holy but rather as a role with tasks that get in my way, I am missing out on one of God’s ordained means of spiritual growth in my life. Not only that, but I am missing out on enjoying God. No amount of mommy angst can compare to the misery that comes from a life devoid of the comforting, encouraging, guarding, providing, satisfying presence of our holy God.

No mother’s nightmarish valley is so dark that Jesus cannot bear her burdens the whole way through.

God's grace to us in Christ is greater than any frustration that threatens to unravel us. Because Jesus is upholding the universe with his word, we can trust him with any no-good, very bad day.

When your eyes are fixed on the horizon of eternity, it affects your vision for motherhood. We need to have eyes to see a view of God that is so big and so glorious that it transforms our perspective of motherhood. In the context of eternity, where Christ is doing his work of reigning over the cosmos, we need to see our mundane moments for what they really are—worship.

We need to remember that God is no less good to us when we find ourselves in a battle of wills with a preschooler in the checkout line at the grocery store than he was as his Son dragged a cross up a hill that Friday two thousand years ago.

The great problem a mother has is not a lack of creativity, accomplishment, or skill, but her inability to love God and others as Jesus loves her.

God has called us to something vastly bigger than our happiness or that of our children.

cliché encouragements about life are like cheap diapers. Only the gospel can persevere your faith through a spiritual blowout.

God's irresistible grace binds our wandering hearts to himself and frees us to love him back and overflow in love to our neighbors.

The long view of motherhood sees far beyond the third trimester, potty training, and even high school graduation. The long view of motherhood scans the horizon of eternity. We understand that our child may one day be our brother or sister in Christ. We mothers always need to have the long view of life in our minds as we go about our days. God is about his work of creating people who are created and recreated in the image of his Son. We are part of the new humanity, a people whose pattern of life is being transformed by God so that we no longer walk in ways that enslave us in death and futility. The world will one day be filled with the glory of the Lord the way the waters cover the sea! In all our mothering, we look toward that day.

A God who uses his freedom to save his enemies in such a way that ensures that they will be inexplicably rejoicing in him forever is a God who is worthy of all our worship.

When our children are struggling with separation anxiety, we give them reasons to have peace. When we, God's children, feel anxious that we are separated from him, he gives us indomitable cause to feel his peace.

The joys of today's motherhood are true joys, but they are like shadowy reflections in a mirror. At the end of every day -- chaotic and mundane alike -- motherhood is about the adoration and enjoyment of our great God.

The Bible describes motherhood as neither a diminishing of a woman's personhood nor the sum of her personhood. Womanhood, ultimately, is about a different Person altogether. Likewise, motherhood is about a different Person altogether. The highest aim of womanhood is not motherhood; the highest aim of womanhood is being conformed to the image of Christ. The multifaceted goal of motherhood points us in the same direction. One of the gifts of motherhood is that God uses it to trace the image of his Son onto our lives.

In every occasion, moms must rely on God's strength. If we think we can do "this motherhood thing" in our own strength, then we are fooling ourselves.

This kind of absolute dependency on God insults our pride. We're so quick to embrace other solutions for our emotional, physical, and mental fatigue. "I can figure this out on my own," we tell ourselves. More often than not in our trials we pretend everything is okay, and we dive headlong into self-sufficiency. Faith, rather, acknowledges the fierceness of the storm and throws us into the sea, and we swim as fast as we can to where we see Jesus walking on the water (John 6:16-21).

Spoken as a testimony to a woman's strength, we hear that "motherhood is not for the faint of heart." However, a case can be made that motherhood is only for the faint of heart.

Glorify God by enjoying him -- he is a truer and better award than the adulations of our children, of other women, and even of our self-approval.

Pride induces us to worry about tomorrow as though we can control the outcome with our anxiety. In those hand-wringing moments we need to remember that God's grace will still be sufficient tomorrow. That means we have all the grace we need for now. And when later becomes now, God will give us the grace we need in that moment, too. God's future grace in Christ is more real than all of the anxiety-ridden hypothetical situations that threaten to keep us awake tonight.

We have every reason to glory in the cross and trust Jesus with out PR department.

The daily lives of mothers around the world are different, but our hope is the same. All of us need to experience the concrete reality of a hope that is for every season and will never pass. Frustrated moms and desperate housewives have a problem that runs far deeper than our need for a break from the daily grind, though physical rest is a daily necessity. Denying that we have no-good, very bad days only works until the next no-good, very bad day comes around. Just cutting ourselves some slack on occasion isn't going to cut it in the long run. What we all need is to be rescued from our sin by the Son, who was cut off from the Father when he took our sin upon himself so that we could be bound to God by his grace forever. What we need to see is the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ shining into our heart (2 Cor. 4:6).

Perhaps the scariest feelings in the midst of these frustrations come from one particular dark thought. It's a lie that we're tempted to believe. This idea has more to do with karma than with grace: we suspect that however the day went is how God feels about us.

Following Christ, loving Christ, and obeying Christ are undoubtedly the most important decisions any mother could ever make. And the follow-through of these decisions comes into play each and every day.