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What Can I Do To Escape This Pressure?

This Sunday is Mother’s Day.  As you might expect the theme this Sunday will reflect the role of our mothers in our lives.  But I have a confession to make. Mother’s Day sermons are hard for me.  And it’s not because I don’t have a good relationship with my mother.  I have a wonderful relationship with her.  Always have.  And I have a fantastic relationship with the mother of my children.  But still, preaching to mothers or about mothers puts pressure on me.  Allow me to explain.

Mother’s Day sermons seem to fall into three categories.  The first one is in celebration of mothers.  You know, mothers are awesome!  Look at Mary.  Look at the virtuous woman as described in Proverbs 31.  The second is one telling mothers how to be better mothers. "Be like Mary or Hannah (the mother of Samuel) or be like Daniel’s mother or Moses’ mother...now here is how to be awesome as a mother."  The third sermon we sometimes hear on Mother's Day is one that has nothing to do with mothers.  The pastor publicly honors the mothers...wait—all the women in the congregation—and then preaches on whatever he would have preached on if it were not Mother's Day.

Now here’s why I feel pressure on Mother’s Day.  Whatever sermon I preach will fall into one of the aforementioned categories, and all of them have a downside.  If I preach on the subject of celebrating motherhood, some women are bound to feel discouraged.  Not every woman is a mother.  And even though most of us guys and kids are ready to say our wives and mothers are Proverbs 31 women, there are plenty of women who feel like they don’t quite live up to that impossible standard.  So they come away hearing a sermon celebrating motherhood feeling discouraged rather than encouraged.  Then of course there is the dangerous practice of preaching a sermon to mothers on how to be better mothers, which is the downside of the second category of sermons.  There are some things I feel qualified to instruct others on, but how to be a better mother is not one of them.  So that leaves the third category—ignore the occasion of Mother’s Day altogether.  Sure, I can avoid the pitfalls of the first two categories, but I run the severe risk of alienating just about every woman and probably more than a few men.  What can I do to escape this pressure?

Several days ago I took a fresh look at Sarai, the woman who would later be known as Sarah, wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac.  Sarai faced some of the same kind of pressures women face today.  She wanted to be a mother, but God did not give her any children.  She grew tired of bearing the social stigma of being childless, tired of waiting on God.  So she resorted to a culturally accepted idea of giving her handmaid (Hagar) to her husband to be a surrogate mother of sorts.  Virtually every mother (and father) alive today knows what cultural pressure feels like.

 So this Sunday here’s what I’m attempting to do in my sermon on Sarai (Genesis 16:1-6). Through the life of Sarai, I want to show you some significant insights in living that apply to all of us when we try to escape pressure.