Two Commitments for the Spiritual Mother

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”—Matt. 22:36-40

So what does a woman possessing faith and spiritual maturity do to ground and equip herself for the task of discipling younger women? There may be many things, but I’d like to focus on two: a commitment to a personal relationship with God and a commitment to reflecting God to others.

The Vertical: A Commitment to a Personal Relationship with God

It is impossible to lead others where I have not gone myself. At least not lead with confidence. Usually it will be the blind leading the blind.

So if I desire to help other women grow in a solid faith lived out in their everyday lives, I need to be doing the same thing myself. There are several important things to keep growing in.

The Gospel

If you’ve been on this blog long enough, you will know that everything else is pointless unless we are grounded in the gospel.

If we are not sure of what Christ has done for us, we will always be living a second-best, parallel, but not true gospel. We will be subject to long lists of do’s and don’ts instead of living in the freedom that Christ has come to secure for us.

And worse: we’ll pass that same false gospel to others.

So whatever we do, we need to keep mining the depths of the gospel. It is simple enough for children to learn. “The Gospel Song” by Bob Kauflin and Drew Jones expresses it simply:

Holy God in love became

Perfect man to bear my blame

On the cross He took my sin

By His death I live again.

But simple as it is, there are so many implications that we will never get to the bottom of it. This is why we want to preach the gospel daily to ourselves, for it is what gives us the comfort, the courage, and the power to live new lives in Christ.

This is something we need to constantly test ourselves against (2 Cor. 13:5) because the sin that still indwells us tends to want to add to the gospel through works. We like to focus on the parts we like (like God’s love) and ignore the parts we don’t (like sin). The messages we here on our society reinforce our natural bents to worship ourselves instead of worshiping Him.

A godly and mature woman is humble enough to know that she is not above these things and keeps grounding herself in gospel truth.

Identity in Christ

As we settle into the deeper realities of the gospel in our own lives, we then begin to live differently. God’s Word is full of promises of blessing that are available to only those who are His children.

This primary identity—that I am a child of God—trumps all other roles we play. Being rightly related to God changes everything in ways that being a wife, mother, student, daughter, or my vocational identity ever can.

Again, this is easy to lose sight of in our busy days. So much of what we do is tied up with these roles. As a result, we then tend to define ourselves by them and find our worth, approval, and acceptance through them.

Besides growing in our confidence in the Gospel, we will want to explore and grow in what it means to be a child of God. Again, we find this in God’s Word.

We also learn to live in line with this identity. When we are God’s child, that means He is our Father and we learn to relate to Him as such.

Sometimes this means we need to unlearn some of the lies by replacing them with new truth about what it means to fellowship with God. Because we still sin, the Gospel now opens a way for us to find confession immediately.

As His children, we will want to please our Father by obeying and keeping His Word. When He calls us to love our neighbors, or even our enemies, we trust Him and will do so in faith, even when it is hard.

When we get to know His goodness, we begin to release our faith in this world and increase in love for His truth. Little by little, we become more like Christ, holding on to Him even when it creates conflict with the world we live in and its values. We pray, not as a last resort, but as a first resort because we are sure that our Father cares for all that concerns us.

So often, we focus on what we are to do but miss out on why we do it. We do all these things because godly women have made God the central bedrock, the nucleus of life—and then all else, including who we are, how we view ourselves and others, what we do—flows out of that.

Here, we learn what it means not only what it means to be His child but to be a woman—as He designed us to be.

David Powlison says this:

“Your true identity is who God says you are. You will never discover who you are by looking inside yourself or listening to what others say. …Your true identity inseparably connects you to God. Everything you ever learn about who God is--his identity—correlates specifically to something about who you are. For example, ‘Your Father knows your need’ means you are always a dependent child. ‘Jesus Christ is your Lord’ means you are always a servant.

“Who God is also correlates with how you express your core identity as your various roles in life develop. For example, ‘The Lord’s compassion for you is like a father with his children.’ You will always be a dependent child at your core, but as you grow up into his image, you become increasingly able to care for others in a fatherly way.

“A true and enduring identity is a complex gift of Christ’s grace. He gives a new identity in an act of mercy. Then his Spirit makes it a living reality over a lifetime.” (Take Heart, March 29)

So what does this mean?

Whenever we read Scripture, do so as if you’re getting to know a Person. Even if you don’t have time to do a full study, you can always ask yourself: What does this passage tell me about God? What does this then tell me about myself?

In addition, God’s Word gives us a sense of who we are as women. In order to help the younger women grow in these things, we also need to understand our special essence and role as women in His body. His Word gives us a strong understanding of our feminine identity that is woven into our nature and perspective.

As we begin to let God’s Word shape our identity not only as His children but also as women, we begin to mold our lives around it and live in light of it.

The Horizontal: A Commitment to Reflecting God to Others

Our relationship with God is not meant for us alone. God transforms us into saints so that we can glorify Him by being a showcase of what it means to be an image bearer. This means growing in the character of Christ, in three particular ways as women.

Humility

This is one of the first marks of character that unlocks the others.

Humility is essential to those who desire to live by God’s grace. The prideful cut themselves off from God—and there is no way we can help others grow in discipleship if that happens (James 4:6-10).

One of the ways humility displays itself is by remembering that we will never “arrive.” We will always be children who are learning. If you feel unqualified for this role, that’s actually a good start—and a sign that your humble and honest evaluation of yourself will probably equip you better than all the knowledge in the world.

Humility also displays itself as we remember that we are also servants, not masters, even if we are in a supervisory role at home or at work. When we understand this, we will humble ourselves and seek to do the mundane, ordinary, and even boring tasks in life with a heart to honor and serve Him.

Remember: even if your past is marked by serious mistakes or major failures, God has a track record of using these very people for His great purposes. Sarah was a barren woman. Rahab was a woman of questionable repute. Ruth was a despised Moabitess. Mary was a teenager.

What makes you effective is your humility that opens the door for God’s grace to flood through you. It is recognizing that you are not enough but He is. This pushes you to nurture your relationship with Him as an act of dependence.

Obedience in Submission

If we read throughout Scripture, we begin to see what God cherishes and desires for us. As we begin to understand our identity as His children, the Holy Spirit dwelling in us will prompt us to desire the things that He wants.

But to be truthful, there will also be times when what God desires is hard—and we don’t want to listen. Yet this is another mark of the growing woman of faith: she has a reverence for God, His Word, and His will more than her personal desires. The desire to please Him is stronger than the draw to follow our own way.

This is not a mere grudging obedience but a wholehearted commitment of love and gratitude to the God who has first loved us. In humility, we submit to the Lord’s design for our lives in the midst of a world that tells us to submit to no one but ourselves. This is particularly important when it comes to the home.

Titus 2:5 includes training the younger women to be submissive to their own husbands. If you are not married, we are to submit to Christ as our heavenly husband (Eph. 5:24). In either case, this posture of submission is very difficult to train in someone else if we are not already practicing and doing this in our own lives first.

Sacrificial Service

This last area flows out of the first two. We begin with a humble heart, not trusting ourselves and our own wisdom but His. Our commitment to submit to Him is translated into living obediently.

One of these commands is to present our bodies to Him in service as slaves of righteousness and not sin (Rom. 6:12-14; 12:1). This is something that Christ himself first demonstrated, symbolically in footwashing (John 13:1-5, 12-15), but ultimately in His death. We are to follow His example, even to the point of dying to self and picking up our figurative crosses to follow Him (Matt. 16:24-26).

There is no place like home to practice this. The call for older women to train the younger women to be faithful to working at home, loving our husbands and children is a very specific way we learn to die to ourselves and do the tedious tasks of footwashing on an ongoing—and often unending—way. Being a wife and mother requires laying down our lives for our loved ones constantly.

Even if you are not married, Paul points out that your concerns are to please the Lord as your husband and dedicating yourself to serve the family of God (1 Cor. 7). Our spiritual families are the ones that will last forever and we can love our Husband, Christ, and love His children by caring for them in their many needs. This can include helping women stay faithful in marriage or help lift the burden of childcare, but it is not limited to those things.

Whatever the context, we want to be living faithfully in humility, obedience, and sacrificial service. We must practice what we are to teach. This is how we not only gain experience but the wisdom we need to train the next generation of women.

Final Thoughts

We will never master all of these things. It is a work in progress.

But the more important thing is not how much we do these things. The greater question is are you willing to keep working on these things even as you disciple other women? WIll you be willing to let them see you fail in your own attempts to grow? Will you be humble enough to also seek women older than you to learn from?

As we do so, we set ourselves as a link between generations—neither the bottom nor the top of a totem pole. We have gone before some but we are still looking up to others.

And as each of us do this faithfully, whatever stage of the journey we are in, we begin to cultivate a sisterhood of women who are all learning and growing together into the beauty of Christ and helping one another along the way as we do so.