Notes: Skills of Mothering

Taking control of your parenting
Part 10
Steve Elzinga


The great things we learned from our mothers

EXTRAORDINARY things that we learned from mothers?

1. We learned to 
have compassion

Isaiah 49:15 (NIV) Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! 

2. We learned to 
be caring

1 Thessalonians 2:7-8 (NLT) As apostles of Christ we certainly had a right to make some demands of you, but instead, we were like children among you. Or we were like a mother feeding and caring for her own children. We loved you so much that we shared with you not only God’s Good News but our own lives, too.

3. We learned to be 
independent

Genesis 2:24 (NIV) That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

4. We learned to 
be interdependent

John 19:26-27 (NIV) When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.

5. We learned to be
 dependent

Ecclesiastes 5:15 (NIV) Everyone comes naked from their mother’s womb, and as everyone comes, so they depart. They take nothing from their toil that they can carry in their hands.

6. We learned to trust

Psalm 22:9-10 (NIV) Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast. From birth I was cast on you; from my mother’s womb, you have been my God.

7. We learned to 
believe we have a 
special purpose

Psalm 139:13-16 (NIV) For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

HONORARY words of 
response to mothers

Proverbs 31:10,28-29 A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.”