The Necessary Desperation {bonus}
Great suffering and great sin are the two things we shield our children from. With finite resources, an invested Christian mum spends decades working out how to give good and limit harm to her children. This is as it should be. We ought not be the wilful cause of our children’s suffering. Our role is to give the good we can, appropriate to the stage of life they’re in, and part of that is to get rid of the things that will hinder our children. It’s right that we spend decades figuring out how to do good to our children; figuring out how to help each heart, soul, mind and body be inclined toward God.
As we give ourselves to decades of helping our children to walk in God’s ways, we can be alarmed when things don’t unfold the way we hoped. Sooner or later as mums, God brings us to the point of deep ache. The pain with which we bring children into the world takes many forms over the years. When that ache happens, we might pause and wonder if it’s a sign that we’ve gotten it wrong. Of course we have. Our best gift to our children isn’t going to be our perfect performance (because we cannot give them that). The best we can give is to be a mum who abides in Jesus, who buries herself in complete dependence on his perfection. To be a mum who reads and hears and trusts and conforms to his word. To be a mum who hangs together with his people. In this age, it can’t be perfect execution that makes a good mum, but repentance: confessing our own sin when we see it, turning to Jesus for forgiveness and to our husband and children for theirs also. And forgiving as we have been forgiven. Then, finding the Holy Spirit’s help to put off the old self and put on the new.
But even with all this going on, even with our plodding effort to raise our children in God’s ways, we are powerless to incline their hearts to him. We cannot get inside them. We cannot make them love Jesus. We can’t shortcut sanctification. Our mothering cannot do the work of Father, Son and Spirit in our children.
By the time our children are young adults, we are no longer at the centre of their discipleship. We still have a place, but it’s further out. Everything we’ve taught our dependent children about belonging to Jesus needs to be tested in real trials, to see what holds when home is no longer the weight-bearing beam of their life. This testing, this proving of dependence on God—not mum and dad—must happen. It comes differently for each person. Through suffering, some children face it early in life. One way or another, the Great Desperation has to come. The question is being asked and answered: will our children persevere to love Jesus when they no longer lean on us? Will they love Jesus when it feels like a cross to follow him? Will we love Jesus even when our powerlessness is exposed? Was it God’s glory or ours that we were invested in? If it’s God’s glory, we will be willing to be shown as inglorious.
As I mentioned in the last article, God will be glorified in our mothering, because he will be glorified in all things. But to be glorified among his people, Jesus has to be loved. Jesus must be prized. Jesus’ sufficiency to achieve everything we cannot must be made plain. Jesus’ brilliance is better seen when we and our children are seen for what we are.
The woman in Luke 7:36-50 teaches us that the one who knows the desperation of a great debt, the one who is forgiven much, is the one who loves much. Our children will not grow to love Jesus much if they don’t become desperate for Jesus, if they don’t see their need to be forgiven much. We mothers might be able to tolerate ourselves being sinners who are forgiven. We struggle much more to cope with our children being sinners who need the same. We’re resigned to having to pray for ourselves to be lifted out of the mud and mire. We hope our children will find a bridge over that bog.
Like us, our children can only come to see their poverty of spirit either through the experience of great suffering or great struggle with sin. There will be a depth for them, somewhere, sometime. While it hurts them to feel some of the cost of sin (their own sin, the sin of others, the effects of sin in creation), seeing our children suffer or sin also scorches us. Both our children and we need this burn. We all need it so we come to love Jesus more. We all need it so we’d be less like our dead selves and more like the new.
Some of our old nature will be stripped off through maternal loss. God cannot be glorified in our mothering if our powerlessness is not proved, including our powerlessness in the life, death and salvation of our children. This proving is painful for us. A purifying pain. As God shepherds our children through their lives, there will be things we grieve, things that threaten to undermine what we’ve hoped for our children. We can only bear this tension if we see it as God does, not as a betrayal of his steadfast love, but part of it.
Read Psalm 107. Notice the pilgrimage, the journey of the soul. Some wandered in desert wastes, some sat in darkness, some were fools through their sinful ways, some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters which then threatened to swallow them. Each of these pilgrims was brought low into a great desperation. From that low, dark, desperate place, “they cried to the LORD in their trouble and he delivered them from their distress” (Psalm 107:6, 13, 19, 28). From each depth, he delivered them. It’s worth lingering in that psalm, noticing the various hues of trouble, comfort and restoration the Lord brings.
When children grow up with the good gift of a Christian family, they still need to be brought low. Without feeling some of the costliness of sin, they risk a remote, abstracted, presumptuous Christianity. The kind of Christianity that is cheap and easily discarded. A great struggle is necessary. It is God’s way of showing his wonderful works. Psalm 107 continues, “He turns rivers into a desert, springs of water into thirsty ground, a fruitful land into a salty waste, because of the evil of its inhabitants” (vv.33—34). God mercifully brings desperation. Then, “He turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water.” The steadfast love of the Lord lowers his people through desperation, that they would call upon him. Then, he lifts them.
Our children cannot treasure Jesus rightly if they haven’t felt some of the death that sin brings. They cannot see they are poor in spirit, they cannot come to hunger and thirst for righteousness, without feeling the cost of sin in this world. They need to find their own pockets empty. They cannot come to rejoice in the mighty works of God, of being lifted out of the mire, if they have never felt that mud. It is God’s mercy to have shielded our children for a time in our families, and it is God’s mercy when he brings about circumstances where they sink for a time. Some things, bitter to mothers, are needed if Jesus is to be precious to our grown children.
When our children are dependent on us, we’re to seek wisdom and do the good we can. We’re to keep working against the effects of sin in our families. But as our children move into independence, we need to be prepared to receive some loss, of some kind, for a time. It is necessary for them and us, that we would both treasure Jesus more, that we would have more of our old self singed off, that our children would find their emptiness on their way to being found full in Christ. Their desperate struggle is a necessary part of them entering into all we long for them. The things that cause us pain as we watch our kids grow might be the very things they (and we) need so the comforts of Christ would be known. Like us, our children need to be emptied; forgiven much, so that Jesus will be loved much. May the Lord help us look upon unwelcome things with hope.
