“Years to a mother bring distress,
but do not make her love any less.”        

—Woodsworth

“Blessing she is, God made her so,

       And deeds of weekly holiness

       Fall from her noiseless as the snow.”

                                                     —Lowell

Some on Mother’s Day wear the color of a flower signifying that their mother is gone.  Another who faced that experience, and remembered mother, wrote these lines:

“She always leaned to watch for us,

Anxious if we were late,

In winter by the window,

In summer by the gate.

Her thoughts were all so full of us—

She never could forget!

And so I think that where she is,

She must be watching yet.

Waiting till we come home to her,

Anxious if we are late—

Watching from heaven’s window,

 Leaning from heaven’s gate.”

           Margaret Widdemer

And I’ve already said it, the Jews have a saying out of their proverbs: “God couldn’t be everywhere, so He made mothers.”  But if you take it one step further, God who is everything can be a mother. 

Genesis 17:1: “The Lord appeared unto Abraham, said unto him, I am the Almighty God.”  El Shaddai: it comes from shad which means ‘breast.’  Thus El Shaddai is ‘the breasted one’ and it comes in that meaning of a mother nursing her helpless child on her breast so it signifies the giver of strength, the nourisher.  It is one of the few pictures in Scripture where God compares Himself to the role of a mother when He says “I’m El Shaddai.”  Ethel Clemance will remember her father Dr. Price used to translate that name with a transliteration saying it means ‘The enough God.’  The God who is enough.  Whatever your need, He is enough.  Certainly the mother who holds and protects that child on her breast and provides all that is needed for that child’s strength and nourishment portrays that view of God, but God’s more direct in Isaiah 66.  There He says in the King James Version “As one whom his mother comforteth,” Isaiah 66:13, “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”

Now today’s message has to reach where you are.  This is not a message where we’re gonna open the Scripture to truths of prophecy that give us an understanding of God’s hand on history.  It’s not some theological discussion past the point we’ve already taken in that twice in Scripture, at least in these two places, God lets our concept or perception of the role of a mother on earth be caught up in the revelation that He is giving to us of what He will be to His people and, “As a mother comforting, so will I comfort you,” God lets Himself be identified with whatever we can perceive of a mother’s role on earth. 

Now Jesus used the father symbol when He talked of ‘our heavenly Father’—draws a comparison and says if you go to an