God at Work and Your Success as a Mom

By: Rebekah Hargraves

Photo Courtesy of: Thiago Cerqueira

"These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up."

~Deuteronomy 6:6-7

"What then is Apollos? What is Paul? They are servants through whom you believed, and each has the role the Lord has given. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth."

~ 1 Corinthians 3:5-7

"Train up a child in the way he should go,

And when he is old he will not depart from it."

~Proverbs 22:6

Have you ever believed that your success as a mom—whether or not you can be referred to as being a good and faithful mama—is based upon how your children turn out? Have you thought before that if your children turn out to be model citizens, lovers of God who follow hard after Him and proclaim His truth to others, and people who love others well because they are walking by the Spirit, then you are acceptable to God, while if your children turn out to be atheists who hate any notion of God that you are a horrible mother and must have dropped the ball somewhere?

I want to set you free from that lie today, mama.

It is certainly true that we have an incredibly important part to play in the lives of our children. We are called to be faithful to our calling of training our children in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6) and to our responsibility of teaching them the Word of God and how to live it out through our example (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). That is our part—faithfulness. This is where our responsibility ends, however. The results are not up to us. Our part is faithfulness to raise our children in the nature and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). God's part is the results and how He works in the hearts and lives of our children.

As Paul encouraged us in 1 Corinthians 3:5-7, we plant seeds of truth, we water those seeds by our encouragement and example and ongoing discipleship, but God is the One who gives the increase. Not us.

So, mama, as scary as it is sometimes to realize there are no guarantees in motherhood and because we each have to choose the Lord for ourselves, we cannot make our children believe or walk in the ways of Christ, it is nevertheless freeing to know that we are not held responsible for the outcome of the work we do as mothers.

Your success as a mama is based not on how your children turn out, but on how you sought to mother them in the first place. We leave everything else to God and His work in the lives of our children.

So, rest today, mama. Rest in the truth that you are not held ultimately responsible for how your children turn out.

If that's not good news, I don't know what is!