Today is Mother's Day, and it makes me think about the love of a mother. In Isaiah, chapter 49, 14 and 15, Zion is complaining, Jerusalem is complaining against the Lord and says, the Lord has forgotten me and the Lord has forsaken me.

But then God responds to that, and he says, can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will never forget you. You see, out of all of creation, the one metaphor that God uses to show that he has a nurturing love for you and me, the love of a mother. All of us in this room, we know those times in our life when we did need mom to come and get the toothpaste off the corner of her mouth and remind us to do our homework and to tie our shoes and did you pack your bag? Or to text us and say, sit up straight.

And when we were younger, we felt these as inconveniences or, you know, just mom just being a nag. But I can tell you how many of you in this room wished from glory that you could hear your mom nag you one more time.

That's not to shame our students in the room, but it's to paint the reality. There's nothing like the love of a mother. For some of this, that that rings true. We have very fond memories. But on the same side of that coin, for some of you, that may not be as true.

Maybe your mom was taken way too early in life. And day like today really brings more hardship and headache and heartache than it does anything else. Or maybe, unfortunately, you're like about 3 or 4 million kids in America today, that your mom just isn't in your life. And that's hard because I believe. I believe that the love of a mother, the nurturing love of a mother, provides security in our life.

Like we need security, we need foundation, we need a safe place to go. And the love of a mother is the best way for that to happen. And you couple that with the love of a father, which I believe a father can also nurture. He can. But when a dad provides provision and he provides protection, studies show that the engagement of a father brings identity.

In our political landscape and American culture today, what we see is a loss of identity. And a lot of that has nothing to do as much with choices being made. But dads who are not in the life of their children and dads. I'll get on. We'll talk about you in a month.

But I do believe that not only can a father learn how to Nurture somebody because God is a nurturer. But this place right here is the best place on the face of the earth other than the love of a mother to find and discover the nurturing love of God Almighty. You see, psychologists talk about what's called a secure attachment. It's the relationship in the service of a baby's emotion, regulation and exploration. Secure attachment.

I mean, how else could there not be moms? You remember the nine months of carrying that child, especially when it's your first and you see the swipe of a hand or the kick or is what our babies did to Laura. They used to like jump their elbow up into her lungs.

And then the pain and the agony of birth to be rewarded with the tears of joy. When you heard that baby cry out, what a beautiful thing that is. A secure attachment has at least three functions. It provides this sense of safety. It regulates emotions by soothing distress, creating joy and supporting calm in the child.

But it also offers a secure base from which to explore. And when a mom is physically, emotionally or mentally absent from that, it can create tension in the life of a child. This word affection, this word nurture is so important. CS Lewis talked about that. It's affection among the familiar.

It's a type of love. Like when you're reading scripture, you realize that when you read the word for love, there's like four different words that that can come from. You have agape, love, unconditional love, love that is God, that he loves us and is benevolent to us. And we didn't earn it, we didn't receive it. You have philia, or the verb form phileo, love, which is this brotherly camaraderie type of relational love.

You have eros, which is the word we get erotic from. And it's a romantic love. But then you have another word, and unfortunately it's not used in the scriptures. In its raw form it's called storge. It almost sounds like stork, doesn't it?

So if you want to remember the Greek word for motherly nurturing love, think about a stork, which is usually the one that brings the baby in the basket. Storge. And it implies this type of affection that is for the well being and the development of someone else. Now it does appear in scripture, but it appears in a root form. There's three different uses in the New Testament for this word.

The first one is in Romans 12:10, and Storge is confined with philia. And you've heard me mention this word before. If you were in my class for Romans 12, philostergos. That word rolls off the tongue philostergos. I'm gonna get a T shirt that says idiot, which means idiot.

That's the Greek word for unlearned and philostrogos. In fact, it says in the scripture, be devoted to one another in brotherly love. That word, to be devoted is this word philostragos. And what it means is to love in a nurturing way those whom you are in a brotherly relationship with. What does that mean?

That means in church we, we do need to treat each other like brothers and sisters. In fact, we need to treat each other like I'm your mother. Now that does not give me permission to nag you. But what it means is that I'm concerned for your well being and I want you to be concerned for my well being. Because when we philostragos, right, we're doing the love one another that God commanded his disciples in John 13:34 and 35 to love one another.

Philostor Goss is an outflow of the agape love of God where he is working for our well being. But when it's gone, when that nurture is absent in someone's life, it does not turn out very well. In fact, we see two other uses of this word and it's not a good use. See, we read through the scriptures and we see this word love, but we don't ask the question what's behind that word. In fact, in the first blanks of your study guide it says, the result of a life void of nurturing love.

This storge love is devastating. Can I prove it to you? Because in these next two verses I'm going to read, the word storge is there, but it's been coupled with a prefix alpha which means no storge, no nurturing love, no affection for people outside. Well, let's start with the first one. In second Timothy 3, 1 5, Paul says, but realize this, that in the last days, difficult times will come for men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, and then embeds this word unloving.

And I'm honest with you, you start reading this list and you get to unloving and you feel like that's just kind of, why is that there? Because you don't realize it's not agape, it's not philia, it's storge. People like this are irreconcilable. Why? Because they're not concerned with the well being of others.

They're malicious gossips because they don't care what they say about somebody else. They don't have self control because it's all about themselves. They're brutal, they're haters of good, they're treacherous, they're reckless, they're conceited, they're lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. And he says avoid them. A lack of storge love is one of the signs of the evil men that we should avoid.

Well then we go to Romans 1:28,32, kind of a similar list. But this time rather than justifying what it looks like to be an evil man, in this case it's Paul arguing what it looks like to have a depraved mind. He says in verse 28 and just as they did not seem fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do the things which are not proper. One of those being not loving.

The results of a depraved mind is to totally be focused on the self and have no concern for the nurture of others. In fact, look at how they're described. They're filled with unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil. Inventors of evil, disobedient to parents without understanding, untrustworthy, and what's the word in your Bible say? Unloving, without mutual beneficial concern for those around me, which leads to all of those things.

But this is the sign of the fleshly depraved mind. On any given day, our culture, our world, our flesh does not know how to properly nurture others in the love of God.

When a mother is absent, it's hard. When it's absent from the church, there's no hope. And today, I mean this is. You're sitting here thinking, oh, this is just a message from others. Well, it is.

We're going to talk about what it means to leave a mark, to leave a legacy. Like what things should we be considering that we pass down to our children? Well, honestly, you can't pass down anything if there's not a context of nurture in which these things may be transmitted. And we're going to talk about three. Three different aspects of modeling from a parent, a grandparent, a friend, or anyone that can show what it means to have nurture in your life.

We're called to nurture, all of us are. And we see it best in our mothers. And so we stand here today thankful for our mothers who strove and are striving to provide a home of nurture that we're saddened when this is not the case today. It grieves me that some of you in this room, if you were honest, you could say, you know what? I didn't have that with my mother.

That breaks my heart. It really, really does. But my challenge is to us as the church, are we providing that kind of environment? And if we are providing that kind of environment, do people see that they can come here and and experience the agape love of God being expressed through his storge love that he wants to nurture us. He would not forget us.

Because a mom would not forget her crying child as it nursed. Come on, you remember those days. I remember with our first child, we didn't know what we were doing. Yeah, we took the classes. We knew all the things.

No, we did not. Dragging out a 50 pound bag of diapers a day. Now we bought diapers the other day and I'm going, golly, you young parents. I feel sorry for you. Are you like selling your blood to buy diapers?

Remember a few years ago when there was a shortage of formula, but you mothers would do whatever it took and takes to be necessary. You mothers have made sacrifices. No one will ever know. Isn't that the kind of legacy you want to leave to your kids?

I'm going to look at three stories today and there's three attributes that I want to discuss in those stories. One is on prayer, one is about reliance, and one is about sacrifice. Because I'm telling you, if you want to leave a mark on the next generation, when you model prayer, when you model divine reliance, and when you model sacrifice, these qualities, I'm telling you, you may be in the. Your kids may be in the teenage phase and you're going like I'm about to pin them to the wall. But I'm telling you, even in my own self, I had one of those mothers who would pick up after me constantly and there'd be times that she'd get upset because we weren't picking up.

But when I left my home, guess what I was doing? I was picking up and picking up after my kids and then trying to encourage them to pick up after themselves because I wanted to pass that value down. But these three things are values that I think that all of us in our own spiritual life need to think about modeling in all areas of our life so that we can pass this down and we can leave a legacy. We can leave a mark on the next generation that will lead them to a life of faith. So let me give you the first one.

The first story is the story of Hannah. It's found in First Samuel, chapter one. And I'm going to paraphrase some of the verses here to read through this, because, I mean, if I read through all three of these stories, we'll be here till 12 o' clock, and then the mothers and grandmothers will be mad at me because y' all have lunch on the table right now, right? Listen to this. Persistent prayer leads to actual answers.

Persistent prayer leads to actual answers. Now, when I say actual answers, like God answers prayer. But our problem in praying a lot of times is we have an expectation on the front end of what that praying should look or that answer should look like. We go to God and say, God, if you answer my prayer, it's got to be this way and fit in this box and fit my bill this way. But that's not the kind of praying we saw with Hannah.

Yes, she's going to ask something very specific, but there's some things about the way she prayed that we can glean today that shows us how to be persistent in our praying. As the chapter opens, we learn about a man named Elkanah. He's an Ephraimite, one of the tribes of Israel, but he's not a Levite, he's not a priest. He had two wives, Hannah and Peninnah. That one does not roll off the tongue.

And immediately we learned that Hannah is barren with no children. Let me make a. Can I take a little tangent for a moment? God never commanded men to have more than one wife. A lot of people wrestle in Bible study to say, why did all these people have all these different wives and practice polygamy?

But God never commanded it. And I'm telling you, if you do an Old Testament study of those relationships, it never worked out well either. I mean, look at Rachel and Leah, Jacob's wives. I mean, like, it's like the stuff that soap operas are made out of. It never worked out well.

And guess what? It's not working out here because there's three elements in this story that kind of heightened the drama. The first one is in verse five, and you can't skip over verse five because it said that God closed Hannah's womb.

Some of us in this room, and I said, us, have experienced the pain of being barren.

Some of us, and I said, us, again, have experienced miscarriage.

And we look at heaven and we say, God, why? Why? Why me? Why my baby? Why not my baby?

Can I stop here and shepherd you for a moment? For you mothers in the room, for you ladies in the room that have either lost a child to miscarriage, lost a child to an accident, or you haven't had that blessing of a child, can I tell you, God has special grace for you. You are no less important than those in this room that are mothers. Do you hear me? Look at me.

I want you to hear that grace being extended. I think that you have honor. God loves you immensely. And the pain that you've experienced, God knows it. I spoke to a lady weeks ago as we were trying to share with her about Jesus Christ.

And she began to tell us about how she'd experienced after nine months of carrying a child, stillbirth. And the pain in this woman's eyes and in her heart as we tried to say, but no, God is good. And she just looked at us and said, that faith stuff's not for me.

My heart breaks because there's a wall between her and the one who brings perfect comfort that could bring that salve. And here's Hannah, who's barren, and God had closed her womb because he had a purpose in this. But then the other thing that exacerbated the situation is that Peninnah was arrogant, and she taunted her constantly that she didn't have children. And Elkanah tried to be a good husband and give her maybe a little bit more, give her an extra portion, as it says in the scripture. But that only made it worse because Peninnah kept doing these things.

And then the third thing is that once a year, it said they would go up to Jerusalem. Most likely was Passover. There were three feasts that the Israelites would make. And at this time, the tabernacle was at Shiloh. It wasn't at Jerusalem yet.

So they would make the journey to the tabernacle. And in the scripture, it says that she would go, and Peninnah would start even picking on her even more like, ha, ha, look at me. I got these kids, and you don't. And it says in verse seven that she would not eat and she would weep bitterly. And Elkanah, like most of you men in this room, you think you can fix your wife's emotions?

Can I tell you you can't? He asks her four questions. Why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad?

And you almost want to take Elkanah by the shoulder and say, because she doesn't have A kid.

And he says, trying to make it feel better. Am I not better than 10 sons? I take that question as a shaming statement. Am I not good enough? A lot of times, husband, when you try to comfort your wife in her emotions, you're really doing it so that she can tell you you are good enough.

And that's not a shepherding attitude. He didn't do any good. And so it heightens all this. So they go up to the tabernacle and she's praying. She's greatly distressed and she's weeping bitterly.

And she makes a vow and says, lor, Lord, if you will look on me in my affliction and remember me and not forget me and give me a son, then I will give to the Lord him all of his days and a razor will never touch his head. Like most babies come into the world and they don't need a razor. What is she talking about? You can jot down Numbers, chapter six, because that's where it lays out the vow of the Nazirite. It's the same thing that John the Baptist undertook.

Didn't cut his hair, in other words, she said, I will give him back to you and he will be more than just separated. It'll be more than just a verbal dedication. I'm going to give him to you. And so she's standing there and she's praying.

She's moving her mouth, but the words aren't coming out. She's praying from her heart. And Eli, who's not the best high priest in the world, and his two sons, who are evil, like the spiritual condition of Israel is not good. And he looks at her just like we talked about last week. And the first thing he thinks, well, she must be drunk because she's over there moving her mouth and nothing's coming out.

And he doesn't tell. She doesn't tell him what's going on. But she says to him, do not consider your maidservant as a worthless woman. You see that? That's why I'm telling you.

I think God has grace. This different, this is seeding grace for those of you that may be in the same situation.

And Eli said, well, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You know what? Go in peace and may God give you what you just asked. He doesn't even know what she said. She could have been asking for a 14 inch pizza.

She said, let your maid servant find favor in your sight. Now watch this. She went away, ate, and her face was no longer sad. Why? Listen, this is where we get in trouble with prayer.

When you pray. You pray believing. If before you say or utter or think a word, if you already in your heart going, well, God's not going to do this. I'm not worth God answering this prayer. You know what?

I prayed this 15 times. And if you already are introducing the unbelief in your heart, that's not persistence, persistence. Persistence is going over and over and over and over and over and praying and praying and praying. And what's going to happen is God begins to transform your heart. So if his answer in his will is not what you're praying, he will lead you in that direction and he will begin to reveal to you what it is that he has in mind.

She had no idea. In fact, Warren Wiersbe says this in prayer, it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. See, it teaches us that she was praying from her heart as we should, that she wasn't wallowing in self pity. She brought it to the Lord that her heart was reflected in words, not spoken. Her pain was being communicated.

But God heard that and he took that pain and he brought to that comfort and salve. But then there are other people sometimes that are involved and sometimes they mean well, but they don't always say the right thing. Here's the thing. When other people help carry my burden, that's a beautiful place of prayer. That people would come around that and they would persist in the same kind of prayer.

And our confidence in praying is that God hears, not man. She left that day not knowing whether or not she would have a child, but she believed she would. And what happens as we get on down in the text, we learn that it came in due time that Hannah conceived and she birthed the son and named him Samuel, which means name of God. His name is El.

We have to remember that the focus of our praying is God, not me.

Persistent prayer. She was willing to say, lord, if you'll give me a son, I'll give him back to you. Now she's got some choices to make. The first feast time comes around and she doesn't go up, she says, I'm going to wait till he's weaned that I may appear before the Lord and that he may stay there forever. You see, her heart was full of faith that led to obedience.

You see how she, before he even came into conception, she had already promised God, I'll give him back to you. And parents listen to me. That's sometimes why parenting as older parents becomes a struggle, because we've never really given our children back to the Lord, we want to parent them until they're 55, when they take over and start parenting us.

And I think today there's a lesson involved here that we need to see because they bring him up and she says, oh, my Lord, as my soul. As your soul lives, my Lord, I am the woman. She's saying this to Eli that stood here beside you praying to the Lord, and for this boy, I prayed. Now he knows what she prayed. And the Lord has given me the petition that I asked.

Persistent prayer leads to actual answers. As long as he lives, he has been dedicated to the Lord. And he, Samuel, worshiped the Lord there. God answered her prayer, but Hannah kept her word. What does persistent prayer look like in your life?

Hey, moms, what would it look like this week? And it's going to be hard. I remember times when I'd say, alright, kids, we're going to get around in the floor, we're going to hold hands and we're going to pray and won't. One was two and one was five and one was seven. And it was like little monkeys jumping around in my living room.

And I'll be honest, I'll confess, I would get frustrated as a dad and be like, let's just forget this.

And I grieve that, because what my kids should have seen me is that when times of hardship come, I want them to see me like this, not trying to solve my problems. Now, anybody in this room ever done that perfectly? I haven't, and I repent of it. But what I want to do, maybe this week is a fresh start. How can I model persistent prayer to my children?

Maybe you don't have children in your life, maybe you live at home alone. But that does not mean that you cannot commit to persistent prayer. What if this week that you could take, I don't know, set a timer for one, ten or one of these verses out of First Samuel and just remind yourself, I'm going to persist in prayer today and ask God whatever it is, because I know that he will answer. But underneath, persistent prayer is radical reliance. Look at point number two.

Radical reliance leads to divine deliverance. And we don't know what that's going to look like. It could be something small or it could be something big. And the example here is the story of Moses and his mom is Jochebed. That is narrow off the tongue.

I don't know how in the world they named these kids. Back in the day, I had rules for naming my kids whatever the first name was. That's what I was going to call them. I wasn't going to call them by a middle name or I wasn't going to call them by a hyphenated name or a shortened name, whatever their name was. And it was going to be spelled normally, and their initials wouldn't spell anything.

Weird. I mean, I know, it's weird, isn't it? I just had some rules about how I named my kid. Just put that one in the bank for you. Jochebed shows us what it means to rely on God even when things don't make sense.

What we learn at the end of Exodus 1 is that because the Hebrew nation, the Israelites, had grown so large that Pharaoh decided, if a child is male and is born, throw him in the river.

How would you like, if this was those days, to see these six families having to go take those boys and throw them in the river? I don't even want to imagine it. And it seemed like a hopeless situation. In fact, as you read the tension. He even talks about how the midwives were like, these women are so, so strong.

Like, they birthed these boys before we can even get to them.

But then we get chapter two, we learn of Moses, mom and dad. We learn in chapter six what their names are. But what we see is this beautiful picture of how she relied on the sovereignty of God. Like, at this point, there is no law, there is no tabernacle, There is nothing recorded. But she knew the stories of faith.

She knew of Abraham and his faith of leaving his country, that he would have descendants and he'd have land. And the promise that. That the Canaan land would be his, and how that carried over into Isaac. And even probably the story of how Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac and God provided a sacrifice. And then all the stories of Jacob and how God intervened and he showed up over and over again, divinely supplying what they needed.

Here's this mom. She's got a daughter who's old enough to speak and carry on a conversation. And she has Moses. She's like, what am I going to do? So she comes up with this plan.

Like, she halfway obeys what they said to do. Instead of throwing Moses in the river to die, she puts him in an ark, a basket, and puts him in the river.

And at that point, there's this reliance. I don't know what's going to happen, but God, I'm going to trust that you've got a plan. See, God already had a plan. He knew Moses was going to come into this world, and he had a plan to use him to liberate his people from slavery.

She relied on that because here's the beautiful thing about that story. So she puts him in the water. I mean, they said, throw him in the river. She put him in the river. I mean, there's a little bit of a literalness there.

He's in the river and begins to float down. And they probably knew it was about the time of day that Pharaoh's daughter would come down. And so Pharaoh's daughter is down there, and this basket floats up. And the Bible says he's crying, so she knows something's inside. And she opens it up and it says.

She says, this is one of the Hebrews children. Now she's the daughter of Pharaoh. What should she have done? She should have turned the basket over and dumped him out. But aren't you thankful for Storge?

She looked at that child and had compassion on him. Not even her own flesh and blood, not her own people. And God and his sovereignty had moved in that situation that he would be spared. Here's where it gets cool, because God is a cool God. Miriam's hiding over in the side.

She said, hey, do you want to go get somebody to take care of that kid? And the princess is like, yeah, that would be awesome. And who does she go get but her own mother? See, Jochebed, not only did God take care of Moses and spare his life exceeded it. And the value that was communicated to young Miriam was this resilient reliance on God to show up.

You know, in my life, I can confess, and two of my three kids are here this morning. I haven't always modeled this kind of reliance. Like, I haven't suffered well in front of my children when the hardships have come. Yeah, I've been like, Job, I've been sitting over there going, saying all kinds of different things, but not expressing that deep reliance. But you know what?

Isn't each day a new day? I think about George Mueller. If you know the story of the orphanage where he worked. He said the children were dressed and ready for school, but there was no food for them to eat. The house mother of the orphanage informed George Mueller.

George asked her to take the 300 children into the dining room and have them sit at the tables. And he came in and he asked God to thank and thanked God for the food they were about to eat. And there was no food on the table, But George knew that God would provide the food. Is that the kind of reliance that you and I have? And if we don't, can God help us get to that place?

I think he can, because here's what happens. Suddenly there's a knock on the door, and a man comes over and says, man, I couldn't sleep last night, and somehow I knew you would need bread, so I baked three batches for you. You.

And another knock at the door, and the milkman's cart had broken down in front of the house and said, hey, I've got this milk and it's going to spoil. Can you use it? And he brought him 10 large cans of milk, and it was just enough to feed the 300 children.

That's the kind of God you and I serve. And he can, and he will deliver us. It may be his way. That's why I'm saying, when you pray persistently, you. You're not just praying, God, you have to answer this way.

God, let your will be done. But over here it's going. But I'm going to depend on you no matter what. When it doesn't make sense, when nothing's falling into place. Will you help me?

Last story I want to share with you is this widow of Seraph. Now, this one's an interesting story. It's wrapped around Elijah. Elijah had just been called by God. The spiritual landscape of Israel and of Jerusalem, of Judah is fallen.

And now God's going to raise up these prophets. And he tells Elijah to go down to this house and there would be a widow who was going to provide for him. And so he gets there, and he sees the widow who's gathering sticks, and he says, can I have a little water?

And it says, as she was going to get it. Now, I want you to stop there, because at the initial reading, all we know is this woman was gathering sticks. But we don't know why she was gathering the sticks. But in her storge, in her compassion and in her kindness, she goes, okay, I'll go get you some water. But then she said.

He said, hey, if you got some bread, bring it, too. But that's when she stopped. She said, as the Lord lives, your God, I have no bread, only a handful of flour in a bowl and a little oil. And I'm gathering these sticks so that I can prepare for my son and me and we can die. That was their last meal.

But do you see how she gave out of her sacrifice? He promised her and said, listen, I'm telling you, as the Lord God lives, if you do this, you'll never run out. That's an awesome miracle, isn't it? You see, the widow of Zarephath shows us that noble nurture leads to sovereign supply. While how has she shown nurture?

Well, she's taking care of her son, and she took care of Elijah. But then tragedy hits. As we get on down through there, verse 17, we find out as Elijah's kind of been there and they've been eating off this supply that's been coming, that the little young lad gets sick and he dies. And she says to Elijah, what do I have to do with you, oh, man of God? Have you come to bring iniquity to.

To my remembrance and to put my son to death?

Some of us in this room are carrying the pains and the scars over the children that we've lost.

And we blame God.

And because of that, we've cut off the supply of the comfort that the ultimate comforter can bring to us. I mean, I'm telling you, if I lost a child, I'd be mad too. Don't get me wrong. I would be disappointed. I would be hurt.

When I realized that Laura was miscarrying him, we weren't as far along as some people have ever been, but it still was a loss. We named that child Jamie, by the way, since Jamie can be used for a boy or a girl. We didn't know you guys are blessed. Now you can find out what a baby's sex is at six weeks. We had to wait till 20 weeks.

It was hard for us, hard on my wife. And for those of you ladies in this room that have miscarried, you know, it's not a pleasant experience. So no wonder she would say, you have brought misery into my home. But he said to her, because he wanted to confirm that he was a mouthpiece of God, he said, give me your son. And through this process, God brings him back to life.

The Lord heard Elijah's voice and the child returned to him, and he was revived. Elijah took the child, brought him to his mother, and said, see, Your son is alive. Now listen to what the woman says. Then the woman said to Elijah, now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord is in your. And the word of the Lord in your mouth is true.

The supply of food didn't confirm that him bringing that child back to life did. Her commitment to nurture was a medium through which God could bring sovereign supply. And today, whatever your need is, what you want to teach your children is that you can trust God no matter what. You can rely on him for anything, as it says in Philippians 4:19, and my God will supply all your needs according to his what his riches and Glory. Now, here's the thing that doesn't always mean that it turns out for my best or what I think is my best.

It always turns out for his glory. But whatever it is, we want to pass down persistent prayer, radical reliance and noble nurture. If I want to leave a mark on my kids and see them grow up to be faith filled, that's what we want to live. Don't ask you to stand at this time. That last point on there says, loving support leads to security.

When you pray persistently, it teaches your kids that they can be secure in prayer. When you show them that you rely on God, it creates security in their life. And when you and I act and extend that same nurture, it teaches our kids to do the same. And it gives them the chance in life to be what God wants them to be. So I'm going to ask you to bow your heads with me and first I just want to pray or two things I want to challenge you to do.

Number one, as you're in this room today and you've lost a child, you've miscarried, or maybe you haven't had a child. And like I said earlier, I believe with all my heart God has extra grace and special grace for you and I want you to experience that love this morning. But for the rest of us, I want to challenge you this week that if you're dry in your prayer life, would you set a time aside each day to pray, a reminder on your phone, whatever it is, and just take a first step. Confess to God that you want to rely less on yourself and, and more on him and look for a way to tangibly make a sacrifice for somebody that you might not normally make. So, Father, as we close this service on this wonderful Mother's Day, I pray, I pray for those in this room that have experienced loss or maybe for those in this room that maybe they haven't had a child.

And Lord, as I said earlier, my heart breaks for that. I just pray that you would give them peace, healing and comfort. I pray, Father, for those in the room today that may say, you know what, I'm not praying like I should. I want them to put that shame out of their mind and say, God, give me opportunity to pray more, give me the words to say. And Lord, for those of us in this room looking for ways to rely on you more, God teach us, Lord, you're letting things in our life happen so that we will rely on you more.

But God help us learn how to do it in the moment. And then lastly, Lord, show us ways that we can sacrifice for the well being of others. And in doing those things, we're modeling to the next generation the same love that our mothers had for us to love and to sacrifice for their well being. Lord, we love you. In Jesus name, amen.