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Uh, before we give the, the Mother's Day message this morning, I want to spend a few moments just talking about May twenty first. I can tell by the, the noise that a lot of you have seen the signs or the billboards. Um, I can tell by a few blank looks that maybe a few of you haven't. Uh, any, any of you that drive much, there are billboards all over the Bay Area, and it's actually all over the country, and in some cases it's all over the world, that there are signs, uh, not only billboards, but signs on buses, uh, signs on cars.
I saw two cars this week driving around with signs they made and put on their car. Uh, it's all over the internet, it's in the newspapers in different places. Announcing May twenty first is the day that the Lord is going to return and that God's judgment on the world is going to begin. And then it, it quotes a vo- a verse from Jeremiah, uh, calling all people to repent. I've had personally several conversations with people about this who know I'm a Christian and read the Bible, and so they want to know what it was all about and what my opinion of it was. And so I just want to say a few words this morning in the hope that maybe you will have opportunities as well, uh, to talk to people and explain the, the truth of the scriptures to them.
The source behind the idea and the funding, uh, for all the signs and advertising comes from Harold Camping here at Family Radio in, in, uh, Oakland. Um, some of you remember that back in nineteen ninety four, he predicted that the Lord was going to return in October of that year. He said at that time, in light of Matthew twenty eight thirty six, that we can't know the hour or the day, but that he had figured out the month and the year, and that was October, uh, nineteen ninety four. Uh, well, it didn't happen. October ninety four came and went, and the Lord didn't return, and so he went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and he's been working all this time to figure out what went wrong.
And this time he came back not only with, uh, the month and the year, but the hour and, and the day as well. And he arrives at these figures through what he says, if you listen to him, just years of intensive Bible study, comparing scripture with scripture, harmonizing the scriptures to find these, uh, what to the rest of us would be hidden, uh, meanings or or truths. Um, if you listen to his talk show, and I've done quite a bit of that in the past couple weeks, and uh, the majority of callers now are calling up to disagree, uh, with him and to try to, uh, debate scripture with him.
And uh, his standard reply is that, well, if if you haven't studied the Bible like I have, then then you're not in a position, uh, to question this. What's that, Frank? And shall we take our next caller? Yes. Um, he uses a very strange, uh, interpretation, uh, method of the Bible. He uses an allegorical method where he believes much of the Bible is an allegory. It isn't to be taken historically or, or, uh, literally. And so that allows him to make the Bible say, uh, almost anything, uh, that you want it to say, uh, because it's, it's an allegory.
It's, it's not, the point is not really what it says, but the, this hidden truth, uh, in it. Uh, and I heard him say on the radio this week in, in response to one caller who called and had him read a couple verses over the air, and the two verses, the, the thought contained in those two verses would contradict something that he teaches, and his comment was, well, these two verses are not linked, that most of the verses in the Bible are not to be read consecutively, but they have a, uh, each verse has its own thought, and so that allows him to take verses out of context, and by taking a verse here, interpreting it in an allegorical way, taking a verse in another place, interpreting it in an allegorical way, and then connecting the two, uh, he can come up, um, with his dates and things.
The way he came up with May twenty first of two thousand is, is this. He, uh, many years ago, back in the seventies, he wrote a book, and he developed what he called the Bible timeline. And somehow, I- I'm not sure, I- I never read the book, but I've seen the timeline. He knows the exact date, uh, of creation. He knows the exact date that Noah entered the ark. He knows the exact date that Jesus was crucified. He knows the exact day of Pentecost. He- every major event in the Bible, he has pinned down the exact date when that happened. And so he knows that, thinks he knows that, that Noah entered the ark and the flood began in thousand nine hundred and ninety BC.
And that God warned Noah seven days beforehand, before the water started to go ahead and take his family and get in the ark. So he got seven days warning. And then he links that with second Peter three eight where we're told that with the Lord, a thousand years is like one day. And then so he comes up with the idea that if Noah was given seven days before God's judgment came, and if one day is like a thousand years, then that means we've been given seven thousand years before judgment is going to come on, on our time. And so he adds seven thousand years to four thousand nine hundred and ninety BC, and he comes up with, uh, May twenty first, two thousand and eleven.
And then, uh, he takes the story of Elijah and the, and the prophets of Baal, the four hundred prophets of Baal, and he does some thinking and comes out, out with that the fire from heaven fell and consumed the altar between five and six o'clock in the afternoon. And so then he says God's judgment is going to begin to fall, uh, on May twenty first, two thousand eleven, sometime between five and six o'clock. Okay, he's, he's transferred that. And the four hundred prophets of Baal in the story with Elijah represent four hundred prominent Christian leaders and, uh, theologians who are going to be slaughtered, uh, on this day of of judgment.
And all the rest of us who are still in the church, uh, are followers of Baal, and we're going to have severe judgment as well because the church age ended in nineteen eighty eight and Satan took over all the churches. And the reason none of us can understand, uh, these teachings and why we don't see what is so plain to him is because we're still in the church and our eyes have been blinded, uh, by Satan. And, uh, it sounds in- incredible to some of you. There are people out there, though, who have sold their house and sent in all their money to pay for this advertising and this type of thing, so it's it's a serious thing.
Question is, how, how should we respond? I mean, what should be our response to that? I don't believe we should mock or belittle him. We shouldn't do that with anybody who teaches the word of God and is serious about it. But we also have to be quite clear that if the Lord doesn't return on May twenty first, as he is absolutely guaranteeing, no, no question, it's going to happen. If it doesn't happen, then, then he is a false teacher, he's a false prophet, and there's no other way to, to think of that or to, to, to get around that. Uh, from our standpoint, First Peter teaches quite pl- Second Peter teaches quite plainly that the Lord is going to return. We don't know exactly when, according to Jesus, but it could be anytime.
And in light of that, we are called to live holy and expectant lives. We should live lives that expect the Lord to return at any time. Uh, I mean, just thinking through this and listening to him, I've asked myself the question, what if it was May twenty first? What if we knew concretely that the Lord was going to return in just a couple weeks? How, how would our lives change? All right, that's a challenging thought, isn't it? And so, uh, we, we should live like the Lord is going to return, all right? But again, camping has, has gone through some interesting scriptural gymnastics to come up with, with this particular date. So we, we need to be prepared if people ask about that.
All right, now let's talk about mothers and children a little bit today. We're going to say a word to mothers about their children, and then we're going to turn it around and say a word to children about their mothers. And our text is going to be in Exodus chapter twenty. We're going to look at two of the ten Commandments this morning. One of them we'll, uh, we'll use to focus on moms, and then the other, uh, will obviously be for children. And I don't have the passages on the screen, so I'm going to ask you to, uh, follow along in your own Bibles, if you would. But before we look, uh, at the verses in Exodus, I'd like to share a few Mother's Day quotes with you, some serious and some not so serious.
Uh, George Washington, the first president of the United States, in talking about his life and what he had accomplished, said, all that I am, I owe to my mother. And then Abraham Lincoln, another great president, said, I regard no man as poor who has a godly mother. Billy Graham, the evangelist, said, only God himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in their children. And this one, we don't know who the author of the statement is, but we've all heard that statement, all mothers are working mothers, and that's certainly one of the things we want to honor mothers for today, is all the hard work they do for their children and husbands.
And here's another one that's unknown. It says you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool your mother. And then some of you that are about my age will remember the comedian Phyllis Diller. She said, it would seem that something which means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided, but for some reason women still want to have children. And then our own Anna Linney, mother of three, uh, teenage sons, said, mothers of teenagers know why some animals eat their young.
All right. All right, now let's, let's, let's get serious. Uh, let's look at, uh, Exodus chapter twenty. all right? This, this is the Ten Commandments. Look at Exodus twenty and verse three. This is the first commandment. It says, you shall have no other gods before me. This is the first commandment in order of chronology, and and some would argue that this is the first commandment in order of importance as well. And you may ask, well, what does that have to do with mothers and Mother's Day? And let me explain. To the Israelites out in the desert, uh, when they received this commandment, it meant to them that they were not to worship any other gods.
They were not to pray to other gods to deliver them in battle or to make their crops or food prosper. Uh, they shouldn't look to other gods or pray to other gods for health or fertility or anything else. And those things are all true of us today. We shouldn't pray to other gods. We shouldn't trust in anything else, we shouldn't seek the help of anything else but the one true God. But this also means that we are to love God more than anyone or anything else. Jesus, in commenting on the commandments, you know, he said, you shall love the Lord your God with what?
All your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. And that comment always baffles me. It causes me to think and do some math in my head. All right, what does all mean? It means everything, right? One hundred percent. And so if you love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength, that's everything you are, everything you have. If you give that all to God, then it raises the question, what's left for everybody else? And when I was in school, the math that we were taught is you give a hundred percent to this thing, that leaves zero for everything else, okay? But in one of those, uh, strange paradoxes of the Christian life, we've learned that the more we love God, the more he increases our capacity to love other people as well.
Um, I don't want to embarrass him, but I want to illustrate with, with my friend Greg Brown. Any of you that attend the Breaking of Bread know that Greg loves to worship the Lord. He loves God. Amen. Amen. All right? But that doesn't mean that Greg is off like a monk sitting in a corner praying and worshiping God all the time, all right? He's hugging people and loving people. His love for God has spilled out into his life and allows him to love others as well, and that's the way it should be for us. One theologian calls it giving God the cream of our love. All right, the cream is that which rises to the top of the milk. It's the sweetest, the richest part of the milk, and that's the love that we give God should be the cream of our love.
Now, the point of I'm trying to make is that it's possible for us to love other things more than we love God. Paul says in Philippians that some people had made their stomach their God, right? I confess that I, I show evidence to that. And although it may sound strange, I think, to our ears, I believe it's possible that mothers can make idols of their children by letting them usurp the place that God should have in their lives. This could happen in any human relationship. It could happen between boyfriend and girlfriend, husbands and wives.
It could be reversed. Children could idolize their parents. Uh, dads could do it, fathers could do it, but I think mothers in particular, because of their, uh, the nature of their relationship with their children, uh, can be prone to making idols out of their children. Thomas Watson, an old Puritan theologian from the seventeenth century, put it this way: If we love a child more than God, we make a god of it. They think of their children, and they delight more in them than in God. They grieve more for the loss of their firstborn than for the loss of their first love. This is to make an idol of a child and to put it in God's place.
If all your time, your money, your priorities, your thought, energy, your whole life is given over to your child, and God is being squeezed and and diminished, then there's a problem. All right, then we've allowed a child to take the place of God. Occasionally, uh, we run into kids who think that the world revolves around them. I've met children who think they're the Lord of the universe. All right? Why? Where'd they come up with that? Because they've been treated that way. They've been raised that way by their parents. Does this mean that mothers shouldn't love their children or they shouldn't sacrifice for their children?
No. But it means God has to be first. Let's be practical. Mother's reading her Bible, praying, giving time to God, and little Johnny falls down the stairs and breaks his leg. All right, mother puts the Bible aside and takes care of Johnny, all right? And there's always those pressing immediate needs that kids need, but in the overall scheme of things, God has to be first. I'm not saying this because I see this as a big problem here at Fairhaven, but this command that we should have no other gods before him, I need, I think we need to think about it. All of us need to think about this and review our lives from time to time.
It could be children, it could be anything else. Is there anything in our lives that, that, that in some way diminishes our, our love for God or curtails it? Okay? Now, let's go down to verse twelve. Let's, let's switch gears a little bit, and now let's talk to children about their parents, and particularly their mother. Look at the fifth commandment here in verse twelve. Honor your father and mother that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you. Uh, when we read the New Testament, this ver- this command is repeated not only in, uh, Ephesians six, but, uh, five other times in the New Testament.
So it gets a lot of play in the Bible, and we should pay attention to it. Fathers are included here, but we want to think this morning specifically in terms of what it means to honor our mother. Well, what does it mean to honor anything or anyone? What's, what's involved in honoring something? The word itself implies respect, obedience, and in some places, glory. And so some of your, uh, translations, uh, we're gonna look up some other verses today that talk about honoring, and I use the NASB, it will use the word honor. Some of your translations may say respect or obey, all right, because the word implies those things as well.
The word is used in John five twenty three where we are told to honor the Son in the same way that we honor the Father. It's also used in First Peter two where we are instructed to honor the king. And then in First Timothy six, we are told to regard our masters, our bosses, or the authorities, uh, over us as worthy of all honor. And in Romans twelve ten, we're told to give preference to one another, uh, in honor. And so parents are included in this very distinguished group of company that we are to honor. All right?
We, we, we, it, it, it kind of comes naturally if we are in the president of the king or some distinguished person, or maybe even the president of our company or something like that. You know, all of a sudden we, we, we behave a little bit differently. Uh, we talk to them in more reverential terms and things like that. All right? Scriptures are telling us that we need to treat our parents that way. We need to think of our mother in those terms. Most of us could probably improve in honoring all of the above, uh, God, the king, our boss, each other. But we want to focus this morning primarily on what it means to honor our mother, and I want to share some very, uh, practical suggestions on what it means to honor our mother, and I want to share some very, uh, practical suggestions on what it means to honor our mother.
First and foremost, for children, I think it involves obedience. Children need to honor their mother by doing what she says, and not, uh, i- with the wrong attitude, but to do it willingly. I see some mothers giving the elbow out there already. All right. Um... Mothers shouldn't have to yell and scream and pull out her hair every time she asks her child to do something. Children, obey your mother, do it gladly, do it quickly, do it the way she wants it done, all right? Children sometimes ask in response to this, well, what if my mother asked me to do something that's not right or something that I don't agree with, something that I don't think, uh, is proper or something like that.
We, we have an example of that in, in Matthew fourteen. Herod the ruler had an immoral relationship with his brother's wife, Herodias. John the Baptist condemned him for it. And then Herodias had a birthday party, or uh, Herod had a birthday party, and Herodias's daughter did some type of dance that got Herod all worked up, and so he, he told her, man, that was great. Ask anything you want, and I'll give it to you. So the young girl went to her mother and said, well, what should I ask for? All right, Herodias said, well, ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and that's what she asked for, and that's what she got.
I'd like to suggest to children this morning that if your mother asked for somebody's head on a platter, you don't have to obey that one, okay? You can, you can, you can let that one go, but most of the time, uh, that's not the type of things that mothers ask us to do. Most of the time, children object to what their mother asks because it isn't cool, it's embarrassing, it isn't fun, it's boring. It's not what the other kids are doing. It's not something they see the need for. I'd like to suggest to you that if your mother asks you to do something, as long as it's not illegal or immoral, even if it you think it to be unreasonable, even if you think it to be too hard, even if you think the timing to be wrong, you do it anyway.
Look at a verse in second Peter for a moment. Turn to, or 1st Peter, I'm sorry, first Peter chapter two. This verse has been, uh, near and dear to me recently. The company I work for has had kind of gener- a generational shift in the management. The men that started the company and, and, and govern it for years all, all got to retirement age and quit or retired. And so we've had a, a new generation of executives come in from outside the company and take over, and of course they want to put their stamp on it and show that they're better than the last group and make the company more profitable and more successful. And so they've made it hard on, on employees like me, asked us to do a lot of things that, uh, have led to a lot of unnecessary and difficult work, and, uh, people have quit, and other people have, have, uh, threatened to quit.
There's a lot of complaining, and morale is bad. And there are times when I want to say my mind and let them know that I, I think that, uh, what they're doing is wrong. And yet the Lord brings this verse to mind, First Peter two eighteen and nineteen. Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are unreasonable. For this finds favor with God, if for the sake of conscience towards God, a man bears up under sorrows when suffering unjustly. I believe this principle applies to the relationships between children and parents as well.
Children, if your mom asks you to do something and you think it's unreasonable, do it anyway, because it finds favor with God. And my experience is that at some point, God will bless you for that. It'll, it'll, it'll come back, uh, and, and God will, uh, bless you for it. Another question that sometimes comes up when we talk about children obeying their parents is, well, what if I'm a fifty-year-old man and I have my own household and my own parents and my mother lives in Omaha and I'm out here, do I still have to obey my mother? Okay? Uh, well, first of all, I'd like to suggest that mothers shouldn't be telling their fifty-year-old sons what to do in the first place.
All right? That's, that's part of the problem. All right? The scriptures tell parents to, to, to train up their child in the way they should go when they're young, so that when they're old, they won't depart from it. All right, your, your, your job is to, to get them to that point where they can stand on their own, but once they are, mothers, you need to back off a little bit. Children, uh, adult children, I don't think when the scriptures tell us that children obey your parents, it has children in mind, children that are still living under their parents' roof, that are still dependent upon their chil- their parents for food and shelter and things like that. And that, that changes when you're on your own and you're raising your own household. But adult children, uh, can honor their mother in, in other ways.
And I think this would include all of us can honor our mothers in what we say with our words, not just in what we say to her, but what we say about her. Do- when you speak to your mother, do you speak to her in respectful terms? Do you speak to her like you would, uh, your boss at work or somebody else that you seek to, uh, speak in respectful terms? Or do you think, well, it's just mom, you know, it's just my mother, you know, it's time, you know, no big deal. I don't know if young girls do this, but when I was a young boy, sometimes we'd have like a little argument or a little fight with another kid, and if you really wanted to hurt a guy, you'd say, your mother wears combat boots.
All right, remember that? Why? If you really wanted to, you know, to to stick the knife in and twist it, you would you would attack the the character of the, of the, of the kid's mother. That anymore because there are mothers that wear combat boots today. So that doesn't work anymore, but, um... Just because you're an adult, just because you're an adult now doesn't mean that we should, uh, speak, uh, in any less respectful terms to our parents, and particularly our mother, uh, than we're commanded to do when we're children. In fact, it should just be the opposite. As we get older and have our own families and have our own kids, we begin to appreciate our mother more because we realize what she had to put up with, uh, when she was raising us.
Another way we can honor our mothers is by gestures. Turn to First Kings two nineteen. This is a verse that I, I, for some reason, I just didn't know until I was preparing for this message this morning. First Kings two nineteen. This is, uh, right after K- uh, Solomon had been anointed king, all right? One Kings two nineteen. So Bathsheba went to King Solomon to speak to him for Adonijah, and the king arose to meet her, bowed before her, and sat on his throne. Then he had a throne set for the king's mother, and she sat on his right.
We know from other books, from Esther and Daniel and others, that in, in this Middle Eastern culture, when you approach the king, you had to bow to him, and there was a certain protocol you had to follow. But here, the king gets off of his throne, gets down, and bows before his mother, a sign of respect and a sign of honoring his mother. How do you greet your mother when you see her? How do you say goodbye to your mother? Do you behave in her presence the same way you would, again, someone else that's distinguished? What, what's our body language? What's our facial expressions? Are we attentive when our mother is talking to us?
We can honor her in the gestures that we use. You can also honor your mother by taking care of her. Turned into John nineteen, the Gospel of John, chapter nineteen. This is an amazing passage in my mind about our Lord. He's on the cross. Look what happens. John nineteen, verses twenty six and twenty seven. When Jesus therefore saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, woman, behold your son. Then he said to his disciple, behold your mother.
And from that hour, the disciple took her into his own household. Jesus has been tortured. He's on the cross in mortal agony, taking on himself the s- our sins, all right? Incurring the wrath of God, and at the same time, he's taking care of his mother, providing for her future. We don't know, Joseph is probably dead by this time. We don't know what happened to, we know that Jesus had younger brothers. They're either gone or not old enough or something, but Jesus, from the cross, is taking care of his mother. Another verse, First Timothy five. This is talking about widows.
Uh, turn there, if you would. First Timothy five and verse four. It's telling us how widows are to be, uh, taken care of in the church. 1 Timothy 5:4, but if any widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to practice piety in regard to their parents, for this is acceptable in the sight of God. In this day and age, women typically live longer than men, anywhere from six to ten years usually. So that means most of us here will have widowed mothers because they'll live longer than our fathers. We're grateful for Medicare and Social Security and all that, but it isn't the government's job to take care of our mother.
It isn't the church's job to take care of our mother. It's our job, if you have a mother in that situation. I'm not saying that's easy. Some mothers, as they get older, get a little hard to deal with, and then all of us that are still employed and have families, we're busy with our own schedules and households and everything else. But somewhere in the midst of all that busyness, mother is to be a priority. We need to take care of our mother. Sons and grandsons, you can do all the things that your dad or granddad used to do, the the lawns and the cars and all that kind of stuff. Uh, we should do that for our mothers. Honor your mother by taking care of her.
We can also honor our mother by spending time with her. Most mothers like to have their children around them, all right? And we have to be careful that we don't let the busyness of life, uh, crowd out time for our mother. When I was growing up, I remember there was a song called Cats in the Cradle by a guy named Harry Chaffin, all right? Cats in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon, Little Boy Blue and the Man in the Moon. When you coming home, son? I don't know when, but we'll get together then, dad. We'll get together then, all right? The song tells a story about a man with a son, and when the son is young, he wants to play ball and do things with his dad, and dad is always busy working and says, well, later, later, later, later.
And then dad retires and has a lot of time, and he wants to spend time with his boy, but now his boy has a job and a family, and he's too busy, and he says, well, dad, I can't do it now, but later, later, later, later. And so life goes, all right, and they never get to spend any time together. That can happen to us. I've never gone to a funeral where a parent dies, a mother or a father dies, and and a a child gets up in the memorial and says, you know what? I wish I wouldn't have spent so much time with my mother. You know, it was just a complete waste of time. I I wish I would have given more time to my job, more time to my hobbies. They never say that.
All right, what what do people say? I wish I would have spent more time with my mom or with my dad. I never got to tell her certain things, all right? Let's not let that happen to us. Now, let me switch the focus back to mothers for a minute. Mom, do you make it easy for your children to honor you? All right? Children are commanded to honor their parents regardless of whether they're honorable or not, but some mothers make it easier than others. Are you dignified, sensible, self-controlled? Are you a good example to your children? Do you practice what you preach, or do they see hypocrisy in you?
Do you command respect? Are you trying to be cool like one of their friends? I get a kick out of it when you have these big football players that win an award or something, all right, and and they go up to accept it, and they have a moment to speak, and they pay tribute to their mothers, all right? He's six' seven, three hundred and fifty pounds, and she's like five' two, one And he's and she said, and he says, well, I I I want to honor my mother. I wouldn't be here today without her. She kept me in line, all right? She kept me going when I wanted to quit. She made me finish school.
She made me believe in myself and all these kind of things, all right? And how did that little woman do that? Well, she commanded and demanded respect and got it, uh, from that guy. Most of us could probably testify to something similar in our lives, where our mothers have contributed to success that we enjoy. We celebrate Mother's Day once per year, and that's a good thing. We need to do that. But lunch in a card once per year, I don't think is what the scriptures had in mind when they tell us to honor our mothers. We need to honor our mothers all year long, and so I want to leave you this morning with these questions.
Do you honor your mother through obedience? Do you honor your mother with your words and with your gestures? Do you honor your mom with your time? And do you honor your mother by taking care of her when the situation calls for it? I think for all of us, we could probably find at least one of those areas where we could improve a little bit. And so let's start today, since it's Mother's Day. Let's pray. Father, we do thank you that you've blessed so many of us with good mothers. We thank you particularly for those, uh, here that have had godly mothers that have raised us in the