Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 10, 2020 | Mother's Day at Home with Alex & Lindsay Wolfe

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May 10, 2020 | Mother's Day at Home with Alex & Lindsay Wolfe · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Happy Mother's Day.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_03: And welcome to our home.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_03: Quarantine or no quarantine, what a perfect place to do a Mother's Day message.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: So we're here, and in fact, we have the perfect people to join us Alex, Lindsay, and a little boy.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's the first Mother's Day that Alex and Lindsay have.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's not the first Mother's Day that you've actually carried him, but it's the first Mother's Day that you've carried him in your arms.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Would you introduce us to him?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, this is Lachlan Alexander.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: So he's 10 months old.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yesterday, right?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, 10 months yesterday.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: And he is so much fun.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna steal him.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: How are you doing?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: Hey Locke, you know, buddy.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he's gonna turn into a cook.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: He's got the uh spatula.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: He loves kitchen utensils.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_05: Yep.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: So uh so really you've been a mom for over a year and a half in a in a in effect.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well what's been just tell us what's been one of the best things that that you've enjoyed about this experience as a mom.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the best things, most rewarding things for me is seeing things click for him, seeing him discovering the world for the first time, and um he is itching to get it out there now, as you can see.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, just kind of seeing him learning and growing, and it's just really cool.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know, just seeing him discover things.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: Locke and I are buds.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: I just need you to know that we're we're good friends for the last 24 hours.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: So so anyway, um, I thought I'd start by just uh introducing one of my purposes this morning is so that you can get to meet our new young adult's pastor, his wife, his son.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: So why don't we go around and uh why don't you start, Alice?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us about your child, where you grew up and your family and and your mother's place in that.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I grew up in uh rural Iowa, so a small town of Stewart, Iowa.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh about 1,200 people, give or take.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I I was surrounded with lots of family uh in the small town.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: But uh my mom played a huge role uh in my upbringing.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh both of my parents were actually working parents, so they commuted in you know, 30, 40 minutes to the city, and uh we we all went to daycare and things like that.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: So you were not an only child.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not an only child.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: How many?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: I have two brothers uh and one who was who was grown and gone by the time I was born, uh, but I grew up with mostly one brother, yeah.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: So so that's cool.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: So uh your turn, Lindsay, where'd you grow up in your family?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I was actually born in upstate New York.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um I am the middle child.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: I have an older brother and a younger sister.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we moved a lot when I was growing up, so we moved to Tennessee to the Nashville area.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because of your dad's job or yeah, because of my dad's job, yep.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: So uh we lived in Tennessee, we lived in the Chicago area, and then we moved to the Des Moines area, which is where Alex and I met in Iowa.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: So that's cool.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: Mel, you're too uh now.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: Melanie's gonna take Lockham and play with him, but but tell us about your, you know, where you grew up.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so my both my parents uh were from West Virginia, so I was born in West Virginia.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: My dad was a Youth for Christ director, and so we moved to Wichita, Kansas when I was two months old.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: My mom was a stay-at-home mom.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um I have one younger sister.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh she uh mom, when I think about mom, I think about the kind of the leave it to beaver mom.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was we're older than you guys in some moments.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have the leave it to beaver mom where uh my mom sewed, she cooked, uh, she was an excellent cook, excellent seamstress, made all her clothes, matchy matchy sister clothes, you know.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and I know you're wondering what happened to that gene in me because I didn't get it.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um it skipped a generation.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so but I loved that about her.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: She was a room mom at school.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then spiritually, she also was very involved in church.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: She was a BBS director, she was ahead of Christian Women's Club for Wichita, Kansas for many years.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um she did um like the Christmas program and things like that.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, later on growing up, she took more of a kind of a backseat role, but she was uh incredibly supportive of my dad and his ministry, and then um myself and school activities, and um, I'm very supportive of my younger sister who um had some special needs and and needed some extra help.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: But um I think about just her supportive way growing up.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_03: So when I met you was later, but your dad by then had become famous.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: He was really high up on YFC, did a lot of traveling, and I remember thinking that your mother oftentimes she wasn't a she wasn't a single mom, but at times she was a single mom for periods of time.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: I don't I think your dad even missed one of the births, child births, because he was on the road.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, so my dad uh with Youth for Christ would travel three weeks out of every month for quite a few years, and so mom was definitely the anchor at home and and kept things together and managed dad's traveling schedule as well as ours as kids.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, she was definitely the anchor and the and the support.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: And you got that, Gene.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: So well, thanks a lot.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: You wanna you wanna take lock in?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So ready to play Grammy.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, here we go.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh now my uh you're missing something, but that's okay.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: So uh some of you know my mom.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: My my mom was uh my mom was 18 when my dad, 29 years old, uh married her.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: And she always she felt really inferior in some ways one year of college, and he was finishing his doctorate at Dallas Seminary.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: And and uh so she always to the end of her life uh felt like she had married up.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: But I will tell you that all of us children secretly believed that my dad had been the lucky one when he got mom because she was the heart of the home, and and and she was she's gonna illustrate, she really illustrated our text for the morning.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so uh Alex, would you would you take us right to the Bible and explain to everybody where we're going this morning and what we're gonna do?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: So we're gonna be in uh the book of 2 Timothy today.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: So as we were thinking through uh how to encourage uh not only everybody but specifically mothers through difficult times and and through the the challenges of parenthood and all those things, this uh text just really uh came came to our minds as the perfect text to encourage us all today.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: So um we're gonna be in both chapter one and in chapter three today, and I'm gonna go ahead and start us off in chapter one, uh verse three.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Before we do that, uh a little bit of background about the book of Timothy.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so we we don't know a lot about Timothy as a person, but the things we do know are pretty significant uh to what we can actually learn from this text.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: Specifically, uh Timothy grew up in uh Lystra or Lystra, however you want to say it, um, and he was born to a Jewish mother and a Greek or a Gentile father.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we don't know much about his father, he's only mentioned once in the book of Acts, but uh his mother and his grandmother played a huge role in his life.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: So he he grew up, not not in Jerusalem, not in the Jewish epicenter of teaching, uh, but he grew up in in very, very secular uh Roman Empire where where teaching of the Bible might have been scarce at the time.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a similarity in some ways that that moms today may not have it any rougher in secular America in the 21st century than then maybe Lois and Eunice did in first century Roman Empire.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: Right, and yeah, as we're gonna see in this text, they they found a way to encourage uh Timothy even with the lack of resources available to them.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so um uh one thing about Timothy though is uh Paul uh took notice of Timothy early on, and and Timothy actually joined Paul on his second missionary journey, and uh Timothy uh was somebody that Paul uh clearly uh loved a lot uh throughout and so Timothy got to travel uh with Paul, and Paul, as a result, after getting to know Timothy, uh gave Timothy a great responsibility, uh even at a very young age.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so we know that Timothy was young, uh, but yet he was put in charge essentially as the lead pastor or elder of the entire church of Ephesus, which was arguably one of the most organized churches in in the Roman Empire at the time.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh so he he was in charge of going and teaching correct doctrine uh that was passed to him from Paul, but also uh correcting false doctrine, which is not an easy task in a large city.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: And on top of that, he was tasked with finding and appointing elders for the church and organizing uh the church.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: So the task he had was was huge, and especially for a young person, uh was probably not an easy task.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so in the book of 2 Timothy, we find that Timothy's discouraged on some level, and we can get into that here a little bit.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: But Paul's going to write to Timothy to encourage him to persevere, uh, to keep the faith and to stay strong.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: And we're gonna read how he how he does that starting in verse 3.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so Paul says, I thank God whom I serve, as my forefathers did with a clear conscience, as night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Recalling your tears, I long to see you, so that I may be filled with joy.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: I have been reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and I am persuaded now lives in you also.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: So do not be ashamed to testify about our Lord, or ashamed of me, his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel by the power of God.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so in this text we see that Timothy is is apparently struggling with two things.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: He's struggling with fear of some sort, uh, and he's he's being tempted to doubt.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: He's being tempted to be ashamed of the gospel which he received from Paul.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: And this is for two reasons.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: One, legend has it uh that Timothy was actually martyred in Ephesus at the very place where he's serving.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know if that's true, but so that was a tough ministry he had, yeah.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: It was not uh as he's correcting false doctrine, people don't necessarily like that.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and legend has it, he was actually correcting idolatry, and uh and people came and beat him to death with clubs and left him in the street as a result of his ministry.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in fact, so I shouldn't feel sorry for myself for getting a nasty email once in a while.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: So to all that to say that his fear was probably warranted in these kinds of situations, at least the temptation to fear.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and on top of it, so but Paul brings up he throws into this mix your mom and your grandmom.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: So you're gonna, you know, you're gonna have to explain why that fits.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: So the whole foundation uh that Paul and that allows Paul to encourage him, uh encourage Timothy to persevere through this fear and to not be ashamed of uh what he is doing in Ephesus is be he reminds him to remember the foundation that his mother and his grandmother set for them.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: And it says here sincere, they had a sincere faith, and that he's supposed to model that sincere faith.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: And that word sincere doesn't necessarily do it justice.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the idea of just a deep faith doesn't really motivate one to not fear death, or doesn't really motivate one to uh to push through in in intense adversity.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but this I this idea of sincere faith is probably more of an unhypocritical faith.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, yeah, it's the Greek word actually from which we get our English word hypocrisy.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: Unhopocrites or something like that.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_03: Something along these lines.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: So what does that mean?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what does an unhypocritical faith look like?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_03: Is one question I think we want to ask.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know, Lindsay, yeah, like we want to think.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: What does that mean for a mom to have an unhypocritical faith in that kind of a setting?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the idea is that the mom, or in this case, the mom and the grandmother, uh, they don't just talk about it, they don't just say Christian cliches and go on, but they're actually living their faith out.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: They're actually, they're actually displaying the character of Christ, they're actually persevering through trials, and Timothy is watching this, and that is the foundation that he is going to use to persevere through these things.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: And so uh so even today, um, I just think that you know, uh, we we can think of what well one thing my mother did, and and I'd love for you guys to chip on in this, is my mother was the real thing.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, she she did walk the walk.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: Uh she herself had Bible verse cards up in the window.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, she would memorize, she was memorizing the book of First John when we were first singing third John, oftentimes.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_03: I remember when I was a kid and she'd constantly recite those.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_03: She was singing Christian songs.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: She was, oh my goodness, you know, when when my two-year-old little red-headed brother Dougie died in a home accident, just a horrible thing.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we watched her, of course, because she grieved more than more than the other, more than her ten children at that time.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: It was ten, and and anyone else.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: And yet she took her tears to God.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know, she lived it.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I have memories of my mom um reading her Bible, journaling.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: She had a prayer journal, so um, she's gonna be like, so you saw her doing that?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like uh every morning, um yeah, she still does it.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember every morning um you could find her either at the kitchen table um or in her room.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: She would, I remember she would sit down beside the bed on the floor and she would have her Bible.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: She would always have some kind of Bible study, have a prayer journal.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you I actually struggled a lot with anxiety when I was growing up, and especially in high school.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: And every single night from the time I can remember when I was really little all the way through I basically left the house.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: She would come in, um, say goodnight, pray with me every night, no matter when I got home.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um, she still texts me scripture.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've been out of the house for over eight years now, and she still texts me verses and praying for us all the time.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, oh, yeah, huge impact.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think of that, and I'm like, I can't believe she was so faithful and steadfast in that.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, and and my mom uh was an example of this through serving our community.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, she worked full-time in a city 45 minutes away, and uh she came home and she was always attentive to us kids and and teaching us and and praying with us at night and and tucking us in goodnight through well, until we were too old to be tucked in goodnight.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh no such thing.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: But on top of that, we were at the church multiple times a week because she was volunteering through various organizations.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there was a Christmas program that helped people uh who couldn't afford gifts for their family or basic necessities, and so she headed up that committee, she was part of various uh fundraising opportunities.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: So she was always, even in the midst of a full-time job and all those things, she was always out there serving uh sacrificially.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: So that's called an unhypocritical fact.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: So um anything else here that we can think of?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um so why do you think that there's no dad mentioned here?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I mean, uh do you think, I mean, do you think he'd passed away, or do you think I mean yeah, you know, were they single?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: Was she was Eunice a single mom and Lois a single grandmother?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: Or or do you think maybe that he just wasn't the spiritual leader in the home?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I think the the assumption most people have is that he passed away and that she's a single parent, but uh the text doesn't necessarily tell us that.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um he j it just doesn't make much mention of him, and so uh it's very possible, being that he was a gentile and that and that the uh uh the scripture and and the background is coming through the mother, it's very possible that he just was not a strong spiritual leader in Timothy's life.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so this faith that he is supposed to be recalling is the faith of his mother and not necessarily because we have so many people who come to us, uh young moms, even older moms, who say, you know, uh, doesn't the Bible say that my husband should be the spiritual leader in the home?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: And go, yeah, well, he's not, and we go, you know, welcome to the world of the New Testament, and this is just the way it's been, and God calls, God's called you to sort of step in there and do that.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: Any other comments about that before we move on to the second text?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't think we're saying here, you know, can I can I just throw in here a disclaimer?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: All holidays are tough for somebody.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: And Mother's Day, as we know, and Father's Day, these are tough holidays for some people.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: Some of you listening, you know, for a variety of reasons, this may be tough for you.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_03: And nor are we saying that somehow there's a guarantee that if you walk the walk, that your children will your child will grow up to be the pastor of the greatest church in the in Turkey, in the in the Roman Empire at that time, Ephesus.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_03: There's no promises that you'll end up with a Timothy, because you know it's true that when a child is the age of Lachlan, you are his whole world and you can control things, but what that control turns into a mirage in about 12 years, as you know, because because nurture is important, but nature somehow, somehow they, you know, so so you can guarantee being a good mom, but you can't guarantee producing a good child.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and I'll I'll just give this encouragement on this on this point that this first point that uh um mothers of honor uh live the Bible.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and looking at this text and seeing it seeing this aspect of fear and of doubt in Timothy's minds reminds us of our present circumstances in this crisis.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: This is a time of great fear for a lot of people.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's a time where people are doubting, and or maybe even doubting the value of church and different things like the value of the gospel.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so this is a perfect time for parents and mothers, especially to really be an example while the kids are at home, being an example of this unhypocritical faith.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: This is the time we we get to walk the walk in front of our children so that in the future, when they're experiencing times like this as adults, uh fearful times, times of doubt, they can hold back to the example you set for them.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: And so I want to take you to chapter three, our other verse uh here, which doesn't, by the way, mention either Lois or Eunice.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: By the way, isn't it interesting?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: There's they only get one verse in the whole Bible where they're mentioned, but because they walk the walk, and now we're gonna say they talk to talk, they're up there with the greatest women of the Bible.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: They're always listed up there with Hannah and Sarah and Rebecca, and I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody, Mary, you know.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: So uh if you turn to three, if you've got a Bible, and you turn to 315, we discover doing a little sleuthing work here, uh, that they did something else.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: So Paul's writing to, again, his dear son in the faith, his friend Timothy, and uh he says, uh, verse 14, as for you continue in what you learned and become convinced of, because you know from whom you learned it and how from infancy you have known the holy scriptures.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: Get it?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: From infancy, we taught him the holy scriptures, obviously Lois and Eunice.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, for nine months, um uh she uh Eunice connected to him by an umbilical cord, and for the rest of the first next 17, 18 years, she connected to him by a biblical cord.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so there was this uh so she was a teacher of him.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_03: She taught from infancy, it says the holy scriptures.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_03: She said, like she lived the Bible, right, but she taught the Bible as well, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: And then the greatest word on the Bible, in the Bible, all scripture is given, you know, this, uh, through through all scripture given by uh is God breathed and given by inspiration of God, is profitable for use, uh useful for teaching, rebuking.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just laughing at how I'm stumbling over.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: My words because I had to memorize this verse from as a kid, and somehow it's slipping away.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's slipping and just slip, slip, slipping away.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: Correcting and training in righteousness.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: So the man of God, the servant of God, can be perfect, thoroughly furnished for every good work.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I am sure that Lois and Eunice knew the Bible of their day, which is just the Old Testament, right?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure they knew they knew the Bible extremely well.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: They knew this, and they probably, I'm guessing, I'm hearing my mother's voice here in the background, probably uh recited words in little Timothy's ears, like turn up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old he won't depart from it.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_03: Or trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not under your own understanding.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_03: Or I said, What's Isaiah 53?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_03: Uh oh, we like sheep have gone astray, turned everyone to his own way.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure they quoted these verses.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe when Timmy was scared at night, they they quoted him Psalm 23, like we do with our children.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: The Lord is thy your shepherd, I shall not want.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: So they knew the Bible, but you know, I think the problem goes both ways.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_03: We often talk today about people who talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: I think to some extent today we're seeing also this other trend, which is walking the walk, but for maybe a variety of reasons not talking the talk.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: Have you seen an you ever see anything like that?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think uh it's a it's a fearful thing for a lot of people to share the gospel or to talk about the gospel to say, well, you know, I'll just I'll just be an example to people and and I'll I'll I'll speak with my actions, which is a great thing as we just saw, uh, but the gospel isn't received unless it's heard.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so there's it's there's a necessity to speak, to talk the talk, essentially.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I think it's very common these days for people not to uh or to be afraid to actually speak up.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they feel like they don't know the Bible, maybe they feel like they're just not prepared enough to do this, or they're uh or they they're afraid of ridicule on some level.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so yeah.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: Lindsay, as you've as you've talked with friends, uh other young moms.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is that uh yeah, yeah, going off of what he said, yeah, sometimes it's kind of you get caught up in just going through the motions um and especially it's kind of hard.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh like I grew up in a Christian home and I had wonderful parents, but um you kind of get I don't know, used to this routine, the Christianity routine, and you know what to do, you know what to say, but um sometimes um it can just be running through the actions, kind of checking stuff off a list a little bit.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: So kind of going off of yeah, what he said.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um when you're not I don't know when you you yourself personally aren't in the word and it's not coming from the heart, it can kind of just turn into actions without a lot of meaning behind it.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's why sometimes uh young moms will will ask us, what Bible storybook would you recommend?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and by the way, they've changed over the years in my home with the Bible in pictures for little eyes.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: Have you heard of that one?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: I've seen other versions, yes.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: There's so many more modern ones now, but you know, this is this is a need to speak up.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: There's this verse at the end of Proverbs in the um the what do you call it, the Proverbs 31 woman, and it says, she says, uh, she opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of love or faithfulness is on her tongue.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: And actually the words in Hebrew are the Torah of Hezid is on her tongue.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: That is the teaching, the Torah, the Bible, uh, but it's the teaching of love is on, and I can't think of, I can't think of a better person to teach children what true love is, what false love is, what deceptive love is, uh, you know, especially in a TV age, media age where you see all the all the false love than a mom to teach love to her children.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: So she's teaching the Bible, but she's teaching and has it, and I think I heard, I watched you give a message, I think, uh down in Dallas where you actually talked about this word when you were preaching.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: Hazid is the special kind of love that comes in when all other loves go out.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's this incredible faithful love that that it's the love really of God and of Jesus.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so so so listen, you know, you're mentioning moms who don't really know what to teach, but they do know the love, the love thing, the love of Jesus.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: And it seems to me that's the single most important teaching you could give anyway.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: The all we like sheep, but Jesus died for us.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_03: So um, now my mom, you know, led us to Christ, you know, the gospel, but then taught us more.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: So uh so uh how did your mother on this teaching thing and on the gospel?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: Did your did your mothers help you with that?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: Did they did they absolutely what was your mom like as far as knowledge of the Bible and that?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, growing up in small town rural Iowa, there it wasn't widespread knowledge of the Bible.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: I I think uh the churches weren't necessarily teaching scripture on a high level to for understanding.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so I saw my mom, I think her understanding of scripture was very limited.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: But as you just said, she understood the love of Christ.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: She understood uh the price that he paid for her, and so so every night before bed it was it was just truth speaks uh spoken into our lives of God loves you, you know, God uh He He wants you to uh give your life to Him and submit to His will.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: So there's all these truths always every night And you know, we didn't get a lot of scripture, we might have read the Bible together a few times but with very little understanding.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but it is those truths that later once I've once I personally confessed faith in Christ that that really compelled me to do so.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: I I I always knew uh that God cared about me, that God loved me, and that uh God wants me to live my life for Him, and that was purely because of the teaching that she was able to do, even with her limited knowledge of the Bible.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: So even if you don't know mom, if you don't know the Bible like Beth Moore, if you know the gospel, you can come up with an Alex.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_03: So so how how did your mother when it comes to talking the talk, where where was your mother in the Oh yeah, well, so I was homeschooled.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um all my siblings, we were homeschooled.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: So um Bible was actually a whole class.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we got the biblical history side of it, we got Bible study, you know, every day, but then it was a lot of what I've mentioned before, like um the spiritual discipline of prayer every day and memorizing scripture was huge.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um not only were we in Iwanas, but my mom would, you know, encourage us to do separate scripture memory at home too.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, prayer before every meal, we always had family dinner, we'd always pray together.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it was just like it was woven into everything, it felt like um through my whole childhood.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, my mom had my mom had Bible verse references, like 200 of them from each book written, and they're on a page, and they covered the window of a door in our house, yeah, and we had to learn those as we grew up.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_03: So my mom was like that too.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: So that's really sweet.
• 29:37
  unknown: Yeah.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: So uh I think walk the walk and talk the talk is pretty much where we've gone today.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's pretty simple, straightforward message.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: A message about a mother whose name was Eunice and a grandma whose name was Lois, and the kind of impact that they could have on a little boy named Timothy, who, as you said, had good reason to feel timid and scared, you know, and ended up getting martyred.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: So he was in a tough place.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: But um, but they were a profound impact on his life, as our mothers have been on ours.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um wow.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_03: You might find any other takeaways?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I would add to that is is uh walking the walk, talking to talk, is for us sitting here saying that, it's it's not just talk.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: These things have actually impacted uh my life.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: And and my mom, uh, one thing I haven't said yet is my mom uh she battled cancer for seven years.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um and she got cancer when I was in high school, and and she passed away in I think 2016, 15, 15, 2015, uh on Valentine's Day, actually.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um but she like I said, seven years of just increasing pain and increasing uh uh sorrow, just kind of coming to that realization that she might not make it through it later on.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and if you ask anybody who knew her, uh they'll still tell you that she was, even through that, one of the most joyful people.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and her laugh just will ring through the memories of uh anybody who knew her uh for an eternity.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: Her laugh was so contagious.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, she didn't shrink back, she wasn't angry at God for what was happening to her.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: Rather, so instead of cursing God, she she worshipped him and she made sure that his testimony was known uh to everybody.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: And and even then, that was still with a very limited knowledge of the Bible.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that has that walking that walk and talking that talk has carried me through uh times when doctors thought I had cancer, and I and that that kept me from this fear.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: It gave me a great comfort.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and times when we've just been very stressed in seminary with everything going on, um, just her testimony and her joy and her laugh and this and just the the worship that uh she gave to the Lord through that whole time, it just uh just provides us a lot of comfort and joy, and and so um I'm sure um I'm sure that one of the wishes that you have would be that your mom was here to hold that darling little boy.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_03: But uh based on Hebrews 12, one verse in the Bible, I I'm confident that she's looking down and rejoicing because she's one of the two lowestes, really, in Laughlin's life, one of the two grandmothers whose influence has filtered down and and will shape him.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_03: So our our two takeaways basically are we just want to celebrate you moms.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_03: We love you, you guys are the greatest, and you've proven it.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_03: How many times have you proved it during this during this virus time and this quarantine time?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, you're just amazing.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing is we really value you for walking the walk and for talking the talk.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's absolutely we we just we just really appreciate that.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: So um we sort of want to Yeah, so as a uh one thing that uh one of my great memories uh from my childhood and for my mom is my mom would sing me and play me this uh special song.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and to this day it still makes me cry because it just it it reminds me so much of the love that she had for myself and my brothers.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um but so we we would like to play this song for you guys kind of as a tribute, uh as a thank you to all the moms, just to honor you uh with something special.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: You'll enjoy this, yeah.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: Uh can I pray and then and then we'll let you hear that song, Father.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for Alex and Lindsay and Lachlan.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_03: We just appreciate them, and we appreciate uh all of our mothers, and we pray for all of the mothers who are listening to this.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: And all of us have had mothers, and some of us struggled at times, but all of us right now are thanking you for the fact that our mothers brought us into the world.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_03: And um we pray for those moms who really, really, really would like to be Lois and Eunice's grandmas and moms who have an impact on children, and we ask that you would bless them, enable them to walk the walk and talk the talk, and give them the joy of watching children grow up to love and honor and serve you.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_03: In Jesus' name, amen.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_04: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_04: You make me happy when skies I'm bright.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_04: You'll never know, dear, how much I love you.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_04: Please don't take my sunshine away.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_04: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_04: You make me happy, it's kind of grey.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_04: You'll never know, dear, how much I love you.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_04: Please don't tell me my sunshine away.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_04: Please don't tell me my son, shine away.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_04: Happy mother, sorry.