We aren’t good mums and we don’t deserve to be happy, but… {bonus article}
I recently mentioned Psalm 16. The Psalms make it plain that goodness and happiness grow in proximity to God. We won’t find the satisfaction of our longings anywhere else. We won’t find goodness and joy anywhere else. The problem is, the Psalms also ask questions like:
Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent?
Who may live on your holy mountain?
And the question is answered, to our despair:
The one whose walk is blameless,
who does what is righteous,
who speaks the truth from their heart;
whose tongue utters no slander,
who does no wrong to a neighbor,
and casts no slur on others;
who despises a vile person
but honors those who fear the Lord;
who keeps an oath even when it hurts,
and does not change their mind;
who lends money to the poor without interest;
who does not accept a bribe against the innocent.Whoever does these things
will never be shaken.Psalm 15
That is not us, and mothering exposes it in every cell of our body. We aren’t blameless. We aren’t righteous. Our words aren’t true, right to the depths of our heart. We use words badly. We despise what we should honour and we honour the wrong things. We don’t consistently do what we say we will do, especially when it costs us. We are easily bought. We are shaken. The place of satisfaction, the fount of all goodness and joy is out of bounds for us.
Enter Jesus, who brings us into the one place we long for but don’t deserve to be:
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. 1 Peter 3:18
This little sentence is in the middle of a passage which talks about suffering for doing good. It’s also a passage which quotes a Psalm with the expectation that God's people are welcome to sing words they don’t actually deserve to sing. Jesus changes us from being the person whom the Psalms warns against, to being the blessed person. All because Jesus has performed perfectly in our place.
When we are joined to Jesus, God welcomes us as if we had only ever been as righteous as Jesus. To have our life hidden in him means we get to pray along with him, our divinely perfect brother-King. That’s why we pray, “in Jesus’ name”. Jesus Christ, our Great High Priest, answers the question, “Lord who may come near and dwell with you?”. He points to his blood-covered people and says, “They do, because I do”. It’s all in the book of Hebrews.
Jesus rehomes us in the very presence of God, that tent of goodness and supreme happiness. That’s where the happy and good we’re after come from and where they end (more on that in the next article #7).
We need two things:
1. We need the sharp awareness of our own sin—how much we don’t deserve to be beneficiaries of God’s goodness and partakers in his happiness. In our attempts to feel better we try to dislodge this, to our own loss. Lose the problem and we lose the sublime solution. Lose the conviction and we start to think any goodness and happiness we do enjoy is of our own making.
2. We need confidence that Jesus has achieved the Great Reversal. He turns enemies who were once far away into his co-heirs, sharing every one of his spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms (that’s a mash-up of Romans 5-8, Ephesians 1 and the whole book of Hebrews). We must be confident in, and only in, Jesus. Jesus’ achievements are bigger than our sins.
The joy he brings us into swallows the sorrow from point 1, but the sorrows of point 1 amplify the joy gained in point 2. Confidence without Christ is cheap folly. Conviction without Christ is despair. Conviction and Christ, but no confidence makes no sense. We need growing confidence in Jesus Christ who has overcome the sin we have a growing conviction of.
Mums, we don’t deserve any of the things we desperately long for. But Jesus brings us into everything that will satisfy those longings. With our needs unexpectedly and undeservedly met in him, we are free to take new risks, eager for what God says is good. This opens up a whole new way of mothering.
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