The Power of a Mother’s Teaching

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says, you can never go wrong by passing Scripture on to the next generation.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: When you are teaching your children the Word and ways of God, what you are saying is very important. It's weighty. It carries divine authority with it, if you are teaching children and your grandchildren the Word of God.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free, for Monday, August 5. I’m Dannah Gresh.

The Bible is a lot more than just a book telling us how to behave. First and foremost, it’s God’s revelation of Himself to us. His Word tells us who He is, and then, based on His character, what He requires of us. 

That doesn’t mean the Scriptures aren’t practical. They’re intensely practical. And the passage we’re looking at in this series is no exception. Here’s Nancy, embarking on the series “To Be Praised: The Woman Who Fears the Lord.”

Nancy: I'm almost a little bit hesitant to tell you what it is we're going to be teaching in this next series. Over the past weeks, as I've been studying, women have asked me, "What are you going to be teaching next on Revive Our Hearts?" When I've told them that it's going to be a series on Proverbs 31, I've had almost uniformly the same reaction. It's something like: eyes rolling or a gasp or a sigh. "I'm not sure that I want to sit through a whole series on Proverbs 31."

I can understand a little bit why people would have that reaction. I have to tell you what I think what has happened in me over these last weeks as I've been studying is going to happen in you as a result of what God is going to do in our hearts through this series these next days. 

I've just been soaking and getting saturated in what is becoming one of my very favorite passages in the Scripture. I want to encourage you over these next days to read Proverbs 31 for yourself. As you do, you might just want to take a blank piece of paper or a journal (maybe something you record your quiet time notes in), and just take notes about what God shows you from this passage—not just from what I'm saying, but even more importantly, what the Holy Spirit shows you as you're reading it for yourself. Jot down, "Here's what this says," "Here's what this means," and "Here’s how God is applying this to my life."

When we talk about Proverbs 31, we usually start at verse 10. Now, I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it's because that's where the part about women specifically begins. But I want to start with verse 1 and have us work through the entire passage, not skipping those first nine verses.

So let's look first at verse 1, which gives us the setting and the context of Proverbs 31. Beginning in verse 1:

The words of King Lemuel, the utterance which his mother taught him.

The words of King Lemuel. Now you won't find that name anywhere else in the Bible. There's no reference if you go through Kings or Chronicles where all those kings of Judah or Israel are listed. There's no reference to a King Lemuel. It occurs just here in the Bible.

But there's an ancient Jewish tradition that identifies King Lemuel as the name that Solomon's mother gave to him. So the thinking is that this is perhaps King Solomon and “Lemuel” being another name for him. Maybe this is a fond name that his mother had and called him Lemuel. If that's the case, and we don't know that it is or isn't, but I like to think that it might be, who would be the mother who's doing the teaching here? Remember who Solomon's mother was? Bathsheba, which makes this a very interesting passage considering it in that light.

"The words of King Lemuel [perhaps King Solomon], the utterance which his mother [perhaps Bathsheba], taught him." Now that phrase, when you put it with some others in Scripture, speaks to me of the incredible power and impact of a mother's teaching.

Now all the way through Proverbs, we have a lot of references to the teaching of a father. We don't have a lot of references to the teaching of a mother. One that comes to mind is Proverbs 1:8–9. In the first chapter of Proverbs we read:

Listen, my son, to your father's instruction and do not forsake your mother's teaching. They will be a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck. (NIV)

Proverbs tell us that both our father's instruction and our mother’s instruction is something that can make us beautiful; it can adorn us. It’s an ornament we ought to make sure that we wear, and it will adorn us with grace and with beauty. This is the utterance which King Lemuel's mother taught him.

Now the word "utterance"—and in some of your translations, like the NIV, I think it's the word "oracle"—it's a word that means, “a prophecy or an announcement of truth.” This word, "utterance" or "oracle," carries with it the sense of weightiness. It's something heavy; it's something important. Sometimes in other parts of the Scripture this word is translated "burden." You read that in Malachi 1—“the burden of the Lord” (v. 1 KJV). It's an important message that comes from the Lord.

These words that this mother taught her son are not just a mother's words. They are words that a mother got from the heart of God. As a mother, you can know that when you are teaching your children the ways and the Word of God, that what you are saying to them is very, very important. It's weighty. It carries divine authority with it if you're teaching your children and your grandchildren the words of God.

These are, according to this verse, “The words of King Lemuel,” the words that his mother had taught him. So apparently, this king is recalling some things that his mother had taught him years earlier when he was not yet king, when he was a young prince, a king in the making. If the king was Solomon, and the mother was Bathsheba, you can see that these words come from the heart of a mother who knew about the grace of God, about the mercy of God.

We think of this passage, Proverbs 31, as being this impossible standard of God's law that no one can keep. Yet, if Bathsheba was the woman who taught these words, she was a woman who knew a lot about the broken law of God and what the grace of God could do to restore people who had broken God's law.

She knew how God had taken her as a woman who had been greatly wronged and perhaps who sinned greatly herself . . . We don't know if Bathsheba was complicit in the sin with David. But certainly, she had been wronged and potentially had failed herself in this matter—maybe both. Nonetheless, she had been restored, and God had made her fruitful and given her a son who would lead to the line of Christ the Messiah. Here is the woman who had learned a lot from a hard, painful personal experience.

Now she's teaching her son, this young prince who is going to be a king. She's teaching him the importance of things like faithfulness—faithfulness as a husband, faithfulness in a wife. Maybe, if this is Bathsheba teaching her son Solomon, she is certainly teaching with some degree of remorse or regret, that she and her husband had not lived out to the extent that they should have, the things that she is now going to teach her son.

You can just sense that here's a woman who doesn’t want her failures to be reproduced in the next generation, so she's going to speak words of warning and caution and exhortation and pleading with him to take God's heart and God's words as his own and to live them out.

So her husband, who'd experienced some serious consequences as a result of his adultery, she's saying now to her son, Solomon, "There are a lot of things in your dad to emulate, but there are some that you need to avoid. Learn from our example. Learn from what we have learned the hard way, and don't repeat the failures of your parents." So she's speaking words of protection, caution.

Then she's speaking words of preparation. Remember that when she spoke these words, her son was not yet the king. He was a young man, a prince. But she knew that one day he would be the king, so she's helping to prepare her son for his future. She knows that he is going to have a lot of responsibility on his shoulders. He's going to be a leader; he's going to be a servant.

She's speaking words in this chapter to her son who would be king that helping to prepare him for a lifetime of responsibility and leadership and service. She knew that some day he would sit on the throne.

Maybe you are thinking as a mother, Well, my son is certainly not going to be a king or a president or a ruler. Yet the Scripture tells us that as children of God, we are all priests and kings to God.

Your question ought to be, "How can I best prepare my children for a lifetime of spiritual service, as kings and priests to God, to live as sons of God and daughters of God and as royalty? How can I prepare them to fulfill God's calling in their lives?"

Sometimes you'll do that by teaching. Sometimes you'll do it by prayer. Sometimes you'll do it by example. We're going to see in this passage that this is a mother who has done all of these for her children. You want to prepare your children to live and to serve the King of kings; to live and serve themselves, as kings and queens under God's authority.

“The words of King Lemuel, the utterance which his mother taught him.” He's now speaking these words. He's remembering back to what his mother taught him years earlier. Aren't you glad, those of you who are still in the child-rearing years, to have this encouragement that your children will remember what you teach them?

Now, you better make sure you're teaching them the right things because they will remember what you're teaching them. You are teaching them something. They're going to remember those lessons, and they're going to reproduce those lessons, for better or for worse, in the next generation.

• What do you want your children to remember about what you taught them?
• What do you remember about what your parents, your mother, taught you?
• What do you want to pass on to your children?
• What are you passing on to your children and to your grandchildren?
• What are you teaching them?
• What do you want them to pass on to the next generation when you're no longer here?

“The words of King Lemuel, the utterance which his mother taught him.” She taught him; he grew up and taught others. Notice, by the way, she didn't leave all the training to the dad. He has a role of course of teaching and training, but this is a mother teaching.

I think that should be an encouragement for those of you whose husbands may not know the Lord, or may not be walking with God, or may not be actively committed to teaching the children. Now of course, they have a calling and a responsibility. But don't assume that because your husband doesn't have a relationship to God that you can't be actively involved in the training and the teaching and the discipling and the nurturing of your children.

Either way, with or without a husband who is training your children, you have a calling and a responsibility to train your children, to protect them, to prepare them, to speak to them weighty words—words that have the authority of God's Word behind them—so that your children will be prepared and equipped to go and provide godly leadership in the next generation.

She says in verse 2:

What, my son?
And what, son of my womb?
And what, son of my vows?

Now these sentences, unless you really take some time to dwell on them, meditate on them . .  . They are not even complete sentences. What we're getting here is kind of the groanings, the longings, the outpouring of a mother's heart, a mother who can hardly even finish her sentences—not because she's not smart—because this is coming from so deeply within her that she hardly knows how to express what she's feeling.

It expresses the intensity and the passion of a mother's heart who's feeling love and tenderness and connectedness to this child who is her own flesh and blood. This is the child that she carried in her womb; she feels responsibility for her child. This is the son of her womb.

Now, if this is King Solomon, then the mother is Bathsheba, then you remember that Bathsheba had lost her firstborn son—the son who was born of the illicit union of her and King David. If that's the case, then you can imagine that her son Solomon was even more precious in her sight, because she had already lost one child. Now she is crying out on the behalf of this son of her womb, her own flesh and blood. He's the "son of my vows." This is a picture of a woman who has dedicated her child to God.

When I think of that phrase "the son of my vows," I think of another mother in the Old Testament. Her name was Hannah. She longed for a child, prayed for a child, wept for a child, waited for a child. Then came the day when God blessed her with a child. She said, "Lord, if You give me a son, I will give him back to You. He will be Yours." He was the son of her vows. We realize how important it is for mothers to recognize that their children are dedicated to God.

I was just thinking, over the last twenty-four hours, of what it has meant in my life to know that from the womb I was set apart for God; that my parents realized they didn't own me. We children weren't their property. We were the children of their vows. We were dedicated to God from the womb.

That gives to me even as an adult woman such a sense of responsibility, such a sense of mission and purpose in life that is fulfilled because as a child I was given over to God from birth. That's what this mother is feeling. She is expressing the intent of her heart to raise this child in the fear of the Lord.

Someone has said, "If there were more Hannahs, would there not be more Samuels—great men of God, spiritual leaders?" If we only had more women—mothers, grandmothers—who were dedicating their children to God and crying out to God on behalf of their children.

So she says, "What, my son? What, son of my womb? What, son of my vows?" It's as if she's saying, "What shall I say? What shall I teach you? What shall I pass on to you?" She wanted her son to come to know God, in the ways of God, and she knew that she had a responsibility to show her son the ways of God, to communicate the heart of God to her son. It's as if she is saying, "What shall I say to him?"

Here's a woman who is taking very seriously her responsibility to train her son in the ways of God. She's looking to God, as if to say, "Lord, show me what to teach this child."

• What are the key things you want to pass on to your children?
• If you couldn't teach them anything else, what would be the most important thing you would pass on to your son or to your daughter?
• How can you best prepare your sons and daughters to be all that God made them to be?
• How can you best protect them from what they will face later in life?
• How can you best direct them into the plan that God has for their life?

God has given those children to you. They are a sacred trust. They are a precious stewardship. You have a responsibility to those children that is greater than your responsibility to anyone else on the face of this earth, except for your husband.

Thank You Lord for the mothers who have taught and trained us. Some of them were godly mothers who taught us directly from Your Word. Some women, perhaps, had a mother who did not know You, but still as a mother was teaching and training basic life skills and modeled important things about what it means to be a successful man or woman.

We thank You for those who've trained us and taught us. Now, Lord, we pray as women that You would show us how to teach and train the next generation. That we may raise up young men and young women who will be kings and queens, spiritual royalty, who will provide spiritual, godly leadership for the next generation. We pray it in Jesus' name, amen.

Dannah: That's Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, asking the Lord to raise up women who are willing to teach and train the next generation. In just a minute, you'll hear some stories about moms willing to look for teaching moments. They’ll provide powerful examples of passing on truth to the next generation.

First, let me tell you how you can get a copy of a booklet by Nancy. It’s called Biblical Portrait of Womanhood. In it, Nancy helps you discover and live out God’s plan for you as a woman. This month, we’re making this booklet available as a thank-you for your donation to Revive Our Hearts. Just request Biblical Portrait of Womanhood when you give any amount at ReviveOurHearts.com, or make your donation over the phone at 1-800-569-5959. 

Well, Proverbs 31 tells us that the children of a virtuous woman will rise up and call her blessed. Nancy will teach on that verse in . . . oh, about three weeks or so. But to close this program on the power of a mother's teaching, we’re going to hear from two listeners who were deeply shaped by their godly mothers.

Sally: One of my dearest memories of my mother goes back to when I was a young teenager struggling with doubts about God and my salvation. I was so troubled I couldn't sleep at night and I went up and I talked to Mom about midnight. She spoke words of wisdom and comfort to me, but once I got back down to my bed the same old troubles and thoughts came back to haunt me.

At about two o'clock in the morning, again I went back to Mom's bedroom. When I opened her bedroom door, I found her kneeling beside her bed. I knew she was talking to her Father about me. And I knew that with a mom like that, everything would be okay. I did find a solid, sure understanding of God and the confidence that I was His child. 

When I was a teen and very much in love with a godly young man, I again faced a great trial. The man I thought I was going to marry got a bad electrical shock and it left him emotionally damaged. He no longer felt love for me. After months of limping along in our courtship, he told me in a letter that he thought we needed to quit looking to each other as future companions.

As I read that letter, I remember sitting at the kitchen table and crying my heart out. My dear mother was hurting because I was hurting. She said, "Well, Sally, I'll always love you. What a comfort those words were at a painful time. I knew they were true because she showed her love in many ways.

The story has a happy ending as my boyfriend got help from a Christian counselor and we're about to celebrate our twenty-third wedding anniversary—twenty-three wonderful years! Mom, you were there when I needed you, and now I want to be there when you need me.

You have buried two sons from a dreaded disease. You have stood by a husband whose health is failing and no longer seems the man that you said "I do" to. But you took your vows seriously and you are faithful.

When many in the world would have given up and would have gone to seek their own pleasure, you stayed by the fire and did what you knew God wanted you to. I'll always love you, Mom.

Donnette's Daughter: My mom, her name is Donnette. She and my dad were married for ten years, and she adopted my older brother. Then she had my brother and me. After ten years of marriage, my dad met another woman and was going to leave. At that time, my mom was pregnant with my youngest brother. This didn't stop my dad from leaving. He still left. It left my mom with three kids and a baby on the way.

The true tribute is that through all the things and all the turmoil that she was going through during the divorce and raising us four children, as a single parent, the one important thing that she always taught us was about the love of God and about the stories of the Old Testament. We would do Bible stories, and we would have memory verses. We always went to church, and we went to Bible study on Wednesday or Thursday night.

I remember she always had her Bible wherever she was. She always was reading her Bible. And just her actions. She didn't try to go out and find a husband or she didn't go out like young people might want or try to find a life for herself. It was always about us children and the Lord. She sacrificed. She didn't have new clothes, but she always made sure us kids had what we could have.

The legacy she passed down to us was her love for God. And through all these things, He was always the most important thing. We all love my mom very much.

Dannah: This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the NKJV unless otherwise noted.

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