I thank God for what mother's love has done for the world.
Oh, there is power in a mother's trust. Surely as Moses was put in his mother's arms by the princess, so God put the babes in your arms, as a charge from him to raise and care for. Every child is put in a mother's arms as a trust from God, and she has to answer to God for the way she deals with that child. No mother on God's earth has any right to raise her children for pleasure. She has no right to send them to dancing school and haunts of sin. You have no right to do those things that will curse your children. That babe is put in your arms to train for the Lord. No mother has any more right to raise her children for pleasure than I have to pick your pockets or throw red pepper in your eyes. She has no more right to do that than a bank cashier has to rifle the vaults and take the savings of the people. One of the worst sins you can commit is to be unfaithful to your trust.
A Mother's Responsibility
"Take this child and nurse it for me." That is all the business you have with it. That is a jewel that belongs to God and he gives it to you to polish for him so he can set it in a crown. Who knows but that Judas became the godless, good-for-nothing wretch he was because he had a godless, good-for-nothing mother? Do you know? I don't. What is more to blame for the crowded prisons than mothers? Who is more to blame for the crowded disreputable houses than you are, who let your children gad the streets, with every Tom, Dick and Harry, or keep company with some little jack rabbit whose character would make a black mark on a piece of tar paper? I have talked with men in prisons who have damned their mothers to my face. Why? They blame their mothers for their being where they are.
"Take the child and nurse it for me, and I will pay you your wages." God pays in joy that is fireproof, famine-proof and devil-proof. He will pay you, don't you worry. So get your name on God's pay-roll. "Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will pay you your wages." If you haven't been doing that, then get your name on God's pay-roll.
"Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will pay you your wages." Then your responsibility! It is so great that I don't see how any woman can fail to be a Christian and serve God. What do you think God will do if the mother fails? I stagger under it. What, if through your unfaithfulness, your boy becomes a curse and your daughter a blight? What, if through your neglect, that boy becomes a Judas when he might have been a John or Paul?
Down in Cincinnati some years ago a mother went to the zoological garden and stood leaning over the bear pit, watching the bears and dropping crumbs and peanuts to them. In her arms she held her babe, a year and three months old. She was so interested in the bears that the baby wriggled itself out of her arms and fell into the bear pit, and she watched those huge monsters rip it to shreds. What a veritable hell it will be through all her life to know that her little one was lost through her own carelessness and neglect!
"Take this child and raise it for me, and I will pay you your wages." Will you promise and covenant with God, and with me, and with one another, that from now on you will try, with God's help, to do better than you ever have done to raise your children for God?
"The Ideal Mother is the Product of a Civilization that Rose from the Manger of Bethlehem."