Mother’s Day

Well, good morning and happy Mother’s Day to all the women in our lives. Thank you so much for joining us today here at Shepherds Gate. We do recognize that we have lots of guests with us today because it is Mother’s Day.

So, if that’s you, thank you for responding to your mom, your grandma, that special woman in your life and giving us a chance here at Shepherds Gate. If there’s anything we can do, please let us know. As you heard, we really do hope you can stick around after the service, get a picture at the photo booth, and enjoy some of the special treats that we have for moms and all of us really today.

Maybe you’re wondering, why do we make such a big deal out of Mother’s Day? Anybody know why we do that? Did anybody wake up this morning and you just decided that you’re going to go on your favorite AI platform and be like, who came up with this idea of Mother’s Day? Just me? So, if you didn’t know, it was actually signed into law by a president a long time ago. It was about 100 years ago that the United States said, we should actually have a formal day called Mother’s Day. Does anybody know how long it took the federal government to recognize Father’s Day? Fifty years later, believe it or not.

So, Greg, I don’t know what’s up with that, but 100 years we’re celebrating mom, 50 years. So, we haven’t even really been celebrating it that much, but here at Shepherds Gate, we love to make a big deal out of not just Mother’s Day, but Father’s Day. You might be wondering, where is this found in the Bible? Is there scriptures that you can point to? The most obvious one is found in the 10 commandments that God gave us.

The fourth commandment actually tells us to honor our fathers and our mothers. All the moms and dads said? Amen. Now, those of you that just say amen, how did we do honoring our fathers and mothers? Is there any of us that would be honest here this morning and say, man, I don’t know if I’ve really done a great job of always making sure that I honor them, and give them the affection, and the applause that is due to them.

I mean, we’ve all screwed this up in one way, shape, or form, but thanks be to God, our parents are usually loving, and caring, and forgive us. Is that not true? So, today can be a difficult, can be a challenging day, and I would say it’s even more challenging than Father’s Day, because you have so many different types of mom and women in the room. You have women that want to be married, and really want to be a mom, and so they’re praying to God, and they’re hoping that that’s going to happen, because they have these desires that they believe God has given them.

You have moms that are moms, and their kids are driving them crazy, and you’re just like trying to survive. You’re in that survival mode, or maybe some of you are blessed to not only be moms, but you’re grandmas as well. Or maybe you’re an aunt, or a spiritual mom, or maybe your mother has passed away, and so today’s actually kind of a difficult day for you.

I have a couple of close guy friends that actually go to this church, and they refuse to come to church this weekend. Like they will not come to a Mother’s Day service, and I’m always like, come on, why won’t you come? And it’s because they lost their moms, and it’s too emotional for them, and they would rather just stay away for this weekend. And so that’s what often happens.

We have all of these things that we’re kind of grappling with, and so today what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna look at a passage of scripture in the book of Acts, where we’re gonna see a situation unfold that I really think’s gonna speak to all of us today, and then at the end, I’m also gonna share what happened to my family 35 years ago, actually more than 35 years ago, 35 and a half years ago, in a situation in my household. I was 13 at the time, and God intervened, otherwise I would have lost my mom. Now, if you’re new to scripture, in the New Testament, there’s four gospels that start the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and those four gospels tell the life and teaching of Jesus, and so the book that follows the four gospels is actually called Acts, and the reason it’s called Acts is because it’s the Acts of the apostles.

Jesus has already died, he rose again from the dead, he revealed himself to his inner circle, to the disciples and many others, and then he ascended into heaven, and so Jesus right now, if you didn’t know, is sitting at the right hand of God the Father, and he’s waiting for God the Father to tell him to come and get his children, his church, once and for all, and so we wait for that day, but in the meantime, he told the disciples that they are to go out, town by town, village by village, and to tell people that he really is the Messiah, the Savior of the world, and so we’re gonna be looking at Acts chapter nine today, where they’re doing this exact thing. The church started in Jerusalem, and there’s all of these areas in and around Jerusalem, called Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, and look at what it says. It says they are enjoying a time of peace.

How many of you would like some more peace in your life? And don’t you feel like every year for Mother’s Day, we should just say Mother’s Day should be a day of peace. How many sign up for that? So that means there’s no quarreling, there’s no fighting, no one’s gonna say anything sarcastic, or aggravate their sibling, or anybody else. Everyone’s gonna get along, and we’re just gonna honor moms for this 24-hour period.

Doesn’t that sound good? So think of the peace that these people are enjoying as more and more people are coming to faith in Jesus, and they’re living in the fear of God, they’re encouraged by the Holy Spirit that now lives inside of them, and it says they increased in numbers, which is always fascinating to me, because every single year, no matter what, not just here at Shepherd’s Gate, but churches all over the country, and all over the world, that celebrate Mother’s Day, all of a sudden see a what? An increase in attendance. Isn’t that pretty cool? Like we’ve been doing this long enough to know, we even had a service last night where people gathered, so it would be able to have more people in here this morning. And so here they are, they’re increasing in numbers, and they’re seeing more and more people come to faith.

Now Peter, if you didn’t know, he’s one of the disciples, he’s really close to Jesus, in fact, he’s the leader of the pack. He’s going around, and he’s checking in on all of these new groups that are forming, and a lot of times the churches would start in a person’s home, and so he’s going around and encouraging them, and telling them what they need to do. Well in Joppa, there was a disciple named Tabitha, and it says in Greek, her name was Dorcas.

Why the Bible tells us what both of her names were, I don’t know. Are you guys okay if I just call her Tabitha from here on out? She was always doing good and helping the poor. And you’re thinking to yourself, okay, I know where you’re going, pastor, with this Mother’s Day sermon.

This is where you tie in our moms, because our moms are always doing good, and they’re always helping us out. So we should applaud our moms, and thank our moms, and encourage our moms. And that’s true.

The women that God has placed in our lives, I mean, there’s exceptions. There’s sometimes people just get bad moms, or they’re caught in addiction, or there’s some other circumstance that unfortunately they’re having to deal with. But by and large, women in our lives have a positive impact in our lives.

They’re the ones that sacrifice for us. They’re the ones that help us. And in this circumstance here, it says that she’s actually literally helping the poor.

She’s helping those in her community. So she’s living a life of not just purpose, but she’s living a life in peace in what it is that God has given her to do. But this is what happens next.

It says that she became sick, and she died. You’re like, this is a really encouraging Mother’s Day message. You got the whole Bible, and you pick this text? It says her body was washed and placed in an upstairs room.

Why did she die? You know why she died? Because she’s a sinner. Ladies in this room, all of you are sinners. All of you have fallen short.

Every single person in this room is watching online. We are all sinners, and death is what awaits all of us. None of us are perfect.

None of us have this thing figured out. And so that’s why we see this in this passage, that even though she did all of these good works, the law at the end of the day caught up with her, and ultimately, she died. Now, Lyda was near Joppa.

And so when the disciples heard that Peter was in Lyda, they go and they send these guys to him. They say, hey, can you come over here at once? And we don’t know exactly why they went and got Peter. Maybe because they knew that he was one of the inner circle.

Maybe because they thought he would do the funeral service, or he would give them some words of encouragement. Or maybe there was something else attached to this. But they go and they find Peter, and they ask him to come.

And he goes with them, and he arrives there, and he’s taken upstairs to the room. And look at what it says. All the widows stood around him and Lydia.

And she laid there. Did you notice it doesn’t say her husband was in the room? It doesn’t say her kids or her grandkids were in the room. So we don’t even know if this lady was actually married, or if she had kids or not.

All we know is that she was a positive person in her community. And they’re crying, and they’re showing Peter the robes and other clothing that she had made while she was still with them. And this is often what we do when people pass in our lives.

Those of you that have dealt with this recently, or most of you that still carry the loved one in your heart, even if it’s been many, many years, you know that if you go to a funeral viewing, or you go to the funeral home, or you go to the funeral service, it’s in these moments where people will share with us not just what the person did with their time on this planet, but more importantly, it’s who they were to us. That they were your mom, or they were your sister, they were your spouse, they were your good or close friend. But so often, we also share the good things that they did with their life on this earth.

So here’s my question today. You ready for this? I’m trying to figure this out. And you’re the third service, and nobody in the last two services have been able to figure this out.

Maybe you’re the one to figure this out. Why do we always wait until people are dead to tell them how we really feel? Quiet in here. Are we just too busy? Do we just not think of it? Do we just think we have more time with them? I mean, all the time, there’s this thing that just perpetuates in our lives where I think we’re just going, going, going, going, and then we forget to just stop and pause and to really express how we feel.

I’ve been with enough families that I’ve heard people say this over and over again. I wish I would’ve known, or I wish I would’ve had those final moments, or I wanted to say one last thing, or I wish I could’ve really expressed how I really felt and the impact they made on my life. Now, this last week, I was meeting with a family here at Shepherds Gate, and we were in my office, and one of the questions that they asked me was, well, what do you do? Like, what’s your pattern in your home? Do you guys ever actually get together and do a family devotion? And I said, to be honest with you, it’s become really difficult the older my kids have become.

My son now, he’s working at a golf course, so he’s gone three to four nights a week, comes home late. My wife works late a couple nights of the week. I sometimes have meetings here at the church.

And I said, so on average, in an average week, we probably have one or two nights that we’re actually together all at the dining room table. Does anybody else have that struggle as well? And quality time is really important to my wife. She loves that family dinner time.

But during the family dinner, I do something that’s revolutionary. I do something that’s very controversial. I do something that just might be child abuse, just so you know.

And I collect all of the cell phones and I move the cell phones into another room. And for a good 12 to 13 minutes, we have a discussion as a family before our two boys turn it into WrestleMania at the dining room table and my wife just gives up on all of us. And so as I was having this conversation, she said to me, the mom said to me, she said, I could never do that.

I could never put my phone in another room because what if one of my loved ones was having an accident or what if something tragic was taking place and I had that one last moment to say something to them before they pass from this life into the next. And it reminded me again of how often we don’t do this. And of course, it’s Mother’s Day.

So why do we always wait until Mother’s Day? To tell the women in our lives how we really feel about them. And all the women in the room said, well, you guys don’t care if we don’t appreciate you the rest of the year? Let’s try that again. Why do we often wait until Mother’s Day to tell the moms how we really feel about them? Which, if you haven’t done that, now’s a good time to turn to that woman in your life and whisper to her, I appreciate you, I love you, you’re amazing.

I have a friend, he’s a really good friend. He’s a pastor of a church out west and he told me about this idea that I wanted to bring here to Shepherd’s Gate. He’s been doing it for a couple years.

He buys hundreds and hundreds of Mother’s Day cards and he strategically places them in the men’s restrooms at his church. And he’s like, Tim, you gotta do this. I’ve been doing this for a couple years.

Every single year, all the cards are taken. And so I told our team here at Shepherd’s Gate, we have gotta jump on board this. We gotta help the men in our church out.

You can go on Amazon, it’s not really that expensive. Let’s buy the cards, let’s have the pens and let’s have them stationed. We just won’t tell the women.

We’ll keep it on the down low and we’ll make sure that all the men know and we’ll just kinda do our thing. Well, the problem is that the meeting that they had in the pre-planning meeting, there were women in the meeting. And the women shut the idea down.

First of all, they said, if those knuckleheads can’t find time to go to Meijer or Kroger or Hallmark to buy a card, why is it that the church has to buy the card for them? And secondly, there is not a woman on the planet that wants a card that was written on in the men’s restroom of a church. So just so you know, guys, next year I’m gonna do this. I’m just not gonna tell anybody.

But I thought, what a way to encourage this whole idea of spreading positive thoughts and encouragement to the women in our lives. Well, look at what happens in our text. Peter sends them out of the room.

He gets down on his knees and he prayed, which is what you do in a moment of desperation. You turn to God. You ask God to intervene.

You ask God to bring peace into a situation that you don’t really know what to do or how to overcome it. And this is amazing because turning toward the dead woman, Peter said to her, Tabitha, get up. And she opens her eyes and she sees Peter.

Peter takes her by the hand. He helps her to her feet. He calls for all the believers that are all gathered there to mourn, especially the widows who were super close to her.

And he presents her to them alive. Here’s the amazing part of this story. She did not ask to be risen from the dead.

She saw Jesus face to face. And then the next thing you know, she’s seeing Peter’s ugly face. I think she got the raw end of the deal.

She’s completely dead. She did nothing. She can do nothing.

God Almighty working through Peter is what enabled him, the power of God, to raise this woman from the dead. And this is what you need to hear this morning, moms. You cannot be perfect.

You do not need to be perfect. We don’t need you to be perfect. And even though there’s all the books and all the social media and all the influencers, and now you have to live in a day and age when you get to compare yourself to all the other moms and all the other stuff that’s going on, on behalf of all of the men in this room, we love you the way that God has created you.

And we love that God has worked in your heart and your life and that God is the one that has brought you to faith and that you’re not perfect. And sometimes you do say and do things that are contrary to God’s will. That’s what makes you human.

But we’re also grateful for the faith that he has placed in you, that you are willing to admit when you’re wrong, and that you want us to also be in a relationship with God. And all the men said. So ladies, today, please do not beat yourself up.

Do not live in this constant cycle of comparing yourself to others, or constantly thinking that you have to do more or try harder. This woman did absolutely nothing. And yet God did this work in her life, just as he does the same work in our life with our faith.

So why is she raised from the dead? What’s the whole point of this? It tells us that the reason she was raised from the dead was so that people in her community would come to faith. Let me say that again. The reason this woman was raised from the dead was so that others would come to faith.

And I’ll say this on behalf of all of the women in here, because I believe this to be true, that one of the deepest desires God creates in a Christian mother’s heart is that those that are closest to her would come to know the Lord. At the end of the day, when they close their eyes in this life and they pass from this life to the next, the most important thing to them is not passing on their recipes to you, or their cooking skills, or their lack of cooking skills, or their wardrobe, or their bank account, or whatever you think it is that they’re going to pass on to you and those things that we say at their funeral. The most important thing that your mom wants to pass on to you is for you to know the one true and living God and the relationship that you can have with Him.

That’s the most important thing to every God-fearing mother in this room. Amen? Now, as I said at the beginning, I’m gonna share my story with you, which is really my mom’s story. I was 13 at the time when our lives took a dramatic turn and we weren’t even sure if our mom was gonna make it.

So I want you to watch this video now. Hi, my name’s Betty Bollinger and this is my really good friend, Michelle Bartarian. And we’ve known each other about 37 years and we’re here to tell you our story and how God has provided for us and protected us.

I kind of came from humble beginnings, but we had Jesus in our life and He blessed us abundantly with three children in three and a half years. So you can imagine we had a very hectic home life. And when our youngest went to kindergarten, I went back to school and finished my bachelor’s degree.

I found employment that God kind of led me to at Zoe Christian Academy, where I met Michelle. I started teaching kindergarten there the year before Betty came. I was a young mom at the time.

I had two small children. We were both very interested in teaching reading and we decided to go back to school and get a master’s in reading and language arts. So the fall of 1990, we started a class at Oakland University.

It was the Monday of Thanksgiving week and we had just finished the class. It had been a long one. We had worked all day and we had the kids at home.

So we were both pretty tired. We were exhausted. So we left Oakland University and got in the car.

I had a van at the time and headed home down 75 going south. And Betty says, well, she says, I’m just so tired. And she puts her head back.

Soon as she put her head back, the world kind of exploded. There was this deafening sound. Something had come crashing through the windshield.

I still had hands on the wheel, don’t know why or how, except the Lord, and looked over at her and she was out. She was down, lots of blood, lots of glass. I have no recollection of driving until I looked up and saw the exit I was gonna get off of.

And I was praying and just saying, Lord, please, you cannot take her. She’s got these three children. She has to be there for her children.

I pulled into this little gas station right off Big Beaver there saying, call 911, call 911. And this woman just hands me the phone from inside the thing. And I’m screaming on the phone, you need to send an ambulance.

The ambulance does come and it didn’t feel like it took very long for an ambulance to get there. And Betty was in and out. The police show up with the ambulance and are talking to me.

And I told them, I don’t know what happened. We were driving and the windshield exploded. And later on, they let us know an eight pound, 14 inch truck spring was what had come through my windshield and it came through at an angle and it hit Betty and went right past me and hit the vinyl in the backseat.

So I jumped in the front seat of the ambulance and I had called my husband and my husband called Bill to let him know that we were on our way to Royal Oak Fullmont. I got the call, this is late at night, it’s like midnight, telling me that my wife was in an accident. So went to the hospital.

And when I saw her, it looked like she had a big hornet’s nest on this side of the head. I almost passed out. It was rough.

Her head was split open and she had glass on her brain. So I was so thankful when I found out that I had like one of the best neurosurgeons who happened to be the head of neurosurgery at Fullmont Royal Oak. I just remember praying, calling my church, anybody I knew that could pray because her head swelled and they had to go in and do emergency surgery.

So Assembly of God Church in St. Clair Shores, they took good care of us. The minister was awesome. He was there, he prayed for, and you gotta realize this is like midnight.

How many ministers get out of bed, drive up to Rochester and pray for you? The next thing that I really remember is waking up in ICU. And my eyes were kind of, I couldn’t see that great at first. And all I saw was my pastor standing against the wall, praying for me.

A lot of people were praying for us. My favorite verse in the Bible is Jeremiah 29, 13. When you really seek the Lord, you’ll listen.

A lot of people were seeking the Lord that night because to me, she should be dead. I was in ICU for one day and then six more days in the hospital. We had a fabulous church family and they brought food every day.

They just kept coming, food after food after food. And Bill’s parents, once I got home from the hospital, came up to spend a week with us and cook for us and care for us. I had always thought, God, why me? Why did I survive? But God still had a purpose for me.

In April of 1992, God blessed us with a fourth child. Joshua was born and we always called him our bonus. It was all a miracle that I survived, that we survived.

So God definitely had his angels protecting us and he’s provided a beautiful friendship between the two of us that is irreplaceable and just amazing. I wouldn’t be here without Michelle. When I see Joshua, it’s a constant reminder of how good God was to me and took that situation and where we thought there was gonna be death, there was new life.

We were able to both see our kids grow up and as moms, we relied on each other and as women, we need each other. I’m so grateful that this was born out of a pretty much tragic night. Would we have wanted to go through it? No, but this is what God did and he’s awesome.

Love you, girl. And I know some of you may not be as fortunate to have that same story and to watch God at work, but it’s interesting when you think about the fact, again, that Tabitha is in the upper room and because Peter walked into that room and God worked through Peter, that she was brought back to life, that my mom was in this car with her friend, Michelle, that God worked through Michelle to get her to that exit so that those EMT guys could then get her to the hospital so the surgeon who was trained to do what he could do could be an instrument of God to bring her back to life. It’s kind of humbling just sometimes the blessings that God does bestow upon us in the community that he puts us in, which is why I think being part of a church is so important.

Not just coming to church on Christmas and Easter and then adding Mother’s Day to the mix, but this is what we get to do as a church each and every week because it’s not just gathering for worship, it’s the care that we have for each other all throughout the week. And for those of you that maybe you don’t have that as your rhythm, I would encourage you. We would love to have you part of this church.

Your mom not only wants you to have faith, she wants you to be connected to a church because of the way the church can minister to you and help you go through all of the stages and challenges of life. But hear me this morning, God sees you and he knows you and he loves you and he will never stop pursuing you and wanting you to know just how precious you are to him. Amen?