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The Man With Two Mothers Series
Contributed by Jeff Strite on May 12, 2008 (message contributor)
Summary: Moses became the kind of man he did because God supplied him with 2 mothers. But one of those mothers supplied him with something the other could not. Do you know what that was?
OPEN: Real Mothers are special people.
Real mothers would like to be able to eat a whole candy bar (all by themselves) and drink a Coke without any "floaters" in it.
Real Mothers know that their kitchen utensils are probably going to end up in the sandbox.
Real Mothers often have sticky floors, filthy ovens and happy kids.
Real Mothers know that dried play dough doesn’t come out of shag carpets.
Real Mothers sometimes ask "Why me?" and get their answer when a little voice says, "Because I love you best."
Real Mothers know that a child’s growth is not measured by height or years or grade.
It is marked by the progression of Mama to Mom to Mother...
APPLY: Real mothers are an integral part of our lives.
We wouldn’t be who we are without our mothers.
Some of the greatest people in history will tell you how important their mothers were to their lives. George Washington, for example, declared: “All I am I owe to my mother”.
This was also true of one of the greatest men in Old Testament history, a man named Moses. Moses became the kind of man he was because of the type of mother he had. In fact, who he was, was very much determined by the type of MOTHERS he had, because God gave Moses two mothers.
And they were both good mothers because they both had some of the same instincts for their roles.
For example: They both loved babies
Now, that may seem like a given… but not every woman loves kids.
ILLUS: I once read the story of a woman who went shopping for swimsuits with her mother.
In the department store, though, she was having a hard time finding one that fit. After trying on at least 10, all to no avail, she grew increasingly frustrated.
Trying to calm her, her mother said "Look at it this way: what would you rather have – the husband and three children who adore you, or a swimsuit that fits?"
Before she could answer, a faceless voice from the next dressing room stall replied
"I want a swimsuit that fits!"
Not every woman wants kids.
But these two did.
And that WAS no small thing in their day because Moses’ 2 mothers lived in a culture of death.
A decree had gone out from the throne of Pharaoh that every male child born to a Hebrew was to thrown into the Nile and drowned. And Moses’ birth mother – Jochebed – was a Hebrew woman.
Thus, she had a choice to make.
The society in which she lived made it virtually impossible to keep her child and she could have decided to simply allow her child to be thrown away. I mean - her son was not wanted.
She could have chosen death (the easy choice)… but she chose life instead.
And this was not an easy decision for Jochebed to make.
It required her to hide her child for 3 whole months always fearing that Egyptian soldiers would discover the baby… and not only would they kill her child but punish her entire family for disobeying the law.
Choosing life was not an easy decision.
But then consider Pharaoh’s daughter.
She knew who this baby was.
Exodus 2:6 tells us “She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. ‘This is one of the Hebrew babies,’ she said.”