The Baptist Pillar © Brandon Bible Baptist Church 1992-Present www.baptistpillar.com
"...The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."
I Timothy 3:15
A Mother’s Privilege
Jabez Burns
From Mothers of the Wise and Good, 1860
What is a mother's privilege? It is your privilege, Christian mother, and you must not neglect it, to train up your child for heaven. It is your privilege, Oh, ever prize it, to plead for him the promises of a covenant-keeping God.
He bids you come. He will not suffer any one to forbid you, when with yearning soul you bear your little one, warmed in your bosom, its heart beating with kindred life against your own, to Him who died for you and your child. This is a mother's privilege, to win a blessing for the babe you love that shall abide on its spirit through the eternity of its being. As it lies lapped in your guardianship, unconscious of the care that watches its slumbers, you can breathe over faith's heartfelt dedication of your love to your present God.
As in gentlest ministry of tenderness you open for it your bosom's fount, and give it as it were to drink from your own life, you can bear its name in all the urgency of a mother's love on your humble, holiest prayer!
You can bind its soul around your own, inseparable from you, and never to be forgotten or neglected while life or hope is yours. To watch its infant passions, and check their promptings —to train its infant thoughts,—to twine around its infant heart a tie that Heaven will kindly own, and that shall wax stronger and stronger beneath a Saviour's smile—this, this is a mother's privilege.
Make it all your own. Think not it is enough to HOPE, but be sure to KNOW that your child is an heir of heaven. Promises bright with protection, and more precious still, with eternal life, beckon you on every page or God's revelation to labor for a world that needs salvation. Plead them—plead them mightily, and leave Him not till he bids you go in peace.
Motives break forth in voices from heaven, bidding you, “Come in with thy child, come!”
And in unearthly warnings from the pit, “Turn him from every path that may bring him here.”
And as they pour their tide of influence on your heart, they proclaim that you have a work of faith and labor of love to perform, in which you must not linger, nor faint, nor grow weary. Strengthen, then, that faith by feeding on the Word of truth, and drink in, in communion with an all-sufficient Redeemer, the streams of life that may invigorate you to the noblest deed that your immortal spirit can accomplish.
You must win that soul, instinct with dying energies, to be a living gem in the Saviour's crown. Pride would teach you to ask for greatness, for honors to laurel the brow of your loved one, for what the earth-born delight in and call happiness, to be his portion here; but ask for Him a greater boon than any or all of these.
You must beg, and passing this narrow bound of time, your prayer must reach out to grasp a prize of which he can only know the worth, as he learns it where eternal ages stamp it never to be forgotten or unenjoyed. As if but one sole request, which must never be let go till it is granted, is your errand there, so make your urgency be felt at the footstool of the throne.
A mother's voice—a mother's heart shall not plead in vain.