Mary Bender > Recent Status Updates

“Wouldn’t we rather be weak vessels who consciously live by grace than be superlative specimens who don’t know the Lord?”

“We need to train our feelings to submit to the truth revealed in God’s Word.”

“Our childbirth and fertility is not about us but about God.”

“God designed childbirth in such a way that we would have a stark, urgent, visceral, common and unparalleled picture of our inability to save ourselves and the Spirit’s freedom to give us the life we need.”

“We should press on daily to see Christ formed in our children. Laboring for our children didn’t end when they were born.”

“We want our own custom made, hand picked sanctification plan… but God is after complete transformation of his children and praise the Lord that he will not stop until we are conformed to the image of his Son.”

“Lord, stamp eternity on my eyeballs” - Jonathan Edwards

“Our willingness to sacrificially lay down our wants and needs for the sake of our children’s good is our testimony of confidence in our powerful God to lead us through death to self and death itself into glory.”

“If the Lord has willed something, then it must be good in the deepest, truest sense of the word. In your heart of hearts do you agree that whatever the Lord wills is right and good, and unquestionably, ultimately good because he is good?”

“When your heart quakes with dread because of your sin, think of Christ who writhed in agony on the cross under the weight of your sin.”

“Oh how we need eyes to see that God is the center of the universe! As dizzying as the pain we experience in raising children can be, we need to have the wherewithal to remember how it points us to God himself.”

“Our multiplier pain in multiplying is intended to point us to a profound theological reality: we need a Deliverer.”

“May God’s faithfulness be what gets us out of bed in the morning, closes our eyes at night, and sustains us during the nights filled with mothering work.”

“From the beginning of the world God has used everyday labors and repetition as a tool for the building of his kingdom, yet we forget this in the cheapness and immediacy of the present age”

“A million wonderful, good, wholesome things in this life shout for us to see the excellencies of the King! They’re like magnifying glasses for our weak eyes to help us understand his creativity, kindness, & mercy!”

“Jesus loves us too much to let us walk the pleasant way to glory.”

“Marriage and motherhood are God’s mirrors to help me see the realities of my sin sick heart that I had ignored and never even knew existed.”

“Christianity calls us first and foremost to bring our failure - nothing else, and trade it in for Christ’s perfect righteousness.”

“As believers, we defeat time not by following ten principles of entrepreneurs or 7 successful tips to keep a clean home but by obeying the Lord of time.”

“Here in the home begins the incubation of the glory of God as it unfolds itself in the hearts of small image bearers and in our own lives as we are sanctified back into divine resemblance”

“If any position had been better for you than the one you occupy, divine providence would have put you there.” - Spurgeon

“Christ’s life given up for others is the centerpiece of our faith. Our life given up for others is the centerpiece of our faithfulness. The glory is that in both cases, death is not the end.” - Jankovic

“If we’re not daily running to the throne, we’re drawing from the dry wells of our own adequacy. The sooner we realize that, the sooner joy can germinate in the soil of our days and grow strong vines up the trellis of our time and bear the fruit of the Spirit to be enjoyed by all those around us.”

“God has designed the utter dependency of small children, the perpetually divided attention, and the variety of unanticipated but pressing claims on our energy to reveal the sins of our hearts”

“The good news of God saving sinners through the righteousness of his son and preserving them through their entire lives to be resurrected in glory one day and to live with him forever is enough to fill our hearts and souls with joy. Yet often we would rather work hard and have the sense of at least partially earning the same grace Christ is waiting to simply bestow on those who know they could never earn it.”