Mary Bender’s Reviews > Labor with Hope: Gospel Meditations on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood > Status Update

“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.”