Under His Wings Mother’s Day ‘93

A mother appears to be a normal human being. She has all the standard physical features that human beings have - two eyes, two hands, two feet, two arms and legs, all connected to one body. But appearances can be deceiving.

If you were a child, you would know that a mother has at least three sets of eyes: two in the front, two in the back, and one eye on each side of her head so she can guard the cookie jar while she makes supper. You would also know that a mother has X-ray vision; she can tell what you’re doing in your room, even when your door’s closed.

Every mother is equipped with bionic ears. She can hear you whisper a bad word a block away. And when she gives you a chore to do, she can hear you complaining, even though you haven’t said a thing.

Any child knows that a mother obviously has more than two hands. How else would she be able to fix lunch, find Dad’s shirt, change a diaper, run the vacuum, and hug two kids, all at the same time?

Mom has the legs of a cheetah. She moves around the house like a speeding bullet. She patrols the street, stops a fight in the back yard, catches a tennis ball before it is flushed down the toilet, rescues a child who is falling out of a tree, and moves all the toys out of the driveway just in time for Dad to pull the car in. She does all these things in the blink of an eye.

Her endless supply of energy makes nuclear power look anemic. She is always the first one up in the morning to get breakfast ready for the brood. She gets each child ready for school and makes their lunches on the fly. She’s goes top speed all day, and is usually the last one to bed at night.

Compared to a mother’s brain, a Cray computer is just an adding machine. She can remember that today is garbage day, that your science project has to be in a week from Tuesday, that it’s your turn to clear the table, and that the library books are due. She also knows that you have watched 3.5 hours of TV this week, that you have an 83 average in math, and she knows your Little League coach’s phone number off by heart.

A typical mother must have more than one head. How else could she wear so many hats? She serves as a barber, a fashion consultant, a budget director, a purchasing agent, an operations manager, an engineer, a paramedic, a veterinarian, a teacher, a taxi driver, a travel agent, a five-star chef, and an interior decorator.

She’s also a pretty good psychiatrist. With a tender kiss, she can heal everything from a cut finger to a broken heart. She can even convince a balding, forty-year old man that he is just as handsome as ever!

But most important of all, Mom seems to have an endless supply of love. A mother’s ability to love is exceeded only by God’s love. She is protective, tender, understanding, forgiving, unselfish, patient, and wise. And to the degree that she has those attributes, she resembles God, because God gave us our mothers to teach us about himself.

The Bible speaks of God as our Heavenly Father, and it is right and proper for us to think of him that way. Radical feminists have no business tampering with the language of Scripture; altering the gender categories and referring to God as “our Heavenly Mother”. God is not our Mother; He is our Father.

But the Bible does have some very beautiful and meaningful passages where mothering images are used to describe God. Although He is our Heavenly Father, he also treats us as a mother would.

One of the mothering images that is repeated over and over again comes from the world of nature; specifically, from the relationship of a mother bird with her chicks. There are about ten word pictures in Scripture that describe the way that God shelters us under His wings the way that a mother bird shelters her chicks. It’s a tender, nurturing, protective picture that God paints for us to teach us about his love.

We like to watch birds. We have a bird feeder in our backyard, and so far we have identified almost 30 different species of birds. In the springtime, the birds are busy building their nests and laying their eggs. Take a pair of mourning doves, for example.

The male will go out and collect the building material, and bring it back to the female. She will sit and carefully place the twigs and branches around her body. When the nest is complete, she will lay several eggs and sit on them to incubate them. When they hatch, she and her mate will take turns feeding the babies. Those little chicks will be utterly and completely dependent on their parents for their life and their food.

Some birds have an interesting way of feeding their young. The mother bird will go out on a food-gathering expedition and she’ll catch several bugs, or worms, or whatever. And she will actually swallow them. That food will go into a sort of holding area called the crop. There, the food is broken down and pre-digested.

When the mother bird returns to her nest, she will actually regurgitate the food that is in her crop and give it to her young. It is already partially broken down, bathed in her own digestive juices, and more suitable for them. So along with the food, she’s actually giving them part of herself.

Psalm 36:7-9 How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. For with you is the fountain of life…

When we take shelter under the wings of God, he feeds us. He gives us spiritual food that satisfies us and helps us to grow. The world offers us “soul food” that seems to be exciting and attractive and tempting, but ultimately it is poisonous to us. It doesn’t satisfy the deep hunger in our hearts. It doesn’t nourish us. It deadens us and leaves us starving. But God’s food nourishes our souls because when he feeds us, he is actually giving us himself.

John 6:35; 54-56 Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.

This sounds like a rather shocking image. In fact, in the earliest days of Christianity, people actually accused Christians of being cannibals because they believed in eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus.

But what Jesus really meant by this saying is that we need to enter into an intimate relationship with him - so intimate that it is as though we were eating his flesh and drinking his blood. We take him into ourselves and He becomes part of us.

The first spiritual food that we need is the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the life-giving manna that God provides for us to make us spiritually alive. If you haven’t partaken of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are, in a spiritual sense, no better off than the poor starving people in Somalia we’ve all seen pictures of.

Psalm 34:8 Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

We need to feed on the Lord Jesus in order to be made alive spiritually. Once we have been made alive in Christ, we need to feed on the Word of God.

1 Peter 2:2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

There is an interesting little bird called the woodcock. It is small, and not a very good flyer. It spends most of its time on the ground. It has a very long narrow beak which it uses to catch worms and grubs. Its favorite food is the night crawler - those long, succulent earthworms that fishermen use.

The woodcock has a very special strategy for catching earthworms. If the weather has been particularly dry, the worms burrow down deep where the soil is cool and moist. But that’s too far down for the woodcock to reach them. So God has taught the woodcock a very creative strategy to get them back up to the surface. It spreads its wings and begins to gently flutter around on the ground, making a kind of pitter-patter sound.

Earthworms’ bodies are very sensitive to vibration. If you’ve ever tried to catch night-crawlers, you know that. The earthworms pick up the pitter-patter sound up above and think that it is raining. They know instinctively that if it is raining, they’ve got to get up to the surface, or they’ll drown. So the worms head up to the surface, and they come within reach of the woodcock’s long beak. That’s how the woodcock provides food for itself and its family.

When we shelter under God’s outspread wings, he feeds us, just like a mother bird feeds her chicks. He gives us spiritual nourishment that we can’t find anywhere else.

The second thing he does is to protect us.

Psalm 17:8-9 …hide me in the shadow of your wings from the wicked who assail me, from my mortal enemies who surround me.

David wrote that psalm at a time in his life when he was under attack. King Saul was after him. He was a fugitive, so he fled to the wilderness down by the Dead Sea. It is a fiercely hot, rugged land. The temperature soars to 120 degrees in the shade.

Perhaps, in his wanderings there, David happened upon a mother bird shading her chicks from the hot sun by spreading her wings over them. This is the image we have in this Psalm: hide me in the shadow, or literally, the shade of your wings.

Psalm 57:1 Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me, for in you my soul takes refuge. I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.

Psalm 61:4 I long to dwell in your tent forever and take refuge in the shelter of your wings.

David knew where to go in times of distress and disaster. He knew where his protection was: it was under the wings of the Lord God. As he prayed, as he meditated on the Word of God, he was comforted and protected from his enemies.

It may be that you are going through a particularly difficult time in your life right now. You may be struggling with problems and pain. It may seem as though the hand of everyone is against you. You may be tempted to say “God has forgotten me.” But that’s when you should be running to Him to find shelter in the shadow of His wings just like David did.

A day doesn’t go by in our house when one of our sons doesn’t need some comforting. Life can be hard when you’re a kid. You fall and scrape your knee. The baseball hits your head instead of your bat. The kids up the street won’t share their toys with you. The best cure for the bumps and bruises of childhood is a mother’s loving arms. There’s a safety, a security there that says “I know it hurts, and it’s okay to cry. But everything will be alright because Mommy loves you.”

Isaiah 66:13 As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.

There’s a third thing God does for us when he takes us under his wings. He speaks to us.

There’s a good illustration of this from the world of nature. The wood duck is an interesting creature. Unlike other varieties of ducks, who build their nests along the shoreline of lakes and rivers, the wood duck nests high up in the trees of the forest. The female duck finds a suitable hollow in a tree about 15 or 20 feet off the ground. Then she lays 5 or 6 eggs. She sits on them to incubate them.

Two or three days before the eggs are to hatch, the mother duck senses the babies stirring inside the eggs. At that point, she begins to talk softly to them. This gets the babies used to the sound of her voice. You might not think that this is very important, but it is. Let me tell you why.

Within twenty-four hours of hatching, the mother duck and the babies will leave the nest. First, the mother flies down to the forest floor. Then she calls back up to her chicks. They can’t see her, but they can hear her voice. Because they recognize her voice coming from down below, they jump out of the nest. They can’t fly yet, so they fall 20 feet to the ground. Their soft feathers, and the foliage on the forest floor cushions their fall.

Once they’ve all jumped out of the nest, the mother duck gathers them together, and off they march through the forest to the nearest lake. That’s where they grow up.

Because the babies recognized their mother’s voice, they followed her to safety. If they hadn’t jumped out of the nest when she called them, they would have died.

In the same way, when we shelter under God’s wings, he speaks to us. We get used to the sound of his voice. We become conditioned to following him, wherever he leads us. If we don’t follow his voice, we perish. When we follow his voice, he leads us to safety.

In the Old Testament, God tried for many years to talk to his people, but they didn’t seem to like the sound of his voice. He sent them prophets and messengers, and they rejected them. Then, when he sent his own son to speak to them, they rejected him.

Matthew 23:37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

They didn’t want to be under his wings, so they never learned to hear his voice.

Well, we’ve been talking about how God is like a mother bird sitting on a nest, sheltering her babies under her wings. She feeds them, she protects them, and she speaks to them. But sooner or later, it’s time to leave the nest! That must be a traumatic experience for a little bird who doesn’t know how to fly. But the only way to learn how to fly is to leave the nest.

Picture a baby eagle. Eagles make their nests high up in the crags and cliffs of the mountains. For many weeks, the eagle chick shelters there under the wings of his mother. His parents bring him all the food he needs. He is safe from predators, because the nest is so high and remote that nobody can get to it. I’m sure that if you asked the little eagle, he would say that he had it made. He would love to stay there forever.

But one day, the mother eagle comes along and, instead of feeding him, or sheltering him, she roughly pushes him out of the nest. Imagine the little eagle’s shock when that happens!

When you get pushed out of an eagle’s nest, there’s no place to go but straight down! The little eagle begins flapping his wings madly as he falls through the air. But it’s no good - he doesn’t know how to fly. He’s going to crash on the rocks below. But at the last second, when he’s closing his eyes for the impact, a giant shape swoops down under him and catches him. It’s Mom! What a relief! She loves me after all!

The mother carries that little eagle on her back, or gently in her talons. Up she takes him on her strong wings. Then she dumps him off for another flying lesson. How would you like to go through that kind of flight training?

But this is what God often does for us. He wants us to grow, he wants us to stretch our wings and learn to fly by faith. We can’t stay in the nest forever.

Referring to God’s relationship with the nation Israel, Moses said…

Deuteronomy 32:10-11 In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye, like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions.

Exodus 19:4 …I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.

We have seen that God loves us tenderly. He is like a mother to us. He shelters us under his wings. He feeds us, he protects us, he speaks to us. But he also challenges us to grow in faith. And those challenges can often be frightening and intimidating. We can feel as though God has left us all alone. But He is always there to catch us and carry us on his wings.

Mothers, we appreciate you! We appreciate you for all you have done for us. But most of all, we appreciate you because you show us what God is like.