Nobody Can Love You Like Momma

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

For Mother's Day 2021 at New Life in Birmingham, Jacob Phillips preaches a short, single-point sermon from 2 Kings 4:18-27, the Shunammite woman whose promised son grows up, goes out to his father among the reapers, cries "my head, my head," is carried home to his mother, and dies on her knees at noon. Phillips preaches the story as typology, and says so plainly: the Shunammite is a type of the church — a mother — and her son is the child of God who lets his aspirations carry him out from under his mother's protection into a field where, when the injury comes, no one can touch God for him. The father in the story can do only one thing: have the boy carried to his mother. That, Phillips argues, is the world's confession. People will be your friends, shake your hand, and get close to you, but nobody will love you, wipe your tears, and put your wounded soul back together like the church will. His own childhood makes the point: a four-year-old who poured gasoline over himself head to foot in his mechanic father's shop heard the same words from his strong, man's-man dad — go see your mama.

The sermon's burden is the backslider: the one who left mama's house full, like Naomi, and came back bitter and empty; the one sitting in church on Mother's Day only to make mama happy, head in hands, asking where it all went wrong. Against that picture Phillips sets the mother's refusal to quit. The Shunammite held her dead son, laid him on the prophet's bed, and rode to Mount Carmel; her three answers to Gehazi are all "It is well," and Phillips lingers on the last one — for the child, in his reading of the Hebrew, the "it is well" carries a different sound: I think it's going to be okay, because I am going back to the place where the promise was born. Rizpah, guarding her dead sons from the birds and beasts, is the same love: the church keeps the atmosphere of its house exactly as the backslider left it so that, however dead he is, he can find hope when he comes home. Mama will beg and plead, but she will never make anyone live for God.

The close returns to the same chapter: the widow's cruise of oil and the borrowed vessels. As long as mama keeps pouring, the vessels keep filling. Phillips turns it into a Mother's Day altar call — not a little prayer but a big prayer of repentance, baptism in Jesus' name, and the gift of the Holy Ghost — pleading with the backslider to come home to mama's house, because nobody can love you like mama.

Scripture index: 2 Kings 4:18-27; 2 Kings 4:1-7.