The mother whose child is buried. The mother whose child won’t speak to her. The woman whose womb the Lord never opened. The woman whose mother was a wound and not a comfort. The woman who is single and wondered if she should have come at all today.

This past Sunday at First Baptist Church Concord, Pastor Jim said plainly: he wasn’t going to preach that kind of sermon. Not because Mother’s Day doesn’t matter — it does — but because the Bible itself, he said, will not allow a Mother’s Day sermon that celebrates some women by ignoring the rest.

Instead, he turned to Isaiah 54 and called it what it is: a Mother’s Day jubilee. A celebration. A promise.

Not a Hallmark Card. A Promise.

When God himself addressed those who carry hurt or shame on a day like this, He did not hand them a Hallmark card. He gave them a promise. And that promise is Isaiah 54.

“Shout for joy, O barren one, you who have borne no child… For the sons of the desolate one will be more numerous than the sons of the married woman, says the Lord.”

This is not a sermon for some of the people. It’s a sermon for all of them — for every man and woman who has ever felt forsaken, forgotten, or unseen by God. As Pastor Jim put it: every man in this room has a mother. Every man in this room was raised, taught, prayed over, or shaped by some woman in the faith. And every man in this room knows what it is to feel forsaken too.

Five Things Isaiah 54 Says to the One Who Feels Forsaken

The sermon walked through five movements in the chapter:

1. Sing the song the Lord has given you. Our response to the brokenness of the world is not to dwell in it but to sing in faith of what God is doing. He is restoring a family — His family — and you are part of it.

2. Receive the identity the Lord declares over you. The woman in Isaiah 54 does not talk her way out of shame. He talks her out of it. “Your husband is your maker… your redeemer is the holy one of Israel.” He married what He made, and He redeemed what He married. That is your identity in Christ.

3. Trust the compassion the Lord has sworn. “For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you.” God’s everlasting loving kindness — the Hebrew word hesed — is set on those who belong to Him in Christ, and it will not move.

4. Live in the city the Lord constructs. While we are counting what is missing, He is laying foundations in sapphires. The crowning glory of that city is not its architecture — it is this: “All your sons will be taught of the Lord, and the well-being of your sons will be great.”

5. Seize the inheritance the Lord has secured. “No weapon formed against you will prosper… This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord.”

Motherhood the Bible Actually Celebrates

The most striking moment of the sermon came when Pastor Jim turned to the question of motherhood itself.

The world, he said, tells women that motherhood is a biological achievement — it begins with a positive test and ends with a graduation photo. But the Bible does not measure motherhood that way.

When Jesus was dying on the cross, He looked at His mother and at the disciple John and said, “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.” Mary did not give birth to John. But the dying Christ named her his mother. Paul greets Rufus “and his mother and mine” in Romans 16 — a woman who did not bear Paul but mothered him in the faith. Timothy’s faith, Paul says, dwelt first in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice.

“The motherhood the Servant confers,” Pastor Jim said, “is not measured by the womb. It is measured by the discipleship.”

And so look around the room:

The Sunday school teacher who poured into other people’s children for thirty years — she is a mother in this city. The woman who never married, who has discipled younger women, prayed for nieces and nephews — she is a mother in this city. The widow whose own children moved away but who shows up every week to teach the kindergarten class — she is a mother in this city. The grandmother raising the grandchildren her daughter could not — she is a mother in this city. The woman who lost a child she never got to hold but who has held a hundred other children here at church — she is a mother in this city.

This is motherhood, and it cannot be taken from you by miscarriage, by infertility, by estrangement, by death, by singleness, or by anything else in all creation — because the Builder is laying the foundation in sapphires, and the climax of His construction is the catechized child.

The Invitation

If you have never trusted Christ, the promises of Isaiah 54 do not yet belong to you — but they can. You can come to Him today. You don’t have to leave alone, or empty, or measured against a standard the world keeps moving on you.

Come to Jesus. He will give you rest. He will give you a new identity, a new city, an inheritance that cannot be taken away. Beauty is fleeting, but the one who loves the Lord will be blessed.

This is the Mother’s Day promise. It is also the Father’s Day promise, and the grandparents’ promise, and the little one’s promise. If you are in Christ, He will work things out — maybe not the way you wanted, and certainly not the way the world keeps score, but on a better standard, in a better city.

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