When your children mature and become less dependent on you, and you start to feel useless, remember that in Christ you were created for good works before time began (Ephesians 2:10). God has important and necessary tasks for you in this new season. Those good works may have been more focused on your children for a time, especially while they were small, but he will use you elsewhere. Through your union with Christ, he will bear fruit in you for his good purposes (John 15:5).

As moms, our days are often filled with the unexpected and chaotic.

We juggle multiple tasks and demands, all the while trying to anticipate and prevent the next catastrophe before it happens — for those who keep track of emergency-room visits, you know what I mean. Our personal stores of knowledge, patience, and strength are often stretched beyond capacity. The demands on our attention are unceasing. At the end of the day, we find ourselves weary and spent. And we go to sleep knowing that tomorrow will be a lot like today.

In the midst of busy days, it can be easy for us to look for help and hope first and most from created things, rather than from God. It’s easy to turn to substitutes to provide peace and comfort in the chaos. We may distract ourselves with short-term comforts by scrolling through social media, feasting on a favorite treat, searching online for solutions to our problems, or simply counting down the hours to the end of the day.

Dear struggling mom, there’s a rich store of help and hope for us, and it’s not rooted in short-term comforts or pleasures. It’s not found in distractions. Our strength, endurance, and joy can be daily and rigorously rooted in who Christ is for us and who we are in him.

We Mother as Queens

The doctrine of union with Christ is one of those foundational truths we often overlook, or if we do acknowledge it, we fail to grasp its significance. We know it’s true and that we need it, and yet many of us, if we’re honest, struggle to really experience or apply our union with Christ.

When Jesus Christ came to this earth, he took on human flesh and lived in our fallen world. He sympathizes with our suffering and weakness. He lived the perfect life we could not live and died the death we deserved. Through the gift of faith in who Christ is and what he has done, we are now united to him. As the apostle Paul writes, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). God looks at us and sees us joined to Christ and his righteousness. All that Jesus has, and all that he is, is now ours, as we are his.

In Luther’s work Concerning Christian Liberty, he describes this union through the illustration of a king choosing to marry a harlot. Through their marriage union, the harlot becomes a queen, and all that belongs to the king becomes hers. She is at once royalty; her filthy rags are replaced with royal robes. Not only that, but the king assumed and took on all her transgressions and debts as his own. As Luther writes,

Christ, that rich and pious Husband, takes as a wife a needy and impious harlot, redeeming her from all her evils and supplying her with all his good things. It is impossible now that her sins should destroy her, since they have been laid upon Christ and swallowed up in him, and since she has in her Husband Christ a righteousness which she may claim as her own, and which she can set up with confidence against all her sins, against death and hell, saying, “If I have sinned, my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned; all mine is his, and all his is mine.”

Our union with Christ is not merely a sentiment or a teaching to assent to; it’s a reality. We are genuinely and deeply united to our Savior. We are his, and he is ours.

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