Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

August 19, 2007

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle

Exodus 2: 1-10

The story is about a group of slaves and slaves, very typically, have little control over their lives. To show just how little control this group of slaves had over their lives, Pharaoh has decreed that any male children shall be killed. The children shall be killed in order to decrease the population to make sure that this group of slaves does not become too great of a problem. This couple though has a child and doesn’t quite know what to do.

It’s not a problem at first. Those of you who have had children or have newborns at home, early on, they are not quite big enough, not quite strong enough, to make as big a racket as they will later. At first, they can perhaps muffle the cries of this baby so they can hide the fact that they have not brought this baby out to suffer its fate at the hand of Pharaoh’s secret police. But as the child gets older, stress begins to build in the home. The cries are a little more forceful, and the baby has a little bit more will of its own and lets people know when it’s happy and when it’s not. The family begins to feel the stress. A crying baby will do that sometimes, and particularly when the crying of this baby can bring about its death, or perhaps the death of everybody in the family. It’s stressful.

They come to a place where they have to do something so they make this floating cradle. They decide that when they go to work in the morning they will put the baby in the cradle and put it in the bulrushes, and if things go well, perhaps they can come back and rescue the baby at night. They leave the sister to watch. There she is on the bank, and wouldn’t you know it, Pharaoh’s daughter comes to bathe. About this time, the baby must be hungry or in need of some attention again, and he begins to cry. You can just imagine Pharaoh’s daughter and these girls, “I hear a baby! Where is it?”

They are searching through the rushes, wading up to their waist in water, and finally, “Here it is. Here it is.”

Of course, they are all Egyptian maids. What are they going to do? They can’t make this baby quit crying. So Miriam instantly hatches this plot and she makes her presence known and says, “Wait a minute. I know a Hebrew woman who has just lost a child and she can nurse this baby.”

“Go get her.”

It is an amazing thing. They say, “Go get her,” and when the mother comes, she promises to pay wages, pay wages to a slave. Can you see how all of this is working for a tremendous blessing? So Moses’ mother receives the good fortune of being able to nurse her child, to raise her child, to teach her child so that when the time comes when he fully goes into Pharaoh’s house, his faith, his personality, his demeanor, his temperament, the way that he prays, all of these things have already been shaped and they have been shaped by his mother.

There are a lot of different points that you could bring out of this story. It is an easy story to visualize. It captures our imagination, but let me just mention two today. I know everybody thinks a preacher has to have three, so you are getting off easy. I am only going to have two points.

One, there is faith and courage in having this child. There is faith and courage on the part of Moses’ parents and what they do to try to keep the child alive. Actually, there is some faith and courage on the part of Pharaoh’s daughter who knows surely that her father has decreed that this baby should die and she takes the risk to keep the baby alive. There is faith and risk in bringing a child into this world.

Those of you who have had children and can remember, chances are when you were in the hospital or early on you were out with the baby somewhere and somebody sees how small and how tender it is, and someone will say, “I really admire you. I don’t know if I would have enough courage to bring a baby into this world.” Anybody ever say that to you? Have you ever said that to someone else? Because we recognize that there are so many different influences, so many different forces at work in the world, and there is this sense that perhaps I don’t have quite what it takes to beat back all of these negative influences and I am not really sure.

Most people recognize that to have a child and to want to raise that child in a way that would be pleasing to God through Jesus Christ, takes more than just casual effort. It takes faith and it takes courage. I have tried to figure out how to say this this morning. There are a lot of different things being said today about what it means to be a parent and how you have kids and how many children you should have. If you are a couple and you are about at that age where your parents or in-laws think you ought to be having children, I certainly wouldn’t want to give them any ammunition against you. But what I would say is have faith, have courage. What this world needs today are Christian parents who believe enough in what they believe in Christ to have children and to believe that passing that faith on to them so that those children can be an influence in the world is something that we need more of. Have faith; have courage; choose children. Choose children and raise them so that they can be the influence in the world that the world needs every time that we look at the news.

Now the second thing is, perhaps you are at least familiar with the title. William Ross Wallace wrote a poem and it starts off, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” The hand that influences the child, the influence on a child’s life is truly the influence that creates that child’s world and leads them along a particular path so that when that child grows up what it becomes, in part, is influenced by the hand that has rocked that cradle.

Think about Moses’ mother and think about the fact that Moses was raised listening to Hebrew lullabies. He was raised listening to Hebrew prayers, to the God of Abraham and Sarah, to the God of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel. He is not listening to prayers to Ra, the sun god, or some other god of Egypt, but he has been raised listening to these prayers. The stories that he has heard about are the stories of faith that we read about, perhaps in the Book of Genesis, and how Abraham was a great person of faith and how they came to this land and how God is going to deliver them. If he had not heard those stories, if he had not been raised to pray those prayers, would he have been the instrument of God that God needed?

Later, when we read the story about the taskmaster that is beating the Hebrew slave, whose side does Moses take? Maybe he doesn’t take it the right way, but why would he have ever taken that side unless his mother had been an influence in his life. The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.

All parents, anyone who is a parent, and if you are not a parent, chances are you have seen this in neighbor’s children or in a niece of nephew or you may even remember it in your own life, but we all have many hands trying to rock the cradle.

If you don’t believe it, most people can think back to a time when a child came home and either said a word or used a phrase or displayed an attitude, you were 100% confident they didn’t get at your house, and somebody else, some other hand was on that cradle. Someone else was trying to have an influence; somebody did have an influence. Maybe they were not intentionally trying to get them to say it, but they were an influence in that life.

What we want to do as a congregation is we want to be involved in rocking the cradles of all the children that come our way. We want to teach them two ways. We want to teach them intentional lessons. We want them to know the good news of Jesus Christ. We want them to know about the grace of God. We want to know about the forgiveness that God offers through Christ. We want them to learn these things, but we also want them to be surrounded by a group of people who so live that when the children grow up they think it is absolutely unnatural for someone not to love another person. They think it would be unnatural for a person not to follow Jesus Christ because so many of the people that they have seen have demonstrated that faith.

It’s one thing to teach a child a lesson but it is an additional thing to put them in the presence of people who so live that it demonstrates Christ in their lives. Of course, we always promise to do this when we have a parent and child dedication. But this is what we want to do as a church family. We believe in Christ ourselves and we believe that it is important to share what we believe.

Did you see the meditation text already this morning? Sometimes parents think that it is best just to leave the children and let them make up their own minds. That is just not responsible. If you have ever said that, I am sorry, but that is just not responsible. We sometimes think of children as little adults and they are not. We live in a world where there is so much information thrown at them and there are so many ways to stimulate their minds that they know things at four and five that many of us didn’t know until we were much older.

But think about this. If you have had a child in your home, chances are somewhere a child has taken something that was said and understood it in a way that it was not meant.

We had some friends and they were going on vacation. They told their daughter that when they got up the next morning, they would get in the car and go and eat on the road. She was very distressed and they couldn’t understand why. They thought it was a good thing; we don’t have to make breakfast. So the next morning, they are getting ready to get in the car.

“Come on. We are ready to go.”

“No, I want breakfast.”

“Come on. We are going to eat on the road.”

You can see what she is thinking. She is thinking they are going to go park somewhere, get out on the highway, and eat.

I also knew a little girl whose father wasn’t home for dinner. “Where is daddy?”

“Well, he’s tied up at the office.”

She had visions of him in a chair, tied up, in the office. I assume that almost anybody in here who is a parent can name a time where a child thought something in a way that it wasn’t meant at all. They took an idiom and just thought it was literal. Those are ways that we can see sometimes that children are not always ready at six and seven years old to make up their own minds without some guidance from good influences about what is good and right, what is eternal and what is true.

So our desire as a church is to have an influence in the life of children that any family will give us that opportunity, but not only so that we might do it but so we might help families be that influence as well. As much as people will say certain things when you have a baby like, “I don’t know if I would have enough courage to do that,” there are also very predictable things that parents will say and I hear many times parents express inadequacy about “How do I lead my own child to Christ? What is it that I am supposed to teach them? Teach me how to pray with my child?”

Not only do we want to teach children but we also want to be an influence in the lives of families so that families can be that influence as well in the lives of their children. What faith can I hope for my child to have if I don’t have faith to lead them as well? Our intention is not only for the child but also for the adults, for the families to help so that when you rock your child’s cradle, and you say those things to the child, that you can tell them about the stories.

Do you have family stories? I confessed a couple of weeks ago about our families’ stories. Do you have stories where all you have to do is just kind of say, “Mrs. Smith,” and they remember the neighbor you used to have when you lived on another street. You might mention a particular place that you took a vacation. “Oh, remember the vacation in Destin,” and everybody starts laughing. They all know the code words. We want to help children directly. We want to help children through families so that some of the code, some of the background, some of the family history, some of the family stories get put into their lives so that if someone says, “King David,” they know that great man of God and who we are talking about.

If we say, “Moses,” they remember the one who lead the children out of bondage in Egypt. When we say, “Jesus,” they know exactly who we are talking about or “Mary” and what it meant for her to be the mother of Jesus, or “Mary Magdalene” to be a follower of Jesus, so that there is this sense of being a part of a great family of faith that encompasses our children and holds them, and a part of influence in their lives so that they, too, can know Christ and someday make their own decision to follow him.

God bless everyone in this church who has had a part in children’ ministry, in the weekday program, the extension of what we do throughout the week. God bless every family that strives to pray with children and to teach children, and if anyone would, we would be glad to be of help in rocking that child’s cradle so that it hears the whisper of God’s voice in its very ear.

Copyright 2007. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

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