In this episode of the CCL podcast, I speak with Jocelyn Loane about her new book on Christian motherhood.
And in the book and in the conversation, Joss really helpfully shows how the gospel more than anything else should shape Christian motherhood.
It's very easy to read parenting books, which have a lot of helpful things to say, but in this conversation, Joss really
shows us how key gospel truths are the most powerful things for thinking carefully and properly about Christian motherhood.
Welcome to Moore College's Centre for Christian Living podcast.
I'm joined today by Jocelyn Loane to speak about her new book, “Motherhood:
How the gospel shapes our purpose and our priorities”.
Welcome to the podcast,
Joss.
I
wonder if we could just kick off, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, and how you became a Christian.
Sure.
I'm married to Ed, we've been married for 23 years.
So he's in university residential ministry.
So we live on the campus.
At Sydney Uni with our five kids.
We've got Jemima, who's 18, Sophie's 16.
Ben and Sam are 14, and Abby, our youngest is eight, and I mainly muck around with them or
else, uh, I'm also here at Moore College as a chaplain and doing some alumni relations work.
So I grew up in a non-Christian home.
Well, my dad was not a believer.
My mom was an occasional church attender, although I don't think she.
Say she had any faith anymore.
And I started school at a Catholic primary school.
So I don't remember ever not believing in God.
I always.
believe that God was real, but I always thought that he was really angry at me.
So I remember we had a really strict nun as our teacher one year, and she told our class
that if we were naughty, God would send a little rain cloud to rain just over our heads.
And I was really convinced this was going to happen to me.
I lived in fear of it until one day I realized I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone with a little rain cloud over their head.
So.
I kind of had this idea that God was angry at me and just waiting to catch me doing the wrong thing.
But then in God's kindness, when I got to high school, I was sent to an all girls Christian boarding school.
And my mum was worried I was going to turn out really weird, never talking to any boys.
So she arranged for me to go to a local youth group.
And there I was taught about Jesus faithfully and at And I remember being read Ephesians and being taught that while we,
by nature are deserving of God's wrath, in his mercy, he sent Jesus and because of him, we can be in right relationship.
So I came to understand the gospel of grace and realized God wasn't angry at me anymore.
He was delighted in me because of Jesus.
So that's how I became a Christian.
Wonderful.
Praise God for faithful youth groups.
Yes.
Now you've written this book on motherhood, you've got some experience as a mother, but what prompted you to write the book?
I was pretty hesitant to write the book, actually.
I think when you put yourself out there to write a book, it's like you're saying you're some sort of expert on something.
And I am certainly not an expert mother.
I often stuff up.
I have done a lot of things I regret as a mum.
Yeah, I keep sitting against my kids, so I didn't really want to put myself out there as somehow knowing how to do it perfectly, because I don't.
It kind of came about because I gave some talks on motherhood and an editor at Matthias Media,
who's publishing the book, got in touch and said, I think there's legs in this to be a book.
Would you be interested in developing a book proposal?
And I went home to my husband and said, I don't think I can do this.
Encouraging me to think, well, it's not you saying.
You're an expert.
It's just, you're speaking the gospel into people's lives.
And I thought, well, that's something I could do.
So I just wrote a book proposal and they said, yeah, this is a book and got going with that.
I guess I also saw a need for it.
There are so many books on parenting.
There's heaps of them and a lot of them are really good as well.
So why write another one?
I guess, because there's not a lot from an Australian perspective and particularly
thinking about being a mother, not just a generic substitutable parent.
So I guess I wanted to think about that space and write into that.
And it's a book about motherhood, but it's obviously from a Christian perspective.
What do you think makes Christian motherhood distinctive?
Well, I guess as a Christian, the Lordship of Jesus Christ changes everything about our life.
Doesn't it?
There's no area of life that's left untouched by living as a Christian, living with Jesus as our Lord and parenthood is affected by that.
As much as anything else, as Christians, we want to be having the Bible as our authority.
We want to be living for the glory of Jesus, for the glory of God.
So that's going to shape how we parent.
And I think it's going to shape how we see our kids as well.
So when I look at my children, I want to see them the way God sees them.
I want to see that they're made in his image, that they have an inherent value and dignity that comes with that.
They're precious.
I want to understand that they're good gifts from God to me, that they're a blessing in my life.
But I also want to see that they're born with a sinful nature and their greatest need actually is to be put in a right relationship with a creator.
So I guess the thing is, as a Christian mum, I'm going to see that need and I'm going
to see the greatest need they have is to be put in a right relationship with God.
And that's going to shape my purpose and my priorities as a mum and how I think about my kids and what I'm doing as a mother.
I'm going to be thinking what I want most is for them to be a disciple of Jesus.
So that's going to shape everything I do as a mum.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
I was struck at one point in the book that you refer to the Great Commission in the context of motherhood.
And I thought that was really interesting, but that's exactly what you've said, that motherhood is connected to discipleship.
Yeah, that's right.
I think we can see motherhood as fulfilling that Great Commission in many ways.
Like we're not just to fill the earth, but to fill it with disciples of Jesus.
And some of those disciples will be birthed from our own bodies, be adopted into our own homes.
So yeah, I very much see motherhood as discipleship.
You have a chapter on sin, which is very helpful.
And I was particularly struck by the line, to regularly seek forgiveness of our children will be the mark of a biblical mother.
Now, you've obviously just spoken about how our children have a sinful nature, but
reflecting on the idea that as a mother, you need to ask forgiveness of your children.
Can you expand a little bit on that?
Yeah.
Yep.
Well, I think as we parent, we really want to think about ourselves as well, and who we are.
And I think understanding ourselves as forgiven sinners is really important as we come to our relationships with our kids.
So we know that while we're freed from the penalty of sin because of Jesus death,
and we're freed from the power of sin, we're still going to battle its presence.
So in our homes, we're going to sin against our kids.
That's something that will happen.
We also know that we've been forgiven and shown so much grace.
We need to extend that grace to our children when they sin.
And we need to ask them to extend it to us as well.
The Christian life is one where you're going to have to apologize a lot.
You're going to confess your sin to God, but also to the people that your sin affects.
So I think we want to model that in our homes.
And we don't want to get our kids to deal with their sin and apologize to each other and just.
Ignore the fact that we're also going to sin.
I think as a parent, it can be really easy to justify your own sin or minimize it.
I think I can lose my temper at my kids and think, well, that was justified.
They did this and I had a horrible day and I still had to get dinner on the table.
But actually we need to keep holding ourselves to God's standard, to knowing He will forgive us, but knowing.
That we've done the wrong thing.
We need to seek forgiveness from our kids.
And I think that just sets a beautiful culture in the home too, of not being prideful
or pretending we don't sin, but relating to our kids with humility and with gentleness.
So understanding that as a mother, you're sinful, but also it's important to understand that your kids are sinful as well.
And how does that shape motherhood?
Yeah.
Well, I think obviously it's a biblical truth.
We see.
David say, surely I was sinful from birth, sinful from the time my mother can see me.
Like in Psalm 51, there's that idea that we know our kids are born as sinners.
So it kind of sets the expectation for us.
We know our kids are going to struggle with sin.
They're not born as these perfect little beings that we're going to somehow stuff up by parenting them.
They're already broken.
They already have the sinful nature.
I guess that prepares us for how hard motherhood can be, that we're going to face challenges.
There's going to be discipline involved in raising our children.
And it's freeing in a way, I think if you're holding this side of the kids as somehow inherently good inside that they're not
sinful, then you'll be surprised when they sin, when they show defiance, when they resist authority, the same way that we do that.
So I think it's quite freeing to know they're suffering from the same condition we are and they need the same solution, they need Jesus.
And obviously we talked about motherhood as discipleship.
Obviously within that is the question about discipline.
And I know that's a bit of a hot topic and the book is really helpful.
Can you just give us a few pointers about what the Bible says about discipline and the mother's role in that?
I think often when we think of discipline in our heads, it's something that's synonymous with punishment or getting your kid in trouble.
That's what you do when your kid's being naughty.
But I think it's helpful to realize that in the Bible discipline is a term that's much broader than that.
Actually you can see in the New Testament it's often translated as training or teaching
and in the Old Testament it's things like instruction and exhortation and warning.
So it's a much bigger picture than just when you deal with.
you could doing something wrong.
It's the whole process really of bringing them up in the training instruction of the Lord.
That's how we can think about discipline.
It's got a positive side to it as well as dealing with negative behaviors.
I think the other thing we want to think about discipline is we want to reflect the way God disciplines us in our discipline.
So God has a long term focus when he disciplines us as his children.
He's thinking of our eternal good.
And that's the same with our kids.
We don't just want a nice, Compliant, nicely behaved kid.
We're thinking of their eternal good.
We're disciplining them because we care about the people they're going to be.
And it comes from a place of love.
Discipline is not just something we do in anger.
In fact, it shouldn't be something we do in anger.
It should be a result of our love for our kids.
We discipline them because we love them.
And while it might be temporarily unpleasant for our kids.
It's aiming to do something that's loving for them in the longterm.
I think also we want it to be characterized by grace because we are forgiven people.
We will forgive our kids.
We don't need to be punitive and pay them back.
We really want to have that training aspect in our discipline.
Probably, I think the most important thing to think about with discipline is.
We want it to address the heart of our kids.
We're not just trying to modify their behavior.
Really what we want to get at is their heart.
It's their heart that needs to change.
They need a heart that's orientated towards God.
So we want our discipline to really be aiming at looking at what's going on inside our children, not just the behavior we're seeing on the outside.
Yeah, it was striking.
I think the first chapter in the book is on love.
And that's, as you say, the fundamental thing is loving our children.
Discipline comes out of that.
And as you say, again, really helpfully in the book, the positive aspect of discipline,
you also engage a little bit with some sort of alternative ideas that are floating around.
Can you say a little bit about gentle parenting?
Because you touch on that and that is sort of a kind of phrase that you hear.
Yes.
Yep.
That's true.
That's been the big change I've seen having a 10 year age gap when our kids, I've seen a bit of parenting stuff come and go.
And I think the big.
Change has been Instagram and that's really made a whole lot of this kind of, especially these gentle parenting movement, very accessible to mums.
And I started seeing it even in our churches with the way parents were interacting with their kids.
If you don't know what it is, gentle parenting, it's kind of a bit of an amorphous.
term covering a parenting style or philosophy, which sounds lovely.
We do want to be gentle.
Like obviously there's some commendable things there and there is some common grace wisdom in it.
I think the big problem I have with it is gentle parenting is often based on the idea that your kid is inherently good.
And I think any discipline method or parenting philosophy that doesn't consider
The sinful nature of our children and the saving Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Ultimately they're diagnosing the problem with our kids is wrong.
And so the treatment they apply is going to be wrong as well.
They're not saying what our kids greatest needs are.
So if you think your kids misbehavior comes from a point of dysregulation or emotional unmet needs,
as opposed to sin, like those things can be in there, but that's going to change the way you parent.
So a big mantra in the gentle parenting movement is.
This saying that all feelings are okay, all behaviors are not.
And that kind of drives a lot of how you parent your kids.
It's okay to have any feeling as long as your behavior is in line.
So you'll hear a gentle parent interact with their child and say something like, you know, the brother throws a block at the sister's head.
The mom would say, Oh, it's okay to be angry, but it's not okay to throw blocks at your sister's head.
I'm going to take the blocks away now.
And you can see what happens.
There is.
Well, there's no restitution made with a sister.
That relationship is not addressed at all.
And the kids, they're kind of okayed in their sin.
Like this is really different than how Jesus approaches things, isn't it?
When you think of Jesus talking to the Pharisees, like in Mark 7 like He has a goal at them
because they're very concerned about their outward behavior, but their hearts are far from him.
You know, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
So Jesus is much more concerned with what's going on inside than just getting the outside right.
So I think gentle parenting really is flipping on what Jesus says with that phrase.
And a kind of okaying the feeling I think is really unhelpful.
Like Jesus doesn't say it's okay to be angry.
You think in the Sermon on the Mount, even if you're angry at your brother, you're subject to judgment.
He really points to the heart of the issue.
Um, feelings are not neutral.
I guess this is the other thing.
Feelings are a good gift from God, but they can stem from a place of sin.
So if your child is sad, they can be sad because their puppy died.
Like that's a sad thing.
That's okay.
I'd say it's okay to be sad when your puppy dies.
Sure.
And you want to sit with them and be sad with them.
But your child could also be sad because it's his sister's birthday and she got a present.
He didn't.
And he's crying because he's jealous because he's greedy because he doesn't love his sister.
Sorry.
You can see the sadness itself can come from a part that's oriented rightly or wrongly.
So I guess with our kids, we want to be saying, feelings point to what our heart's saying.
We want to be looking at a heart and addressing what's going on there.
That's really helpful.
And it just raises a question about other voices.
So you've written a really helpful book on Christian motherhood.
Do you have any advice on how we engage with secular books on parenthood in general?
I mean, we've talked about the specific of gentle parenting.
There's some good, but there's some bad.
Any wisdom on that?
Yeah, I've read a lot of secular parenting books.
I've read a lot of parenting books actually now, and I think there's lots of helpful stuff you can glean.
I guess the thing as a Christian is you always want to.
first see things through a gospel lens.
So you want to have your biblical principles, the foundations of a Christian worldview in place first, as you engage with this stuff.
And you want to question it all.
You think, what's this saying about human nature?
What's this saying about what my child's greatest needs are?
Where's this pointing my child?
So I think a lot of that stuff can be really helpful.
I've benefited a lot from more psychology driven parenting ideas, but we do want to hold them up to the gospel and.
Disregard them if they're going to contradict what scripture tells us about our children.
It just struck me that idea of gentle parenting, as you say, gentleness is a scriptural idea, but it's just very subtly distorted.
And so we need to be really careful as we think about these things.
That's right.
Yeah.
And actually I think the thing is with books, read books, but I reckon it's great to read books in community.
So I think I've been really helped by older Christian women talking.
through things.
I've often seen fads come and go a bit.
So I think it's really good to remember God gives us each other in the church.
So reading books with other women in your church is a really great way to help each other discern what's helpful and what's not as helpful.
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This conference takes place the day after the Priscilla & Aquila annual conference to make it easy for women to attend both.
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And other talks will also be presented by Claire Smith, Jocelyn Loane, and Kate Snell.
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So it spoke on Christian motherhood, not just on Christian parenthood.
Can you speak about the particularities you see in being a mother as opposed to being a father or just being a parent in general?
Yeah.
Well, the first thing to say, of course, is a lot is very similar.
It's not like there's one way to be a Christian for a woman particularly and another for a man.
So much of the Bible is written to both men and women.
And so much we could say about parenting is true for both of us.
But I think there's a distinction because we understand as Christians that God has made us men or women.
Like there's a distinctive there and it's a good and beautiful distinctive.
It's not that you're human with a side of man or human with a side of woman.
You are human in the type of man and human in the type of woman.
So everything I do as a woman is going to be a bit different because I'm doing it as a woman.
In reading for the book, I did read a lot of studies that look at the differences in parenting.
And I find that stuff really interesting, actually, like the sort of stuff that, you
know, dads tend to play more roughly with their kids and moms tend to be more gentle.
But the problem with all these studies and why I didn't end up putting them in the book is.
They're based on generalizations of what men and women are like.
And there's always differences.
Like I'm sure you can think of, I can think of a family.
I know where the mom is a much more rough player and the dad's a very gentle type.
So I don't think generalizations help, but I think it's worth noticing that places where scripture does kind of draw out that there's a difference.
Difference in how we experience parental love.
So God himself who clearly reveals himself as father at times in the Bible, he
uses the language of motherhood as a metaphor for how he's relating to his people.
You can think like in Isaiah 66, he talks about as a mother comforts her children, so I comfort you.
And even Jesus, when he's weeping over Jerusalem and he's like, I long to gather you like a hen gathers her chicks, this kind of motherly love aspect.
And we see it in 1 Thessalonians when Paul describes himself as like a mother and like a father.
And we see there is this distinctiveness in different parental love.
And further on from that, obviously the Bible sees there being a significance in the created order.
We see that work out in the home, like in Ephesians 5, you see that the husband is going to lead the family with.
that kind of self sacrificial love that Jesus shows the church, and a wife is going to
voluntarily submit herself to that loving leadership and she's going to respect her husband.
So that's a dynamic we're going to see play out in our families.
I don't think we want to think about it as, uh, It's putting on a certain set of characteristics necessarily,
but I think a lot of what it comes down to is just embracing that God made you man or woman by his good design.
And we want to rejoice in that.
We want to rejoice that it is a good thing that I am a woman and a mother.
That's what God made me to be.
And I can let my kids know that I'm happy and that I'm not resenting the sex that he's given me.
I'm rejoicing in his goodness in making me this way.
That's really helpful.
And as a father, though, I read the book and find it very helpful and lots of encouragement as a father,
but I think so helpful to see the biblical clarity on the difference between being a father and a mother.
Lots of really helpful things in the book, your chapter on prayer, really encouraging.
I wonder if we could just finish by talking about two aspects.
Where maybe motherhood can go wrong and you talk about how to deal with mum guilts, you know, when you feel like a bad
mother, and maybe on the other side is the kind of idolatry of motherhood when we almost become too proud of how we're doing.
Can you say something about those two extremes?
Well, mum guilt is something that is very common.
I think all mothers feel it, whether they're Christian or not.
I think a lot of us just walking around with a really kind of low level grade guilt at all times.
And I think.
It could be appropriate or it can be inappropriate is the problem.
So I guess as a Christian, you want to think where's the guilt coming from.
For me, sometimes that guilt comes from comparison, which I don't think is appropriate.
So I look at another mother and I think, so even the other day I was spending time with a mother who had really carefully chronicled every
detail of her children's lives, like she had photo books and journals with everything they said and all these cute things they'd done.
One of my kids asked me the other day, what was my first word?
And I'm like, I've got nothing.
I can't remember.
Isn't that terrible?
Anyway, I don't remember my first word either.
And I seem to be functioning as a human without that.
But I think you can look at that and think, gee, I'm doing this wrong.
I've yeah.
So I think there can be this comparison that comes in.
And actually I think social media has made that.
Even worse.
Like I'm not taking my kid on that holiday.
They're not winning the Irish dancing competition.
You know, what's wrong with my kid.
So there can be this comparison thing.
I think also our limited capacity can drive our guilt.
So sometimes I have in my head, this is list of things I want to be doing with my kids.
And.
I just don't have the hours in the day to do it.
I don't have the energy or the stamina to do all the things.
And I can just always think I'm failing because I'm not doing everything.
So they might be inappropriate ways that we feel guilt.
But I guess the thing as Christians is, we know sometimes the Holy Spirit's going to convict us that we are doing something wrong.
And the right thing to do with that guilt is not to say, Oh, well, it doesn't matter.
I'm, I'm just tired or I'm just comparing myself.
It's actually to say, Oh Lord, I'm sorry.
Thank you for convicting me of how I'm not mothering the way you want me to here.
Please help me change.
And then actually we can let go of that guilt because we know we're forgiven.
We don't have to carry it around.
We don't have to wallow in it.
Knowing forgiveness can really free us from that.
Knowing that no situation is beyond being redeemed by God, that he uses us even in our sin and our mess.
to achieve his purposes in our kids lives.
So there's the real weight that can be lifted from Christian mums.
And I think actually we don't need to be walking around with mum guilt because we have the goodness of the gospel to deal with guilt.
I think the idolatry side of things can happen when we start to get our value and our meaning and our significance from being a mum.
And if you're someone who's very thoughtful about motherhood and you're putting
a lot of energy and effort into that relationship, It can slip that way.
I guess we want to see our mothering as being something ultimately that we're doing for God, to His glory.
We're doing it out of our love for Him.
It's not that we somehow have to think our love for our children is competing with our love for God.
So we need to love our kids a bit less so we love God more.
No, we're loving our children as a way of loving Christ.
It kind of comes in the same package.
So I think we need to ask ourselves sometimes, If we're making our kids an idol, if we're getting too much of our sense of who we
are from our relationships with our kids, if we're devastated when our kid fails at something, that might be a sign we've done that.
Or if our family culture is revolving around the kids and their needs as this anxious focus on our children, that might show we're doing that.
Or if we're kind of making our children's choices about us, like how they reflect on us and
making them about our glory, that could be a way that would make our kids an idol as well.
Brilliant.
Well, Joss, thanks very much for coming on the podcast.
Thanks for writing such a helpful book and really appreciate your time today.
Thanks for having me, Pete.
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