Welcome to the Faithful Mother’s Podcast. My name is Kait Isaak and my goal is simple. To bring you to the feet of Jesus in your marriage and motherhood and encourage you to cultivate a faithful heart and home. I want to help you overcome overwhelm and distraction, keep your eyes focused on the Lord, and equip you for the everyday challenges motherhood entails.

I pray this episode blesses you.

Hello friends, and welcome back to the podcast. If you’re new here, welcome. My name is Kate. We talk all things faith and motherhood here on the podcast, and I’m just so blessed that you are choosing to spend a little bit of your time here with me today. I do not take that lightly. So thank you. Thank you.

And before we dive right in, if you would be so kind to just scroll down on your app and leave a rating and review for the podcast, if you are blessed by it, if you’ve listened before and you’ve been blessed by it, it just helps other like minded moms to find our podcast. And it would just be a great big hug from you to me.

So I’d appreciate that so very much. So let’s dive right in. As Christian moms, when we are navigating the complexities of raising our families, it’s really easy to feel overwhelmed by the demands of daily life. Today, we’re going to dive into some practical insights and some spiritual encouragement. And we are going to focus in on one small lesson from scripture, but this small lesson will help to provide a strength, balance, joy, and purpose amidst the chaos of your everyday life.

And we’re going to uncover some ways to cultivate a more peaceful, joyful, and purpose driven life. Grounded, of course, in our faith and guidance from the Lord. When I first became a Christian, it was a lot easier for me to focus on learning about God than about accepting how actually loved I am by God.

And maybe that’s not your story, but I’ve been a follower of Christ for 20 years now. 20 years. Wow. That’s crazy. And it’s just been in the last few years that I’ve really accepted how loved I am by him, which has shaped how I live that out. It’s shaped my intimacy with the Lord. It’s, it’s really just changed everything for me.

I think in the past I was always so worried about making following Christ too much about me and not enough about Him. Because truly, He doesn’t owe us anything. But He chose to die on the cross to save us from our sins and so that we could have restored relationship with the Father. I’ve shared with you before about my childhood and growing up without faith.

And if you’ve done any sort of therapy, you know so much of the things we deal with today relate back to our childhood. So I’ve had to do some healing and some accepting of how much the Lord loves me. Which helps me to understand reliance on him and helps me to understand his truth better. So maybe you relate, or maybe that’s the easiest part of your faith is accepting his love and grace and mercy for you.

But either way, I think you’re going to enjoy today. We are going to focus on Proverbs 31 25. And if you go way back, I think this episode’s from 2019. So the Lord has certainly sanctified me since then, but I have a whole episode on Proverbs 31. But we’re going to focus specifically on Proverbs 31 25 today.

She is clothed with strength and dignity. She can laugh at the days to come. So what does it mean to be clothed in strength and dignity? Well, it’s about living with confidence and assurance because we trust in God’s promises. Strength means being steadfast. It means being courageous, it means standing firm in our beliefs and our values, even when life gets chaotic, even when life gets hard.

And dignity involves maintaining integrity and honor, reflecting Christ in our actions and attitudes. It’s about knowing our value comes from our identity in Christ and not from any sort of external circumstance. I love the second part where it says she can laugh at the days to come. We all know that life is full of challenges, but when we’re rooted in Christ and we draw our strength from him, it gives us a lightness often described as the peace and the joy of Christ.

Trusting him helps us not to worry so much. One of my favorite things to say, especially during tough times is, okay, this is what the Lord has for me today. And it helps me to look for the lesson in every challenge and find the new strength I need to face it. So as busy moms, how do we tap into this biblical truth amidst all the craziness that goes on in our days?

We can embrace this truth by implementing some practical and spiritual strategies. I love that God gives us all the answers we need. Our job is to be diligent in A, learning them, B, faithful in implementing them, and C, creative in how we actually integrate them into our lives. So let’s start with implementing a practice of daily devotion and prayer.

I feel like I say this in every piece of content I create, but It truly is the first step. Start the day with God. Begin each day with a few moments of prayer and reading scripture, even if it’s just a short passage. This sets a positive tone for your day and it aligns your mindset with God’s promises.

It doesn’t have to be a big, huge Bible study. Just make it a priority. Secondly, prayer breaks. Take short breaks throughout the day to pray, asking for strength and for guidance. These moments can be grounding for us and they can provide a sense of peace amidst the busyness. I’ve started praying over my family whenever I feel frustrated.

especially over messes in the house, because to be honest, that’s a trigger for me. It helps me to recenter, connect with the Lord and shift my mindset. Moving on to using scripture and affirmations. So I’m not talking about the woohoo new agey affirmations, but affirmations rooted in scripture. So first we want to start with memorizing some key verses.

So I challenge you this week to commit this verse, Proverbs 31 25, to memory. This is going to help remind you of your strength and your dignity in Christ. Repeat this verse to yourself throughout the day, especially in challenging moments. And then on the flip side of that, Using positive self talk, use this verse or other verses as affirmations to counter negative thoughts and stress and speak God’s truth over your life.

It can reinforce your spiritual strength when you are constantly speaking God’s truth over your life. He tells us in the Bible, we need to be renewing our mind. We need to be focusing on good and lovely and wonderful things in his truth. We so easily focus on lies and focus on the negative and it just brings us into this negative spiral.

Next, I want to ask you, do you have a supportive community? If not, create a supportive environment for yourself. So start by building a faith community. Surround yourself with other Christian moms who can offer support, offer encouragement, offer accountability. All those things are so important. You can share prayer requests and celebrate each other’s victories.

Connect with like minded women in real life and also in online communities. Maybe you live far away from a faith community and you don’t get to tap in as much as you would like to. I’ll leave our Facebook community linked in the show notes for a way you can get connected online. And you can also create that supportive environment within your family.

I think this is the most important part. Involve your family in devotions and Bible study. This strengthens your faith and it creates a supportive and spiritually enriching environment for your children, for your husband, for your entire family. Next, we need to prioritize self care, both physically and mentally.

Start with making sure you’re taking care of your body through proper nutrition, exercise, and rest. I know as busy moms, so often these are the first things that we forget about. Physical health can significantly impact emotional and spiritual wellbeing. I know whenever I go back and look at my journal entries, when I’m like on an exercise and healthy eating kick, which it’s a big struggle for me, honestly, guys, it’s my biggest sin area that I struggle with is just not.

treating my body as the temple of the Holy Ghost. For me, it’s always the first thing to go. And I go back and I look at journal entries from when I was being diligent and I’m like, wow, I love that woman. I want to be that woman. I need to get back to that. Our physical health significantly impacts how we feel emotionally and spiritually.

You also want to make sure you’re taking breaks to rest and rejuvenate. Engage in activities that refresh your mind and spirit, such as reading, hobbies, or simply enjoying quiet time. Meditation is also great for this. Actively seek out things that bring peace and joy. If you are finding your situation to be very chaotic and you’re finding it hard to pull out the purpose in what you’re doing, and you’re finding things to be very mundane, try and insert as many joy inducing things into your day as you can.

And this doesn’t mean just tuning out all of your responsibilities, but do you like to read? Do you like to listen to worship music? Do you like to journal? Do you like to go for a run? Do you like to just sit out in the sun and feel the sun on your face? Try and implement just short breaks, short pauses throughout your day where you can get some of these things that fill you with joy in your life.

Next, and this is a big one, I want to move on to the idea of intentional living. Intentional living is all about making deliberate choices and actions that align with your values and goals. It’s the opposite of living on autopilot or merely reacting to circumstances as they arise. Instead, it’s about purposefully designing your life with God around what truly matters to you.

As Christian women, wives, and mothers, having clarity of your values and your goals is so important. So identify what is most important to you, your faith, your family, your health, your personal growth, your community involvement. These core values become the foundation of all your decisions. From there, define clear, actionable goals that reflect your values.

These can be both short term and long term, helping you to focus your efforts and measure your progress. I am huge on tracking and measuring. It’s so helpful to get you from point A to point P when you are trying to align your goals with your values. We’re going to get more into goal making in some upcoming episodes.

It’s a huge passion of mine and we offer some great tools to help you with this. But with today’s episode, I just want us to be thinking about the idea of setting goals that align with our values in order to live intentionally. In order to live intentionally, you need to be aware. Like I just said, I’m a huge fan of check ins and resets and journaling through some key questions that make sure that I’m aligned to who I know God wants me to be.

You need to be conscious of how you’re spending your time, your energy, your resources, and you need to be regularly evaluating whether your daily actions and habits are moving you towards your goals or away from them. Being intentional in your relationships means you’re engaging in activities that are meaningful to you, that are fulfilling.

This could be investing in your relationships, pursuing a passion or serving others in your community. Being intentional simply means you’re living with purpose and on purpose. You’re directing your efforts towards what truly matters. Rather than getting distracted by less important tasks or societal pressures, cultural pressures, you’re staying committed to your values and your goals, even when it’s challenging.

Intentional living often involves Perseverance and resilience. You’ve often heard anything worth it is not easy. Moving on into gratitude. Do you have any sort of gratitude practice right now? If your answer is yes, I want to encourage you to bump that up. How can you bump that up a little bit? If your answer is no, I highly encourage you to start one.

So you can just simply use a gratitude journal. It can just be a plain piece of paper that you write things down that you’re thankful for, or it can be a more guided, um, reflective journal. I have one that I use. I’ll leave it linked down in the show notes for you. And then not only writing things down, but just incorporating more Thanksgiving into your prayers.

So often we go to God with requests and our requests outweigh our Thanksgiving. So let’s try and reverse that and let our Thanksgiving outweigh our requests. It helps us to be more content and focus on what God has already given us. All right, let’s talk about embracing grace. Not always easy for me. I’m not going to lie to you, my friends.

We need to accept imperfections. Let’s understand that it’s okay not to be perfect. You need to extend grace to yourself as God extends grace to you. Embracing imperfection can reduce pressure and allow you to experience God’s strength in your weakness. I often struggle with yelling at my kids and it leads to a downward shame spiral every single time.

And I’ve had to learn to give myself grace, repent, seek forgiveness, and ask God for strength to do better, but also give myself grace. My kids forgive me every single time. If you’re like me, you easily count the ways you screw up as a mom and you minimize how many times you actually are an amazing mom.

Repent, seek forgiveness from the Lord in your kids and move on. Don’t sit in the shame of your mistakes. When mistakes happen, forgive yourself and others quickly. Holding on to guilt or resentment can drain your emotional and your spiritual energy. A phenomenal way to bring God’s strength and dignity into your everyday mom life is to use music.

Play worship music in your home to create a worshipful atmosphere. Singing praises to God can lift your spirit and remind you of his strength and presence. My favorite worship song right now is Abandoned and it’s on repeat in my house. I will also leave that linked on Spotify below. Beyond music, find opportunities to worship God in daily tasks.

Whether it’s praising him while doing dishes or thanking him during a commute, worship can transform mundane moments into spiritual encounters. When I’m picking up clothes off the floor, I thank God for the money to buy them and the kids who wear them. I never experienced this with my older kids, but my little guy needs to be laid with until he falls asleep.

So, you know, sometimes I’m thinking of all the million things I could be doing on my to do list, but instead I’m just laying there and I have learned to refocus out of just like this intentional sweet, sweet time that God has given me. I put an earbuds and I focus on scripture and I pray over my kids and I thank God for them.

I’m just laying there anyway. There’s nothing else I can do. So why not use that time? To be thankful, to be grateful and to pray over my kids. So now I want to move into a really practical application that helps me so much be rooted in my identity as a child of God. So I think this is really going to help you.

I’m going to read you 10 affirmations and I’ll have these linked down in the show notes. I have a really pretty digital graphic with these on them that you can print out, put them near your sink or by the mirror. So when you’re getting ready in the morning or when you’re doing dishes, you can read them over.

So take a deep breath with me.

All right. I am strong and courageous because the Lord, my God is with me wherever I go. Joshua 1. 9 I am fearfully and wonderfully made by God, and my soul knows it very well. Psalm 139. 14 I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Philippians 4. 13 The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. Psalm 23.

1 God’s grace is sufficient for me, for his power is made perfect in my weakness. 2 I am a new creation in Christ. The old has gone. The new is here. 2 Corinthians 5 17. The joy of the Lord is my strength. Nehemiah 8 10. God’s plans for me are good. To prosper me and not to harm me, plans to give me hope and a future.

Jeremiah 29 11. There’s more context to that one, but I still think it’s a beautiful verse to affirm. I am clothed with strength and dignity and I can laugh at the days to come. This just brings peace and joy. The Lord gives me peace that transcends all understanding, guarding my heart and mind in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4, 7. And

to end us off, I’m going to read you a short reflection. So if you’re able to close your eyes, please don’t if you’re dropping right now, but if you’re able to close your eyes, do that right now, if not, just try and remove any distractions from your mind. When I’m trying to connect with the Lord, I often picture him with beams of light shining out all around him.

And I just try and keep that picture in my mind. It just helps me to stay focused and not let my thoughts wander off to what I’m cooking for dinner. So maybe that’d be helpful, or maybe you already have a great way of connecting and focusing on the Lord. But if you can close your eyes and focus on the words I’m about to read.

Cultivating inner strength and dignity begins with embracing the profound truth of your identity as a child of God. This identity is not based on your achievements, social status, or the opinions of others, but on the unchanging and unconditional love of our heavenly father, when you fully grasp that you are fearfully and wonderfully made.

and that you are chosen and dearly loved, you can begin to see yourself through God’s eyes. Your inner strength is rooted in your relationship with God. As you draw closer to him through prayer, scripture, and worship, you tap into his infinite power and grace. Philippians 4. 13 reminds us, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

This verse encapsulates the essence of inner strength. It is not about your own capabilities, but about the strength you receive from Christ. When you face challenges and feel overwhelmed, you can rely on His strength to sustain you. This reliance on God transforms your weaknesses into opportunities for His power to be displayed in our lives.

Dignity comes from understanding your worth in God’s eyes. Being a child of God means you are an heir to His kingdom. This royal status ingrains in you inherent value and honor. Proverbs 31 25 describes a woman clothed with strength and dignity, highlighting that these qualities are not merely external, but deeply woven into her character.

Dignity involves carrying yourself with the assurance that you are beloved daughter of the king. It shapes how you interact with others, encouraging you to treat everyone, including ourselves, with kindness and grace. Living out your identity as a child of God involves daily choices that reflect your inner strength and dignity.

It means setting boundaries that protect your well being, prioritizing time with God, and engaging in activities that nourish your soul. It also involves extending the grace you have received to others, forgiving as you have been forgiven. And loving as you have been loved.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review in your podcasting platform of choice. And don’t forget to share it with a mom friend and be a source of encouragement for them today. If you’re looking for some more tools to help you be more intentional, you can head to my website, faithfulmothers.

com slash shop to see our planners and journals and other connection tools. Okay, let’s pray. Heavenly father. I thank you so much for the woman who is on the other end. Of the speaker right now, who is listening to my words that you have given Lord, um, I just pray that anything that was not of you just falls away and they don’t remember any of it.

And that they only remember everything that came directly from your heart and your mind, Lord. Thank you so much for this platform to connect with women all over the world, Lord. Just looking at the podcast statistics this last week and seeing all over North America, Central America, Asia, Europe, India, there’s listeners all over.

And I thank you for the good news of the gospel, Lord, and that it is shared and in today’s day and age, it can be shared so widely through the internet, Lord. And I pray that if people Somebody’s listening to this episode that does not know you, Lord, that you come and you prick their heart right now and you draw them to you, Lord, Lord, we would just remind them in this moment that.

All they need to do is say yes to your free gift of grace and mercy and love and accept you in their heart, Lord, and follow you and commit to following you and becoming a disciple of you, Lord. We just pray for any woman who’s listening, who’s in that experience right now, Lord. And for women that are more seasoned in their faith and they’re farther along in their walk with you, Lord, I just pray that they are blessed by this episode.

Um, Remind them of some practical ways that they can get more of you, Lord, and that they can connect with you and grow in intimacy with you and let others see the fruit of your spirit just bounding through them. Lord, we thank you for this day. We thank you for our health. We thank you for all the blessings that you give.

And we just ask for more of you, Lord. We ask all these things in Jesus precious name. Amen. Until next week, friends be blessed.