The world is filled with messages for women about pregnancy. Popular books and well-meaning family and friends offer unsolicited advice about what to expect and how to stay healthy—sometimes resulting in joy and excitement but other times leading to discouragement and fear.
The Bible, too, has a lot to say about childbirth—offering real hope that nothing in this world can match. In Labor with Hope, Gloria Furman helps women see topics such as pregnancy, infertility, miscarriage, birth pain, and new life in the framework of the larger biblical narrative, infusing cosmic meaning into their personal experience by exploring how they point to eternal realities. Women will see that only Christ can provide the strength they desperately need in order to labor with hope.
160 pages
Read our Reformers Review by Shamira Eglinton here.
“Gloria Furman has a disarming way of connecting the most concrete stuff of our lives to the most glorious truth of the gospel. She’s doing it again here, as she peers into the realities of pregnancy and childbirth through the windows of Scripture. This book opens the windows wide. We do well to ponder this theme, of which God keeps reminding us in all kinds of painful and marvelous ways.”
--- Kathleen Nielson, author; speaker; Senior Adviser, The Gospel Coalition
“Gloria Furman has written devotionals that will transform the way we view pregnancy from conception to birth and beyond. Labor with Hopemagnifies the glory of Christ and all that he has done, and helps us fix our eyes on the one who gives eternal life.”
--- Trillia Newbell, author, Sacred Endurance; If God Is for Us; and God’s Very Good Idea
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. In the Image of God He Created Them
2. Be Fruitful and Multiply
3. The Promised Seed of Woman
4. Why Does Childbirth Hurt So Bad?!
5. Pain in Parenting
6. Writhing under God’s Judgment
7. God’s Birth Pain
8. The Gospel Is the Only Cure to the Abortion Epidemic
9. Tasting Death for Others
10. The Birth Pains of Death
11. Jesus’s Death Begets Spiritual Offspring
12. Birth Pain after Childbirth to Raise Spiritual Disciples
13. Putting Pain in Its Place
14. All Creation in the Throes of Labor
15. Conceived in Sin and Saved by Grace
16. You Must Be Born Again
17. Boasting Only in the Cross
18. A Tomb Became a Womb for the New Creation
19. Our Deliverer Delivered through Birth Pains
20. Saved through Childbearing
21. Children Are a Blessing
22. Knit Together
23. Don’t Trust Birth, Trust God
24. God Who Causes to Give Birth
25. From Inevitable Sorrow to Guaranteed Joy
Labor with Hope: Gospel Meditations on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood is in the following collections: