| Home Making |
Chapter 8 |
Page 12 |
Bowing in prayer together in the morning strengthens all the household for life’s active duties. Wisdom is sought and obtained for the decisions and plans of the day. Guidance is asked and received. Help is drawn down from the throne of God. The children go out under sheltering wings and are safe in danger, guarded by angels and kept by Christ himself.
Thus reasons multiply why there should be family worship in every home. It is hard to see how any parent who realizes his responsibility can fail to have his household altar. Consider the matter frankly and honestly. You are a Christian man or a Christian woman. Your children look to you for the witness of Christ. What do they think of the absence of family prayer in their home? How does it impress them? Is your testimony before them what it should be? Can your religious life stamp itself on them if you never bow with them in prayer? Are you bringing to bear upon their tender lives all the hallowing influences needed to purify and keep pure the fountains of their hearts? You want their characters to be permeated with the truths of God’s word. Can you hope that this will be so if they are not from childhood accustomed daily to hear these truths in their own homes? It is impossible to estimate the influence of the reading of the word in a home day after day and year after year. It filters into the hearts of the young. It is absorbed into their souls. It colors all their thoughts. It is wrought into the very fibre of their minds. It imbues them with its own spirit. Its holy teachings become the principles of their lives, which rule their conduct and shape all their actions.
Where every day the Bible is read in a home in the ears of the children, and its lessons simply and prayerfully taught, the effect is incalculable. It was thus that God himself commanded his ancient people to do, to teach the truths of his word diligently to their children when they sat in the house and when they walked by the way, when they rose up and when they lay down.* This was the divine plan for bringing up a family – not a lesson now and then, but the incessant, uninterrupted and continuous teaching of the Holy Scripture in the ears of the children. Such teaching unconsciously assimilates the character to the divine likeness. Can any parents who desire to see their children Christians afford to lose out of the school for their nurture these mighty influences? Even if there were no family prayer, the mere daily reading of the Scriptures year after year continuously would be in itself an inestimable influence for good. But where prayer is added, the household waiting together daily around God’s feet while heavenly gifts and favors are tenderly supplicated, who can sum up the total of blessing? What parent can afford to omit this duty and lose out of his home nurture this mighty element of power?
*Deut. vi.6-9
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