We should not give much weight to men who cannot rule or refuse to rule their households well (1 Tim. 3:4-5; Titus 1:6), especially if they are in leadership. This is a warning and a focus to prioritize the family for all of us -- God cares more for how you lead and love your wife and raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord than He does about your political labors, financial status, how gifted you might be at teaching biblical doctrine, how based you were on racial and national matters, how many spats you got into or battles won online, and other lesser endeavors.
You cannot have a people and a heritage, natural or Spiritual, if you lose your own children due to sinful neglect, incompetence, impatience, prioritizing other things that should not be as highly valued or invested in, etc. if you reform your country but your wife is a bitter, contentious women and your children resent you and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, what have you gained? Nothing but misery, except for the salvation of your own soul by the skin of your teeth perhaps. But a true Christian desires to see his own flesh and blood walking with the Lord, and if it were righteous would even long to take their punishment for them.
Of course, men should not only raise their families well -- this is the beginning of faithfulness -- but press on to all their other duties and callings and do them well also. The things mentioned above are important, but they are less under our direct control and duty (unless you are in a high position of authority or office, and even then the influence and bond of the father in the home is greater than even the pastor with his congregation) and should not be nearly as precious to us. If they are, we need to repent. There are many ways to create disordered loves, on the left and on the right and out of sheer hedonism.
Let Southern Presbyterian Pastor R.L. Dabney's words sink down into your soul, for they are true words that I wager we do not really believe:
"Seeing the parental relation is what the Scripture describes it, and seeing Satan has perverted it since the fall for the diffusion and multiplication of depravity and eternal death, the education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth.
On the right training of the generation now arising, turns not only the individual salvation of each member in it, not only the religious hope of the age which is approaching, but the fate of all future generations in a large degree. Train up him who is now a boy for Christ, and you not only sanctify that soul, but you set on foot the best earthly agencies to redeem the whole broadening stream of human beings who shall proceed from him, down to the time when men cease to marry and give in marriage. Until then, the work of education is neverending.
The generation which is trained for heaven is the one that dies; the one that is born into its place is born in enmity and under the curse. Thus the task of training is ever renewed, until the final consummation shall make the race equal to the angels.
In the last place: We observe some sincere Christians, whose minds are so swayed by the assertion that personal faith must be the invariable pre-requisite to baptism and admission to the church, that they seem incapable of ever entertaining the thought that the church membership of the children of believers may be reasonable and scriptural. The doctrine seems to them so great an anomaly that they cannot look dispassionately at the evidence for it. But to one who has weighed the truths set forth above, the absence of that doctrine from God’s dispensations would seem the strange anomaly. To him who has appreciated the parental relation as God represents it, the failure to include it within the circuit of the visible church, to sanctify its obligations and to seal its hopes with the sacramental badge, would appear the unaccountable thing.
We have seen that the promise of a multiplying offspring was the blessing of paradise; that paternity was the splendid expedient of our Maker for multiplying the human subjects of his blessings and instruments of his glory, and of making holiness and bliss the sure, hereditary possession of the increasing multitudes of men, through the probation and adoption of their first father. We have seen how, when Satan had essayed, with a stupendous, yet impotent malice, to pervert the invention of God to the propagation of sin and death, our merciful father rendered his victory void through the woman’s seed, thus causing redemption in the second Adam to spring again out of the family tie. We hear him declare in Malachi 2:15, long after the fall, that his object in founding the family, in the form of monogamy, was “to seek a godly seed.” Thus the supreme end of the family institution is as distinctly religious and spiritual as that of the church itself.
Civic legislators speak of the well-ordered family as the integer of which the prosperous commonwealth is formed. But God assigns the family a far higher and holier aim. The Christian family is the constituent integer of the church—the kingdom of redemption.
The instrumentalities of the family are chosen and ordained of God as the most efficient of all means of grace—more truly and efficaciously means of saving grace than all the other ordinances of the church. To family piety are given the best promises of the gospel, under the new, as well as under the old dispensation. How, then, should a wise God do otherwise than consecrate the Christian family, and ordain that the believing parents shall sanctify the children? Hence, the very foundation of all parental fidelity to children’s souls is to be laid in the conscientious, solemn, and hearty adoption of the very duties and promises which God seals in the covenant of infant baptism. It is pleasing to think that many Christians who refuse the sacrament do, with a happy inconsistency, embrace the duties and seek the blessing. But God gives all his people the truths and promises, along with the edifying seal. Let us hold fast to both."
Comments
Post a Comment