Business and Religion
381
My brethren, are you cultivating devotion? Is love of religious
things prominent? Are you living by faith and overcoming the world?
Do you attend the public worship of God? and are your voices heard
in the prayer and social meeting? Is the family altar established? Do
you gather your children together morning and evening, and present
their cases to God? Do you instruct them how to become followers
of the Lamb? Your families, if irreligious, testify to your neglect and
unfaithfulness. If, while you are connected with the sacred cause
of God, your children are careless, irreverent, and have no love for
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religious meetings or sacred truth, it is a sad thing. Such a family
exerts an influence against Christ and against the truth; and “he that is
not with Me is against Me,” says Christ. The neglect of home religion,
the neglect to train your children, is most displeasing to God. If one of
your children were in the river, battling with the waves and in imminent
danger of drowning, what a stir there would be! What efforts would
be made, what prayers offered, what enthusiasm manifested, to save
the human life! But here are your children out of Christ, their souls
unsaved. Perhaps they are even rude and uncourteous, a reproach to
the Adventist name. They are perishing without hope and without God
in the world, and you are careless and unconcerned.
What example do you give your children? What order do you have
at home? Your children should be educated to be kind, thoughtful
of others, gentle, easy to be entreated, and, above everything else, to
respect religious things and feel the importance of the claims of God.
They should be taught to respect the hour of prayer; they should be
required to rise in the morning so as to be present at family worship.
Fathers and mothers who make God first in their households, who
teach their children that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
glorify God before angels and before men by presenting to the world
a well-ordered, well-disciplined family, a family that love and obey
God instead of rebelling against Him. Christ is not a stranger in their
homes; His name is a household name, revered and glorified. Angels
delight in a home where God reigns supreme, and the children are
taught to reverence religion, the Bible, and their Creator. Such families
can claim the promise: “Them that honor Me I will honor.” As from
such a home the father goes forth to his daily duties, it is with a spirit
softened and subdued by converse with God. He is a Christian, not