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Children are God’s Property, October 15
Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruits of the womb is his
reward.
Psalm 127:3
.
I have a special message to parents. I am charged to bring to parents the
strict requirement of God in each family. Fathers and mothers need to be daily
reconverted in the line of bringing light into their own families. Cultivate Christian
politeness in your training of your children. Guard yourselves. Never allow your
hand to strike a child in anger. Your children are the Lord’s property and they
must be treated kindly, but not vindicated in their disrespect of righteousness and
truth by your own careless irreverence. Give them righteousness. Christ is truth,
the complete perfect sample of what every soul must be if he enters the heavenly
courts. All the great facts are set forth. You can never cure an evil spirit by doing
irreligious work....
Be kind in your speech to your children. No loud, tempestuous scolding will
cure your children of any evil action. No taking your children in a passion and
shaking them will convert them from the error of their ways to do God’s will.
They are God’s property. As a people professing to be reformers the very best
lesson that you can give your children in this age of corruption is not to indulge
them to become fashionable after the worldly style. Sons and daughters are to be
instructed as to what it means to be obedient to God’s requirements, what will fit
you and them for a position in the heavenly kingdom.
Watch and pray, fathers and mothers, lest ye enter into temptation. Give your
hearts and minds and souls to God’s service. You are not to be severe, but kneel
before the Lord with your own hearts softened by the grace of God. Be converted
that you may have the earnest of the Holy Spirit. What a comfort to know that the
Lord will help you in every emergency, for you are laborers together with God....
Fathers and mothers, you take the responsibility of bringing children into the
world. Will you consider it is not for you to work in vain? “We then, as workers
together with him, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God
in vain
.”
... Now this takes in Christian experience. Here is large encouragement. Here are
the graces we are to receive, if we comply with the conditions. Fathers, mothers, if
you are not converted, will you measure your advantages if you will comply with
the conditions? ... Your children are the Lord’s property with which you have been
entrusted, to bring up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.—
Manuscript 61,
October 15, 1911
, “Individual Responsibility of Fathers and Mothers.”
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