Thou shalt make a pro-active decision that thy household will be a godly one.
“Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain who build it;” Psalm 127:1
When you build a house, you don’t simply wish it into existence. You have to have plans drawn up, buy the right materials, find the right place to build, and actually get out there and start sawing and hammering.
The same is true of having a godly household. It doesn’t just happen by virtue of the fact that you and your spouse are Christians. You have to sit down together and make a definite decision, preferably before you even get married, that your home will be run in a godly way.
Where will we attend church? How often will we have family devotions? What is our understanding of what the Bible has to say about what is and is not acceptable behavior for us as spouses and for our children? How will we respond when one of us sins or when the children are disobedient? What will we do if one of us feels that God is presenting us with an opportunity for a new career or to move to a new location?
Naturally, you can’t foresee every scenario that might come up in the future, but if you lay a godly, biblical foundation from the start, you won’t have to re-invent the wheel every time a new situation arises. You will have developed a godly “policy and procedure” for facing life.
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone?And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
There are so many little details to attend to when you’re planning a wedding. Will the guests throw rice or blow bubbles? Will the bouquets be wrapped with pink ribbon or white? Will the groomsmen wear bow ties or regular ties? For someone like me who has to see absolutely every option available to her before making a decision, it can be a daunting and time-consuming task. Such was the day I sat down to pick out napkins for my reception.
Before I undertook the planning of a wedding, I never would have guessed that it would take more than about 30 seconds to choose napkins. You just pick out some napkins that go along with the color scheme of the wedding, right? Au contraire. In my day, there were huge ring binders (yes, that’s binders, plural) chock full of hundreds of napkins in every imaginable color, size and texture. Once you nail down those preferences, you have to choose what you want embossed on the napkins. There, too, the choices are nearly endless.
So, I flipped through page after page of embossment designs, finding them either too corny, too plain, or otherwise unacceptable. Finally, I came to a very interesting one that I eventually chose. It quoted the second half of Ecclesiastes 4:12, “A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.”.
I had never noticed this little verse before that day, but I thought about how beautifully the principle behind the passage could apply to a Christ-centered marriage. When a person is alone, she can quickly become overwhelmed. A spouse can help to bear the burdens of life, but the strength of a marriage of only two people pales in comparison to a marriage centered around a third Person- Christ.
The primary reason our marriages must center around Christ is that it brings Him glory. But there are certainly blessings to our homes that go along with honoring and obeying Christ in our marriages. Study after study has shown that children do best in a home where their parents are married to each other. They are physically and emotionally healthier, do better in school, are less likely to commit crimes, etc. But when you add in the component of spouses treating each other in a godly manner and striving to set a godly example for their children, the quality of the home environment rises even higher. Just as putting God first in our own personal lives makes us better parents, so, putting Christ first in our marriages glorifies God and benefits us and our children exponentially.
“They said, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.'” Acts 16:31
I can’t imagine undertaking a task as huge as parenting without some divine intervention. It’s a tough job! Most things in life are simpler when you’re a Christian. Not necessarily easier, but usually less complex. Take parenting, for example. If you’re a Christian, parenting by God’s Word, you have a plan of action all laid out for you. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel. What should I teach my kid about religion? What do I tell him about pre-marital sex? How do I reassure him about death? It’s all in the Book. If your parenting doesn’t begin and end with the Bible, it can be a much more confusing, fly by the seat of your pants operation.
When you’re a Christian parent, you have the benefit of all the resources in God’s storehouse. You’ve got a God who, at the end of a rough day, says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28); a God who promises that wisdom is yours for the asking (James 1:5); a God whose name is “the Lord will provide” (Genesis 22:14); a God whose eyes “…move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His.” (2 Chronicles 16:9).
Finally, when you’re a Christian parent pursuing holiness in your own life, God is working on you to make you more like Him: more loving, more joyful, more peaceful, more patient, kinder, better, more faithful, gentler, and more self-controlled. (Ephesians 5:22-23) God is sanctifying you, making you more Christlike, and enabling you to pour the gospel into your children day by day, so that they might come to know Christ as savior. As a parent, there’s nothing more important.
If you don’t know Christ as your Savior, I hope you’ll carefully and prayerfully consider the Scriptures and materials at the What must I do to be saved? tab in the blue menu bar at the top of this page.
