What Older People Can Do to Get Younger People Into Service by M. E. Ellis

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 8, 1910

What Older People Can Do to Get Younger People Into Service

By M. E. Ellis

1. They can live. Men and women who are Christians are never too old for service; it is Satan's scheme to persuade them that they are. All the “successful careers” of a thousand great men will not have as much influence to incite to service as a homely, Christian life, strongly, honestly, actively lived for God and man. That does not refer to the kind that is long in the prayer-meeting and short in measuring potatoes, nor even the kind that professes to love its neighbors as itself, but has hardly a pleasant look for its immediate family; but rather to the home religion having the traits mentioned in 1 Corinthians 13.

2. They can remember. The minds and hearts of some people have atrophied until they positively can not remember how they felt when they were young. They show this in their actions, and are correspondingly disagreeable in their lives. The elder members having a desire to inspire service in the youth must not be so. The continual impulse of the spiritual life is activity — growth. There is coupled with this, in every healthy spiritual life, the charity that calls to mind the fact that there are differences in age, development, and mental traits of the persons met with daily, and that growthless perfection is no more to be expected or desired of each of these than it is of any other half-grown thing that we are very anxious to see develop.

3. They can sympathize. “Acquaintance awakens sympathy, and sympathy is the spring of effective ministry.” Many who are aging faster than they have any right to, have scant sympathy for the youth and children, because they know them so little. This is as true of the parents themselves as of any one else — often more so. A wise teacher, who realized a great lack in our social economics, said, “Come, let us live with our children.” There are thousands of children with living parents who are the most pitiable of orphans, because “home” means nothing to them but a place to eat, sleep, and work.

What common interests do we have with our children? What books do we read together? What projects are we carrying out together? How much do we fathers know about the lessons in school? When last did we all go to the woods together for an outing? Is it easy to talk with our boys about Jesus? If not, why not? Is there any practise of ours that persistently obtrudes itself in the mind when we think of talking seriously with the children about their spiritual welfare? or do we have our consciences so well trained that these practises do not bother us so much as they do the children? Is it hard for us to beg their forgiveness when we do wrong or are in the wrong?

O, our children and young people are far too precious a heritage, and too valuable a help in finishing our work, for us to be warranted in failing, by precept and example, to inspire them with a love for service! If our children are lost to the truth, and fail of eternal life, it will be, first of all, because their parents did not lay hold of God mightily in their behalf; because mother's heart was not large enough to hold them, and father failed to “command his household after him.” And should they be rescued, trained, set to work, saved in the kingdom of God, will others wear the crowns the parents should have had?

M. E. ELLIS.