SAVED BY FAMILIES by S. M. L. H.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 13, 1900

SAVED BY FAMILIES.

By S. M. L. H.

It takes a man and a woman to make the human unit. Society recognizes this theoretically, but at its best the church gives a slow and weak-minded recognition to this fact. A strange doctrine, which bears the earmarks of Satan, has been accepted instead,—that it is one office of the truth to break up the family. Among our own people I have found men and women who thought they could not live the truth peaceably in their homes, and that therefore they were warranted in separating.

It is Satan’s work to break up families. He began it when he beguiled Eve away from Adam for a little while. He has been trying to draw wives from their husbands, and husbands from their wives ever since. And how he has laughed in the face of the love eternal, which intended to bind the severed halves of the human unit into one indestructible body! How he has laughed and rejoiced in the face of God at his success even in the church!

Let the husbands or wives who think they have a sorrowful story to tell of life with one who is an unbeliever, turn to the plain words found in the seventh chapter of 1 Corinthians and read, and forever settle themselves to the work to which they have been called in their marriage: “And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband: but and if she depart [if, in her haste, misunderstanding what the mind of the Lord was, and being foolish to such a degree that she did not know how to come to understand his mind, and she has departed, then] let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife. . . . If any brother hath a wife that believeth not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not put her away. And the woman which hath an husband that believeth not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband.”

Many of our brethren and sisters have let Satan hold the light for them while they read God’s word, and have allowed him to turn the light off and on as he chose; hence they have only seen the burden without the blessing.

Any man who loved a woman well enough to ask her to make a home with him; and any woman who loved a man well enough to accept such an invitation; and any home into which children have been born, into which the blessed revelation of the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus has come, should be kept a unit, no matter what any unbelieving member should or should not do and be, and no matter how Satan might stir one of them up to wrath and anger against the other. There need be no quarrel, no contention; for it always takes two to make a quarrel, and the most riotous temper will wear itself out after a while against the smooth, polished surface of a patient love that never answers back.

And, furthermore, “the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband.” This statement should be sufficient to sweeten any cup of bitterness that Satan might press to any lips. God has power which, through the channel of a human life, he intends to communicate to the husband or wife who needs it for winning purposes. With any truth comes re-enforcement of power to every part, for every work; and God intends that the truth that has come to this people shall carry the power by which family life shall be filled for the purpose of reproof and comfort, or enlightenment and salvation.

S. M. L. H.