Christ in the Home by R. F. Horton

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Michigan · Apr 8, 1902

Christ in the Home

By R. F. Horton

On this subject it is easier, and perhaps more profitable, to cite instances than to elaborate theories. And it chanced that in a certain week I fell so naturally and unexpectedly on Christ in two homes that I am tempted to recount what I saw, and to show that there is nothing in either case which is in any sense exceptional.

Christ can be in the home only by being in the people who make the home. His presence is distinct and overwhelming if he is in all who make the home, but it is manifest, and sometimes by contrast even more startling, if he is in only one or two, while the rest, even in view of his manifestation, remain for a time blind and indifferent to him.

The two homes which I had the privilege of entering in one week, are just such homes as are to be found by thousands in this country; and there is no reason why every home should not be of the same kind; for Christ is able and willing to enter every house in all the world. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in.”

It is highly important in thinking of Christ in the home to remember that there is no favoritism with him. He does not prefer rich homes to poor, nor does he choose homes where trouble is unknown. He enters the house where the mother is sick of a fever, and he enters a house where all the godless people of the neighborhood are asked to dine. On the other hand, he has no contemptuous aversion to the rich as such. He chooses Zacchaeus as his host, and is found at the table of a covetous Pharisee.

But to come to my two homes: the one was a manse in a remote village, a home of the kind in which Christ often elects to dwell. There were father, and mother, and child.

The pastor was passing rich on sixty pounds a year; this was a mark of Christ, for he was an educated and cultivated gentleman; his brother, who had chosen medicine as a profession, was making many hundreds a year, and another brother in business was well to do; for a wage not much greater than that of a laborer, and not nearly so great as that of an artisan, this follower of Christ was bestowing all his best of heart and mind on the people of the village.

So diligent was he, that for years he had not taken a walk, for a walk’s sake, in the sweet fields and along the leisurely river which flows past the village. His sermons were as carefully prepared as if he had to preach in St. Paul’s. His flock were all known by name, and carefully watched. All the neighborhood was participant of his friendship and pastoral zeal, though few would enter the chapel to hear him preach.

But this lowly, diligent service, prolonged in gratitude and love for many years, had produced its effect.—Christ was in the home. You knew it at once when you entered; you knew it better when you left. The prayers, quiet and reverent, did not tell it you more than the conversation, cheerful and charitable, at the table. You recognized it in the way the mother held the child, and in the prattle and baby acts of the child himself. That diligence of unrequited service, that humble love of the poor, that ineffable gentleness and sweetness of the little circle within, announced that Christ was in the home.

And then, as it chanced, I was the day after in another home with the same inhabitant.

This home was spacious, lying in the shrubberies and meadows like a sweet abode of peace. An old man welcomed me, bearing the reverence and wisdom of well-spent years; and his quiet references to a home elsewhere and the undreaded change, gave me the sense of Christ, the resurrection and the life.

There were busy fingers knitting stockings—for whom? It came out incidentally; for the pastor, whose narrow income was not the worst of the ills to which his work exposed him. There were little children gathered in, to roll over the hay. There were the poor women invited to spend the afternoon on the shady lawn. There were the lives of girls, themselves free of the enjoyments that the world offers, quietly and inwardly dedicated to the service of others. There was the note of love, of mutual care, of worship, of faith, in all that was said and done. Christ was in the home.

How does he enter? Why does he abide?

It is very strange that any one who has come across the traces of him in a house should be indifferent to the inquiry. Is it possible that the fact of his being there can be missed, or that one could slight its significance?

Let every one realize, whether parent or child or servant or guest, that he can take Christ into a home. Though nine in a house be opposed, yet the tenth can bring him in. He will enter sometimes by a child, for “of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

A tiny thing who can only just speak, whose words therefore still carry some of the inspiration of another world, brought Christ into a home I know a little time ago. The father had gone off to business; and the child suddenly said to her mother, with perfect naturalness, “O, I bedot.”

“What did you forget, darling?”

“I saw Jesus zis morning, and he said, ‘Give my love to daddy.’”

I think the father felt that this mysterious message, duly delivered on his return, carried more weight than any sermon he had ever heard.

I may be exaggerating, but I can never see a child in the cradle, still less smiling up into the mother’s face, without a feeling that Christ has come, at least tentatively, into the home.

But with a more deliberate and conscious purpose, when we are older, it is given to us to bring the honored Guest into the home where we dwell. To believe in Christ, where faith is real, involves more than the adoption of a principle, or the attempt to shape life, according to a certain ideal; it means that the invisible Presence himself has effected a lodgment in our nature, and is beginning to act through us as his agents. We should try more definitely to conceive this. “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

What alien and uncongenial elements there are in your home! What a blight falls from the cultured sneer of a father or brother who does not believe! What a chill creeps from the ineradicable selfishness of a mother or a sister whose heart is in the world, not in Christ! Conceive yourself as set against these forces, and you are helpless. Your wit and learning cannot parry the sneer; your fire of love is far too faint and faltering to melt those hearts of ice.

But consider that in your trembling faith Christ himself has entered your heart, and has therefore entered your home. He is asleep for a moment in the prow of the ship. But he can awake at summons, and utter his authoritative, “Peace, be still.” Assuredly he can entirely disarm the sneers and the selfishness which are too much for you.

Let the reader go with Christ into his own home, and allow Christ to carry on his warfare of subjugation and conversion. Be more eager to keep the life of Christ clear and operative in you than to assert your opinions or to correct the faults of others. He will quietly but surely work. Introduced by you into your home, he will slowly make your home entirely his.—R. F. Horton, D. D., in C. E. World.