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

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 16, 1900

SAVED BY FAMILIES.

By S. M. I. H.

Since God must have families that will illustrate and witness to his purpose, he has provided that, in answer to your faith and consecration, all that is lacking to make a family in your home shall be supplied out of himself. He would not have the father who, in his place in your home, is a misrepresentation of fatherhood, replaced by any other stick of human timber; but out of the cedars of his own Lebanon he would supply this very father that which is lacking.

To you who may be worse than widowed he says: “Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; the God of the whole earth shall he be called. For the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God.” Isa. 54:4–7.

To the children who are left worse than fatherless comes the assurance that “God is a God of the fatherless.” He will supply fatherhood out of his own vast resources, and motherhood as well. “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.” Ps. 68:5. “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” Isa. 66:13. All this, provided there is found enough faith and consecration in you to hang a promise on.

Is it children who are lacking to make the family? God has plenty of them to give away. They are lying around in the slums of the city, heaps on heaps of them, in lonely and desolate places, waiting for fatherly and motherly hearts to gather up and teach and train for service in the kingdom. “God setteth the solitary in families.” Ps. 68:6. “Setteth he the poor on high from affliction, and maketh him families like a flock.” Ps. 107:41.

These childish conductors from the great Reservoir, neglected though they may be, are yet open enough channels of the sweetness of the life of God to bring into your home a personal blessing.

One of the things that has convinced me that this people is certainly the people of God, and will draw more and more from all peoples, is the fact that they recognize the obligation to bring the hungry, the naked, the desolate, into their homes. Let this law and gospel of love become more and more manifest among us. If it should be that because of past failures one of your very own has actually gone to ruin, as some have so sorrowfully confessed, then you are under a most sacred obligation to fill the place of the ruined child with one whom you can rear in the clearer light, and with a better understanding of what it means to train a child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. If your house has been left empty because your children have gone into the field of Christian labor, what a sacred privilege is yours to fill its solitary places with the Lord’s little ones, whom he will send you for the asking.

S. M. I. H.