Family Religion by Talmage

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 4, 1875

Family Religion.

By Talmage

Take first the statement that unless our children are saved in early life they probably never will be. They who go over the twentieth year without Christ are apt to go all the way without him. Grace, like flower-seeds, needs to be sown in spring. The first fifteen years of life, and often the first six, decide the eternal destiny.

The first thing to do with a lamb is to put it into the arms of the Great Shepherd. Of course you must observe natural laws. Give a child excessive meat diet, and it will grow up sensual; catechism three times a day, and sixty grains in each dose will not prevent it. Talk much in your child's presence about the fashions, and it will be fond of dress; notwithstanding all your lectures on humility. Fill your house with gossip, and your children will tattle. Culture them as much as you will, but give them plenty of money to spend, and they will go to destruction.

But while we are to use common sense in every direction respecting a child, the first thing is to strive for its conversion, and there is nothing more potent than family prayers. No child ever gets over having heard his parents pray for him. We had many sound thrashings when a boy, but the most memorable scene of all was father and mother at morning and evening prayers. We cannot forget it, for did we not often squirm around on the floor, and look at them while they were praying? Your son may go to the ends of the earth, and run through the whole catalogue of transgression, but he will remember the family altar, and it will be a check, and a call, and perhaps his redemption.

Family prayers are often of no use. Perhaps they are too hurried. We have so much before us of the day's work, that we hustle the children together. We get half through the chapter before the family are seated. We read as if we were reading for a wager. We drop on our knees, and are in the second or third sentence before they all get down. It is an express train, with amen for the first depot. We rush for the hat and overcoat, and are on the way to the store, leaving the impression that family prayers are a necessary nuisance, and we had better not have had any gathering of the family at all. Better have given them a kiss all around; it would have taken less time, and would have been more acceptable to God and them.

Family prayers often fail in adaptedness. Do not read for the morning lesson a genealogical chapter, or about Samson setting his foxes' tails on fire, or the prophecy about the horses, black, and red, and speckled, unless you explain why they were speckled. For all the good your children get from such reading you might as well have read a Chinese almanac. Rather give the story of Jesus and the children climbing into his arms, or the lad with the loaves and fishes, or the son of Galilee dropping to sleep under Christ's lullaby. Stop and ask questions. Make the exercise so interesting that little Johnny will stop playing with his shoe-strings, and Jenny will quit rubbing the cat's fur the wrong way. Let the prayer be pointed, and made up of small words, and no wise information to the Lord about things he knows without your telling him. Let the children feel that they are prayed for. Have a hymn if any of you can sing. Let the season be spirited, appropriate, and gladly solemn.

Family prayer also fails when the whole day is not in harmony with it. A family prayer, to be worth anything, ought to be twenty-four hours long. It ought to give the pitch to all the day's work and behavior. The day when we get thoroughly mad, upsets the morning devotion. The life must be in the same key with the devotion.—Talmage.