Home Is a Place of Recreation…

Not only is the home a place of service, but a place of recreation. David was on the housetop. Many people think he might have gone up there to pray, but he went up there for recreation and rest, the night he fell into sin.

Preachers talk much about David’s sin, his fall, and his return, but not very many preach on Bathsheba’s sin. Jesus said in Luke 17:1 that offences will come, but woe unto him through whom they come. God, give us some honest-to-goodness, ordinary, everyday modesty! God expects saints to “raise up” a battlement. Why? When God is good enough to teach us modesty, He is teaching us for our protection. Modesty is a preventative. Parents become upset with me. They say, “What kind of a daughter do you think I have? Just because she would wear shorts, does not mean she is going to commit adultery.” However, it is just one of the moves of Satan to move her in that direction. When he starts getting you to take off part of your clothes, you are on the way, no matter “who you are”, and where you will stop, only God knows. You do not know. You may have some scrupulous ideas that you will not do this or that, but you do not know what you will do when the battlement is taken down.

It seems as if people today are being sold on the idea that to just have knowledge of the facts of life is all that is necessary. However, just knowledge of life does not make people good. Doctors and nurses have a great knowledge of life, but, on the average, they are no better moral people than any other class. Just knowledge of the facts of life without the fundamental principles of decency and morality that only godly advice can give will not be protection. It will only open up the door to let people “go to hell” in a faster way. There is a vast difference between an unsaved schoolteacher teaching your children about the facts of life and their sitting on a godly mothers’ knee being taught, and there will be a world of difference in the effect.

The fundamental principles of decency need to be taught today. Many things are going to go on in the world, but our homes ought to have a battlement, saints, against a lot of it. Piety begins at home. If Christianity is not lived out and taught in the home, it will go no further.

God’s “way of salvation” starts in the heart by changing you, and when He gets you changed as a parent, He is beginning a work right there to change your home. Your home will begin to take on a Christian flavor and change to a Christian atmosphere if God is allowed to work.

Why is God interested in our home life? Let’s go back to David. David could not help taking the first look, but when He took a second look at the scene next door, a scene of lust was painted on the wall of his brain. With the next look it took greater color. Finally, that picture developed into action.

[ NOTE: I had pondered omitting the following because of the tendency or likelihood of it being “over-read” or the context abused(?) Please, just consider the lesson illustration… only. This article was written about forty years ago. And the truth is, conditions are much worse now than they were then. ]

By having a television in your home, you are putting things right before the eyes of your children not only a first time, a second time; and daily, week after week, you are writing things on their brains. You can try to teach your children that the things they see are wrong, but how are they to believe that? If they were wrong, surely, you as a Christian, would not have them going on in the home. It reverts right back to the battlement.

There has never been a television in our home, and I do not feel that our children have missed a thing. They are not behind on what is going on in the world. I have kept them from lots of battles that they would have had in their hearts and minds by looking upon things that would have stirred their affections and turned their thinking in the wrong way.

There needs to be a battlement set up. It is your right to have a television set in your home if you want to, but I am going to be faithful to you by telling you just exactly what it will do for you. When you lose your children and they fall off the wall and break their necks in sin, remember Dad and Mother are to blame. They are responsible for that home. (Going to the neighbors and watching TV is not any better.)

I know that television is here to stay. So is sin. However, I am not going to have a part in that which is wrong. Television is an evil. You do not need a preacher to tell you that. Sound thinkers in government positions tell you it has wrecked and ruined many lives. Schoolteachers have given testimony that they can tell the home where television is.

If I had a TV, I don’t know when I would watch it. If you get busy for the Lord and do the work God wants you to do, you will not have time to look at one.

The home is a place for recreation, and we need to make it the right kind. We can make our home enjoyable.

I might go up the other side of the street: while there are some women who will not keep a clean house, there are others, who keep a house so clean you cannot even use it. The devil would like for us to go from one extreme to the other. We need to make the home enjoyable so that every member of the family will want to come there every time he can. Oh, the important place you mothers hold! You can make home a place where the husband loves to come to after work and the children cannot wait to get there after school, a place where the married children rejoice in the privilege of getting to go home.

I will give you sisters a pointer here: if anyone ever takes your husband, it is going to be a clean, smiling woman. It will never be an “old grouch”. Don’t get the idea that because you stood before the preacher and signed the paper, you have him for life; you may not. It is a proven fact that he can get away from you. Love is something that must be won every day, and respect must be built every day. Some of you women, clean up and quit letting your husband come home at four thirty and see you with the housecoat on he left you in, dishes still in the sink, and the sweeper not run! Let him come home and find the house cleaned up, you freshened up with a clean dress on and a smile on your face, waiting to give him a kiss when he comes through the door. I am talking about a battlement. There does not have to be some of the sadness that is going on if people would do a little more listening to what God has to say to us out of His eternal Word.

Let’s make the home happy. Some children just come home and eat and “take right off”. They find their happiness somewhere else. I remember my father had a pony for us. It cost quite a bit to own one, but I heard him tell people when they asked him, how he could afford to keep a pony for the children to play with: “It is the cheapest thing I ever bought. I spent ninety dollars for that pony, and my children are right here. I know what they are doing. If I do not entertain them at home, they are going to find entertainment somewhere else, and that begins to get costly to me.”

We are going through so many things. These are days of trials. These are perilous times. Whenever you begin to feel as if the load is getting too heavy, read Romans, 8:35-39. There, Paul tells of the many things we go through, but should any of these separate us from the love of Christ? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors. If you are just a conqueror, you can make it through with a straight face, but if you are more than a conqueror, you can make it through with a smile. Paul said, “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” God’s grace is sufficient for us. If Christianity does not work at home, it does not work anywhere.

Home Is a Place of Retreat…

The housetop was a retreat in time of battle. That is why David was on the housetop. Every home ought to be a retreat from the battles of life. A man can stand most anything in life if he has a good home to go to; but life’s battles become almost unbearable to an individual when he is having a battle on the job and knows when he goes home, there is going to be a battle there.

The whole world is a battlefield. We know that. There never was a time when there was more trouble and more things to overcome than today. There is a battle away from home, and the devil would like it to be a battle at home.

God bless the faithful mother who stays home and has her castle ready for its comers! They rejoice in coming, and she rejoices in their coming. I am talking about a happy home. We need to stop and realize how blessed we are if we have a Christian home, a good home, food, and healthy children.

How very easy it is in this day and time, to become sour. There is enough happening in our world to get you soured. When the devil works that kind of work and causes you to become soured, you will be miserable to yourself and you will make everyone else miserable.

I read once where a man got in that shape, and he said, “There is not anything right in the world. God did not even do anything right. Look at that big pumpkin on that wee little vine. Look at that little acorn on that great big tree. There is not anything right.” About that time, an acorn fell and hit him on the head. Then he thanked God it was not a pumpkin. God knew what He was doing!

You can get into such a shape that you are wrong, but you think everybody else is wrong. It is very hard for a person to see his own faults, unless he would really be honest before God.

A man would come home drunk and sit down in the living room chair and lay his head back and snore for hours. His wife got so tired of it that she decided to fix him one day. She took a piece of Limburger cheese and laid it right in his mustache. When he got up, he said, “I cannot stand it in this house! The house stinks. Wife, why don’t you clean this place up?” He got out on the street, and he said of the people that passed him, “Boy, do they stink! It must have been a week since they took a bath.” He picked up a flower, smelled it, and threw it down, saying, “Even the flowers stink!” He went by the drugstore and put some expensive body lotion on, and he said, “Man, it stinks, too!” He went back to the saloon, bought a drink, and said to the bartender, “Isn’t it awful? The whole world stinks.” Now, we know the trouble was with him! So many times, it is just that way in peoples’ lives. Most people, who smell a stink, are smelling their own smell. People who are so quick to find wrong in everybody have wrong in themselves.

Good, old-time religion and some common ordinary sense mixed with unselfishness can fix your home.

Home Is a Place of Prayer…

The housetop was a place of prayer. Acts, 10:9 states that Peter was on the housetop at noon praying.

I repeat, thank God for the privilege of being raised in a home where prayer and Bible study were laid before us. The Bible is the Book of life, and it gives instruction on how to find a companion, how to get married, how to treat one another after you are married, how to look forward to childbirth, and how to handle a child. Everything that is needed to have a happy home is in the Word, if we will read it.

A person can “go to hell” from where a family altar has been raised, but he has a hard time doing it. There is a battlement there. I have said many times that when I get to Heaven and see my dear old dad, I am going to take him in my arms again and thank him for the battlement he set up in our home. That battlement was so set up that it put some definite marks in my mind. Even when I was “out in sin” and overseas, there were many things that I never touched or indulged in because that battlement guided me and guarded me and prevented me from getting into a lot of circumstances that I could have gotten into.

We must face the fact, that not one of us knows enough to raise children, but it is wonderful what God can do with praying fathers and mothers.

A Battlement of Discipline…

Family discipline is a battlement. The Bible teaches very plainly that to obey is better than sacrifice. Back of all of the heartaches and miseries of our day, is disobedience.

I learned to respect through a wet dishrag. My sister would often say, “Mother, I would rather you hit me with a club than hit me across the face with that dirty dish towel.” “Well,” Mother would answer, “don’t talk back to me!” She did not go half a day saying, “If you don’t quit that, I am going to punish you.” When you did wrong, wham! It came so quickly you didn’t get any hand up. She meant what she said!

There would be less trouble with young people in the congregation if there were more discipline at home. People ask, “Should you make a child go to church?” If he is trained with family discipline, there will be no question about his going to church. He will get his good clothes on when it is church time. I am not talking about forcing a child into an experience, because if he ever gets saved, he will get saved on his own volition; but going to church every service is part of the training of training up a child in the way he ought to go.

A Battlement of Reverence…

There needs to be a battlement, raised up in the home of reverence for the Bible. “Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon they gates” (Deuteronomy 11:18-20). Unless you start right at home, reading God’s eternal Word to those little children and teaching then reverence for the Bible, they are not going to respect it when they get to be fifteen or sixteen

We are in a time of irreverence. There have been times I had to quit praying for someone in the hospital because the nurse came in and pushed me aside and talked to the patient. I knew what kind of a home that girl came from by the way she acted!

The pastor can spend time before God to get a message, and it will be God-anointed and sent, but because of disrespect, young people talk to each other, laugh, and send notes to each other right while the Bible is being preached. Where does that “stem from”? Don’t lay it on the church. In the home, is where the trouble lies. Teach them to respect the Bible at home and they will respect the Bible at church.

A Battlement of Consistent Christian Living…

There needs to be a battlement “raised,” of consistent Christian living. James said, “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22).

Our next generation, if Jesus tarries, is only going to have what truth we give them, and if the devil gets us to cut corners and take some easier (more pleasant) way, we are taking away the hope of our posterity ever having the truth. God help us, to look beyond ourselves! When we say “no” to God, we are putting “no” in our children’s mouths, and our children will outdo us because they are “fleeter of foot” than we are.

What Is the Condition of Your Home?

Deuteronomy 22:8, says to put up battlements around your rooftop. The wise man said, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).

I read once, of a minister who ran a mission in Chicago. He dealt with lots of people who were middle-aged and past; alcoholics whose lives were wasted, and addicts. When he got them into the mission and fed them and said, “Let’s get down and pray,” he could tell by the way a man got down on his knees to pray, what kind of home he came out of and what kind of father and mother he had.

This is what the wise man meant, when he said, they will not depart from it. We have the privilege of setting up battlements. We have the privilege of making marks within our children’s minds that will stay with them. Whenever they may travel, it will cause them to turn back.

May God help us to put up some battlements in our homes! Thousands of voices are calling our children. The enemy is working on every level, along religious lines as well as in the schools. Every kind of move is being made to kill the effect of home teaching.

Let’s put up some battlements. Let’s turn back to the blessed old Bible. Let’s let God into the “minute things” of life. Let’s quit making a difference between the sacred and the secular. Let’s let God be in the home as well as in our hearts and make the home a Christian home, a home where God’s power and blessing is.

I purposely, called your attention to the thought about a bird’s nest. Consider what God put with that commandment---you had better obey this for two reasons. First, that it may be well with you, for if you overstep and hurt this bird, God was just liable to cause hurt to come on you. Secondly, that you may live longer. We would say that to spare a mother bird is such a little thing, but with God, what we call a small commandment, can be a large commandment and involve a lot of things.

What is the condition of your heart? What is the condition of your home? May God help us to “raise up” a battlement around our homes, so that we can prevent our children from falling into some of the “grosser evils” that they may never get out of! [ The End ]