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WHAT MAKES A HOME CHRISTIAN?
Eph. 5:15-6:4
Annual Sermons: Vol. 3 Sermon 10
homeorchurchbiblestudy.com bob marcaurelle
In 1641 Richard Baxter went as pastor to the English village of Kidderminster. He found the church to be cold and apathetic. As he worked and prayed for revival, God led him to go into the homes one by one and establish family worship. In a few years his church completely turned around and became an example of evangelical life and fervor.
Such a revival is desperately needed in our homes today. Our families are being torn and tempted as never before. Divorce is the order of the day. Drugs are camping out on everyone’s doorstep. Television pumps a steady stream of immorality, profanity and violence into the minds and hearts and lives of family members.
Alex Carrell says modern man “simple does not have the nervous system to keep pace with modern civilization.” We Americans swallow ove ten billion sleeping pills a year. Valium is the number one prescription drug in America.
Fifty years also we boasted that an increase in leisure time would make us healthier, happier people. That belief has been silenced by the facts.
No simple solution will help our homes. What we must do is build our families on solid Biblical principles as we practice Christianity at home. Family worship is no magic cure-all. The cure must run far deeper than simply adding one more religious routine.
If family worship is merely a habit we tack on, it it is mechanical, if it is more “churchianity,” if it is not backed up by consistent Christian living day by day, then it will do more harm than good. .
One tragedy of modern " churchianity" is that we have COMPARTMENTALIZED religion. Religion is what we do on Sunday and Wednesday, down at the church. The rest of the time we are busy in the real world of living.
The result is that Christianity is seen as something unreal and Jesus and David are put in the same category by our children as Santa Clause and Jason and his Golden Fleece.
It is when our relationship to Christ transforms our home life, our business life and our recreational life that our children will sit up and take notice.
Christianity is more caught than taught. It is not just another philosophy to be debated, it is a way of life to be shared. One frivolous, high-tempered, moderate churchgoing mother said, “I don’t know what has got into my Jane. Anything I say goes in one ear and out the other.”
I know what “got into” Jane. Her mother! We reproduce ourselves in our children and all the formal religious instruction in the world cannot outweigh the witness of a weak life.
Christianity is not a flag we stick on the roof, it is the mortar between the bricks. Without it our homes will crumble.
Wherever Abraham carried his family he built an altar. God gold the Israelite parents to teach His truth to their children all through the day (Deut. 6:4-9).
When Paul wrote the Philemon letter, he addressed it to “the church in thy house” (1:2). It was at the feet of his grandmother and mother that Timo¬thy received his faith (2 Tim. 1:5; 3:15) by being taught and shown the Word of God.
I. RESPONSIBILITY WILL BE ASSUMED (6:4)
This begin with PARENTS. The Bible says, “Parents . . .bring them (your children) up with the loving discipline the Lord Himself approves, with suggestions and godly advice” (Eph. 6:4, LB). The two pillars of a Christian home, says Wayne Dehoney, are a Christian father and a Christian mother. If only one is a Christian then he or she must assume the spiritual responsibility.
In every church there are those parents who take their children home because they don’t LIKE to sit through church. The problem here runs far deeper than church attendance.
It is the problem of parents trying to PLEASE their children instead of preparing them for life’s responsibility; of parents more interested in worldly pleasure than spiritual maturity. These same children grow up to “do their own thing” all though life and the results are disastrous. Kids don’t like dentists, shots, or school but they endure it and are better for it.
II. ROLES WILL BE ACCEPTED (5:21)
Being a member of a home is a responsibility and God tells each member in Ephesians five and six how and where we are to fit in. When we disobey this we invite heartache and trouble.
We are ALL TO “SUBMIT ourselves to one another because of our reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21). We yield our wishes to the wishes of others.
But we must humbly and obediently submit to our assigned place in the home.
Christian wives are to SUBMIT. This doesn’t mean you become a doormat and neither does it mean you always obey your husband no matter what.
It does mean you refuse to nag, it means you look to your husband for leadership, it means you do not wear the pants in your family. It means her priority is to be a good Christian, wife and mother – in that order.
Christian husbands are to SERVE The trouble with too many husbands is they are reading what God says to the wives - submit - and not what God says to them.
The Bible never tells a husband to be the head of the home. It tells the wife to make him the head but it never tells him to demand the headship. The Bible tells the husband to love his wife and this love is spelled out in First Corinthians Thirteen. It involves:
Patience, courtesy, sincerity kindness, unselfishness, generosity, a temper under control, humility and integrity.
If you men want to “wear the pants” in your family then put on the garments of love. Serve your family and they will give you the leadership you can never seize by force alone. Some force is necessary but your greatest force is love
Christian YOUNG PEOPLE are to respect and obey. You should always, in a Christian environment, be able to sit down and discuss your parents’ rules. But in the end it is the parents who should draw the lines and you should respect them.
I promise you this, the day will come when you realize the lines were drawn in love. In another state where I pastored, a young boy was allowed to jump on the running board of his daddy’s truck when he drove in. The parents would yell at him for doing it and then say, “One day you’re going to kill yourself.” But they never MADE him stop.
One day he did kill himself. His foot slipped and he slid under the truck and the rear wheels crushed his chest. If those parents had drawn the line in love he would be alive.
III. RELIGION WILL BE ACKNOWLEDGED
We Baptists stress the inner qualities of religion and put the emphasis on the heart. This is good, but it can be carried too far if we depreciate the value of externals.
Abraham built altars - trees and rivers were not enough. God gave Israel a tabernacle and then a temple. Our Lord gave us two beautiful ordinances. In our homes and lives we need some external, visible practices to help stir our hearts to greater devotion.
First, the Christian family will say GRACE before meals. No one, however hungry, will start to eat, until God is thanked. Our Lord thanked God for the bread that represented His broken body (Mt. 26:26) and it was when He gave thanks for food that the disciples on the Emmaus road recognized Him (Lk. 24:31-32).
Make this a real time of thanksgiving and prayer. Don’t merely let children say “blessings” but encourage all who pray to really pray. At every meal we can be reminded of the presence of the Lord.
Second, the Christian family will encourage each member to have their own time of personal BIBLE READING and PRAYER.
Parents should see to it in early years that children read their Bibles, study their Sunday School lesson and pray before going to bed or before beginning their day.
The Christian family will pray when CRISES come. Life is full of trials and we need to teach our children how to face them. You don’t face them by throwing in the towel, cursing God, stealing the tithe or blaming the church.
You face them on your knees, calling upon God, and on your feet, with every member pitching in to help. I have seen problems draw families closer together because under God they have labored together and prayed to solve them.
The Christian family will maintain the habit of regular CHURCH attendance. You don’t “support” the church and its organizations as much as they support you.
Here are your allies in building a Christian home. Here you encounter the truths that strengthen and set free. Here you learn to practice Christianity. Here you find friends to help and encourage you.
The Christian family will TITHE or work towards it. The parents will tithe and teach their children to tithe.
Neither God nor the church doesn’t need your money as much as you need to give it.
This is your way of teaching your children negatively, not to be mastered by money and positively, to trust God with their finances.
Lay your Bible on the table along with your Sunday School quarterly and your offering envelope and you will be teaching faith and obedience to your children.
The Christian home, above all else, will practice Christian LOVE AND FORGIVENESS.
There is no perfect home, no home without problems, no home without hurts. Every member of every home is a sinner and is weak in some areas.
Mothers will scream too much. Fathers will work too much and gripe too much. Children will lie, cheat, steal, disobey and break your hearts.
The medicine that heals these wounds is love. Every member, from father on down, should have the courage and humility to say “I’m sorry” and every member, when this is said, should have the grace to say, “I forgive you and I love you.”
One of Christendom’s greatest missionaries was John Paton who ministered to the savage headhunters of the New Hebrides. In his Autobiography he tells of a room in their modest home when he was growing up. It was the room of prayer. His memory of home was primarily that of his father going into that room to pray. He said that many a time when they heard the sacred pleadings of that father behind the door, he and his brothers would tiptoe past it in silence. And this missionary, after worshipping in every kind of church here and abroad, wrote:
“Never, in temple or cathedral, in mountain or in glen, can I hope to feel that the Lord God is more near, more visibly walking and talking with men, than under that humble cottage roof. . .”
That was a Christian home. Is yours? Is mine?
