FAMILY PRAYERS.
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-seed,
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 in the arms of the Great
Shepherd. Of course we must observe natural laws. Give a child excessive
meat diet, and it will grow up sensual, and catechism three times a day,
and sixty grains in each dose, won't 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 parents
pray for him. I had many sound threshings when I was a boy (not as many as
I ought to have had, for I was the last child and my parents let me off),
but the most memorable scene in my childhood was father and mother at
morning and evening prayers. I cannot forget it, for I used often to be
squirming around on the floor and looking 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 must 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, 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 the 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 Sea 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 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.
Family prayer is infinitely important. If you are a parent, and are not a
professor of religion, and do not feel able to compose a prayer, get some
one of the many books that have been written, put it down before you, and
read prayers for the household. God has said that He will "pour out His
fury upon the family that call not upon His name."
Prayer for our children will be answered. My grandmother was a praying
woman. My father's name was David. One day, he and other members of the
family started for a gay party. Grandmother said: "Go, David, and enjoy
yourself; but all the time you and your brothers and sisters are there, I
will be praying for you." They went, but did not have a very good time,
knowing that their mother was praying for them.
The next morning, grandmother heard loud weeping in the room below. She
went down and found her daughter crying violently. What was the matter? She
was in anxiety about her soul--an anxiety that found no relief short of the
cross. Word came that David was at the barn in great agony. Grandmother
went and found him on the barn floor, praying for the life of his soul.
The news spread to the neighboring houses, and other parents became anxious
about their children, and the influence spread to the village of
Somerville, and there was a great turning unto God; and over two hundred
souls, in one day, stood up in the village church to profess faith in
Christ. And it all started from my grandmother's prayer for her sons and
daughters. May God turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the
hearts of the children to their fathers, lest He come and smite the earth
with a curse!