64 Sermon Illustrations on Family Discipleship

A recent writer tells in one of his books of an experience he had as a boy when he went on a fishing-trip with his father. They were wading along in brooks with their rubber-boots on. But sometimes the water was too deep for him, and he was in danger of getting his feet wet by the water running in over the tops of his boots. When, however, they came to places like these, his father would take him pig-a-back and carry him along, and then the boy would fish with his rod resting on his father's shoulder, and his line dangling in front. And this writer says that he used to catch many fish in this way. Then he adds, "How many of our best catches in life are made over someone's else shoulder?" I think that fathers and mothers are always allowing their children to fish over their shoulders, don't you? When they send you to school to get an education, so that in later life you may enjoy good books, you are catching fish over their shoulders. When they give you money to travel, so that you may know what a big, beautiful place the world is, you are fishing over their shoulders. When they give you beautiful homes, so that you shall have good friends and grow up thoughtful, well-mannered men and women, you are fishing over their shoulders. In fact, it seems to me that we should not catch many fish at all if it were not for our loving, painstaking, unselfish parents. And don't you think we ought to be obedient and thoughtful of them when they carry us along so uncomplainingly and rejoice in seeing us take in such beautiful catches from life?

In dibbling beans the old practice was to put three in each hole: one for the worm, one for the crow, and one to live and produce the crop. In teaching children, we must give line upon line, and precept upon precept, repeating the truth which we would inculcate, till it becomes impossible for the child to forget it. We may well give the lesson once expecting the child's frail memory to lose it; twice, reckoning that the devil, like an ill bird, will steal it; thrice, hoping that it will take root downward, and bring forth fruit upward to the glory of God.

Mrs. Wesley carried her principle of method and a time-table into the realm of religion. She began surprizingly early. “The children were early made to distinguish the Sabbath from other days, and were soon taught to be still at family prayers, and to ask a blessing immediately afterward, which they used to do by signs, before they could kneel or speak!” The cells of each infantile brain were diligently stored with passages of Scripture, hymns, collects, etc. Prayer was woven into the fabric of every day’s life. The daily lesson of each child was set in a framework of hymns. Later, certain fixt hours were assigned to each member of the household, during which the mother talked with the particular child for whom that hour was set aside.--W. H. FITCHETT, “Wesley and His Century.”

The teaching and preaching by fathers and mothers in the seclusion of the home circle are doing much more to determine the fate of souls than the eloquent sermons and elaborate lessons in pulpit and Sunday-school. Parents are touching life at its beginnings, making impressions that can never be obliterated. The family is the natural and divinely appointed school of religion because it has the first opportunity. The smallest thing at the beginning of life affects all the future. A child but a year old slipt and fell on a wet floor, and tho that was seventy years ago, the man is lame yet. And the moral nature is as easily crippled as the body. The moral lameness we see in the old or middle-aged is often caused by some mistaught or neglected lesson in infancy.--_The Cumberland Presbyterian._

A man in his Gethsemane utters words that burn themselves into your memory in letters of fire. The personal experiences of one’s friends are sacred; sacred forever the events of the household, when grief and repentance lay healing hands like angels upon a broken life. But recently I saw with mine own eyes, and heard with mine own ears, and received a charge. The house was a mansion on an avenue, and the man was approaching threescore years and ten. Beside us was the coffin of his dead daughter. On the other side sat his chum, his closest friend. Suddenly the sorrowing man broke into speech, and this was the substance of his soliloquy: “There is nothing in these things. You and I have been living for a good time and success. We have gotten everything we could during the week. We have been good poker-players on Saturday night, we have spent our Sundays in the automobile and driving, and in social pleasures. We have put the club and the bank first, and my son has disgraced me with his shameless marriage, and my daughter is dead. I tell you,” he said, using his friend’s name, “there is only one place in which to bring up a family, and that is the Christian Church. There is only one way to use Sunday for children, and that is to take them to church. What with money, and wine, and poker, and pleasure, all day Sunday, and parties all Sunday night, my family has been ruined. People don’t know what the result of this kind of living will be until the end comes, but I know.”

— N. D. HILLIS

In a sermon on “The Debt Parents Owe to their Children,” Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D., of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, told of a parent who had said to him: “For twenty years neither myself nor my family have paid attention to Christianity. And now I have learned to my sorrow that the Christian Church is the only place in which to bring up a family. If I had ten sons I would compel them to marry wives reared in the Christian Church and the Christian home, who have the Christian method and Christian spirit of rearing children. (Text.)

The father of a little boy in Philadelphia, an irreligious man, offered to attend him to the Sabbath school, it being a very rainy day.—"Father, why don't you stay at the school, and go to meeting with me? you ought to go to meeting." The reproof was too powerful to be resisted. His soul was filled with remorse. He left his child at the school-house door, and turned back.

But the arrow of conviction had pierced his soul! He turned back, conscience-smitten, to weep over his sins, with a heart full of sorrow. He returned home immediately, retired to his chamber, bowed his knees in prayer, opened and read his Bible; in doing which he found relief, for the Spirit of the Lord had accompanied the words of the child, and the result was, that from this Sabbath day he determined to consecrate himself to God—to forsake the company of his guilty associates—to abandon the drunkard's bowl, and to lead a new life. He was enabled by divine grace to fulfil his resolution; from that day he established family prayer; became the subject of renewing grace, was baptized, and united with the church, of which he proved a worthy member.

# 80. Happy Deaths of Pious Children.