The Christian Home

"It was said of one that 'she looked like a prayer.' If we would make our homes truly Christian homes, our daily lives must be like our daily prayers.

If the members of the family wrangle and quarrel, the fact that the father is a minister or an elder, and the mother president of a Dorcas society or secretary of an association to send the gospel to China, does not make the home religious. If a blessing is asked at the table before the meal begins, and if then, instead of cheerful and affectionate conversation, the table-talk is made up of faultfinding with the food, of ill-tempered disputes amid acrimonious bickerings, the asking of a blessing surely does not make the intercourse Christian. If family worship is observed with scrupulous fidelity, and the members rise from their knees to violate the simplest lessons of Christian love and kindness in their fellowship as a household, the fact that there is family worship does not make a Christian home.

The prayers must be lived. The Scripture lessons must find their way into the heart and then into the speech and conduct."


- J.R. Miller (1840-1912), a Presbyterian pastor from Pennsylvania and a popular Christian author.

Speaking in God's Language

"The more intimately we converse with the word of God, and the more we dwell upon it in our thoughts, the better able we shall be to speak to God in his own language and the better we shall know what to pray for as we ought. Reading the word will not serve, but we must meditate in it."


- Matthew Henry (1662-1714) on Psalm 119:148.

Prayer

"Words are but the body, the argument, the outside of prayer; sighs are nearer the heart work. A dumb beggar gets an alm at Christ's gates, even by making signs, when his tongue cannot plead for him; and the rather, because he is dumb... Tears have a tongue, and grammar, and language, that our Father knows. Babes have no prayer for the breast, but weeping: the mother can read hunger in weeping."


- Samuel Rutherford (1600?-1661)

Meditation

"Many a plain, honest, unlearned disciple of Christ, by meditation, experience, prayers, and especially obedience, attains to a more clear, sound, and useful knowledge of the word of God, than some great scholars with all their wit and learning."

- Matthew Henry (1662-1714), an English Presbyterian. His father taught him as a child to meditate each day, throughout the day, on one verse of Psalm 119, traversing through the whole psalm twice a year.