You are as much serving God in looking after your own children, & training them up in God’s fear, & minding the house, & making your household a church for God, as you would be if you had been called to lead an army to battle for the Lord of hosts.
Interpretation
Taking care of your family is a significant service to God.
This quote emphasizes the importance of familial responsibilities and how they are as noble and God-serving as grand acts of leadership or public service. Spurgeon suggests that nurturing and training children in faith and managing a household is integral to one's spiritual duty, reinforcing that everyday acts of love and responsibility towards family are forms of service to God.
In practice
During a sermon about family values, this quote can illustrate the spiritual duty of nurturing children.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
It's interesting that I had such a close relationship with my grandfather. Because your parents always judge you: they say, 'You shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that.' But with your grandparents you have a feeling that you can say anything or you can do anything, and they will support you. That's why you have this kind of connection.
The horrors of war, pale beside the loss of a mother
I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.
There are certain characteristics that define a good chimp mother. She is patient, she is protective but she is not over-protective - that is really important. She is tolerant, but she can impose discipline. She is affectionate. She plays. And the most important of all: she is supportive.
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