Religion in the Family

Jeremiah 31:1

What constitutes a godly home? The acknowledgment of God in all things. Making His will the governing principle. There can be no godly household where that is not done.

I. Where the will of God is placed first there will be order—an inestimable blessing in a home. God is not the God of confusion in the home or the Church. A man or woman who truly walks with God will soon become ashamed of disorder and slovenliness. And where God is the God of the family, and not merely the God of the Church, there will be order. The father and mother will take their proper place at the head of the household, and govern it and administer it as a trust for God. There will be no tyranny, no caprice; but there will be firm order, and an insistence upon it, and a constant striving after it.

II. There will be unselfishness. Not every one doing that which is right in his own eyes, but every one asking, 'What is the will of God?' And there will be a perpetual and relentless war upon selfishness. Care for others will be supreme. Consideration of others will prevail. Kindness will be paramount, and it will be a happy service to render it.

III. Where God is the God of the family, His will will govern the whole policy of the home. Such matters as the education of the children, the treatment of servants, such matters as dress and evening parties, as books and games, are sadly in want of a Christian standard. They are matters about which some Christian people think, or seem to think, that there is no will of God, and they simply follow the fashion, that is, the fashion of the world, and sometimes money dominates, and sometimes your neighbour's custom. And we shall not get right in any of these matters until we recognize that there is a will of God in them, and it is not a question of what my neighbour practises, and allows or condemns. Not my narrow neighbour on the one hand, nor my broad neighbour on the other, but 'What is the Christian standard? what is the will of God? 'and I must be brave enough to follow that.

IV. And there is another side to this fair and lovely picture. It is suggested by the last line in the verse. Wherever you have a number of people set on doing God's will and placing that will first, there you have most surely God's protection and safe keeping.

—C. Brown, Light and Life, p. 137.

References.—XXXI. 1.—C. Brown, God and Man, p. 95. XXXI. 1-26.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No. 2726. XXXI. 3.—Ibid. vol. xxxii. No. 1914; vol. xxxvi. No. 2149; vol. 1. No. 2880. J. S. Maver, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. 1900, p. 109. J. Tulloch, Sundays at Balmoral, p. 18. S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Sermons, p. 61. R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, vol. ii. p. 253. G. Brett, Fellowship With God, p. 132. XXXI. 10, 11.—John Clifford, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. 1899, p. 161. XXXI. 14.—H. W. Webb-Peploe, Calls to Holiness, p. 53. XXXI. 14 and 25.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No. 2726. XXXI. 18.—Ibid, vol. xiii. No. 743. XXXI. 18-20.—Ibid. vol. xxxv. No. 2104. XXXI. 31-34.—Ibid. vol. xlviii. No. 2762. H. P. Liddon, Christmastide in St. Paul's, p. 38. A. Ramsay, Studies in Jeremiah, p. 261. XXXI. 33. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii. No. 93; vol. xxviii. No. 1687; vol. lii. No. 2992. XXXI. 34.—Ibid. vol. xxviii. No. 1685; vol. xxxiv. No. 2006. E. Griffith-Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxii. 1907, p. 282. XXXI. 36.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture —Isaiah and Jeremiah, p. 332. XXXI. 37.—Ibid. p. 336. XXXII. 1-27.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvi. No. 2675. XXXII. 8-10.—A. Ramsay, Studies in Jeremiah, p. 241.

Jeremiah 31:34

Man's cry and God's answer, that is our subject; man's cry—for pardon, renewal, restoration; God's answer—willingness and power both to forgive and forget.

I. Man's Cry for Pardon.—What is this sense of sin that pursues man so persistently, and of which the cry of the Psalmist is a proof that we can neither get away from it nor forget it without help from above? It is at once a proof of man's grandeur and of his impotence. God and Nature seen at strife within us. That which we should be and might have been rises upon us in clear tormenting vision; then that which we are gives this the lie and torments us still more. And so that strange sentiment, or experience, or quality of our nature rises in power within us—remorse, which is the feeling engendered by the changelessness of an ill-spent past, in whole or in part. Memory may sleep, but it never dies. We can bear many memories if we think they are our own, safely locked up in our bosoms. But there is another consciousness than our own, other than that of the whole human race; a consciousness universal as being, pure and retentive as the light, holy as holiness itself can be; which holds all that ever was, that has ever happened to us and within us, in its unfailing, unfading grasp, and which never forgets. It is the thought of this tremendous cosmic memory which is the ultimate bar of judgment at which all good and evil must receive their verdict, the ultimate correction of an easy-going optimism as regards the issue of wrongdoing. There is no escape from God's knowledge of the present, nor from His memory of the past.

II. The Transformation of Memory.—We shall not come into any satisfying faith in the forgiveness and forgetfulness of God till we realize that all reality of sin remains and must remain for ever; and yet that forgiveness and forgetfulness are both real. The Cross of Christ is the furthermost point in the journey of heavenly love in seeking to bring back the lost; a love that bent all the Divine attributes (like the earth under the stresses that carry it round the sun) into a perfect circle of reconciliation. And so when man, recognizing this miracle of atoning love, repents and is reconciled to God as a dear child, the result is a moral forgiveness, which is also a moral forgetfulness.

—E. Griffith-Jones.

References.—LXXIX. 15.—J. H. Hitchens, Catholic Sermons, vol. ii. p. 73. LXXIX.—International Critical Commentary, vol. ii. p. 197. LXXX. 1.—J. Parsons, Penny Pulpit, No. 1702, p. 655.