Don't neglect your family
to minister to others
Now, I come home to many of
you. You are working as Sunday school teachers, you are working
as evangelists, you are going from house to house as tract
distributors. Beloved brethren and
sisters, never let even the tongue of scandal be able to say of
you that you cared for other households, but not for your own.
I remember well a man — his case was a warning to me, and I hold
it up as such to you. He was always ready to attend the open-air
preacher and pitch the tunes; he was always glad to walk into
the country when the lay preacher went to a cottage meeting.
There was scarcely a prayer-meeting at which he was not present.
He was a man with a large family in poor circumstances. He ought
often to have been at work with his boots and shoes when he was
attending a prayer-meeting, and he ought oftener to have been
praying with his boys at home than to have been out helping
others to do good in the street; for I saw his boys grow up one
by one. I knew and I often had told him of it, that, as
children, they frequented the public-house, as lads they were
found in the theater. He seemed everything that was devout and
earnest, and I believe he was so, and about everybody’s children
he was careful except his own, and for the conversion of
everybody else he prayed except for the conversion of his own
children. To them he never spake — they said he never did; with
them certainly he never prayed; and he was constantly out, so
that, whatever good example he did give them, they could not
see. And his sons grew up and died, one or two of them, in my
presence through drunkenness ere they had completed the age of
manhood — through drunkenness and vice — and none could say to
that father a word of consolation, because he had kept the
vineyard of others but his own vineyard he had not kept. It is
right that you should take a class in the Sunday school, but not
if your own children are neglected. It is right that you should
go out and work for others, but not if your own household is
uncared for. Therefore, I say to every Christian, call your
children and your household together, and make a solemn approach
unto the Most High with this prayer, “O God, save this
household, for Thy mercy’s sake.”
- C. H. Spurgeon, Able to the Uttermost
