More Than Tradition

(Proverbs 19:14 KJV)  House and riches are the inheritance of fathers: and a prudent wife is from the LORD.

Family can only do so much.  Of course that is quite a “so much.”  Here it talks about financial security.  It is a family thing.  Parents train children.  They model for children in finance.  When the time comes and the if the parents are able they might help with actual dollars.  Other places it talks about teaching values and priorities.  Family has a big job.

But finding the right “wife” (802), or husband for that matter, is a spiritual mystery.  It may be the family is involved.  Remember this is written in a culture where arranged marriages were common.  But finding the right spouse, the “prudent” one, is a matter of trust in God. 

This is another reason why divorce is not an option for believers.  If we have trusted God for our salvation and sought his leadership in marriage don’t let times of doubt break down what God has established.  Remember your wedding day, or one you have attended.  I hope it contained,

(Mark 10:9 KJV)  What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

You thought that was just traditional, didn’t you?  It comes from the lips of Jesus.

So.  Pray and trust that God is blessing your marriage, now or to come.

Children and the Kingdom of Heaven

(Mark 10:15 KJV) Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.

I am reading G.K. Chesterton’s book Heretics. He was discussing the idea of simplicity and wrote this paragraph:

The child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide. And in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothing does he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity, than in the fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex things. The false type of naturalness harps always on the distinction between the natural and the artificial. The higher kind of naturalness ignores that distinction. To the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are natural but both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained. The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the gold of fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only spiritual or philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. The evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain. The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical.

The idea of being like a child has been a subject I have heard mentioned often. This paragraph helps me to understand the concept a little better.