We conclude this week with Elisabeth’s poignant recollections of her father taken from her book Shaping of a Christian Family and the chapter He Lived What He Taught Us, where many other memories and spiritual disciplines are shared. We encourage you to read further and pray this series has been a blessing to you.
The biggest decisions of his life—his salvation, his marriage, his life’s work—were made on the basis of eternal, not temporal value. When he accepted Uncle Charley’s invitation to the S.S.T. (Sunday School Times) he knew he would never come anywhere near being “comfortably off.” What mattered infinitely more was being a faithful servant of God, and since his task as a father was a part of that service, he strove to set our hearts on the same transcendent goal. As he had covenanted with God to saturate himself in His Book, so he sought to teach us to love it. No one can make a child love anything, from spinach to sparrows to Scripture, but the parents’ love for things exerts a powerful thrust in that direction (and I for one learned to love all of the above). It works both ways—a son whose father loves sports is likely to love sports; a son whose father hates work is likely to hate work. Because we heard the majestic cadences of the Authorized Version of the Bible read to us day after day, year in and year out, at home and in church and Sunday School and the Christian institutions we all attended, we learned, finally to love the Bible, in spite of all the years when we shrugged and sighed and rolled our eyes and poked each other under the table and generally appeared to ignore what was supposed to be going on. Much more than we or our parents knew sank in by a sort of providential osmosis.
**Excerpt originally published in Shaping of a Christian Family, p.60