A New Years Resolution: To Be a Keeper At Home

While millions of people are making new years resolutions that may never take, may we resolve in our hearts to be busy at home, blessing our family and training our children. Let us look forward to this new year as one of hope for generations to come. I encourage you to gain renewed vision and passion for your precious calling as a wife and mother. Though trials and discouragement come, may the all sufficient Word of God be our standard and may the precepts therein stand the tests of the cultural tide. We are the women whom God has blessed with the privilege of raising the next generation, teaching them His truths, and creating an atmosphere that is vibrant and full of love and the joys of life. There is no other place on earth that we are more needed to give these blessings, than in the home. There is no other people who need these blessings more from us, than those of our own household.  The influence we have over the next generation can be greater with our own children in our own homes, than in any oval office or Sunday school classroom.  J.R Miller says it well in his book Homemaking (or recently republished under a new title The Family).

There have been wives who in their zeal for Christ's work outside have neglected Christ's work inside their own doors. They have had eyes and hearts for human need and human sorrow in the broad fields lying far out, but neither eye nor heart for the work of love lain about their own feet. The result has been that while they were doing angelic work in the lanes and streets, the angels were mourning over their neglected duties within the hallowed walls of their own homes. While they were winning a place in the hearts of the poor and the sick or the orphan, they were losing their rightful place in the hearts of their own household. Let it be remembered that Christ's work in the home is the first that He gives to every wife, and that no amount of consecrated activities in other spheres will atone in this world or the next for neglect or failure there.

Let this be the year that you put your hand to the plow and did not retrieve. Put away activities that keep you from serving your husband and discipling your children. Commit yourself to cultivate well for Christ a home that is productive and efficiently managed, that shows the skillful handiwork of God. And may you reap a harvest of blessings in the years to come.

Grace and peace be upon you in 2009 and many more to come as the Lord sees fit.