Family Tip Number 4
Psalm 128:3 At home, your wife will have many children, like a vine full of grapes. The children around your table will be like an orchard full of olive trees.
Bringing up children is one of the toughest challenges in life. And some days, it feels like it’s been going on forever and it’s never going to end.
As I’ve been sharing with you over the last few days, friends of mine, Mark and his wife Precious from Lincoln, Nebraska have brought up nine children in the most amazingly godly way. Which is why I asked them for their top five tips for building a godly family.
So, today, here’s tip number 4. It’s my absolute favourite:
Bringing up a godly family is like, like olive plants around your table…. God impacted us with this idea out of our own family study of the Scriptures some time back. It comes out of Psalm 128:3 which says: “children will be like olive shoots around the table of the man who fears God.”
When we learned that olive plants typically take sixteen to eighteen years of careful cultivation, pruning, watering, and during that time, typically bear very little fruit, and that, after the eighteenth year bear abundant fruit (for years to come!), it gave us reason to persevere and “not be weary in well-doing…”
That is an incredible truth from Scripture that has kept us going through some tough times!
Anybody who’s brought up children knows that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And there are always some incredibly difficult times along the way.
But one day, one day those children in whom we’ve invested so much, start bearing fruit and that’s the day you realise that it was all worth it. So if you’re running that marathon, be encouraged.
Psalm 128:3 At home, your wife will have many children, like a vine full of grapes. The children around your table will be like an orchard full of olive trees.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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