Devotional Thoughts

The pressures of today’s society have put a large strain on the old form of family and home solidarity. The requirements made on parents for providing for the family today often lead to a loose family relationship. Working mothers and moonlighting fathers do not have much time to spend with the children in family activities.  All of the activities that teenagers engage in today produce the same result. This has reduced the place of importance the home and family once had. It has also eroded the authority and influence of the home. There is, therefore, a great need to examine the place of the family in modern society. A greater effort is going to have to be made in order to have a tight-knit family unit, which a generation ago, came as a matter of course.  It must be recognized, first of all, that the family is God’s basic institution for the ordering of society. This is a presupposition of the entire Bible. This is a principle that has not changed. God laid the foundation of t...

In one of the great Psalms of thanksgiving, the writer asked a most pertinent question. “What shall I render unto the Lord for all of His benefits toward me” (Psalm 116:12) ? We may observe two elements in this question. The psalmist acknowledges having received many benefits, or blessings, at the hand of the Lord. For the believer, to be the receiver of blessings from the Lord is a fact beyond question. That is one facet of a proper perception of reality. However, for the unbeliever, or even for the nominal believer, such things come in the course of nature, or as a matter of deserving them. But to fail to see that such benefits and blessings come from the Lord is to lose touch with reality. The other element of the question is that the writer expresses a sense of obligation to the Lord and reveals a desire to do something in response to the amazing goodness of God to him. It is the reflex of the godly heart to desire to do something in response to the perceived go...