Christian Traditions

One doesn’t have to look far to find a dead tradition. They lie around churches like the old tombstones of a church burial ground: rotting, crumbling, and yet too memory-filled to just dump over the hill somewhere.

But what about live traditions? Like faithful apple trees in the graveyard fencerow that bear fruit with the regularity of a ... tradition, they bless souls time and time again.

How do you turn a crumbling tombstone into a live apple tree? At this point my analogy sort of breaks down ...Yet for some people, those old, dead, dry traditions can never be revived: they HAVE to go! They have experienced traditions for years—dead, dry, hollow, and starting to stink—and they KNOW that church life never prospers if it is clogged with the tombstones of centuries gone by.

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Augustine the Baker (1556)

From The Martyrs Mirror
Around 1556, there was in Beverwijk, a brother named Augustine, a baker by trade, who had forsaken the world, and been baptized upon his faith. At this same time there was a burgomaster who was very bitter, and was filled with perverted zeal. He would go about telling people that he would be glad to furnish the peat and wood out of his own money to burn Augustine the baker.

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Governing Your Family

“For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment; that the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him.” Genesis 18:19

There are three things very remarkable in this verse.

1. That Abraham used parental authority in governing his family: “For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him.” He did not think it enough to pray for them, or to teach them, but he used the authority which God had given him—he commanded them.

2. That he cared for his servants as well as his children. In Genesis 14:14, we learn that Abraham had three hundred and eighteen servants born in his house. He lived after the manner of patriarchal times; as the Arabs of the wilderness do to this day. His family was very large, and yet he did not say, “They are none of mine.” He commanded his children and his household.

3. His success: “they shall keep the way of the LORD.” It is often said that the children of good men turn out ill. Well, here is a good man, and a good man doing his duty by his children—and here is the result. His son Isaac was probably a child of God from his earliest years. There is every mark of it in his life. And what a delightful specimen of a believing, prayerful servant was Eliezer! (Gen. 24.)

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