I shall never forget when the modem tide struck our home. It began when my sister, an artist, got music and some other ideas in her head, and went to college. After her first year she came home, and the morning after she came back when we had prayer after breakfast, she rose sweetly and excused herself and went upstairs.
She ‘got by’ with it that morning, but father ‘took note of it’; and the next morning, when she excused herself, he said, “Sit still.”
“But really,” she pouted, “I don’t care to stay.”
“That doesn’t make any difference-stay.”
“I think a person should have some liberty in religion,” she said.
“You can have all the liberty you please in religion,” father told her, “but I run this house; I paid for your grub, I bought the clothes you have on, I paid for your education. Sit down there quietly and listen while a father who loves you reads and prays.”
My big brother came home one day. He had made money for himself and had a big fat cigar in his mouth. He smoked it awhile on the back porch. Father came out, reached out his hand, took the cigar and, throwing it into the garden, said, “Don’t smoke them around here any more.”
“I would like to know what right you have to throw that cigar out,” my brother complained.
“You know my idea,” my father answered. “This is my house, I am rearing boys and making a specialty of it, and you don’t get by with that kind of stuff. When you are working for a man he can tell you whether to smoke in his office or in his warehouse. I am running this house. God gave me the command to do so.”
“I will go somewhere else,” my brother threatened.
“I am sorry; I love you,” my father replied quietly, “but if you want the cigar worse than you do the home, you can go.” He went away three weeks and came back and said: “Dad, you are all right. I submit and will play the game according to the rules.”
Most people say, “Well, you have to let children have their own way.”
Is that so? Then good-bye to home, to government, to everything. God will not stand for that.
I had a father who stood by the river of life, thank God, an old pile-driver, and smiled while he drove down the jetty. He never licked me in his life, but I always knew I had one coming if I needed it. He raised ten children and he did it as an undermaster to God.
God intended parents and children to live together in the unit He ordered. He commanded parents thus, and with a covenant attached, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
I thought I was getting away with something. I left my Father’s Christ and the Bible because of the teaching in the universities into which I went. The antichrist spirit of plunder in modem ‘culture’ clothes attracted me. I lost my faith. My father died, and before he died, he turned his face heavenward with the happiest, most beautiful smile. Someone leaned over the bed and said, Dr. Rader, how can you smile like that when there is not one of your children that is serving the Lord?”
He smiled back as he answered, “That doesn’t matter a bit. It was settled long ago. I brought them up as He commanded me. They will every one be in. They are a strong-headed group, but God will lead them. He will bring them in.”
Now, every last one of them is in.
God talks to fathers and mothers, and God stands behind fathers and mothers with all the army and navy of Heaven when they stand Godward with their children! I tell you; God hears them. He hears!
Paul Rader
