CURRENT SERIES TITLE "Happy Homes & Happy Living"
Lesson #5 Keepers At Home

The inspired apostle Paul instructed the young preacher, Titus, that he should teach the older women in order that they might teach the younger. Paul was interested in the formation of Christian homes. Thus one of the things he bound upon Titus to teach was that the younger women who marry are to be "discreet, chaste, keepers at home.

To be discreet means to "possess good judgment." To be chaste means to be pure in heart and in conduct. No happiness can be found in a home where there is distrust and suspicion. Sometimes a wife will desire to maintain her popularity in society and even with the opposite sex to the extent that she violates the rules of propriety and flirts with others. It is evident that such action lays the groundwork for a broken home if it is not stopped at once. Keep your heart clean and youll keep your life clean. It is out of the abundance of heart that the mouth speaks. It is from the heart that fornication, adultery and other forms of uncleanness proceed. Most loose conduct is the result of loose speech and is always preceded by it. Guard your thoughts and your speech and the life will take care of itself!

But we wish today to emphasize especially the quality of a Christian wife expressed by the term "keepers at home." The home is the wife's domain. There she can reign as queen. She is adapted to it by nature and qualified for the task by intuition.

The average husband has no more judgment as to color schemes than a Kansas jack rabbit. If left up to him the wallpaper in the living room would probably be yellow, the drapes purple, the rug green and the upholstery in stripes of blue and pink. The average man does not even know which tie to wear to match his suit and socks, much less anything about tasty arrangement in the home.

For that reason, I suggest that the husbands had better leave those matters up to the wives. I knew of one man whose mind had apparently gone to seed on the thought that he was "the head of the house." His wife was not allowed to think for herself. If she wanted to open a can of tomatoes when company came she had to send one of the children out to the field and ask permission of her husband. When she changed a picture from one wall to the other he became highly incensed and changed it back again. He wasn't a husband, he was a dictator! God certainly never authorized any such highhanded autocratic ideas. The wife is to be "keeper at home."

I know a lot of women who sit around and sigh about what they might have been if they had married someone else. A lot of them think of the careers which they forsook to become wives. But let me tell you that the greatest career any woman can have is that which comes with being a Christian wife and mother. You may never get your picture in the paper and may never know the adulation which is heaped upon heroines of the day, but in the sight of God, what you are doing is of great value. And that's what counts!

HOME! Songs have been written about it! Poems have been composed about it! On foreign fields soldiers have dreamed of it! Wanderers have taken new courage as they drew nearer to that beloved place. It has formed the pattern of our fondest dreams and been the center of our greatest hopes. And yet, home is the sphere of woman's creation, the crowning achievement of her life and work. Thank God for Christian homes! Thank God for the faithful women who have made them such! They are the keepers at home and they are the keepers of home. Without them, there could be no home to keep!

The first duty of the wife and mother is to the home. She must be attentive to the domestic concerns of the family above all else. Why does the religion of Jesus Christ so specifically bind this upon her as a duty? The answer is that the Christian religion world by organizing clubs, if at the same time you break up the homes to do it! All of the clubs and social gatherings in the world will not save us if the homes go down!

Too often, women neglect their own affairs to become busy­bodies in the affairs of others. Most of us will have a full-time job in regulating our own homes without at the same time regulating those of everyone else in the community. Have you heard of the woman who went from house to house visiting all of the neighbors telling them how she would arrange the furniture if she lived in their homes, pointing out this and that which she felt needed changing? You will recall that one day coming
home she slipped on her back doorstep and broke her leg. The doorstep was greasy! The moral is that you'll no doubt have enough to do to keep your own doorstep clean!

The wife who is a true keeper at home has no time to spend in vain gossip and harmful talk about others. She cannot while away precious hours hanging on the telephone merely to exchange all of the latest juicy morsels of scandal. She knows that the job of being a Christian is a twenty-four hour per day proposition and she will not suspend the work to labor for the devil in backbiting and common idleness.

I care not, then, how much may be achieved by anything you do abroad, it will not in the long run be helpful to the Cause of the Lord Jesus, if in doing it you neglect your home. You may manifest such zeal for the church that you spend all of your time in going and coming, but if in that you neglect your home, it is evident that the church has been hurt rather than helped. Your every duty as a Christian wife will be best performed as you meet the requirement of a "keeper at home." And don't
think that this means merely a "housekeeper." There are thousands of women who have kept house that never kept a home. There's infinitely more to keeping a home than merely keeping house.

Keeping house may actually interfere with keeping a home! What about the mother who spends so much time dusting and sweeping and washing and scrubbing that she does not have time to sit down and talk to her little ones about life or tell them stories from the Bible? What about the mother who turns her youngsters out to play in the street because she does not want them playing in the house for fear they might disturb it slightly? Martha was a housekeeper, Mary was a homemaker. Jesus said she had chosen the good part. Let's have more wives who are willing to be "keepers at home."

Lesson #6: "Obedience To Husbands" will follow in the next mailing.
"Lessons From Yesterday" is compiled by Dwain R. Stoops
If you have comments, please contact: dstoops@msn.com
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