September 20

Read: Exodus 13:11-14

And when in time to come your son asks you, “What does this mean?” you shall say to him, “By strength of hand the Lord brought us out…” (Exodus 13:14, R.S.V.).

The Testimony Of Holy Living

We saw yesterday that there were genuine spiritual values in God’s Old Testament laws for the sanctification of His people. We have reserved perhaps the most important of those values for our thought today.

A man may sacrifice an animal to the glory of God but he does not thus consecrate a son. A godly parent does not sacrifice his first-born, but he does recognize God’s claim upon the child. And not only upon the first-born, but upon every child of the home. God declares, “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the Father, so also the soul of the son is mine” (Ezekiel 18:4).

Holy living is the only finally effective way that we have of consecrating our children to God. The Hebrew parent was required to be careful in his religious observances in order that his son might one day ask him, “What does this mean?” The question was to give God’s man opportunity to declare his faith to his child: It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt (Exodus 13:8).

Is any service for God too difficult, is any consecration of self too demanding, if in that devotion my child sees God in my life, and grows hungry to know Him?

A “preacher’s kid” saw his sanctified father mistreated. Later the boy watched his dad get blessed under the ministry of the man who had done the wrong. Here in his own language is the boy’s reaction: “I said then, Holiness is realm and I want it.”

Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me, All His wonderful passion and purity. O Thou Spirit divine, all my nature refine, Till the beauty of Jesus be seen in me.

— T. M. Jones