An eight-year-old lad made his way into the lingerie section of a big department store to buy a Mother’s Day present. “I want to buy my mom a slip,” he told the clerk, but when it came to giving information as to size, he was totally at a loss.
“It would help,” the clerk suggested, “if you could tell me whether your mother is tall or short, or large or small.”
“Oh,” said the boy, “She is just perfect.” So the clerk wrapped a size 34 in a gift box and gave it to him. And he gave it to his mother on Mother’s Day morning. The following day, without saying a word to anyone, the mother went back to the department store and exchanged it for a size 42. You see, perfection in a mother is not dependent on size or shape. Wonderful mothers, thank God, come in assorted sizes and shapes.
Mothers are given special recognition every year on Mother’s Day, and they have earned it. But it is also a good time to talk about the Christian family and the role each member of the family plays. How can your family be a Christian family? The answer: By letting Christ live at your house! Houses contain families where mamas and papas and children live. Houses contain Christian families where those mamas and papas and children let Christ live within the home. Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I will be in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). So, who lives at your house?
Finding the answer to this question is of the utmost importance. Thus, it is not absurd to ask, “Father, do you live at your house?” Many fathers use their home as little more than a rooming and boarding house, for they live elsewhere, and drop in where the family lives occasionally. Take, for example, fathers who are alcoholics, workaholics, playboys, or professional jocks.
How about you, mother? Do you live in your house? In today’s world many wives work outside the home, and in many instances this is a necessity. But the workplace should never become more important in a mother’s life than the place where her children grow up and learn to live. A father cannot become a mother, and a mother cannot become a father, but neither fathers nor mothers should be so preoccupied with their responsibilities that they forget the importance of living together with their family in the home. A wife and mother who works at a fulltime job outside the home has every right to expect . . . (Are you ready for this, dad?) . . . that her husband share some of the domestic responsibilities within the home.
How about you, young people? Do you live in your house? James Truslow Adams once said, “Any astronomer can predict with absolute accuracy where every star in the heavens will be at half past eleven tonight. He can make no such prediction about his daughter” – nor about his son, I might add. Today’s youth live in a world of many influences that have an adverse impact on their lives. The only way peace and happiness can reign at your house is that you do your best living with the members of your own family.
Of the greatest importance, your home should be a place where God lives. God will be permanent resident in your home if you allow Christ to be Lord of all that takes place there. The atmosphere of your home will be changed. The character of your family will be different. Your goals and those of each member of your family will be raised. In addition, the ultimate destination of every member of your family will be heaven.
Does Jesus Christ live in your house? If not, you need to know this: He only lives where He is invited.
The Paper Pulpit 
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