The Open Door

We often sing a chorus that is so true: God is so good. God is so good. God is so good. He’s so good to me.

As I held my new grandson, Jacob Robert Millage, for the very first time, I had to fight back the tears of joy. The emotion felt by the grandparent far exceeds anything I anticipated, and now, this wonderful feeling has come to me five times! That’s five times in three and one-half years. When it rains, it pours showers of blessing.

How thankful I am that all three of our daughters and their families are active in church. These children will be taught the Word of God and at some point, led by the Spirit of God, I am confident that they will receive Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and Lord. I have already begun to pray for that moment in each of their lives.

In this day as debates rage on about what it means when we speak of marriage and family, I am thankful for the clarity of God’s Word which speaks of marriage by saying, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh" (Ephesians 5:31). In a following verse the Bible says, "And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4).

Not only is the Bible clear in defining marriage, it is also clear in its instruction to parents that they raise their children to know the Lord. As a Christian parent, I can say that there has been no greater joy in my life than that of raising my children to know Christ as their Savior, to see them come in faith trusting Christ, and to have the privilege of baptizing them.

No one that I know would have ever dreamed that there would come a time in this country that we would need an amendment to the Constitution to define that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Even more shocking, no one could have ever imagined that the United States Senate would defeat an effort to clearly define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. One has to wonder, "What were they thinking?"

Clearly, we are living in a day of unprecedented confusion and lostness. The mandate for the church to rightly divide the Word of Truth has never been greater.

My four grandchildren helped me celebrate my birthday in May. Pictured left to right are Ben Lillard, Meaghan Curtin, Ryan Lillard and Lauren Millage. This picture was taken before Jake arrived. The children weren’t allowed to get close enough to blow out the candles, but they did eat some icing that really charged them up and kept them from going to sleep for a while.

Jake, my newest grandson, was a precious four-pound, fourteen-ounce miracle of God.