Mothers, don’t let anyone ever dupe you into thinking there’s anything ignoble or disgraceful about remaining at home and raising your family. Don’t buy the lie that you’re repressed if you’re a worker in the home instead of in the world’s workplace. Devoting yourself fully to your role as wife and mother is not repression; it is true liberation. Multitudes of women have bought the world’s lie, put on a suit, picked up a briefcase, dropped their children off for someone else to raise, and gone into the workplace, only to realize after fifteen years that they and their children have a hollow void in their hearts. Many such career women now say they wish they had devoted themselves to motherhood and the home instead.
John MacArthur
Successful Christian Parenting, 1998, p. 195
Family J.R. Miller Pg.65-66
But it should be understood that for every wife the first duty is the making and keeping of her own home. Her first and best work should be done there, and till it is well done she has no right to go outside to take up other duties. She is to be a “worker at home.” She must look upon her home as the one spot on earth for which she alone is responsible, and which she must cultivate well for God if she never does anything outside. For her Father’s business is not attending Dorcas societies and missionary meetings, and mother’s meetings, and temperance conventions, or even teaching a Sunday-school class, until she has made her own home all the her wisest thought and best skill can make it. There have been wives who in their zeal for Christ’s work outside have neglected Christ’s work inside their own doors. They have had eyes and hearts for human need and human sorrow in the broad fields lying far out, but neither eye nor heart for the work of love lain about their own feet. The result has been that while they were doing angelic work in the lanes and streets, the angels were mourning over their neglected duties within the hallowed walls of their own homes. While they were winning a place in the hearts of the poor or the sick or the orphan, they were losing their rightful place in the hearts of their own household. Let it be remembered that Christ’s work in the home is the first that he gives every wife, and that no amount of consecrated activities in other spheres will atone in this world or the next for neglect or failure there.
When you cook nutritious, tasty meals for your family, you are pointing them to the One who feeds the hungry and who satisfies thirsty souls with Himself. You’re giving them an appetite for Him.
And when you go to the time and effort to be sure that your husband and your kids have adequate clothing that fits, you are pointing them toward the One who clothes us with His righteousness.
See, every aspect of homemaking is meant to reflect some spiritual, eternal truth that we’re trying to picture to our world.
When you maintain a clean home, an orderly home, you’re creating an atmosphere where your family can appreciate the value of being spiritually clean, cleansed from sin, and of having lives that are spiritually ordered. You’re teaching; you’re training not just to be clean and orderly because that is not a supreme, ultimate eternal virtue. It’s pointing them to virtues that are supreme and eternal. As you are homemaking what you are doing is creating a taste for our ultimate home in heaven.
We’re talking about homes that reflect the glory of God, the beauty of Christ, and that are havens and greenhouses and places where life can be cultivated and where people can grow and become like Christ and where the gospel can be manifested.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
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