HOME MEETINGS
Read and pray: “Who then is the faithful and prudent slave, whom the master has set over his household slaves, to give them their food at the proper time?” (Matt 24:45)
THE NEED TO COOK AND TO TEACH
In October of 1984 I realized that we needed to have a radical change in our way of meeting and in our way of caring for the saints in the meetings. We have to change. I call the old way the “lazy way.” If food is bought and stored but there is no effort to cook it, this is simply laziness.
Whether a nation is strong or weak depends mainly on its people, its citizens. If there are strong and proper families, surely there will be strong and proper citizens. Then the country is strong. If there are no proper families, it is difficult to have an adequate society.
Families are the real and basic factors for building up society and the nation. To build up a proper and strong family, first we must take care of the meals and, in second place, of the education.
If the wife does not take proper care of the children in these two matters, meals and education, one should not expect this family to be proper. The future of this family will be lamentable. The wife, the mother of the family, must work and cook. You may spend four hours cooking a meal or you may spend ten minutes.
A proper meal is both nutritious and tasty. It also should not be very expensive. These are the principles you need to observe. To do this, you need to labor.
You cannot go to the market and choose the things quickly. As the wife and mother of the family, you need to work a lot. I would like to propose that you take an hour to prepare breakfast. This involves buying, preparing, cooking, and serving.
For lunch you will need an hour and a half, and for dinner at least two hours. Perhaps you will say: “We cannot! We have to go to work, we have to study and do many other things.” The opinion is yours. If you want to kill yourselves gradually, and also your children, such a decision is in your hands. It depends on what you want.
Do you want to have a healthy family? You may argue that you do not have enough hours in the day, but I say: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Young people may cut their hours of sleep from eight to seven hours. Just cut a little, but do not cut the hours for cooking or the hours for eating.
If you cook with very little time and eat very fast, surely you will not have good health. How good you are as wives or mothers is measured by the time you spend cooking. Any unhappiness in a family is due mainly to insufficiency in cooking.
In Christianity, the members of a church are cared for in a lazy way. There is simply not much cooking. I hope that all who take the lead—not only the elders, but all who are concerned for the church, and those who have a sincere interest in the Lord’s recovery, including myself—will get out of the old way.
Since you are the housewives and the mothers in the church, you need to labor in the word and in the teaching (1 Tim 5:17). Paul said that the overseers must be “apt to teach” (1 Tim 3:2). This phrase does not mean to teach casually, but to teach in a habitual way. Apt to teach implies habit, desire, or appetite for teaching. The overseers, the elders in the church, must be such, apt to teach.
In 1 Timothy 5, Paul says that the elders must labor to the point that they cannot work at another job. “Let the elders who take the lead well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in word and teaching” (lit. v. 17).
The double honor includes economic supplementation because they labor so much and are fully occupied with the needs of the church. For a human being to do something, time is needed. If you are completely occupied physically and mentally, you will not be able to do anything else.
“Labor” in this verse is to labor in the word and in the teaching. By this criterion, all the elders are not very diligent. They do not labor much in the Word, and they do not labor adequately in the teaching. The elders are always afraid of being assigned to speak, because speaking is difficult.
However, you need to realize that in our practice of the church life, the speaking of the elders has been to give a message. To give a message is easy, but to care for the church as an elder or to cook a little all the time for the saints is difficult.
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Hymn: Praise the Lord – “In Remembrance of Him”
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