Brothers and Sisters
I am subscribed to a quarterly publication called the Free Grace Broadcaster. It is self-described as, “a quarterly digest of Christ-centered sermons and articles. Each issue focuses on a different theme. The FGB is useful for personal study, discipleship, family worship, and sermon preparation.” If you do not get this free resource, I highly recommend it.
The latest edition is called Thoughts for Young People, and includes a piece from John Angell James (1785-1859) on the subject of brothers and sisters and how they should act toward one another. We Sat down as a family Sunday evening and I read the whole article. We have four children, one girl and three boys, ranging in age from fourteen to seven. And you could have heard a pin drop as I read the charges that James puts forth to siblings in this piece. Here is an excerpt:
No family can be happy where a right feeling is lacking on the part of brothers and sisters. Nothing can be a substitute for this defect, and it is of great importance that all young people should have this set in a proper light before them. Many households are a constant scene of confusion, a perpetual field of strife, and an affecting spectacle of misery, through the quarrels and ill will of those, who as flesh of each other’s flesh and blood of each other’s blood ought to have towards each other no feeling but that of love. [They ought] to use no words but those of kindness…
The general principles that are to regulate the discharge of these duties and on which indeed they rest are the same in reference to all seasons of life. Love, for instance, is equally necessary whether brothers and sisters are sporting together in the nursery, dwelling together as young men and women beneath the parental roof, or descending the hill of life at the head of separate establishments and families of their own…Children of the same parents who are lacking in love are lacking in the first virtue of a brother and sister…
- from A Help to Domestic Happiness
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