Notebook Leaflets from the Elmshaven Library, vol. 1

Kindness and Patience

I shall not speak very long this morning, but I want you to carry away with you the few thoughts that I shall suggest. Let it be deeply impressed on your hearts that when you speak angry words to your children, you are helping the cause of the enemy of all righteousness. Let every child have a fair chance from babyhood up. The work of teaching should begin in childhood, not accompanied by harshness and fretting, but in kindness and patience; and this instruction should be continued through all their years to manhood and womanhood. It is the blessed privilege of every Christian parent to reveal the Lord to the child as merciful and good and full of kindness. He will put His Holy Spirit on the children, even though they sometimes make mistakes and do wrong. These children may hear the “Well done” as verily as the older members of the Lord's family. 1NL 87.1

It is not bringing up the children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord to meet their mistakes with anger and chiding, to send them off feeling that you do not care what they do. To manifest passion toward an erring child is to increase the evil. It arouses the worst passion of the child, and leads him to feel that you do not care for him. He reasons with himself that you could not treat him so if you cared. 1NL 87.2

And think you that God takes no cognizance of the way in which these children are corrected? He knows, and He knows also what might be the blessed results if the work of correction were done in a way to win rather than to repel. 1NL 87.3