Topic: Joseph – A Model Dad – Discover the Book by Dr John Barnett  11 September 2022

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Joseph – A Model Dad

The key to Joseph’s parenting was that he led his family to worship God. It was nothing spectacular; nothing superhuman; just regular and consistent. But the results were extraordinary. A modern illustration of this type of consistency can be found in the upbringing of John Paton.

John Paton was a Scottish missionary to the New Hebrides, islands that are today called Vanuatu, located one thousand miles north of New Zealand and four hundred miles west of Fiji.  Paton arrived November 4, 1858, on the island of Tanna at the age of thirty-four, with his wife, Mary Ann.  A son was born February 12, 1859.  “Our island exile filled with joy,” Paton wrote in his autobiography, but “the greatest of sorrows was treading hard upon the heels of that joy!”  First came the fever, then diarrhea, then pneumonia and delirium.  On March 3 Mary died.  “To crown my sorrows, and complete my loneliness, the dear baby boy, whom we had named after her father, Peter Robert Robson, was taken from me after one week’s sickness on the 20th of March.

Paton buried both of them with his own hands and “with ceaseless prayers and tears…claimed that land for God.”  He confessed, “But for Jesus, and the fellowship He vouchsafed me there, I must have gone mad and died beside that lonely grave!

What kind of father prepared John G. Paton for that kind of perseverance — another fifty years of rugged, faithful missionary labor?

Paton’s father, James, was converted at seventeen and immediately convinced his mother and father that the family should have morning and evening prayer together.  Paton writes about his father:

“And so began in his seventeenth year that blessed custom of Family Prayer, morning and evening which my father practiced probably without one single avoidable omission till he lay on his deathbed at seventy-seven years of age…None of us can remember that any day ever passed unhallowed thus; no hurry for market, no rush to business, no arrival of friends or guests, no trouble or sorrow, no joy or excitement, ever prevented at least our kneeling around the family altar, while the High Priest led our prayers to God, and offered himself and his children there.

Also Read: Open Heaven 11 September  2022 Daily Devotional By Pastor E. A. Adeboye – WHEN GOD LAUGHS 

The place of the Lord’s Day was just as crucial in shaping the children in their relation to God and the joy of his fellowship.  Paton writes:

“Our place of worship was the Reformed Presbyterian Church at Dumfries…four miles from our Torthorwald home; but the tradition is that during all these forty years my father was only three times prevented from attending the worship of God…Each of us, from very early days considered it no penalty, but a great joy, to go with our father to the church; the four miles were a treat to our young spirits, the company by the way was a fresh incitement… A few other pious men and women, of the best Evangelical type, went from the same parish…and when these God-fearing peasants ‘foregathered’ on the way to or from the House of God, we youngsters had sometimes rare glimpses of what Christian talk may be and ought to be.  They went to church, full of beautiful expectancy of spirit — their souls were on the outlook for God, and they returned from church, ready and even anxious to exchange ideas as to what they had heard and received of the things of life.”

“There were eleven of us brought up in a home like that; and never one of the eleven, boy or girl, man or woman, has been heard, or ever will be heard, saying that Sabbath was dull or wearisome for us. “

Such was the father and the family that fit John G. Paton to suffer, to survive, and rejoice in the glorious work of the gospel among the cannibalistic tribes of the New Hebrides.

So I ask you, and myself

(1)   Dad, Is your family altar established?  Is there a place and a time for family focus on the Word and prayer that takes priority over less important things?  Do you lead it when ever possible?

(2)   Dads, do you come to corporate worship here at our fellowship with a beautiful expectancy of spirit on the lookout for God?

A great secret of rearing children who endure for fifty years in the New Hebrides is to be a disciplined, Bible-saturated, worshiping, and joyful dad.

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