Genesis 18:19
Question
God trusted Abraham to teach his children “the way of the Lord.” This trust extends to us too.
What can you do, like Abraham, to nuture the “happiness and spiritual safety” of your children, grandchildren, or other members of your family?
Scripture
19 For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment; that the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him.
Genesis 18:19
Quote
At a vulnerable moment in young Nephi’s life, his prophetic future was determined when he said, “I did believe all the words which had been spoken by my father.” At the turning point of the prophet Enos’s life, he said it was “the words which I had often heard my father speak” which prompted one of the great revelations recorded in the Book of Mormon. And sorrowing Alma the Younger, when confronted by the excruciating memory of his sins, “remembered also to have heard [his] father prophesy … concerning the coming of … Jesus Christ, a Son of God, to atone for the sins of the world.” That brief memory, that personal testimony offered by his father at a time when the father may have felt nothing was sinking in, not only saved the spiritual life of this, his son, but changed forever the history of the Book of Mormon people.
Of Abraham, the grand patriarch, God said, “I know him, … he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord.”
I bear my witness…that “great things [will] be required at the hand[s] of [the] fathers,” as the Lord declared to the Prophet Joseph Smith. Surely the greatest of those things will be to have done all they could for the happiness and spiritual safety of the children they are to nurture.
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
Bethene Zetterquist Photography 