| Devotional Hours with the Bible |
Chapter 6 |
Page 5 |
We have here a beautiful glimpse of the home-life of Jesus from His twelfth year until His thirtieth. He turned quietly away from the temple and went back to Nazareth with Joseph and His mother, and there took and kept the place of a child, obeying His parents and proving in all ways dutiful, reverent, and helpful. He found childhood in a lowly home a place large enough for the exercise of His blessed life. Robert Browning, in one of his poems, represents Gabriel taking the place of a poor boy and working for him at his lowly trade as contentedly as if he had been engaged in the highest service of heaven. But here is something more sublime than even the poet’s fancy: the Son of God Himself working for eighteen years as a carpenter, patiently, sweetly, simply, and without discontent.
Should any true-hearted child, however great his gifts, consider the child-place in the home unworthy, or a place too lowly, or too small for use of his gifts? Canon Farrar says: “A life spent in brushing clothes and washing crockery and sweeping floors — a life which the proud of the earth would have treated as dust under their feet — a life spent at the clerk’s desk, a life spent in the narrow shop, a life spent in the laborer’s hut, may be so ennobled by God’s loving mercy that for the sake of it a king might gladly yield his crown.”
Page 5
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