Last week we saw that Proverbs 31 leaves us with a
powerful picture of the impact a homemaker with a vision of the kingdom of God will have through her home by exercising her gifts, abilities and business skills in the community around her.
What does she really want to do? What is she gifted to do? As we have seen. the possibilities, within the context of the home and her submission to her husband, are endless if she has the initiative to follow her dream.
For example, a homemaker who loves to extend hospitality and does so very naturally has at her disposal a God-given tool to bring the kingdom into her home by using it to touch the needy she naturally encounters with the love and provision of God.
Some time ago, within one three-year period a family in our church made their home a “home” to the following “displaced persons” by temporarily taking them in to live: a newly married couple with a baby who were starting a new business and could not afford rent (5 months); a single young man who came into our church as a new Christian, with no Christian background, and no understanding of the Christian life or what a Christian family could be (3 months); some old friends (their age) who had recently moved to their city and needed a place to stay while going through the transition to a new location (6 months); their son, his wife and three young girls, all under 6, who had just moved there as well (2 months). Finally, a single man who was estranged from his wife resided with them for several months as he pursued the healing necessary to restore his marriage.
Each of these instances represented ministry to the needy, in the domain of the homemaker, in some way or other that would have been very difficult if not impossible, if the wife had not been a full-time homemaker. They did so without any effort to “extend hospitality” or “have a ministry.” The Lord’s Prayer was answered as this homemaker’s home entered “the kingdom of God” for five families who were each experiencing a time of crisis.
Not everyone can open their home in this way because of space limitations or because of family needs. This family had the room, and their children were either grown and gone, or almost grown, and the need for private family time was not so great. The idea is not to do what they did, because every family is different, but to grasp the vision that their own home is already a dynamic source of ministry where the life and vision of the kingdom of God is being experienced by everyone who lives there.
Can you see that a home with an on-site homemaker, filled with the Holy Spirit, producing His fruit in her home (love, joy. peace, etc.), is the source of a dynamic “river of living water” to all who enter there? However, this is much more difficult, if not practically impossible,if she has listened to the siren call of the world to choose a life of independence and rejection of her calling to be a helpmate for her husband. She is told, instead, “If you want a life of real fulfillment, you must have a career outside the home and give your days to being the helpmate of another man whom you don’t love and who is not your husband!”
It is my firm conviction that God has placed in every woman’s heart 1.), a desire to give herself unreservedly to a man who loves her with all his heart with agape love, and then 2.), to make a home for him and their children. This is how she fulfills the purpose for which she was created—to reflect God’s image, to rule over the earth and to reproduce. The following article, written by a 36 year-old homemaker, expresses that idea and the fulfillment that follows as beautifully as I have ever read.
