A DISCIPLINED CHRISTIAN HOME: (A W Pinks Life)

A DISCIPLINED CHRISTIAN HOME: (A W Pinks Life)

The Pinks home, besides being Christian, was very strict and disciplined, and the children were

expected to honor God in all their ways. The Sabbath was reverently observed, a practice Pink continued through out his life following his conversion. He later wrote of his early training in Sabbath observance:

“And today the writer is unfeignedly thankful to God that he was brought up in a home where the holy Sabbath was so “strictly”—scripturally—kept. The day began by our father reading to us God’s Word. In the morning the family attended preaching service. In the afternoon father and mother read to us out of spiritual books. Quite a liitle of the time was spent in the singing of the hymns…And our father was not a preacher.”

Pink says further in this comment that no business letters were ever opened in his home as a child on the Sabbath, and neither were Sunday newspapers ever allowed. Besides that, all toys were put away on Saturday night, and pictorial editions of Bunyans pilgrim progress and other spiritual books replaced them.

Pink never expressed sorrow over this early strict life and training. Rather he often spoke of this early parental and family influence with praise to God. In one instance he listed all he had to praise God for, and he included his godly parents who cared for him in infancy and trained him in the way he should go spiritually. When speaking of the story of Joseph, he said that the story was “indelibly impressed” on his memory from his mother’s knee and from the lips of his Sunday school teacher. He refers elsewhere to some lines of poetry taught to him by his mother, lines that search the heart deeply and stayed with him down through the years.

Those lines were:

I often say my prayers

But do I every pray?

And do the wishes of my heart

Go with the words I say?

I may as well kneel down 

And worship gods of stone

As offer to the living God

A prayer of words alone.

Quite obviously the Pinks took being Christians very seriously. Bible teaching in the home, strict Sabbath observance, searching honestly before God in prayer, and no doubt, full respect for the demands of Gods word in lifestyle and holiness of life. The children were expected to behave to respect their elders and to be disciplined in their lives. Failure at these points brought punishment mixed with words of admonition and rebuke. The Pinks did reared spoiled brats, as can be seen from comments made by Pink some years later as he traveled in the ministry.

“One of the saddest and most tragic features of our twentieth-century "Civilization" is the awful prevalence of disobedience on the part of children to their parents during the days of childhood, and their lack of reverence and respect when they grow up. This is evidenced in many ways, and is general, alas, even in the families of professing Christians. In his extensive travels during the past thirty years the writer has sojourned in a great many homes. The piety and beauty of some of them remain as sacred and fragrant memories, but others of them have left the most painful impressions. Children who are self-willed or spoiled, not only bring themselves into perpetual unhappiness but also inflict discomfort upon all who come into contact with them, and auger, by their conduct, evil things for the days to come.”

Though Pink and his wife never had any children, his convictions concerning the rearing of children were strong and unquestionably in line with his childhood and early training.