Your wife will be like a fruitful vine flourishing within your house, your sons like olive shoots sitting around your table.Your wife will be as a fruitful vine in the innermost parts of your house, your children like olive shoots around your table.Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine, In the innermost parts of thy house; Thy children like olive plants, Round about thy table.
3 sermons cite this verse
VIII. Eighthly, THE BEAUTY OF THE OLIVE TREE OFTEN LIES IN ITS PROGENY. The writer of the 128th Psalm says of the man who fears the Lord and walks in His ways, "Your wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of your house: your children like olive plants round about your table." If you have ever been in the olive groves you must frequently have noticed around the parent olive tree, two, three, four, sometimes as many as eight, ten, or 12 little trees all growing up from the old root—some of them also beginning to bear fruit and standing there ready, when the old tree in the middle is taken away—to do all they can to supply its place. I have occasionally seen an olive tree felled and the white trunk left flat like a table, with several little trees growing all around it—and that sight seemed to bring the text I just quoted very vividly to my mind, "your children like olive plants round about your table." May your children, Beloved, be like young olive trees springing up around your table to bring forth fruit unto God when you have done with fruit-bearing! Or even like the old and young olive trees, may you all be fruitful together! It is to me a very beautiful sight to see a godly man succeeded by gracious sons and daughters. It is a privilege beyond comparison, a delight beyond description to see those whom you have nursed and nurtured come under the nurture and admonition of the Lord and be so taught in His ways as to become true disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ! The aged Apostle John wrote, "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in Truth." Do not you, dear parents, desire this joy for yourselves? I believe you will have it if the dew of the Lord is upon your souls. …
… Happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house. and thy children like olive plants round about thy table. Now folks, that's where it's at. Your wife, your children, the family fellowship right there. There she is clinging to you like a vine, fruitful, luxuriant. There you are providing for the family, eating the labor of your hands. There are your children like olive plants, which are very valuable in the Middle East, having that fellowship. Folks, if people today who are foregoing having children so they can have things would wake up and understand that children don't make a rich man poor, they make a poor man rich. You can't take your riches to heaven. I'm taking my children to heaven. A very wise man, a gifted man, looked back upon his life and asked himself, if I could do it all over again, what would I do with my family? Let me read what he said to you. …
Well, we're talking about contentment. What is contentment? May I give you a definition of contentment? Contentment, here it is, is an inner sufficiency that keeps us at peace in spite of outward circumstances. Now actually in the New Testament the word contentment has the idea of being self-contained. You remember Paul said when he was in that Philippian jail, I've learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content. The idea actually means I'm self-contained. I don't have to look at circumstances to find my peace. When the space shuttle goes up they put everything on board that people are going to need because there's no 7-Eleven in the neighborhood up there. It is self-contained. It has everything on board. Now a Christian, a person who has the Lord Jesus Christ in his or her heart, has that contentment, that self-containment. Now let me say this about contentment, however. Contentment is not complacency. It is not being laid back. It is not being self-satisfied. Many of us need to get busy. …