Faithful Grandparents

By Andrew McChesney

In the evening, after it was too dark to work in the maize field, the Reyneke family gathered around a large kitchen table for supper on their small farmhouse in central South Africa. Father, Mother and their seven boys and four girls ate homegrown food every evening: maize porridge along with potatoes, pumpkin, and meat. Afterward, the children cleared away the dishes, and Father opened his Dutch Bible for family worship.

Image © Pacific Press

On this particular evening, Father opened the Bible to Exodus 20 and read, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work” (Exodus 20:8-10; NKJV).

“Listen,” Father said, puzzled. “It says here, ’Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest.’” The idea of resting on the seventh day was new to him. He and the family had always observed the first day, Sunday, as the Sabbath, but the Bible said otherwise.

Father made a note in the margin of his Bible. Beside the words, “Six days you shall labor,” he wrote, “Plow time.” Beside the words, “On the seventh day you shall rest” he wrote, “Rest time.” The matter was clear to him. His family started keeping the seventh-day Sabbath. Families took notice on the neighboring farms, and soon three of them also were keeping the Sabbath.

Time passed, and a Seventh-day Adventist literature evangelist stopped by the farm and sold Father a little Dutch-language book titled, “God’s Covenant With Man.”

Through the book, Father and Mother learned about the Seventh-day Adventist Church for the first time. They understood that other people also worshiped on the seventh-day Sabbath.

While there is no historical record of Father and Mother joining the Seventh-day Adventist Church, four of their 11 children became Adventists. One of their grandsons is Gideon Reyneke, a pastor who helps oversee mission work in South Africa and 14 other countries as executive secretary of the Southern Africa-Indian Ocean Division.

Gideon said he owes his Adventist heritage to faithful grandparents who simply read the Bible and obeyed it in the 1920s. “We pray that by telling this story from generation to generation, it will yield results and bring many more people to Jesus Christ,” he said.

This quarter’s Thirteenth Sabbath Offering will help spread the gospel in Gideon Reyneke’s home Southern Africa-Indian Ocean Division. Thank you for planning a generous offering.

Produced by the General Conference Office of Adventist Mission. Find more mission stories at adventistmission[dot]org

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Further Thought:

A comparison between the mentality and the behavior of the people and the state of the world before the Flood and that of the people in our days is particularly instructive. To be sure, human wickedness is not a new phenomenon. Look at the parallels between their time and ours.

Image © Stan Myers from GoodSalt.com

“The sins that called for vengeance upon the antediluvian world exist today. The fear of God is banished from the hearts of men, and His law is treated with indifference and contempt. The intense worldliness of that generation is equaled by that of the generation now living … God did not condemn the antediluvians for eating and drinking … Their sin consisted in taking these gifts without gratitude to the Giver, and debasing themselves by indulging appetite without restraint. It was lawful for them to marry. Marriage was in God’s order; it was one of the first institutions which He established. He gave special directions concerning this ordinance, clothing it with sanctity and beauty; but these directions were forgotten, and marriage was perverted and made to minister to passion. A similar condition of things exists now. That which is lawful in itself is carried to excess … Fraud and bribery and theft stalk unrebuked in high places and in low. The issues of the press teem with records of murder … The spirit of anarchy is permeating all nations, and the outbreaks that from time to time excite the horror of the world are but indications of the pent-up fires of passion and lawlessness that, having once escaped control, will fill the earth with woe and desolation. The picture which Inspiration has given of the antediluvian world represents too truly the condition to which modern society is fast hastening. Even now, in the present century, and in professedly Christian lands, there are crimes daily perpetrated as black and terrible as those for which the old-world sinners were destroyed.” — Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, Pages 101, 102.

Discussion Questions:

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