I Have a Friend - Jesus

One time I was at a homeschooling conference and went to a vendor group. The guy was selling books that introduced small children to Jesus by taking them through the "steps of salvation." We had his book and I was interested in meeting him and seeing how he used it. At the meeting was a young father who had a little girl who wasn't reading yet. He said, " I try to read your book to my little girl, but she is not interested. She only wants to hear the story of the good Samaritan over and over." The teacher explained that it was good to read the story, but how important it was that the little girl get saved by going through the steps in his book.

I was taken back a number of years when I had questions about how to raise and train my children in the Lord. I remember trying to read a chapter of Romans to kids who were 6, 4, and 2. The most troublesome was my son, the 4-year old. He said what the girls were thinking, "I'm bored. Are we done yet?" I went to God with my problem. I knew I was not there to entertain my children, but the glassy eyes and the fidgeting hands and the plain admission of boredom worried me. "Do I really want them to learn that the Bible is boring?"

God was good to me. He used the form of scripture to teach me an important lesson about teaching my children. A number of years before, I visited with a missionary couple who were home on furlough. Jim and Beverly explained that they were following the Bible format for explaining and teaching God to a people group who had not had any Bible to read. They began with Genesis and the Creator God and moved to the covenant God and the God of Israel. They honored the flow of history in teaching about Jesus more than a particular theology. They did not despise theology, but they found it hard to start with it. I remembered that conversation and tried to be a missionary to my family.

I discovered that both testaments of the Bible begin with a lot of stories. Then there was wisdom and law. Then there was prophecy. It was a really rough understanding, but it got me started right: stories. I found that what my children needed first was to come to know Jesus and all his friends. The Bible characters and their stories were the foundation of our family's Bible education. Suddenly, there were questions instead of boredom. At times they would remind me of our times together when I forgot. They were asking to read the familiar books with pictures and words they could understand.

I once read an article about educational television. They were doing some tests with children and their TV program, monitoring when the kids got up and when they would remain and watch. The main thing that got children bored as they watched was not a lack of special effects or color or excited voices, but simply understanding. When children stopped understanding the show, they got bored. It made me realize that my kid's boredom was not so much about excitement, but about sharing God in an understandable way.

So, stories and appropriate leveled language helped. My interest in learning helped them to learn as well. Theology came naturally through questions. We became students of Jesus and of God by wondering about them and their ways. I realized that the stories kept speaking to me as I learned how to see it as freshly as my children did. The stories laid out the framework where law, wisdom, prophecy, and salvation made sense. Most importantly, Jesus was their Friend before he became their Savior.

This is not strange. Watchman Nee expressed this as the gospel truth. Jesus is a friend to sinners before he is their savior. I have found this truth so helpful and have been able to expand on it as I have been involved with the spiritual formation of my family. We do not come to know Jesus as Savior and Lord apart from knowing him as Teacher and Friend.

I could not resist going and talking to the father of that little girl after that meeting. I told him a little of my story with my children and said, "Keep reading that story over and over and over to your daughter. She will become friends with the people in it and learn to know the story-teller through it. There will be time to see her saved from the corruption in this world, but first she needs to have a friend - Jesus."

Into the Arms of Jesus

From a Spiritual Exercise in the Renovare Institute:


Ask yourself, What breaks my heart that breaks the heart of God? Consider passages of Scripture that talk about what breaks God’s heart. Then consider, What disadvantaged, overlooked person or group of people’s condition do you find heartbreaking?

This morning my heart goes out to children and youth.  For all the attention that both groups seem to receive, I ache when I see how little they learn about God's love.  "Let the little children come to me" are the words of this God.  Childhood and youth are the places where innate trust or distrust of God are formed.

For all the lessons and classes and "education" that our children receive, they ache to see adults who are living as God's children themselves.  I look around and look back on my own childhood experiences and have to agree with Rich Mullins when he sings, "I heard so much of the dribble, it's a wonder I can think."  I was immersed in a world hiding from God.  I see children and youth caught in the same world where the greatest injustice is that they are not taken to the Lord's loving arms.  Actually, they are even prevented from finding him.

For this Jesus said one of his strongest statements.  "If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."  I do not think he was only talking about children and youth, but I think that they were certainly included and even highlighted in the statement.  It is one reason that, even with my own children, I remind them at times not to look to me always, but remember that "God alone is good."  I pray for mercy for where I fail them and for grace for them to find the Lord in their own lives.

So I ache for children and their parents and teachers.  I long for them to know just how serious the responsibility is for letting the children come to Jesus.  If all things were equal, if this world were not what it is, children and youth might "find their way" on their own.  But since the world is a trap, Satan is alive and well, and hearing God and trusting him is not instinctual but sought, acquired, and learned, our children and youth need to hear the words "Let the little children come to me" and they need to see adults running to him as well.  Besides, one of the greatest joys in life is leading little ones into the arms of Jesus.  It reminds me that my place is there as well.

Because I long for the children to come, I find myself teaching them and trying to remind and encourage their parents to do the same.  I long to share not because I have the answers, but because I know how much help children and parents and teachers need to face the obstacles in this present evil age.  We must not lose our focus on the sufficiency of Christ nor the hope that our children can live in that sufficiency.  In comparison to this hope and faith, nothing else matters!  Without it our children are lost as much as we are ourselves.

I say all this to express my concern for those I consider "overlooked."  It is ironic that so much attention can be given to youth and children and yet somehow what is most important be left out.  This speaks about our own hearts more than anything else.  For myself, it speaks to how I raise my family, but also to how I lead or take other children and youth either into Jesus' arms or away from them.  The children are his - consecrated and set apart - I am merely a steward set to watch over them for a short while. 

Can Children Hear from God?

The question really becomes how do children hear from God.  In one way, God is always speaking for those who can hear: "The heavens declare the glory of God. . . day after day they pour forth speech."  (Ps. 19)  Certainly the scriptures are God's word for us.  God's word is always there.  He is speaking.

With my children, I have had to teach them how to distinguish God's voice.  For a long time God's voice came through Dawn and me.  Their consciousness was not fully developed, so they were not aware of their own thoughts, exactly.  Of course, God spoke to them, but they were not fully aware of it in a specific sense.  They seemed to merely live in it by instinct, so to say.

What I mean is that the Creation is constantly interacting with and trusting God, but it does it by instinct.  God made human beings special in that they can choose to interact with and trust God and also be aware of it.  Those are things that other earthly created beings cannot do.  Children seem to start with a somewhat automatic sense of God, but then they come to a place where they must choose such interaction and become conscious of it.

Our fallen nature comes in as a "missing sense."  I read somewhere that being fallen is the fall of our hunger and awareness of God from the highest and most prominent part of ourselves to a place of death and insignificance.  Children, then, have to be taught to nurture that hunger and awareness although it is fallen and weakened by our present condition.  (Kind of like a lifetime of rehab.)

My daughter, Bethany, asked me recently if her dog, Hudson, obeyed God.  I answered, "Always."

She then said, "I wish I was like Hudson."

I said, "That's good, but Hudson is not aware of God; he just obeys out of instinct.  God has given us the gift and responsibility of having to choose to obey and being aware of that choice.  That's an important part of love."

She said, "Oh, then, I am glad I am not like Hudson."

"Me too," I said, "you'd be too fuzzy."

Kids are great.