Repetition can be helpful, and repetition can be hurtful.
Repetition can be helpful: Probably everybody has heard the adage that “repetition aids learning.” Go all the way back to old school, elementary, kindergarten. You have to memorize the alphabet. You hear it over and over. Back in my day—I don’t know if they still do this—but you’d have a card that would have your multiplication table on it, and you had to memorize that.
You get a little older, and you start reading your notes over and over and over, getting ready for that final exam in high school or college. In music, you have to repeat things. If you’re a drummer, you practice what’s called “the rudiments” so that you can play them easily every time. If you are an instrumentalist or vocalist, you practice your scales over and over and over.
Even in relationships, we do repetition. Families tell the same stories every Christmas or every holiday when they get together. Or when you’re introducing a friend to someone new, you repeat that classic antidote that you’ve told about them who knows how many times. Repetition can be helpful.
Repetitions can be hurtful: Those same things—like we do an exercise, you have to get your reps in—those same reps, or the same practice in music, can cause tendon issues or soreness or pain. Memorizing those facts in elementary school becomes a little bit monotonous and boring.
Family stories remain funny for some people. I joke that Rebecca used to think I was funny. There was a time when, for Rebecca, I was hilarious. But she’s had to put up with my material for 30 years, and year by year, I’ve become less and less funny.
Repetition can be helpful; repetition can be hurtful.
The gospels of Jesus utilize repetition at a high rate. It’s helpful to hear these repeated stories about Jesus to get to know him, but I think (and hopefully I’m not alone here), sometimes after you read those same stories over and over throughout your life, they can become familiar, normal, and sometimes—if we’re honest—boring.
If you think about it, we actually have very few stories about Jesus compared to his entire life. And of those few stories, many of them are repeated in the Gospels over and over, so much so that I want you to see it.
I want to see how much repetition happens in such a short period of time in Jesus’s life, so we’re going to go old school and use a bar graph. At the bottom, you’re going to notice I’ve divided Jesus’s life into four periods: 0-12 years old, 13-30, 30-33, and then Passion Week (the last week of Jesus’s life). On the left, we’re going to say what percentage of the Gospels that era of Jesus’s life takes up.
For instance, from 0-12, that’s only 5% of all of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). It’s only five percent. But of that 5%, all the same stories are repeated: the genealogy, the nativity, the wise men, the temple scene when Jesus is 12. And only Matthew and Luke share those stories.
From 13-30, we have zero — zero stories of Jesus when he’s that age in the Gospels.
I’m going to skip to the Passion Week, the last week of his life. That’s 35% of the Gospels. Think about that: 35% of the stories about Jesus are about the last seven days of his life. In those seven days, the stories are repeated among all the gospel writers in one form or another: the crucifixion, resurrection, trial, and the last supper.
If you’re good at math, you know there’s 60% left from 30-33. And guess what? In that 60%, there are repeated stories all over the place. So I did a little research. Here are the top 10 repeated stories about Jesus from 30-33.
The top 10: Number one, the feeding of the 5,000 (the miracle). Number two, Jesus’s baptism. Number three, the call of the first disciples. Four, Jesus calms the storm. Five, Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah. Six, transfiguration. Seven, cleansing of the temple. Eight, Jesus blessing children. Nine, parable of the sower. Ten, healing of the paralytic.
If we look at those top ten and we try to categorize them… You have numbers one, four, and ten that are these demonstrations of divine miraculous power. They’re amazing stories. Numbers two, five, six, and seven are these great theological moments in the life of Jesus. These moments in Christ’s life have a lot to do with who he is and what we believe about him. Numbers three and nine describe how the kingdom affects people and the type of people Jesus invites into his kingdom.
Then we have number eight: Jesus blessing children. The Spirit of God, for us to know who Jesus is, decided that how Jesus interacted with kids was top-tier information. If you want to know who Jesus is, and here are his top 10 repeated stories in the Gospels, one of those says you have to know how Jesus interacts with kids. If you don’t know that, you really don’t even know him. We have to know this part about who Jesus is.
With so few unique stories about Jesus, those that are repeated are like exclamation points describing and emphasizing who he is. Repeated stories take up space where another unique story of Jesus could have been told. After all, at the end of John’s gospel, he writes this:
“Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).
Unique stories about Jesus abounded. The repeated stories that we have in the Gospels are not due to a lack of content. They’re meant to emphasize who Jesus is. They’re the stories the Spirit gave us over and over to understand who Jesus is.
With all of that in our brains, let’s listen one more time to Jesus’s interaction with children in Matthew 19.
“Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people, but Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.’ And he laid his hands on them and went away” (Matthew 19:13-15).
To understand today’s text, we don’t have to sort through a lot of cultural lore, Old Testament allusions, or complicated words in the Greek. It’s pretty much right in our face. The big idea of this passage is “the kingdom of heaven is kid friendly.” The kingdom of heaven is kid friendly.
Jesus shows us this big idea, and he tells us this idea, which, if you remember (if you’ve been with us through a lot of Matthew), that’s very Matthew-like. He records Jesus showing things and telling things. So Jesus, first, shows us that the kingdom of heaven is kid friendly. How does he do it?
1. Jesus lived an approachable life.
Having a rabbi pray over a child was not unique to Jesus at this point in history, but we have to observe that Jesus was an approachable person for people he probably didn’t know. Most parents don’t just give their kid to anybody on the street to pray for. It’s not really protective, and that’s part of our job, but for Jesus, this rabbi, he seemed to be a safe leader for these people.
2. Jesus publicly rebuked non-kid-friendly behavior.
That’s how he shows us that the kingdom is kid friendly. He rebukes this type of behavior.
As parents approached Jesus, the disciples stepped in and rebuked them. They made it crystal clear, “We’re not doing this right now. We’re not praying for your kids right now. He can’t do that.” They made it known.
I think the disciples would have been really wise to ask Jesus his thoughts on what he wanted to do, but they made an executive decision to manage his calendar. We’re not given a reason why the disciples did this, and I want to be charitable.
For me, I think the best answer I can give is that the disciples unwisely tried to steward Jesus’s schedule. What’s Jesus going to invest his time in? They thought that was their job, and the parental prayer request was a time detour they didn’t think was important. Praying for children didn’t warrant blocking off time on Jesus’s calendar.
If you think about it—again, trying to be charitable—with that time, Jesus could have written another Sermon on the Mount and preached. He could have gone into another synagogue and city and healed everybody who came to him with a disease. He could’ve done another moment where he went toe-to-toe with the Pharisees and showed them their religiosity.
There were great things Jesus could have done, and that’s where the disciples thought Jesus should invest his time. Not praying over some snotty-nosed toddler.
But what’s amazing is the Spirit records these stories more than once, and we immediately get the idea that this wasn’t a time detour for Jesus. This was the mission. This was part of his ministry plan.
Mark, in his account of this story, provides us with a unique detail: Jesus’s reaction to the disciples managing his calendar. Mark says this:
“And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it [the rebuking], he was indignant…” (Mark 10:13-14a)
Jesus’s response to their limiting prayer time for kids was grieved anger. Jesus, angry? Yep. Now his anger was displayed in a holy way compared to mine, but we have to get comfortable with the fact that Jesus got angry, and he did it in the New Testament more than once.
When the temple became a place of profit and deceit rather than worship, Jesus got angry, took a whip, cleaned out the tables, and made space for prayer.
When Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees walked in, and their reaction was to get angry at Jesus because he healed on the wrong day, Jesus got angry at their hardness of hearts.
In this moment, when they bring kids to Jesus so that he can pray for them, and they try to limit that ministry, Jesus gets angry.
Jesus is a king who gets angry when worship is destroyed, when religion is more important than kindness, and when anyone tries to prevent children from coming to him for prayer. Put yourself in the moment. This is why I love narratives, the story. Put yourself in this moment:
This morning, we had a child dedication. Clark came down here and led prayer over people. Imagine the social awkwardness of the moment if I would have stood up from over there and interrupted.
Parents are coming up to Clark, we’re about to pray, and I’m like, “Hold, stop, we are not doing this. We don’t have time for this. This isn’t profitable. There are better things we could do. I could preach a longer sermon. That would be better.” It would be so awkward. As a parent, you would feel—in some ways—shamed, like you’re trying to do something wrong.
Now, imagine what it would feel like as the parent when Jesus, this famous traveling, touring, knowing, amazing, teaching rabbi, publicly rebukes his disciple in anger and allows you to come forward for prayer. You’d realize there’s a King who loves your kids, and that’s a king worth following. Jesus is a King who loves kids, and that’s a king worth following.
How else did Jesus show us his kingdom is kid-friendly?
Last thing, Jesus lived kid friendly. Or you could describe it, Jesus lived kid aware. Jesus and his ministry were not at all distanced from children. There are a couple of ways in which he did this. Here are a few highlights:
One, there’s this interesting moment where Jesus knew kids’ games. He describes a kids’ game and uses it as an illustration to speak to the Pharisees. Jesus brought kids forward to teach adults lessons.
I find this one fascinating: Jesus didn’t discriminate in his interactions with children based on their age. In Luke, it says they brought “even infants” to Jesus.
In my experience (this is my experience culturally), sometimes there’s this idea of dads describing that they’re not really so much into the infant stage. They’re waiting for that kid to get a little bit older, where they interact, and you can kind of have fun with the kid and do and be with the kid.
Jesus was all in on the infant stage when it came to ministering to kids. Even infants, the rabbi took care of them.
Jesus physically interacted with kids in a safe way. He picked them up. He put his hand on their heads. He prayed for them. And maybe most dramatically, Jesus raised a girl from the dead.
Jesus lived aware of children. It was part of his aura; it’s part of what he did.
Later in Matthew — I’m going to steal from a story about Jesus and children that we’ll get to later, Matthew 21. What’s amazing about Matthew 21 is now we get to see children’s view of Jesus. Not how Jesus interacts with children, but what they think about him. So Jesus cleanses the temple (whip, tables flipped over, cleans house), and then this is what happens:
“But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that [Jesus] did—”
So that’s the first thing they saw, what Jesus did. The second thing they say was this:
“…and children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ [when they saw that, the Pharisees] were indignant, and they said to [Jesus], ‘Do you hear what these kids are saying?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Yes; have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” (Matthew 21:15-16)
In the middle of the temple, you have a volunteer kids’ choir who’ve come together to sing about Jesus, “Hosanna to the son of David!” Save us, son of David. The children got it. The children proclaimed who Jesus was in very clear terms. “Save us, Messiah,” “Save us, son of David,” the forever and ever king. They got it. The religious elite missed it. The kids loved Jesus. They sang about him in the middle of the temple when he was alive.
Jesus shows us that his kingdom is kid friendly.
Jesus also tells us his kingdom is kid-friendly; he flat-out states it: “Let the little children come to me…” Remember, this is in the midst of Jesus being indignant about what his disciples were doing. This is a corrective statement. The disciples thought this: “The kids don’t need to be here.” Jesus is correcting them with these words:
“Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them [don’t you keep the kids from me! Why?], for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14).
It’s theirs. My kingdom, it’s for them too, guys. What are you doing? Don’t limit people from coming to the kingdom. Don’t limit the audience. This is for them.
It’s as if Jesus is saying, “If my actions with me and children didn’t speak loud enough, let me make it crystal clear: The kingdom of heaven is a kid-friendly zone. It’s theirs, they’re welcome. Let them in, let them come to me.” Jesus shows us and tells us that the kingdom of heaven is kid friendly.
So that’s it. That’s the text. That’s the sermon for today. Don’t get too happy, I’m not really done.
I’ve spent a ton of time in these stories about Jesus and children, and so I ask myself the question: If the Spirit of God repeats these interactions of Jesus and children, if we zoom out and take them as a whole, and look at them, and ask the question, “Why is he doing this? Why do we keep seeing Jesus interact with children?” What are takeaways? And how do we respond to Jesus and children?
Takeaway #1: Jesus invites everybody into his kingdom. Our response? We should enter.
In Matthew, do you remember who followed Jesus, who his followers are? It is not a strategic group of good, powerful people. It’s terrible.
You have poor, powerless fishermen. You have a former crooked IRS agent. You have people that you don’t even know who they are, their name is just in there. There’s no story about them whatsoever. There’s nothing that’s of note about them in the New Testament. You have women who were rescued miraculously by Jesus and other women who followed Jesus who, out of their means, provided for him.
It’s this weird conglomeration where it’s like, Jesus is asking followers to follow him, and they bring absolutely nothing to the party. It’s just, “Follow me. I love you, and I love you, and people like you and you.”
Then, when you watch Jesus interact with children, well, now that just throws the whole thing upside down. Especially in a Roman-occupied state, where, at that point, among the Romans, children were legal property and could be disposed of. That doesn’t mean that all Roman parents were bad parents. It just means, in a timeframe, you could legally just dispose of your children. It wasn’t an issue.
Jesus then comes along, redignifies the humanity, the image bearing of all of these little ones (even infants), and says, “No, no, no, no, these are kingdom people. These are the types of people I want following me. The children’s choir at the temple? That’s my kind of people. That’s kingdom people. Don’t you limit them.”
Jesus invites everybody: male, female, young, old, employed, unemployed. Race has nothing to do with it. Culture, ethnicity… Jesus’s kingdom invitation is wide open! Everybody in this room, Jesus’s interactions with children declare to you, “Well, if he’s inviting them in, this is a wide-open thing!”
If Jesus is inviting you into his kingdom, enter! Follow him, test him, read the Gospels, and see if this Jesus is actually worth following. I think if you read and discover who Jesus is, you will find out that he is a King, a man, a Savior worth following. I’m putting all my life on him, and I’m pursuing him to the end of my days because that’s somebody I want to be with. These stories of Jesus and children reveal there’s a wide-open invitation to his kingdom.
Takeaway #2: Jesus wants his “little ones” protected. We should obey. We’d better obey.
I’m going to have some friends help me here on this one. Judah and Tim are going to come up, and we’re going to talk about a story from Matthew 18. Judah is a young man, but we’re going to call him a child, not to be unkind to Judah. We love Judah. Tim is not a young man anymore, but he is a follower of Jesus. So we’re going to jump to a story we’ve already talked about in Matthew 18, Jesus and children.
In Matthew 18, you have the disciples who are arguing among themselves, “Who’s the number one disciple? Who’s the best disciple, Jesus? Let us in on it.” And Jesus, to answer that, literally brings a child like Judah right into the middle of his ministry team and says to them, “Well, if you want to enter my kingdom, you have be like a Judah.”
What does that mean? Because I’ve known Judah his whole life. I love Judah. He’s a great kid. Judah isn’t perfect. So what does Jesus mean when he says to become like a child? Jesus answers that question. He goes, “You have to humble yourself like a child to enter the kingdom.” What does that mean?
If you think about it, in Judah’s world, he’s completely dependent on Tim and Rachel for everything he has— food, clothes, house, getting around, arriving here. Every bit of care, he’s dependent upon them, and they don’t give him that care because he earns it or works hard or anything that he does. No, they just love him like crazy, and they give him all of that stuff for free because they love him.
So Jesus looks at all of us and says, “To come into my kingdom, be like a Judah. Admit your neediness. You’re not bringing anything to this party. I love you, follow me.”
Jesus then says one of the most mic-drop moments ever. He says this: “If you receive this child, you receive me.” Don’t miss that. There’s a one-to-one relationship between how we receive the Judahs of the world and how we receive Jesus the Christ.
Jesus then goes on and says this: “It’s better off for you to have 38 concrete blocks tied around your neck and I drive you up and throw you into Lake Jocasse than it is for you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin.”
“The little ones who believe in me…” So is Jesus only concerned with children who believe in him? No, of course not. That word “little ones” just means small, “the smalls.” So when Jesus says, “I don’t want any of the smalls to be caused to sin,” who’s the small person in the middle of the scene? The most obvious one, Judah, or the kid that Jesus brought forward.
So Jesus is saying, “Hey, you don’t cause a little one to sin,” but Jesus is doing two things at the same time. “The little ones who believe in me…” It seems like now Jesus is also saying, “I don’t want you to cause any of my little ones to sin. Don’t you cause a child to sin, but don’t you cause a little one, a vulnerable one, a weak one to sin either.” It’s a double warning. We are called to protect the Judahs, and we are called to protect the Tims, and we better obey. Can we thank these guys for helping me out?
Protecting little ones is a big deal to Jesus. We should protect the Judahs of this world.
In very practical terms, that’s why at North Hills, we are so active in the realm of child safety here at church. I really believe it would be a missed opportunity and unwise not to share with you how we, as a people, when we gather, try to protect the Judahs—both those who are younger than Judah and older than Judah—because here, a child is anyone under the age of 18.
In the past 11 years or so, we’ve had 1,390 people attend our Safe and Sound training classes. This is meant to provide a general overview of the reality and responsibility we have in keeping children safe.
To serve with our children, as Ruthie mentioned earlier, to serve with children here, you have to be a member for six months, have a background check, and provide references we actually contact. You have to do online training, live training, and departmental training.
We conduct age-appropriate training classes for our children, equipping them to be safe.
We continue to look for the best child safety practices, having last summer finished a two-year review of every policy document and correspondence we use in our child safety process. As of last fall, all of those policies are publicly available on the student ministry page and the children’s page of our website.
As we went through that review, we interacted with our local child advocacy center, the Julie Valentine Center, to receive their feedback. And due to your generosity in last year’s harvest offering, we have contracted with a non-profit group called GRACE.
In their own words, GRACE exists to “equip the church with a vision for authentic community, where responsibility, accountability, and compassion are second nature and caring for children is non-negotiable.”
With decades of practical legal and counseling experience, GRACE will review all of those documents that we created, all of our processes. They’ll provide two live trainings, and we will invite everybody to one of them. Lord willing, we’ll get a giant crowd here for that. They’ll also do a building safety review.
Friends, one of the best parts about gaining their knowledge is this: I can, with complete transparency, say we’re not doing this because of a situation we’re walking through. Rather, we’re doing it because we don’t know what we don’t know. So we’re going to partner with wiser, more experienced believers in the realm of child safety to gain more information and wisdom on how to better keep kids safe. Because how we receive the Judahs is a demonstration of how we receive Jesus himself. We should obey and protect the little ones like Judah.
One of the other things we gain from looking at these stories with Jesus and children is that we should obey Jesus and protect the “little ones,” the Tims. This is so kind of Christian basics 101. How we treat each other matters.
I’m not sure, in my time in the Word, I have ever taken that warning about the 38 concrete blocks and being thrown into Lake Jocassee to describe how I interact with other followers of Jesus. If I cause another follower of Jesus to sin, I’m better off underwater. In the words of Hebrews, our calling is to “stir one another up to love and good works.” That’s the most basic idea of being a believer.
When we interact, after you hang out with me, hopefully you leave going, “Okay, I’m going to love some people, and I’m going to do some good things.” That’s fundamental Christianity. That is what we do. I don’t want people leaving interaction with me, and then they go and sin. So friends, and I’m speaking to me and you, we have to take warning: Our impact on the lives of each other, of Jesus’s “little ones,” matters.
Takeaway #3: Jesus views his followers as children. We should embrace being little children.
Jesus hints at this in Matthew 18, but John records for us this moment where Jesus outright says it. In John 13:33, Jesus is getting ready to tell his disciples that he’s going to leave them. “I’m about to go, guys,” and this is how Jesus addresses them:
“Little children, yet a little while I am with you” (John 13:33a).
It would be odd for me to be called a “little child” at 52-53 years old, 265 pounds. It would be an odd experience…unless it’s Jesus. “Little children, little children.” Jesus saw us (his followers and us) through that lens of being his children.
So my question is, how often do we remind ourselves of that reality? How often are we purposely in the mindset of, “Jesus, the Father, the Spirit— they see me as a little child.” The little children.
A way to define “little children” for us— What does that mean? What does it mean to be one of God’s little children? It’s this: Little children are the humble, dependent, and vulnerable who follow Jesus in faith while being fiercely treasured by God. That’s what we get to embrace every day.
If you ask me, “Ryan, what does it mean to embrace being a child?” It’s this: Embrace being humble, dependent, and vulnerable while we follow Jesus in faith, knowing that we’re fiercely treasured by God. That’s what it means to be a child.
Jesus welcomes me as a child, protects me as a child, provides for me as a child, trains me like a child, and he’s patient with me like a child.
We can’t say it enough: As little children, I’m not bringing anything into the equation to make it better, to make Jesus really love me this time, or really look at me as a child this time. He demonstrates that to me through his life, death, burial, resurrection, present intercession, and his future coming that I am and will be always one of his children. The God-man, the forever and ever King of the world, when he thinks of Ryan — “My little children.” That’s a king worth following.
Jesus says, you have to become like a child to enter the kingdom, and you have to be a child as you live in the kingdom. We don’t stop being children. We grow up, we mature, of course, but that idea of Jesus and the Father and we’re his children — I think it has to permeate everything.
That identity that Jesus placed on his followers deeply impacted them. The reason I can say that is they started borrowing Jesus’s language of children and using it to each other, to the people that they impacted all over the place. Here’s a sampling of what happens with this word “children” moving forward. It becomes a primary identity of followers of Jesus. Paul, who met Jesus face-to-face, writes this to the church in Corinth:
“I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children” (1 Corinthians 4:14).
To the church of Galatia,
“…my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!” (Galatians 4:19) He takes on the metaphor of being their mom.
To the Ephesians,
“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Ephesians 5:1).
To the Thessalonians,
“For you know how, like a father with his children—” (1 Thessalonians 2:11).
Now he’s stepping into the role of dad.
Peter remembered how Jesus spoke to him and his friends and reminded people in his letter,
“As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance…” (1 Peter 1:14).
Perhaps no one was impacted as much as John, the disciple Jesus loved. This is everywhere in his writing. This is all of the uses in 1 John (listen to what being a child is connected to):
“My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin” (1 John 2:1).
“I write to you, children, because you know the Father” (1 John 2:13).
“And now, little children, abide in him” (1 John 2:28a).
“Little children, let no one deceive you” (1 John 3:7a).
“Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18).
“Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).
And the last line of his letter is,
“Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).
In his third letter, John declares,
“I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 John 1:4).
Jesus viewing his followers as children was so deeply impactful, it became a foundational identity in being a Christian. You’re a child, you’re God’s child. Jesus sees you as a child. God sees you as a child!
On Friday and Saturday, I had this thought pop into my brain, so this is not in your notes. I’m throwing this in there, and I’m going to move fast: If we embrace the identity of a child, so what? What difference does that make? How does it impact me? I want to give you two things.
1. Embrace being a child.
Jesus seeing us as one of his little children transforms the way we pray.
Would you out loud with me just begin the Lord’s Prayer? This is the moment where the disciples said, “Hey, Jesus, teach us how to pray. Tell us how do that.” How does Jesus begin that teaching? What are the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer? Say it out loud, with some energy. Here we go, ready? “Our Father…” Huh. To pray a base understanding of who God is, is that he’s a father and you’re a kid.
I have a grandkid in my life now. She’s in our home, running around, and I’m relearning a lot about that era of life. She’ll be two this summer. She’s awesome. But there is such simplicity when she tells her dad what to do. She doesn’t even really ask yet.
When she’s thirsty, it’s “Juice!” Just juice. When it’s time for food, in her world, that’s called “Eat-eat.” Eat-eat. “Eat-eat! Eat-eat!” You know, “Nana! Nana.” All of these. There’s this simplicity.
She looks at Max through this innocent, humble, vulnerable, dependent lens of, “Of course, you’re going to give me juice. That’s your job. You love me.” She doesn’t have the consciousness of that, but the simplicity is there.
What happens if we, as God’s people, are like “Juice!” “Provide!” “Save my family that doesn’t know you!” “Rescue us from this world that’s so jacked up!” What if we just said, “You said I’m one of your kids, so I don’t have to take prayers and craft them as if my oratory will get you to listen to me.”
The eyes of the Lord search out the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. The Father’s like, “Yeah, talk to me like I’m your dad.” If we embrace being a child, it radically transforms the way we pray.
2. It radically transforms the way we’re trained, the way we’re training.
Again, I’m learning this with a granddaughter in the house. I forgot how many little things you have to do with little ones to kind of make sure — Like, she started to walk, and then she’s got running down now, but she wants to run downhill on our concrete driveway.
So I get in front of her, and I’m kind of doing the blocking, going, “You can’t run yet,” because she’s going to do a digger right on her head, because she doesn’t have the balance yet. I’m training her how to run by limiting or moving in and caring for her in how it happens.
In the book of Hebrews, there’s this moment where the author looks at these struggling, persecuted people, and he cries out this question to them: “Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?” Have you forgotten your identity as children? He goes on, “For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?”
Discipline in our culture is a negative word. “Discipline” literally means train, raise up, teach. What kind of father is God if he doesn’t train us? As we go through life and face various struggles or sufferings, when we go through difficulties, God is there and training us.
If our view of God is not informed by our identity as a beloved child and his identity as Father— Man, that can mess up training. That happens in real lives where, when parents don’t match love with training, it turns into abuse. We have this moment where we have to embrace, “Okay, God is a Father, and I’m a child. Therefore, this is what I’m going through as he trains me.”
Back to the author of Hebrews, he says, “For the Lord disciplines—” The Lord trains the one he loves. God trains you. It transforms the way we walk through life as God walks with us through various circumstances.
He’s a loving Father who’s training me how to make my way down the driveway so that I don’t trip and fall and take a digger. He’s with me, trying to help me understand what it means to be a man who sacrifices himself for his wife and family. He’s trying to transform how I look at money, so he’s training me as I go.
Embracing being a child of God radically transforms the way we view God training us.
I’ve become really thankful that the Spirit of God chose to repeat the stories of Jesus and children. Without them, we can’t know Jesus the way we need to. With them, we see that Jesus is a King worth following. Jesus’s kingdom is kid friendly. Jesus calls us to protect all the little ones. And as followers of Jesus, we have the privilege to declare with confidence and joy, “I’m a child of God.”
If you’re a follower of Jesus, right now, with confidence and joy, you can say, “I am a child of God.” Would you do that with me out loud and with some energy? If you follow Jesus, say, “I’m a child of God.” Amen.
