What Difference Does Jesus Make in Raising Children?

Children. That is the object lesson Jesus uses in this passage this morning.

And he has some pretty strong feelings about the subject, even talks a little fire and brimstone. We don’t think of Jesus as someone who talks hell and damnation, but he does when it comes to the little ones. We don’t think of Jesus as someone who gets angry, but he gets angry here.

In other words, this is important. “Let the little children come to me,” he demands, not only for their welfare but also for ours.

Mark 9:33-37, 42-50; 10:13-16

Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs… And Jesus took the little ones up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

One of the singles in my previous church said that after her husband died, her 13 year old daughter was hell-bent on getting pregnant, doing drugs, running away, and other things that would put her life in danger. She sat her down for a serious chat.

“I gave her my wedding ring to wear,” she told me, “so that wherever she went she would know that I loved her. She is now in her twenties – still wearing my wedding ring. She claims that there were several times that that ring saved her life.”

I must admit, I am in awe of you parents, how you agonize and struggle and sacrifice to love and raise your children. I know that even the best among you feels like a failure. I have heard some of you say that you are telling your children that you are paying into a fund for their therapy later when they are recovering from your parenting.

Your true calling however is not to be the perfect parent. Your true calling is to bring your children to Jesus. Only he is perfect in his loving. He is the only one who is able to fulfill that wedding ring promise. He is the only one who is there to love and protect and provide for your children no matter what.

Isn’t this why we bring our children for baptism? We want the fullness of blessing for them, and it is in his arms that they find it.

When we baptize infants there are three questions that we ask, beginning with the parents: “Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and your Savior? Do you intend to raise your child to be his disciple, obey his word and show his love?” It starts with you and what you believe and what you do, because you certainly aren’t going to pass on anything to your children that you don’t believe in yourself.

My friend, Ellen Steele, is the mother of two young children. She and her husband are ministers in San Jose, and she is a trained Marriage & Family Counselor. I was talking to her about what she has learned in parenting. She has discovered that children are taught discipleship mostly by the little things that their parents do every day, more than from Sunday School (as important as that is). It’s when she and her husband point out where Jesus is at work in their day, that’s what most shapes their faith.

She gave me an illustration. Recently they explained to their 6 year old, Jonathan, how money is kind of tight and this would change how they would be celebrating his little sister’s birthday. Right after that conversation they were all out in the garage rummaging around, when a little plastic recipe box fell off an upper shelf and literally hit her husband on the head. When they opened it up, they were surprised to find twenty-three $20 dollar bills wadded up inside that had been hidden and stored away and forgotten years ago.

Jonathan saw all this but at that point, in Ellen’s words, “the whole experience was ‘value neutral’ until we explained to him that ‘This was a God-thing!’” To which Jonathan responded, “Don’t we need to give some of it to the church?” (This is why we need children.)

Day to day, it’s the little things that most effectively bring your children to Jesus. Of course that kind of daily processing is dependent on your own relationship with Christ. You can’t help your children do what you aren’t doing yourself.

There was a little girl who kept asking her father questions. “Why do birds build nests?” The father said, “I don’t know.” “Why do cows have horns?” “I don’t know.” “Where does the sun come from?” “I don’t know.” Finally the little girl said, “Daddy, does it bother you that I ask so many questions?” He said, “No, honey, how else are you going to learn?”

You aren’t supposed to have all the answers. When you answer those baptismal questions: Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? Will you raise your child to be his disciple, obey his word and show his love? That does not mean you have all the answers. But it does mean that you are looking to the One who does. It does mean that you are Jesus’ disciple and are dependent on him for everything. And so you read the bible stories together with your children; you look to God together in prayer.

This is especially important when your children are young, Ellen said, and are greatly influenced by you. When they are teenagers they aren’t looking to you anymore to answer their questions, but their peers. At that point your parenting helps them seek out friends and influences that will lead them to Jesus. But this will happen only if your priority in your own life is to seek first the kingdom of God.

There was a little boy named Jason whose baby brother was baptized in church one day. After the service as they were driving home Jason sobbed all the way in the back seat of the car. His parents asked him three times what was wrong. Finally, he said, “That preacher said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, and I said I wanted to stay with you guys.”

That certainly begs the question! How are you doing with discipleship in your home? Are your children growing up in a Christian home? What are the priorities in your life? Do you really believe that your children will be fully blessed only in the arms of Jesus?

There are strong pressures and values around us that would convince us otherwise: that your children will only be fully blessed if they excel in school, excel in sports, get into the right colleges and get high paying jobs. Those things can have value, but what comes first? Are we helping our children come to Jesus, or without even knowing it or intending to, are we hindering them?

The third question in baptism is to the larger church.

I have been impressed with the significance of you grandparents and God-parents, you adopted grandparents and mentors and teachers and advisors. Parents can’t do the job alone, can they? They are not supposed to. Many households don’t have two parents who are committed to bringing their children to Jesus Christ, and that makes it really hard for these kids. But they have God-parents or grandparents or neighbors or a church family who are committed, like you. Jesus uses all of us, the whole community, to bring the little children to him.

It can be in the little things you do everyday. Maybe it’s the kind of birthday gift you give or the Christian music you play. Maybe it’s getting them to the Third Grade Bible Class or encouraging them to go to summer camp or VBS.

What about assisting in our Sunday School? Where else will children be schooled in the faith? In the private Christian schools? No. Christian education is our job. It’s the church’s job.

By the way, Trinity is the kind of church that ‘home schools’ our children in Christian faith. We are not a large church that hires professionals to teach our children for us. Camala is hired to help all of you teach our children. We do it ourselves out of our own intimate knowledge of the children we baptize.

It’s not just parents who should be concerned about this, but all of us, the whole church. Like our elder for Children’s Ministries, Pam Daniels, who does not have children of her own, but the church’s children are her children. And they are yours and mine too. You all answered that question. What gifts do you have to help bring our children to Jesus?

And it’s not just our own children that Jesus wants us to care about, is it? But the ones most at risk around the world, through sponsoring a family in Romania, or addressing the AIDS pandemic in Malawi, which orphans thousands every day.

What can I do? You may wonder. I am too old. I am not good with kids. You can pray. It is one of the most powerful ways we bring our children to Jesus.

I remember my mother lamenting the sixties when most of her seven children were high on drugs and beyond her ability to control them. She was out of her league, in over her head. All that she could do, she said later, was pray, which was no small thing. I think we are all alive and growing in our faith today because of her prayers.

Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

This is important, not only for their sake, but for ours. We need little children to understand the way of discipleship. Our children desperately need Jesus. And we need the children to figure out how to get to Jesus. That’s how our passage begins.

Jesus had just taught the disciples about where he was headed, down the path of humility and vulnerability and the lowest kind of death of all time. Then his disciples immediately launched into an argument among themselves about who was the greatest. When Jesus asked them what they were talking about ‘on the way,’ they fell silent because something told them they were off track. In order to illustrate just how off track they were, Jesus placed a little child right in the middle of them.

In those days children weren’t so much adored as they were ignored. The infant mortality rate was high; they had lots of babies, and children were pretty much non-entities until they became adults.

So, he placed this non-entity with no status and no legal rights – this vulnerable, helpless little one – right in front of them and taught them about the way to his kingdom. “You want to be great? Be like this. You want to be first? Be like this. You want to enter the kingdom? Be like this? You want to know me? You want to know the One who sent me? Be like this!” End of lesson.

Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

Children and discipleship -- so important! Not only because they need Jesus, but because we need them to know how to get to Jesus. Why is that true?

Perhaps because they are so honest. They have not yet learned to cover over their feelings, but they tell it like it is. Frederick Buechner puts it this way:

But for Jesus in his day, there is an even greater reason. It is their helplessness, their vulnerability, their dependence (empty hands) that show us the way to Jesus.

Friends, we can think we are on the way with Jesus, like his disciples were ‘on the way’ with him, but they didn’t get what that ‘way’ was, just like we don’t really get Lent. They needed a little child in their midst to help them avoid taking the popular road to greatness, instead of taking Jesus’ self-emptying road to the cross.

Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. And Jesus took the little ones up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.