To Whom Do Our Children Belong? (8)

Today we are pleased to share the eighth and final instalment of an important work from Geoff Thomas, “To Whom Do Our Children Belong?”

The first seven are available here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

Geoff was the pastor at Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, for fifty years. He is retired, and the author of many books and articles, having been a frequent speaker at conferences throughout the world. He still preaches at the Chapel he attends in London, as well as travelling extensively to speak in different churches.

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In the previous instalment, it was established that Our Children Belong to God Because He Made Us in His Image.

To Whom Do Our Children Belong?

As Our Children Are Made by God in His Image Then Their Education Must Reflect This

Children will not be educated people unless the epistemology and the ethics taught reflect God our Creator and Judge, the One who would be our Saviour. This education is summarised in Luke’s description of the maturation of Jesus of Nazareth, And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man. (Luke 2:52). Let us consider the necessary ingredients of an education for children who belong to God, and in the following I am indebted again to Principal Macleod for his insights. 

(1) Jesus increased in stature

He grew physically, through infancy, childhood, adolescence and into manhood; Jesus’ growth was not stunted at any stage of his development. Parents can have an enormous impact on their child’s health. The most elementary beginning is teaching a child where their daily bread comes from: a loving heavenly Father. Children recognize this in every grace they hear before meals, and every time they remember the Lord’s Prayer where its first petition is asking God to “give us this day our daily bread.” In other words, God creates a concern for the physical side of life, for our bodies, our health and our food.

We teach children that God expects them to glorify him in their bodies, that they present their very bodies as living sacrifices to God. One day we hope that our children’s bodies will be temples of the Holy Ghost,  that God the Spirit will take up his residence within them, that he will visit them in regenerating power and energy giving them another birth, and that he will make them new creations.

We pray that he will enable them to yield the members of their bodies as instruments of righteousness to God. We long for their strength, stamina, and resilience to be dedicated to God’s glory, and so every parent has a concern for the physical side of his child’s development.  This includes proper nutrition, and being aware of the dangers of obesity and ensuring that children have a healthy, balanced diet. That might be fairly easy to establish as a goal, but implementing it varies from child to child. Yet what is more important than that is to instil into children a certain attitude to their bodies. What is a child’s attitude going to be? Are they going to be ashamed of their body, immodest about it and prudish? Will they be pensive about the body, or pamper it, or discipline it? Will they harm their own body, or the other extreme, idolize it? Will they care for their body?

We are surrounded by hideous influences that say, “If your body has certain appetites and hungers and desires then all that is perfectly natural. Go ahead! Satisfy them! If you like the taste, drink it. If you like the dream world, then smoke it. If you like the buzz, ingest it. If you like the mood, inject it.”  If a person likes it, they are told to do it – and if there are two, they are licensed to do it together. There is no other criterion but your likes. That attitude dominates our relativistic culture, but the word of God stands over such hedonism and indulgence. It says certain experiences might be beautiful to you but self-denial and cross-bearing is more beautiful still. It says, “Glorify God with your bodies. Serve him cheerfully with your energy at every age from the dash of youth to the more sedate pace of old age. Satisfy your bodies in their God-designed functions and you will learn solid joy and lasting pleasure. Maintain purity before marriage and faithfulness within it. You will answer at the judgment day for the deeds done in the body. Make sure your body is the temple of the Spirit.”

Nevertheless, there are many physical and manual skills our children need to acquire, in using their hands and gaining proficiency in basic abilities – even neat handwriting despite much of their written communication being via an electronic device. Every Jewish child learned a trade. Saul of Tarsus learned how to make tents and it became very useful to him as a Christian. He never knew when growing up how indispensable his skill in this trade would prove to be. It kept him alive and independent of anyone’s charity. He never begged. We have lost sight of the advantages of having a manual skill.

All of us live under the shadow of universities and colleges. We mustn’t be intimidated by that. University is not the goal for every child. Eden was not a university; it was a garden. With all his spiritual and mental activity, Adam found delight and expressed himself in manual labour. We are to impress on our children the dignity, importance and necessity of elementary manual skills – home craft, maintenance, gardening, do-it-yourself. John Murray would return every two years to the farm on which he was born by the side of Loch Migdale in Sutherland and soon he would be planting trees, and digging ditches, and herding sheep as he did before he went to fight in the First World War Parents will teach their children such skills, and then they in turn will teach the older generation the newer skills such as operating computers. It is essential these days for men and women to learn computing.

Every child can use his body in the service of his God and Saviour. Let his strength be used first of all in loving his neighbour as himself. Let his dexterity and co-ordination be given in loving God and loving others more and more. Think of a very superior athlete who is also a Christian.  Eric Liddell, who won a gold medal in the 1924 Olympics, was encouraged in his running by another Christian who was his headmaster. In that school the head saw it as a normal part of human development – even indispensable – to take some part in physical education. Eric Liddell’s sister Jenny was portrayed in the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ as a frumpish, disapproving, pursed-lipped opponent of her brother’s running, as if that is the authentic voice of true Christianity, and that Eric’s athletic skills was some kind of aberration and rather dangerous. What a cruel distortion it all is – Jenny actually said, “We were all thrilled about his running.” Of course. Remember the rich Bible imagery of running a race and winning the prize both in the Old Testament and the New. That metaphor would not have been used by the Spirit if athletics were a sinful pursuit. There is only one justification for a man running, or a child playing, and that is that God has given him a body, and beyond that it needs no defence.

I do not need to encourage any Christian to get more involved in playing sport. Today we are surrounded by multitudes who live for sport. They virtually worship sport – this is what they talk about most. These are their heroes; this is how they spend their evenings, watching other men playing football on television or reading about their exploits in the papers. Today the great need is for Christian sportsmen to say, “Sport is not my god; success and winning is not my god. I am not living for football, or rugby or tennis.”

We are informed by the Holy Spirit deeming it sufficiently important for Luke to tell us that God the Son increased in stature. In his strength, co-ordination, balance, manual skills and dexterity he developed. He was a useful assistant to Joseph in the carpenter’s shop. He had remarkable physical energy and endurance later on during those years of his ministry. He could travel, and preach for hours, while having no home to retire to at the end of the day for rest and seclusion, not even a cubby hole he could call his own. He would rise early to pray and stay awake late at night, and heal at much cost to himself when virtue went out of him so that though he was super-strong he was often exhausted. There was one occasion when he slept on a little pillow on the hard planks of a fishing boat in a storm. But he was able to do all that he needed to do, and finish every task he was given, for our strong young Saviour had a right attitude to his own body, and that wholesome Biblical attitude must be ours too.

(2) Jesus increased in wisdom.

Jesus’ mind grew, there was intellectual development, and there was an increase in understanding and comprehension. He asked “Why?” and his father and mother explained things to him. He resolutely gathered information, he made the connections, and his vocabulary grew. The body of factual knowledge in his possession increased. He learned about himself, about his whole environment, about his history and about the background of his own nation. He learned more and more about the contents of the word of God – the mind of our Lord was absolutely saturated in Scripture. You remember what we are told of Timothy, that from a child he knew the Holy Scriptures. Jesus was like that. How can a young man cleanse his way? It is by taking heed to God’s Word. So we read the Scriptures at the table, and we encourage children to read the Bible for themselves. We take them to a Bible-centred church where they soon sense the power of the Word in the preaching.

We also want them to know what the Son of God has done in making our world, the vastness of outer space and the tiny world of the atom; science and the arts; the world of farming and heavy industry, and also the world of theory where the laws of physics and mathematics are important. Christ made it all; Christ is relevant to it all. Everything around Jesus in Nazareth was the expression of his own mind. So this little boy set out on a voyage of discovery which was also a voyage of self-discovery within his own creation, admiring it and glorying in it. Everything he met around about him in Nazareth, and in the heavens above the village, was absolutely consistent with every one of his own great perfections. There was nothing he ever met that jarred within his soul that was in contradiction to and violation of his nature as the eternal Son of God made flesh. It was all, in fact, an expression of his own mind and nature. All its matter, logic, rationality, explorable-ness, organisable-ness, admission to the possibility of technology, derived from the fact that it was Jesus’ own end-product as the Son of God. It was replete with his own understanding. The whole Nazareth development of our Lord can be compared to a composer who in his brilliant youth had written a wonderful symphony, but he had laid it aside for fifty years, and then as an old man rediscovered it and pored over its pages, seeing that early creativity and sense of beauty and harmony and challenge and mystery, and weeping in delight at what he himself had done. Christ’s looking at the brook and the hawk and the goldsmith at his furnace and the snow falling and the sunset made him cry out thankfully, “How excellent is the name of the Son of God in all the earth”.

So we encourage our children to set out on the same voyage of discovery confident that they can meet no booby traps anywhere; nothing that can blow up in their faces; no area of knowledge which can be anti-Christ, or un-Christ-like whatsoever, because our Lord Jesus made it all. It is in complete harmony with his nature and filled with his wisdom. There can be lots of theories masquerading as facts; there can be lots of speculations that are anti-Christ and atheistic, but nothing in creation itself can be antithetical to the Lord Jesus, because he designed the atom, and gravity, and the gene, and the woodworm, and the whale, and the galaxy. He plotted the trajectory of the comet. All our research and all our technology is only an approximation of Christ’s own understanding of the wisdom which he has imposed upon this world

I say that a consequence of this is that part of our vocation as parents is to do all in our power to put within the reach of our children this great body of fascinating factual knowledge and to encourage them in every possible way to explore the creation all around them. Much of it can be learned from books, but more of it, perhaps the most important part of it, cannot. Yet God has placed them in a world that is the expression of God’s own infinite mind, in all the depths of its complexity and beauty. Let the child probe it; let him understand it; let him search it; let him know his past; let him know his nation’s past; let him know above all the contents of the Bible. He must have this body of factual knowledge, and he must be able to recall it, and apply it day by day.

That’s the factor we’ve lost. It’s something we have discarded almost deliberately because those who form the theories of contemporary education have been depreciating this. They say memorization is no longer important. It is evident that earlier generations which did not have our kind of media, our ways of storing knowledge, carried about with them as a matter of course, tremendous masses of information. That is why, for example, we have the gospels, because behind them there was a great oral tradition. Men who had seen and heard the Lord charged their memories with storing that knowledge, and their memories obeyed. We ought to make the point of training our own memories to retain useful information. So they have to acquire it, they have to retain it, they have to be able to recall it, and above all they have got to be able to apply it, to use it effectively in argument and persuasion.

The emphasis here isn’t on intelligence; the emphasis is on wisdom, which is divine knowledge applied. Now it may be that each of us is born with only a certain intelligence potential. That may be, but the point is not one’s I.Q. The point here is one’s common sense and practical sagacity, and in many ways – short of grace – it is the most important gift we can give to our children, by example and by education. We will encourage them to apply as much as they know in a way dictated by conscience and prudence and humanity. Rabbi Duncan said that there were three requirements for the ministry – grace, Greek and gumption. Then he added this: that if a man lacked gumption even the Lord could not give it to him. Now that is bad theology, and bad education. Your child may still be silly as a teenager, but there is no reason why anyone should accept fatalistically that he will always be silly. “Get wisdom and get understanding,” God says, and let’s listen to God and obey him. We are to invest by faith in the intellectual side of our child’s development.

So Jesus grew in wisdom in Nazareth. He had no Gamaliel figure to instruct him. He sat at the feet of no great teacher. He was self-taught; he was taught in the Scriptures. The fact that he displayed such incredible wisdom while coming from an obscure place like Nazareth created perplexity in his hearers during his public ministry, and it became an offence to the people of Nazareth. They said, “He’s not fooling us. We know all about him,” and they repelled him because he was from the same insignificant place as themselves. They thought he was ‘putting it all on.’ He returned on one occasion to Nazareth where, “he began teaching the people in their synagogue, and they were amazed – ‘Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?’ they asked.  Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things? And they were offended in him. But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.  (Matthew 13:55-57)

(3) Jesus increased in his social skills.

We are told that he increased in favour with men – And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man. (Luke 2:52)  In other words, our Lord got on with people; he was interested in them; he was well disposed to them; he was, in today’s tired cliché, a good communicator.

He is set before us quite deliberately by Luke as a social and sociable being. It is tremendously important because here is something that we commonly tend to depreciate. It is in fact a skill which some religious people conspicuously lack, yet our Lord had this graciousness, so that we can say that people in Nazareth spoke well of him as a boy, and as a teenager and as a man. He was the one who fixed their doors and put in their rafters and beams and repaired the wheels of their carts. They enjoyed him calling and working in their homes and on their small-holdings. He was highly esteemed by the people; he had a definite affability; there was social ease and grace in this all-round portrait of our Lord.

As we read on into the next chapter we meet a deliberate contrast with John the Baptist who was a hermit and a recluse, who spent his life in the wilderness and was unsociable. He was stern and forbidding to an eminent and high degree. This is quite deliberately set out by Luke to show that Christ was not like that. The problem can arise when John the Baptist is made the model for religious men as if they ought to be detached and remote, as if they were to live their lives in isolation. It seems to me to be tremendously important that we face up to this and make sure that such an unsociable spirit – which is so alien to the ethos of our own congregation – should be refused a toehold here. There are those who rarely smile, who do not join in the hymn-singing, who are so critical of anything of which they disapprove, showing it in their stony faces and downcast eyes. Our Lord is set before us as one who got on with people.

Now I’ve got to qualify that quite obviously because the day came when they despised and loathed him. The hour arrived when the mob chanted, “Crucify! Crucify!” How do I explain that? I say it is taught here very plainly that it was not because our Lord was deficient in humaneness, in humanity, in courtesy, in kindness, in social skills and graces. It was not for any of those reasons that men shouted, “Away with him! Release unto us Barabbas.” But a day came when it was incidental to his pubic ministry that he must tread upon the prejudices of men. He must condemn, and he must expose their sins, and it is at that point that his social grace was insufficient to get him immunity from their hatred and barbarism.

Now Peter raises the same problem when he says to his readers, men may be persecuting and ill-treating you and despising you. Be sure that it is not because you are an evil doer. Be sure that it is not because you are discourteous, a hard-liner, a self-appointed judge, selfish, rough, crude, unthinking and unfeeling. Be sure that you are being persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for the Christ-like spirit you are showing – Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake. (Luke 6:22)  Be sure of that. As the writer to the Hebrews exhorts them to follow peace with all men, and holiness without which no man shall see the Lord. Follow peace; be on the best terms possible with your fellow men, and the limiting condition is holiness. Don’t follow peace to the extent that holiness is compromised. Don’t cultivate social graces and the favour of men beyond the point where you are embarrassed to do what you are doing in the presence of the Holy One.

So it is important to instil in our children social skills so that they can mix freely, communicate and form stable relationships. They must learn to co-operate with others, to lead, to tolerate and to function as members of a team, to control their egotism and aggression without losing a normal drive and competitiveness, to compete fairly, to lose graciously and to win magnanimously, and to do all that without compromise in a moral or spiritual sense. They must have cultivated in them from the earliest age an interest in other people, a concern for other people which submits their own interests to the interests of others, other children and other adults. Our grand-daughter was saying good-bye and she left the house after farewells were said in order to get into the car taking her to school. Then she remembered something. She hurried back to her grandmother for a moment and she said to her gravely, “God’s blessing be upon you,” and then she ran back to the car. It was very touching.

The Reverend Alexander Stewart of Cromarty would lament his lack of social skills. He said, “I feel as if destitute of the faculties for dealing with men. I ought to have been a monk in a cloister dealing with books and systems; living among people I feel myself powerless as a child.” I think he was underestimating his graces. We are under obligation to grow in social skills.

(4) Jesus increased in favour with God.

What does it mean for us as parents? That we consciously dedicate our children to God. You remember that Hannah went to the temple with the child Samuel and that she gave him back to God, and as we stand over the wonder of an infant life, its perfection, its complexity and potential, let us adopt the same attitude. Let us say to God, “We want to him to grow in favour with you. We want him to be your child. We want him to serve you, and love you, and honour and obey you. We want him to burn for you. We want him to be yours.” I do not mean in the sense of full-time temple service. I do not mean that we dedicate him to the mission field or the ministry.  I mean, that we say before God in all sincerity, “Lord, my heart’s desire and prayer to you for this child is that he be yours, that he knows you, and serves you, and honours you and is useful in your service, an ornament and pillar in the church.” It has nothing to do with office or gifts. Above everything else we want our child to be God’s child. We dedicate him to the Lord. We encourage our children to pray, “Show me my sin and show my Saviour,” and not to cease that kind of praying until he knows that God has answered him.

We are to be instructing him in all the truth, implanting and imparting wonderful information to him, just like Timothy was taught by his mother and his grandmother from the earliest age. That is a model for our instruction in the history of God’s dealings, and his great redemptive acts. I know we have to ask ourselves how we can do that relevantly. It must certainly be related to the child’s stage of development and intellect and attainments. We have no right to under-estimate the church, or to abstain from what the Lord has told us to do, but we are to instruct our children pleading that he who has promised to reveal his truth and power to babes should not keep it hidden from our little ones.

Jesus developed religiously. In many ways that is a fascinating statement, that the Son of God increased in favour with God. In his first years it was only the religion of a child. It was no more fully grown than his body. It is no more to be judged in adult terms – in terms of its maturity – than his physical stature. We speak to children and we urge them to remember the God who made them, to speak to him, to thank him for the blessings great and small, to ask him for forgiveness at every point when we do things he has told us not to do. We must learn to praise him for the glory of what he is, and for all things wise and wonderful which were all made by the Lord God. It is imperative that before their God children are taught to bow the knee, and you will see this, that they can deal with God as they deal with every other part of their environment. From the same age as they become conscious of their father and mother and the great objective world around them, from that age they become conscious that this is God’s world. But remember theirs are infantile religious impressions, and childish religious impressions remain the same as everything about them: they are childish. My grandchildren’s impressions of me are childish, and their religion is the religion of a child. We can err when we expect religion to be excepted from the ordinary course of development. A child’s grasp of truth and theology and devotion and ethics is not yet mature but it may be tremendously real and glorious, notwithstanding. There has to be infantile religion, and if I were to be converted as an old man I would begin my journey in grace as a child in grace, and I might well learn the children’s catechism in the seventies: “Who made me?” “God made me.” “What else did God make?” “God made all things.” “Why did God make all things?” “For his own glory.”

We ought not to make it a criterion when we evaluate the religion of a child that it looks like an adult’s in its grasp and in the maturity of its devotions. Nor should we expect them to give up their love for the things of a child, its toys and games. We shouldn’t expect those who are born again in their tenderest years to free themselves from the paraphernalia of childhood. Let the religion of a child be a childish religion, and that of a teenager and student be a student’s religion, full of turmoil and questions. But let a man’s religion be a man’s religion, not blown about by every wind of doctrine.

Let us commend the Christian faith to our children, not dispassionately, but with the zeal of an advocate, that we may present it in all its glory in order that they receive the truth and love of it. I don’t see why the Christian Union in presenting the faith of the Bible to students on the campus should not do so earnestly and passionately to get people to believe and become Christians, just like the Mountaineering Society, and the Folk Music Society, and the French Society presents France, and folk music and mountain-climbing enthusiastically so that students will love France and mountains and folk music. We want children to love the word of God and we have failed if they are not enthralled and captivated by the teaching of the Bible. When Timothy was taught the word of God from childhood I am sure his mother did not brainwash him, and pressurize him in any way, but I am sure she taught it to him lovingly and ardently and wisely in such a way as to commend it to him. We commend our Lord and Saviour so as to instil Christian faith and a life-long response of discipleship in our children.

But there was a great difference in the religion of Jesus and ourselves; ours is the religion of sinners, but his was not. Our religion means at the end of every day we say, “Sorry, Father, for the sins of today. Forgive me through Jesus Christ.” Our Lord in Nazareth and on until he entered the presence of God, never needed to plead for forgiveness because every day he, as a man, increased in understanding what God desired from him, how he should live before him, what he should believe and how he should behave.  Then, at every level, he did what he grasped. You and I need an experience of which Jesus Christ was a complete stranger: we must be born again. Our stony hearts removed, that we should know a broken and a contrite heart, and that we should be cleansed from our sins and clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

This is the fourfold demand God makes on every parent to be our children’s educators. We have not been delivered by Caesar from the responsibility of training them in this definitive way. We have not and cannot delegate our children’s education to any institution.

Fathers, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Fathers, the word of God is directed to you. To God we answer as parents, and it is tremendously important to train our children in all these ways. God has given us this obligation and with every obligation he also gives us the grace to do his will. God never gives us children without also giving us grace to raise them.