Well, our passage this morning is unique because of how much we already are on Jesus side on this one. We’re on his side of the argument, and that doesn’t happen very much in the Bible. Usually, when I read something that Jesus says, I find it to be deeply challenging because of how far away I am from it, and how far I am from living it out correctly. Jesus says anger is murder. Uh oh. That’s not good for me. He says lust is adultery in your heart. He says you can’t serve God and money. Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. And I take these words in my heart, and they bring conviction and repentance, and it leads to transformation by God’s grace and a new commitment to spiritual disciplines in my life. That is a very typical time of listening to God’s Word for me, probably is for you. But then I hear Jesus say, let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. And I think, of course, who’s hindering little children from coming to Jesus? What monster would stop little kids from coming and finding the loving grace of God in Jesus? And then I look in the scriptures and you know who it is? It’s the disciples. The disciples are doing this. Haven’t they ever heard of children’s ministry? It’s like the most important part of church.

But then I calmed down and I remember it’s been 2000 years change that has taken place since the days of the disciples. Our Western culture has been saturated with biblical values. And so the status of children has been raised considerably over those 2000 years. And that’s a good thing. Now, it can sometimes tip in the other direction, and we can get to the place where we’re idolizing children. That’s a different sermon. Also, our churches have been applying Jesus words to our ministry to kids for 2000 years. And it shows. I’m going to talk a little bit a little later on about how we do children’s ministry here at Calvary. So we’re doing pretty good at this part of the Bible that we’re going to look at this morning in a way that’s encouraging and different from the more challenging parts of God’s Word. However, you knew there was a however, right? However, while Jesus talks about the value and importance of children and their place in the Kingdom of God, that is not his only point in our passage. As Jesus so often does, he takes what’s happening around him, and he uses it to create a teachable moment. And this second point is quite challenging, especially to our highly educated people who consider themselves to be independent thinkers when it comes to God and only want an intellectual engagement with him. Jesus is going to move from an argument of valuing children to a statement that all saving faith should be child like.

Children should come to Jesus because everyone must come to Jesus like children. We’re going to look at both halves of that statement this morning. We’re in just three verses. We’re in Luke chapter 18, verses 15 to 17, if you want to follow along. Let’s start with why children should come to Jesus. Now, they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. You know, we see a lot of failure from the disciples throughout the Gospels, which I’m thankful for, because it means that my failure as a disciple of Jesus is to be expected. Even the 12 apostles who walked most closely with Jesus were works in progress. They were learning through their failures. They were slow to grow. They were slow to conform to the kingdom of God. And if you’re like me, you resonate with discipleship failure. You can be encouraged this morning. We’re in good company. If you feel like a discipleship failure, you’ve got a good team around you. But thankfully, the Lord continues to work on us, doesn’t he? He doesn’t just leave us there, His grace ensures our growth.

The crowds continue to come to Jesus and they’re finding healing and he’s happy to receive them. And what starts to happen is people start bringing their children to Jesus. The ESV says infants here, but the word can refer to a range of young children. This is probably, infants through toddlers. So crawlers through walkers, these folks want Jesus to touch these children. Now, in some cases it might be for healing. Some of these kids might be sick and they know that Jesus can heal them. There’s also a tradition of rabbis giving blessings to children in that first century. So maybe something that parallels our child dedication is what they have in mind, but there are probably a variety of reasons people want their children to be near Jesus, but regardless of the purpose, their goal is to have their children encounter Jesus. That’s what they want to have happen. And the disciples see this and they’re determined that it shouldn’t be happening. And again, we’re not told exactly why they don’t want the children to come to Jesus. It’s likely to do with the lower status of children and the higher status of rabbis in the first century. So in that day, children were valued okay. They were loved. They were blessing to the family, just like they are today. But children served a role in the family.

They’re not honored like they are in our culture. Nobody’s throwing parties for children in that day, okay? Adults aren’t breaking their ankles at the trampoline park for children in the first century. All right, none of that’s happening. Families weren’t looking to children for their opinion about what we should do this weekend. Right. They were loved. They were cared for, but they were served the household. They were trained in marketable skills, and then they became a functioning member of the family economy. That’s how they functioned. And so the idea of any old family just bringing their kids to Jesus and using up highly valuable ministry time to bless people of such small social status would have been considered countercultural. And I believe if this were any other teacher other than Jesus, these disciples would not have been rebuked for what they did. They probably would have been praised for protecting their rabbi. So what Jesus says here, and the implications it has for raising up the value of discipleship among children is pretty remarkable. Let the children come to me. Jesus is throwing open the door. He’s saying, I have a full invitation to these children. And then he says, and do not hinder them. That’s the word for the adults. The adults, including the disciples, should not put any hindrance in the way of full access to Jesus. If I was doing a full systematic theology of children’s ministry this morning, I would take us back into Luke chapter 17, and I would remind us where it says that it would be better for a person to be drowned in the sea than to mislead one of Jesus little ones that he says there.

The clear biblical answer to the question, how should children engage with the gospel of Jesus is that we should show them who Jesus is and what he has done as plainly as we possibly can in age appropriate ways, and do nothing to prevent them from understanding him, because the gospel is true and because Jesus is our salvation. And by embracing the gospel, our children will be given the foundation for life of flourishing that they need in the Kingdom of God. Now, for those of us who are in the church who spent any time in the church, what I just said is not controversial. We know that the best gift that we could give our children is to teach them and model Jesus to them. But the last 25 years have been kind of a weird moment in history. Which I think is worth noting here. There was a small but vocal movement of new or neo atheists, kind of back in that 2000’s range, who were popular for a pretty short time. But they argued that it was akin to child abuse to teach a child about faith in God, any God, not just the Christian God, any God.

As one example of this, a guy named Richard Dawkins wrote this. He said this teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue, primes them to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads and crusades. Faith can be very, very dangerous and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. Okay, now I take issue with his characterization of unquestioned faith. Good Christian teaching welcomes questions. We welcome them. The truth always stands up to questioning. But Dawkins means any kind of faith taught to children is potential training for them to become future violent zealots. And I call this a weird moment in history because up to this point, faith in God was generally seen as a good thing for society, even by people who didn’t have it. They thought it was a good thing. The gospel of Jesus Christ has shaped the foundation of our society to such a degree that even people who don’t have faith in Jesus still think and argue in biblically shaped categories. It’s so interwoven into who we are as human beings, you can’t really escape it. But Dawkins and his brand of atheism said, let’s call all faith in God the source of violence and evil in the world, regardless of doctrine, regardless of what’s being taught. The content of that faith.

And so, for a very short period of time, for some people, faith itself became an enemy. And to teach faith in Jesus to children came to be seen by some as misleading them or even hurting them. By the way, this is the type of thinking that caused a lot of millennials to react against their faith heritage. And it’s a complete failure of this ideology, this sort of new atheism. It’s a complete failure of it that is driving some of the Gen Z folks back to the gospel, you realize it was just an empty road to nowhere to go the other way. Do you know how I know that this whole sad atheist movement has failed? In 2024 Richard Dawkins went on live TV, went on TV. I don’t know if it was live or not, but he went on TV and he called himself a cultural Christian. That’s the phrase he now uses for himself. I quote, I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. We in the UK are a Christian country in that sense, and he rightly got pounded for this by everybody around him. How do you think we got those carols, Richard? Where’d that ethos come from? One Christian thinker, a guy named Rod Dreher, said for Dawkins to mourn the loss of Christian churches and hymns while also celebrating the decline in Christianity is like saying that you enjoy eating, but you’re glad that farms are closed.

It just makes no sense at all. This guy has been attacking and celebrating the demise of Christianity his whole career, and now suddenly he’s realizing that maybe, maybe all that Christian culture he’s enjoyed came from people who truly follow Jesus. And that’s really what’s changed the world. You don’t create a Christian culture that leads to human flourishing by rejecting God, but still insisting on biblical values. You do it by making disciples. That’s how you do it. You do it by handing the Gospel of Jesus Christ on to the next generation. When we teach children about Jesus and we invite them to follow Jesus, we’re not just showing them the path of salvation, we’re showing them how God has designed us to live for his glory and our good. That’s our makeup. That’s how he’s made us. Jesus doesn’t want these precious children to grow up rejecting their creator and becoming their own authority and living out worldly values, because that path leads to a life of misery, and it culminates in eternal damnation. Instead, from an early age, he wants these children to understand and live within the values of the Kingdom of God. Serving the Lord by living out his ethics, his values. That’s why he says, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. I understand to such there to mean these kids are the perfect age to learn. They’re the perfect age to learn and understand and receive entry into God’s eternal kingdom. And this is going to be reinforced in just a moment when he says that everybody has to be like these children. But here he’s welcoming the actual children. Clearly, Jesus thinks that childhood is the perfect time to begin teaching kids what it means to know him and to enter into the Kingdom of God through him. And we agree with Jesus on this here at Calvary. I mean, we agree with Jesus on everything here at Calvary, but specifically this morning.

Our kids ministry is designed very intentionally to walk with children through the scriptures over and over again. We use a curriculum called the Gospel Project. It’s a full Bible curriculum that cycles kids through the scriptures year to year with a depth and the detail expanding as the as the child grows. And every lesson is anchored in the gospel. We’re instilling in our children a firm understanding of how all of God’s redemptive history hangs together. And we’re applying this to their hearts. We’re not just handing on Bible facts, okay? We’re not just giving them some things to know. We’re working to help these kids see their need for Jesus and the whole world’s need for Jesus.

We’re not just teaching them to be good little boys and good little girls. They don’t need that. We’re showing sinful children that God has made them and that he loves them and his grace covers over their sins because Jesus died on the cross for them. Our aim isn’t better behavior. It’s transformed hearts. And we do this all at appropriate ages, right to the best of our ability. We try to do this in age appropriate ways. I’m not a teacher of children. I really am not a teacher of children. But I imagine that some of the finer points of the gospel are often lost on the littlest ones. I had one week, where I was not preaching, and so I had a chance to walk around the building, and I went down the children’s ministry hallway, and I looked in on one of the classrooms, and I saw a little guy in there and he was stacking blocks. Not a lot of gospel content in that. I mean, he wasn’t building them on sand, so there was that. But there’s not a whole lot of gospel to that. But as the kids grow, as they become more able to handle stories and understand the meaning of things, we find more and more ways of helping them see what God has done in Jesus, and what life is like when we’re transformed by the gospel.

All of our classes are theologically rich and doctrinally sound, and they’re led by people who love Jesus. These people, they love Jesus. They love Jesus, and they want to share Christ with these kids. They’re passionate about mentoring young people. Do you know, in fifth grade here at Calvary, we have a Sunday morning class called Roots where students learn doctrine, and then they begin to learn apologetics at the same time, the way of defending the faith. And they get to begin forming a biblical worldview so that they can pair that worldview to other worldviews that are out there. Eric and Karen Howden who teach the class said that they’re giving the kids the building blocks of God’s Word, and they give them an opportunity to think through and respond to the gospel for themselves. Awana on Thursday nights, kids are memorizing scripture, which we hope will rest in their hearts and that will come to mind as they develop. And all of this is done in partnership with parents. We work to equip you to be the primary disciple makers of your family, because that’s who you are. You are the primary disciple makers. Our kids ministry isn’t babysitting. It’s not playtime with a Bible story. Our goal is to make disciples who will go on in life, to worship the Lord, and to make more disciples.

And because of that, there’s a very important implication for parents that I need to point out here. It’s embedded in what Jesus tells us in verse 16. See that there it says, and do not hinder them. Usually when we talk about our children’s ministry, we think about the sharing of the gospel, the active work of teaching our children the gospel. And that’s certainly important. We should do that. Listen to this. This is instruction to God’s people from Deuteronomy chapter six. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Do you hear that? You can hear the charge to parents to make gospel instruction comprehensive throughout your home life and all of the developing years. So you should be talking about Jesus and applying God’s Word and helping your kids wrestle with their issues through the lens of the gospel.

And there’s a lot of ways that you can do that. I’m not going to tell you this morning, here’s what your home should look like. Every family’s a little bit different, has a little bit different shape, a little bit different rhythm to it. But Christ should be a regular part of the interaction that you have with your kids. That’s the positive that should be taking place. But notice Jesus says a positive and a negative. He says, let the children come and do not hinder them. And it strikes me that there are a lot of ways that we can hinder our children from seeing Jesus. Just consider these three facts. The first is that you control their schedule and transportation. By the way, I made these slides delightful to take the edge off the really hard things I’m about to say. Okay, so you control this. You’re entirely in control. Your kids go where you take them, and they only experience the things that you allow them to experience. They don’t have the ability to choose how much exposure to Christ and his church that they get to have. In the passage, the parents are bringing their children to Jesus. It’s the only way those children will get to Jesus. If the parents bring them. And the same is true for your family.

Your children’s access to the Body of Christ and the resources of our church community is entirely predicated on your dedication to bring them. And that means when you choose not to take church attendance seriously, they’re forced to not take church attendance seriously. Their dedication to growth within the church is whatever your dedication is. And when you decide involvement in the Body of Christ is not worth your time. They are then hindered from the benefits of life and growth within God’s community. I’m not saying you can’t teach them about Jesus at home. I just got done saying you should. You absolutely should teach them at home. But they need the body of Christ, just like we all do. And if you keep them from it because you’re too busy, or you’re too tired because you don’t like it, you’re hindering an aspect of their access to Jesus. Here’s a second thing to consider. You are their primary model for seeing Christ. The apostle Paul, who identified himself, by the way, as the chief of sinners, said he told his friends, follow me as I follow Christ. So role modeling is a big part of learning about Jesus. And your children will not have a more influential role model in their entire lives than you. Now, don’t hear that as pressure to be perfect. Christianity is not a performance religion. It is a relationship with the Lord built on undeserved grace.

Your kids don’t need to see you as the pinnacle of perfection. By the way, they already know that you’re not. Okay? So just give that up. If that’s what you think it is. They know. They know you’re not. What they need is to see someone who’s striving to love the Lord more and more. They need someone who takes walking in step with the Holy Spirit seriously. They get their understanding of discipleship primarily by watching you be a disciple. So, one of the biggest ways that you can hinder your kids from being a disciple of Jesus is not being one yourself. Do your kids see you repent? Do they see you repent? They see you admit your sin before the Lord and reach out for his grace. Do they see you practice spiritual discipline? Do they hear you pray and watch you worship? Here’s the last one. You’re the one who instills values. You’re the one who instills values. What you tell your children is important is what they’re going to find important. If you say this is important, they’re going to say, okay, mom. Dad says, that’s important. I should think it’s important, too. By the way, that’s true of all parents everywhere. That’s why Dawkins argument never really did hold water. If you teach faith to your children, they will learn faith. If you teach skepticism to your children, they will learn skepticism.

Every parent disciples their kids in some direction. So the key then is to tell them the truth. If you show them the grace of of God in Jesus Christ that overcomes sin, and you instill them with love and peace and joy and hope that comes in the gospel, then they’re going to understand the kingdom of God. They’re going to see that. But if you marginalize the kingdom and its values, and you instead give them worldly shaped views of success and money and relationships or honor or pride or whatever it is, you’re hindering them from finding the truth of Christ. If your son comes to you because he’s having a problem with another kid at school, and you don’t show love to that other student, the one he’s having the problem with, if you don’t show love to that other student while you engage with parents and school officials or whatever it is, if you’re not showing love to that other student, then don’t be surprised if your son doesn’t learn to love his enemies as Jesus told us to. Because you’re teaching him not to. If your daughter doesn’t make the team and everything you have to say is negative about the coaches and about the other players, don’t be surprised when she grows up unable to accept her limitations and the strengths that God has given to her, and can’t work through the adversity in her life with perseverance, knowing that God is shaping her faith through that adversity.

You see it? We model it. Our values as parents must be ever-increasingly biblical, so that the values we hand on are those that are found in Christ’s kingdom. And look, I know that’s a high bar. I get what I’m saying is a high bar. We’re going to fail. I fail all the time as a dad. I fail all the time at this. But when we turn our weakness into an opportunity to show the strength of the grace of Jesus at work in our lives, ironically, we succeed even when we fail. If we fail the right way, if we fail biblically, we fail forward into God’s grace. We succeed. Because we don’t enter the kingdom of God by our own strength or our personal achievement. We enter by being dependent on Christ. Listen to what Jesus says here. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it. Not only should we teach children about Jesus and not hinder their ability to come and be blessed by him, we should learn about our own faith and what it looks like by looking at theirs. We should learn from their example. Look very carefully at the wording of this verse.

Whoever does not receive like a child. Like a child modifies the act of receiving. So how does a child receive anything? Total joy. Right? Total joy. Total dependence on the giver. My family was recently watching an old home video from many years ago of our kids opening presents at Christmas time. Ali was two in the video, Sammy was four, and we got Ali a baby doll stroller, and she just loved this thing so much she immediately went and grabbed her favorite stuffed animal, threw it into the stroller, and started running around the house pushing this stroller. And we had kind of this sort of circular thing going on in that house. So she just went round and round and round in our house. And it got even better when she realized that she could take that same stroller and ram it into her brother. It was like, wow, I could do this with it? That was amazing. And then the very next present that Sammy opens up is a vest, which you would think would elicit no excitement at all. But apparently he was into his fit even back then. He immediately put it on and was overjoyed! I got a vest! And he’s putting on the vest and, wow! I mean, we were killing it that year on the presents. That was amazing. They were overwhelmed to get this stuff because they couldn’t get it for themselves.

It could only come from us. And that’s how kids receive things. Complete dependence on the one who gives and filled with joy for receiving. What’s the opposite of that? No regard for the gift. Because you have no love for the giver. I don’t need anything. I don’t want anything from you. That’s the opposite. If you have this attitude toward God, you could never enter the kingdom, could you? Why? Well, think of what the gospel requires. The gospel is a message of utter grace, undeserved, unearnable salvation. We are completely and totally dependent on Jesus to make the sacrifice for our sins. And that grace is the only entrance into God’s kingdom. You might be a grown, very competent, capable, highly skilled individual who is, by every worldly measure totally self-sufficient. In fact, just by the fact that you live in and around Rochester means you probably are that sort of person. This town is full of self-made, successful people. But when it comes to your salvation, none of that matters. None of that counts. You have to become a child and receive God’s gift entirely as a dependent. That’s childlike faith. Not to be confused with childish faith. Faith shouldn’t be childish, as in simple, shallow, or unserious. No one is telling you to turn your brain off when we talk about childlike faith. On the contrary, Jesus tells us to love God with all our mind, we should be using every bit of intellect that we’ve been given by God to explore every aspect of His Scripture and every aspect of his creation, so we can deepen our understanding of him.

But at no point should we ever lose our understanding of our utter dependence on Jesus graciousness to us as a gift. That need for Christ should propel you in your heart to pursue Jesus eagerly, to receive his kingdom joyously, like your life depended on it, because it does. That’s childlike faith. And I wonder how many of you have lost that eagerness. I wonder how many of you have lost it. It’s pretty easy to do. All you have to do to lose it is get too wrapped up in your job. You get too focused on bills and responsibilities around the calendar. We still feel dependent and eager, but it’s its eagerness for vacation, its dependence on a bonus. And those are good things. But if we make lesser things into saviors then we lose our focus on the Savior. You do that too long, and these things become idols in your heart. They become replacements for the joy that we’re supposed to be finding in Jesus. And if you’ve lost that childlike faith, you can regain it. And there’s ways to do it. How do you recapture that? Well, you know all the answers, but let me reframe those answers.

Let me reframe them. You should read Scripture. You should read the Bible, but read it with an eye toward what God has provided. Don’t just read it for Bible facts. Don’t just try to figure out what it’s saying. Read God’s Word, looking for direction toward the man or woman that God has called you to be. And you should pray. But pray with a heart of dependence. Don’t just pray for the stuff you need. Ask the Lord to comfort and to guide you, and to thank him for what you’ve received only by his grace, because you’re utterly dependent on him. Try fasting. I know a lot of people don’t fast, but try fasting. Skip a meal or two. Use the hunger to drive you and remind you of your complete dependence on Jesus. And sacrifice. Sacrifice for the good of others. If you’ve become overly dependent on money, give enough. Give enough to the church. Give enough to other organizations until it costs you something. Not just from your excess, but from what you need. And let that remind you of your dependence on Jesus. By practicing these things, we consistently shake the idols from our hearts, and that’s what we really need to do. We need to shake the idols out of our heart, posture ourselves in childlike faith and dependence on Jesus. And you need to do that no matter how old you are. Would you pray with me?