Elf in the dock: An open letter to children growing up in church

Dear Children,
I am sorry we big people have done so poorly at proclaiming to you the good news of Jesus Christ. We are far better at telling you to perform well, so God will reward you like he supposedly did Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Job, Deborah, Gideon, David, Daniel, Esther and anyone else I might have missed. The message of their stories, as we tell them to you (not exactly as you might find them if you look in the Bible yourself), is about great people doing great things. Of course, some of you may aspire to be just like them some day. Most of you, though, realize you are regular kids, not biblical heroes, so you might wonder if God will overlook you.
Of course, we never want you to think God would overlook you, so we also focus on God’s opposition to sin. He clearly hates it. That is not the same as hating you, but we may not have been too clear about that. In fact, you might think he is watching for you to slip up, maybe even hoping to catch you in the act. That way he can feel good and you can feel bad. When you feel bad we tell you to say a prayer and to try really hard at doing better next time. That way God will have to take care of you, even if he is not too thrilled about you as a person most of the time, always letting him down.
We also tell you about grace, forgiveness, mercy, and love, especially during Christmas time, but those things can easily get drowned out by other messages we like to tell you. On the one hand we want you to know about the gift of Jesus, who graciously saves us from our sins, offers us adoption into his family, and a place in the kingdom of his Father without any of us deserving any of it. But on the other hand we also say you better be great people who do great things or at least nice people who do nice things in order to get some stuff as a reward. When you put all of that together it doesn't make much sense. Sorry about that.


The good news of Jesus Christ does not make much sense to us either. That is actually one of the main themes of the New Testament. That is not to say the good news of Jesus is complete nonsense like claiming the number nine has a tummyache. The good news just seems so one-sided. There is no balance to it. God most definitely hates sin, but he is also hurt by it because of the ruin it brought to great things he created, including us. Instead of leaving us alone in sin he did something about it himself. He took on our nature to forgive us our sins while still accounting for their high costs. He did it all himself out of his love for us. We did not do anything except trust his offer of forgiveness.
Forgiveness means someone else takes on the responsibility for my wrongful actions, which goes against about everything else you hear growing up, doesn’t it? And that is exactly what God has done in Jesus. He took on the responsibility for our sins. That is part of what it means for him to save us from our sins. There is more to it than that, including his defeat of the forces of sin at work against us and the world, his adopting us into his family, his outpouring of his own life into us forever, his offer of a kingdom in which we, with renewed physical bodies, will live an amazing life that never ends on a renewed physical earth. I wish we told you more about those things, but we don’t.
I have some guesses on why we don’t. The gospel, which means good news, is foreign to all we think we know about life. We have understood all too well that other message we have been giving you—the one about performing well, or else. After all, we too heard it growing up. As you grow older and our hearts become more intertwined into yours, maybe you will help us better understand God’s grace, forgiveness, and good news. Until then I am sorry we have not taken more time to understand it ourselves before trying to tell you about it. I hope you can forgive us. More than that, I hope you can trust that God forgives you in Jesus, for there are no naughty and nice lists in him.
Sincerely,Brandon