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December 11 - December 31, 2017
tone shows the true basis of our trust to be in one of these formulas, that’s what kids will trust too. We pronounce them saved—then they grow up and realize they aren’t really changed. They give up on Christianity, and it’s hard to bring them back...
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Even though parents and teachers can’t “get kids saved,” we still have a huge role in bringing them to faith—but only if we work in step with the Spirit. We must use his formula. We must do what heralds ought to do with good news: tell it! God’s method is that unbelievers “hear the word of the gospel and believe” (Acts 15:7).
No how-to-live lesson can wake the spiritually dead. You might as well be teaching corpses. If a kid is still dead in self-love, such a lesson will, at best, only get him to work harder at a selfish, manipulative sort of religion. But new life springs up where the good news is proclaimed. It hatches loving wonder at Jesus and true gratitude to God. “For it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).
The elder was right to listen for a profession of faith, but what if he had followed up his first question by asking, “How do you know Jesus is at work in you?” I knew this kid. He could have given fantastic answers. His parents could have attested to them as well. He had a new attitude. He was trusting Jesus and eager to live for God. The elder, by looking for an external decision instead of internal faith and repentance, missed hearing a testimony that would have knocked his socks off.
Saved kids need to see Jesus, too, so they can grow.
We make a mistake if we think kids are saved by hearing the good news and trusting Jesus, but then grow as Christians some other way. Paul tells the Colossians to continue in the faith they first had, “not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard” (Colossians 1:23). He underscores this a few verses later: “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith” (Colossians 2:6–7). We grow in the same way we became Christians—rooted in Jesus, with our hope in the good news.
They needed to hear that the good news came to a churchy guy.
God’s grace trains us to renounce ungodliness. The hope of Christ’s return fuels our upright lives. Jesus gave himself to make us zealous for good works.
If kids are leaving the church, it’s because we’ve failed to give them a view of Jesus and his cross that’s compelling enough to satisfy their spiritual hunger and give them the zeal they crave. They haven’t seen that Jesus himself is better than any “Jesus program.” He’s better than the music used to worship him. He’s better than a missions trip. He’s better than their favorite youth leader. He’s also better than money. Better than video games. Better than romantic teen movies. Better than sex. Better than popularity or power.
We’ve failed too many kids. We’ve fed them things to do. We’ve fed them “worshipful” experiences. But we’ve failed to feed them more than a spoonful of the good news. Now they’re starving and they’ll eat anything. They’re trying to feed their souls with something—maybe even a churchy thing—that feels like it fits them, when what they need is someone utterly better than themselves.
Then I saw Ryan’s hand. “It sounds like us and God,” he said. “We’re like Mephibosheth. We’re the hurt guy who’s not on God’s side. But God is kind to us anyway. He’s so good!” Yup. That was the best answer, all right—and Ryan saw it before any of the church kids did. The church kids had years of experience with Bible lessons and had learned to respond to questions about God by thinking first, “What do I have to do for him now?” They’d need to unlearn this before they could admire Jesus as the King who invites them, his crippled enemies, to sit at his table. Both they and Ryan had heard the
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As kids learn about God’s goodness and holiness, they ought to increase in awe of him. That’s growth. And as they examine themselves and see the ugliness inside, they ought to increase in conviction of sin. That’s growth too. But the combination of these will drive them to despair—unless their understanding of the forgiveness and righteousness they have in Jesus also grows.
And if he hasn’t also been growing in appreciation for the good news—if the cross remains roughly the same size in his life—there will be gaps.
fills the gap between the cross and his sin by pretending his sin actually isn’t so horrible. He stops repenting. Instead, to keep up a Christian image, he will lie, get defensive when corrected, tear others down, and do churchy things or obey his parents only to look good.
Adults do this too!
The Bible tells us to expect this dynamic. Consider the prophet Isaiah, who had a thundering vision of God in the temple. His understanding of God’s holiness grew huge in an instant, and he couldn’t handle it: “Woe is me! For I am lost” (Isaiah 6:5). But an angel touched his lips with a hot coal and declared, “Your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for” (Isaiah 6:7). Only then, once Isaiah’s bigger understanding of God’s holiness and his own sin was matched by a bigger confidence in his forgiveness, was he ready for ministry.
He won’t try to look better than he is but instead will dare to confess sin openly and repent earnestly.
This is a common way of thinking. We assume kids are well-grounded in the good news and that it’s there in the background as we teach other stuff. But what’s assumed is quickly forgotten. Without constant revival from the good news, kids—and adults—start trying to obey God under their own strength and willpower. The good news was never meant to be background. It’s foreground—the source we look to for the power to do everything else. “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1–2, emphasis mine).
Often, you can’t tell for sure. The good thing is that since both need the same kind of teaching—large helpings of the good news and encouragement to believe it and repent—you don’t have to figure it out. I seldom try.
Then do you treat kids as if they’re already saved or as if they aren’t? Sometimes when I urge kids to believe, I’ll acknowledge the difference. I’ll tell them they may need to believe for the first time or they may need to believe more deeply to grow. But usually I talk to church kids as if they’re already saved. If they’re part of the church family we ought to prayerfully expect God to be working in them, even if we know it’s possible they actually aren’t converted. For example, take Nicole, the girl I shared the God Report Card with in our last chapter. I spoke to her as if she were an
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Teachers: The next time you teach a lesson based on a Bible story, test your class by asking them how they would apply the story. Use the same open-ended question I asked at camp: “What can we learn about life with God from this story?” If your students have much to say about how they need to behave better but little to say about what God does, it’s a safe bet they aren’t used to hearing the good news. Tell them that learning how to behave is an excellent way to use the Bible, but often the very best thing is to notice and appreciate how God behaves. Keep asking the question, lesson after
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I’d stopped the argument but done nothing about the greed.
They understood that Abraham must have believed God’s promises. He’d learned that the best things in life come from God, unearned. Abraham could give up the best part of the land because he knew God was giving him a far bigger inheritance.
We talked about how this applies to us. We discussed how God gives us even bigger blessings than Abraham got, that we’ll have a home with Jesus forever and share all his riches. The more we’re gripped by this truth, the more we won’t feel a need to be greedy for this life’s lesser trinkets.
I tell this story to show you where kids’ hearts will naturally go, even when we teach well. I’d taught a good-news lesson. I’d carefully avoided moralizing, instead showing God’s love and our blessings in Christ. I’d encouraged the kids to believe that good news above all. Even so, in their hearts they’d turned it into nothing but a what-you-must-do-for-God lesson. This is the way everyone’s heart naturally works. Our kids are programmed to try to earn points with God. Like a piece of electronics shipped from the factory with default settings, they’re preset not to believe the good news. This
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I should point out that not all good-news lessons end in frustration. Many times I’ve seen the Spirit use the good news to break into kids’ hearts. Still, the scheming drive to impress God by what we’ve done is deeply embedded in our corrupted programming. Removing it requires being intentional. It takes deliberately pounding home the good news, over and over again.
We know the kids we’re with have changes they need to make in their Christian lives, but often we don’t know what to say beyond “stop doing that” or “God wants you to do this.”
At such a moment the issue is not what those kids should do—it’s how to reach their hearts. They need to rest in Jesus until they have such joy over his beauty and what he’s done for them that it
spills out into the way they live. It sounds hokey, but our goal must be to build love for God. There are...
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Christian behavior isn’t real obedience unless it starts ...
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There’s no power to obey vigorously without love for Jesus.
We might convince some kids to be good churchgoers and to say their prayers and such at home even if they don’t love God, but at best they’ll just be working harder at a selfish, manipulative religion that God rejects. Joyless pretending is dangerous to kids. It looks like holy living and makes them think they’re following Jesus—when, in fact, their hearts remain cold. We must go after the heart.
Even though I know this, I too often ignore the heart in my own teaching. It seems too much to expect hearts to change, so I go for what’s easy. I fall back on lesser motivations that are proven to bring short-term, external results. After all, I can get a fourth grader to take just three crackers. And because I’m good at persuasion, I might even convince a teenager to do something big—like stop lying to his parents or put off having sex. I can stop the evil act—for a while. So I choose to do that, instead of deal with the evil heart from which those acts come.
I’ve appealed to pride.
I’ve appealed to self-interest.
I’ve appealed to fear and reward.
I’ve even resorted to blissful blindness.
Some of these arguments are true, especially the one about how obeying God is good for you. But at best, they’re secondary motivations. At worst, they’re all about self. Self-esteem. Self-preservation. Self-advancement. Selfishness dressed up to look Christian. I ought to hate it when I talk kids into such selfish repentance! And I shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t last.
When we motivate kids with the good news, we reject the nonsense that
they just need to make a few life adjustments as they create a spiritual journey. The good news tells the truth—that kids need to be crucifying sin in their lives. They are prone to horrendous acts of rebellion against a jealous God, and he does not take it lightly. Sin is deadly serious. Jesus takes sin most seriously of all. He’s the guy who said to cut off your hand if it makes you sin. But to understand how serious Jesus is about sin, consider also how he left heaven to live as one of us in his world we’ve messed up. He got hungry and tired. People misunderstood him. He was beaten, laughed
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But she knew hardly anything about meeting Jesus himself as a person—or being awed by him.
What’s the solution, then? We must bring in a bigger heart to battle the sin we love. Only a stronger love for Jesus can overpower and displace our love of sin.
A good-behavior kid… A good-news kid… Divides the world into good people and bad people. Like Peter before he caught the fish, constantly tries to prove himself to be one of the good kids. Sees only bad people and one good person—Jesus. Like Peter after he caught the fish, spends his life trusting and following that one good guy. Is prone to sins of the tongue. Tells lies to protect her image, gets defensive when others criticize her, and gossips to make herself look better than others. Admits when she’s wrong and allows others to correct her without fear because her confidence is in Christ.
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It’s good and necessary to study God’s commands and to work hard to obey them. One of their functions is to show us how to live—and what it looks like when love for God and others shapes all we do. However, this becomes a problem if it gets to be pretty much the only reason you open the Bible.
A kid whose heart is touched by the good news will come to love studying God’s commands because they teach him how to be like Christ.
But to serve God only out of self-interest is to miss the core of who God is.
God was in charge, I told the class. He showed himself to be the better King. Haman should have sought honor from God instead of from Xerxes. And Esther proved herself wise for trusting God first. “She must have been tempted to trust all the rich things Xerxes could give her,” I said. “We get tempted that way too. We think the world’s treasures are better than God’s. Like Esther, we need to remember we’re God’s people. We have a far better King than even the great king of Persia. Our King is worth putting first.”
If I’d used the Esther story merely to teach a moral lesson such as “be brave” or “help God’s people,” it actually would have worked better to edit the Bible’s version of the account. That right there should tell us the Bible isn’t meant to be turned into neat, isolated moral lessons.
The Bible is one epic story about God saving his people. We can’t rightly understand any part of it unless we understand that context. This epic story centers on the person and work of Jesus. If we cut individual stories off from the Bible’s central story arc about Jesus, we miss the main thing the Bible wants to say—and fashion Bible stories that aren’t biblical.
I need to say that sometimes Bible characters do provide helpful moral lessons.
Take Jacob, for example. Every group I’ve ever taught has been able to see how Jacob just doesn’t work as a moral example. He’s faithful to God but dishonest. He trusts God but also schemes unnecessarily. He loves his wife—well, one of them—but plays favorites with his kids. So the best thing to say about Jacob is not that he’s a good guy or a bad guy, but that he’s God’s guy. His life story is about God’s goodness amid the mess.
