How to make Jesus Indignant
My wife loves garage sales. So when she called me a few days ago and said that she and the kids would be down the street at our neighbor's garage sale, it didn't surprise me at all. By the time I made it home, the garage sale was over, but my family was still there. My kids playing with their kids, my wife talking with Hakeem's wife.
We spent the afternoon in their living room, getting to know each other while our kids ran around the house and up and down the street. The wife of the family told us that her mom was disappointed that she didn't have very many kids. This surprised me because she had six kids...twice as many as we have. Apparently, in her culture in Southern Sudan, families typically have many more children.
15 is the average. Children fill the house, and they see this as a blessing.
What a refreshing worldview of children! Not a hassle. Not an inconvenience. Not noisy or expensive or annoying or messy, but a gift from God. I say this is refreshing because it's Biblical.
"Children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward...Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them." (Psalm 127:3)
Children are from God and should be dedicated to God (1 Samuel 1:27-28) and brought to Christ.
In the Gospels, many families longed to see their children at the feet of the Savior. They pressed through the crowds, bringing their children to Jesus, like the men who dug a hole in the roof so that their paralyzed friend could see the Lord.
The disciples tried to stop this. Maybe they didn't have a biblical worldview of children. Maybe they saw them as an inconvenience or unimportant or as a distraction.
And this, this hindrance, this attitude, makes Jesus indignant.
Jesus said, "Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:14)
I believe one of the surest ways to make Jesus indignant is to keep children from the Lord, and I believe one of the surest ways to keep our children from Jesus is to fail to view them as a heritage from the Lord.
Kids are gifts. Gifts that should be given...right back to the Giver. And the Gospel truth is that when we lead our children to Jesus, they become children all over again, adopted as sons and daughters in the Family of God.
Jonathan Williams is the founder of Gospel Family Ministries and the Senior Pastor of Wilcrest Baptist Church, a multi-ethnic church of 44 nations located in Houston, TX. He and his wife are blessed with three wonderful children.
