Little Powerhouses of Faith

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Happy Sabbath. Welcome. It's good to see everybody on a nice, beautiful day. When our kids were little, I think a lot of dads do this, but I would take our kids and I would toss them into the air. Any other dads do that? Okay. I see a couple. Yeah, yeah. Pretty high. I'd say uncomfortably high for Judy. It was pretty high up there. But the kids loved it. I loved it. And to hear a child just screaming with joy after getting thrown in the air that high, it's fun. It's so much fun. And they would just laugh. It was great. When they got older, we would go to the parks. I remember one specific park. They'd climb the structure and they would jump off into my arms and I'd catch them. I think about the scale. If I was to do that, it would be like 20 feet in the air. It would be jumping down. They had no qualms. They would just jump, just leap full tilt right into my arms. And it was really cool. It was a fun, fun moment in my life. They had full trust. They never doubted that anything bad could ever happen. Full trust. Just, you know, open arms just falling in. You remember doing trust falls in high school? And there was that one kid who you did not trust. Our kids did not have that. Not with me. And if you've experienced that, too, then you've seen that as well. Let's go to Matthew 18. Matthew 18.

Matthew 18. We'll start verse 1. At that time, the disciples came to Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven and calling to him a child? He put him in the midst of them and said, verse 3, What is this? What is this? What is he talking about here?

If you don't become like a child, you won't enter the kingdom of God. You know, it's interesting because, you know, as adults, as parents, we're tasked with training our kids, with teaching them away so that they don't turn away from it later on. It's our job to guide our kids so that they learn the right way to go to follow God, to know what he expects of us and to live a good life. But here, Jesus, he kind of flips the script on us a little bit, and he said, unless you become like a child, it's like, oh, wait, I'm supposed to learn something from this child? Yes, yes, you are. We're supposed to train our kids, but then he tells us that unless you become like children, you know, Jesus is alluding to some characteristics that we had at some point in our life when we were very little, and we grew out of them.

Let that sink in. He's saying, you have to become like children again. There was something that you had, and you no longer have it, and you need to examine it. So let's do that today, because children have some amazing attributes. And as we're here today on this special day, we typically bless children today, two weeks after the feast. You know, our blessing here happened in the morning, but let's consider what we can learn from the youngest among us. Let's learn what we used to have, but we lost as we became adults, because today I'd like to talk about that children, you know, a specific thing is children have an unabashed faith that I think that we can learn from.

Now, where does that come from? Well, it begins with the fact that they don't care what others have to say about them. Now, we're talking about a very specific age, because there's a point when you become a teenager, and teenagers, if you know, you feel very much like everyone is looking at me. I very much care what everyone says about me, but very small kids, you know, don't put on rain boots and underwear and no shirt, and they're like, this is who I am. You know, they just, that's who they are. So they don't experience, you know, looking at someone else and saying, oh, that person's, they're thinking bad about me, right? They lack the social understanding and life experiences, and that gives them the ability to, you know, know God as well as they can, and just be comfortable with, there's a God, I trust him, and that's it. That's beautiful. You know, he says here that, you know, we have to humble ourselves like a child, and you might think, well, if they don't care, is that humbling? Yeah, I think it's that they have shed every other ounce of, you know, social identity that it's like, no, I could just be me, and I could understand how God set up a family, and I could have a relationship with him, and that is a pretty humble way to live.

But for us adults, you know, we become very self-aware. We're very keen on that other people look at me, and they might judge me, and you, you know, feel that when someone looks you up and down, and they ask you questions about your religion, because we want to fit in. We want to, you know, we want to, we know what's socially acceptable. We want to be liked, and it's different. The kids don't have, they don't have that. You know, we're called to live a life to stand out from the norm. You know, Christians, we swim upstream. From that moment that we're plunged in the water of baptism, it feels like we feel everyone else going the other way. We feel that. We know it. And we can easily concern ourselves with what everybody else thinks. Can't we? That's why we tell people we're in a church convention for the Feast of Tabernacles, or you know, that's why we sort of skirt conversations, because we were like, just not very comfortable. If you look at a if you look at a child at a certain age, they don't have that. That's kind of beautiful. That's kind of beautiful. And I've been there. I know that gut feeling that someone asks you a question about what you believe, and you're like, oh man, I'm about to stick out like a sore thumb. Here we go. We have to find ourselves to get comfortable with that feeling.

We're supposed to live differently, and we tell ourselves, you know, okay, I'm gonna be peaceable among all men. Okay, I'm putting that principle in my life. You know, if I just say things that are not as, you know, hurtful or, you know, not as bold, you know, maybe they'll like me, and that'll be good. That will be good. Again, looking to our to kids and children at a certain age, you know, this is just the way it is. God tells us to go to church on Saturday. It's the way it is. God tells us not to eat pork because it's gross. Perfect. That's just the way it is. There's no social pressure to conform. But like I said, that doesn't last long, you know, we start to grow out of that. Recognizing that you are different also might not just come from the social aspects of it. I'd like to share just a little bit, you know, I grew up in a household where I saw that the truth of God can be painful, not just, not just odd, as that some people look at us in the world, but painful. You know, my mom was never part of the church. My dad came in when I was five or six. And so the boldness that, you know, that these children can have, it was difficult for me because I saw that it was something that could divide even in a family.

So it's one of those things that I've had to examine myself, you know, like, why don't you feel very bold? Why aren't you very bold? And when people ask you certain questions, it's like, well, I felt very personally that sometimes the truth is hard on even the people that you love. Let's go to Matthew 10, a few chapters back, because Jesus talks about this very fact. So perhaps it's not just about fitting in. Sometimes, like, we're learning and overcoming because, you know, the truth has impacted us in a very different way. Matthew 10, verse 34, Jesus says, do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. Okay, feels like another flip of the script, doesn't it? I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I've come to set man against his father, daughter against his mother, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and the person's enemies will be those of his own household.

Sometimes the truth does that. Sometimes it does that. And so, you know, we, who are not kids anymore, we feel that. We feel that. So it can separate us, or it can, the truth of God can make us even separate from our own families. Kids don't always feel that, but we do as adults, and that's a way that we can lose that from those childhood characteristics.

So if you feel this way, you know, what do you do? What can we do to, you know, try to embolden ourselves like a child could be, and be confident in the God that who has called us and, you know, given us so much, and we're trying to shed away some of these feelings that that might hinder us from being bold. Let's go to Acts. Acts 4. As I was doing some self-assessment years ago about this, and, you know, I was really wondering, you know, about myself, like, why am I not very bold? Why can't I always speak the truth? And, you know, realizing that it's like, oh, okay, now I've grew up where I know that the truth can be divisive in a way that's not necessarily meant to be hurtful, but just in the way that God has called people. I came across this scripture in Acts 4, starting in verse 23. Let's see if my eyes fall on it. Here we go. When they released, they went to their friends and reported with a chief priest and elders. Let's see, this is right, 23. Okay. This is, yes, sorry. And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God, sovereign Lord, who has made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of the father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, why do the Gentiles rage and the people's plot invade? So, you know, the disciples are being persecuted this time and they're really feeling it, and they're lifting up their voice to God. And if we drop down to verse 31, we'll continue to see what they said here, finally. And when they had prayed, oh, sorry, verse 29, and now the Lord looked upon their threats, grant your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness. I remember reading this and thinking, okay, here are the disciples who walked with Jesus, and they themselves had to pray for boldness. Now, they were being persecuted in a way that, you know, I've not experienced, but that for me was like, oh, you know, they walked with God here. They're still asking God, I know it's true. I've seen miracles that you've done in my life. I still need you to help me. I need you to shore me up. I need you to make me bold. We're called to a different light. And boldness does not mean that we're sticking our thumb in people's eyes, but just being confident in a way that we know is a light. And I think that this scripture helps me grow in a way to sort of try to become more childlike. No, no, what I'm asking for is to be confident and have that full trust, being able to, you know, sort of fall into your arms in these moments where I'm not comfortable.

The second thing that children have that I want to talk about is just a clear sense of right and wrong. Have you experienced this having a conversation with a child? I think some of this is actually developmental for children. They see the world in a very black and white way. There's very little gray and nuance that they understand. And perhaps you've experienced this with children. You know, that person did something to me, and so that person is bad, you know, as it's very clear for them. You know, someone else is either their friend or they're not. There's no like, well, it's kind of complicated, you know, we're acquaintances in this scenario. Kids don't have that. It's like, nope, nope, I'm not friends with them anymore. But as we mature, our brains grow. We start to have a little bit more nuanced conversations, and we can see that the world is not always as black and white. And we can talk about the complexities of stories of, you know, David's life or Abraham telling the pharaoh that his wife was a sister or, you know, Rahab's story. You know, we kind of can see the Bible as like, okay, it's not actually as black and white as I would hope it would be.

Or understanding even harder things like, you know, how can we have a good God? They're suffering in the world. You know, a child can't understand that concept. But what they can do is they can, they can see who God is on their level and just fully trust him no matter what. And I think that's beautiful. And how we get back there is by doing what we try to do every day. Going to God, praying to Him, humbling ourselves before Him, reading His Word, trying to understand and saying, you know what, despite everything else, I'm going to decide to trust you. Romans 10, 17 says, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ. And that's where we live. We live doing that every single day.

So on the state that we typically have a blessing of the children, you know, I wanted to talk a little bit how Jesus tells us to become like children. He's asking us to recover something that we had as little children, and we can grow old. And we need to remember to reflect on what those feelings were like to be a child. We want to have a wholehearted trust in God. You know, thinking back to the kids jumping in my arms, you know, they weren't calculating the risks. They weren't thinking about what anybody else thought. They just simply knew that this was fun, and they were going to trust their dad. And that's how our relationship should be with our father as well. As adults, we know more. We've experienced more. We know disappointment and suffering, and we understand the complexities of life. And sometimes that experience, it makes it hard sometimes to trust God, doesn't it? But I'm honest. Those things make it hard.

But today, when we witness the little children as we see them walk, you know, going around our legs here this afternoon, let's remember that we're not here just to teach them, but we can also learn from them. We can learn from them a lot. We can recover a childlike trust, and we can stand for God's truth, regardless of what other people think about us. And remember that our Heavenly Father is worthy of our confidence and full trust so that we can fall into His arms. The greatest power of faith isn't just knowing everything and figuring it all out, but having a trust and confidence in the One who is there for us from the very time that we're little children.