What Does The Bible Say About Children?

Hi everybody. My name is Phil, and I'm going to be talking today about what the Bible says about kids.

Away In A Manger

I'd like to start off by telling you about a row I had with my grandfather. I'm going to guess it was the mid to late 1980s. Now my granddad was born in 1901. So he was a Victorian, and was widowed for about 35 years. He was something called a Presbyterian, which I've since found out means he was a Christian, he was just quite an angry one. I don't know if that's true of all Presbyterians, but he was.

I wasn't a particularly easy teenager, and I decided to pick a fight because one Christmas Day, we'd been to church in the morning, (that was pretty normal for us) and we'd sung ' Away in a manger '. You probably sang it at primary school, you possibly have been to church on a Sunday at Christmas time and sung it. My point was, that "the little Lord Jesus", according to the song, "no crying he made", well my point was, there's no way that if Jesus was a little baby, and he was in a manger, which as I understood, was some sort of cowshed. So they were probably cold, a little bit damp, possibly hungry, there's no way Jesus wouldn't have cried.

So I started to say this out loud, and my grandfather being a certain man of a certain era, Victorian, said, "you need to listen to me because I'm your elder, you need to respect me because it says in the Bible, respect your mother and father". And it's true, it does say that. If I'd known my Bible a little bit better, as a teenager, I would have been able to say to him, it also says, parents, might have got this verse a little bit wrong, parents do not make your children angry.

The conclusion of this row was we just fell out. He was in a bad mood with me and I was in a bad mood with him. We probably marred Christmas Day somewhat for everybody else, and I probably should apologise to all the other people who were there.

Maintain The Relationship

My first point I want to make is, if you've got kids, maintain the relationship with them. Don't fall out, over, almost anything. If you can keep talking to them, if you can keep listening to them, you've always got a chance of repairing any fallout or riff that you have. Keep talking.

Fostering And Adoption

Anyway, a little bit more about me. I am a birth parent. So me and my wife have two kids of our own. We became foster carers about 11 years ago. Then, we adopted one of our foster kids. I'm also a secondary school teacher. I've done tonnes of kids and youth work in Liverpool where we live over the years.

One of the things that the Bible talks about very much is looking after the orphan. Old Testament and New Testament. There are so many verses. It would take me ages to go through them all. The one that I like the most is probably in the book of James, where it says, religion that God likes is where we look after the orphan and the widow.

In the United Kingdom, there are 107,000 kids in care. If you're interested in fostering, if you're interested in adoption, please get in touch with me. Even if you're not in Liverpool, it doesn't matter. I'd love to talk to you more about it. I really think God's heart is for looking after kids who've got no one to look after them. We call them orphans in a very sort of loose sense of the term. It doesn't necessarily mean their parents have passed away.

What Does The Bible Say About How To Raise Your Children?

You'd have thought with all my kids and youth experience I would know all about children and I'm afraid I don't. I get it wrong more times than I get it right. Children, forgive me. If I've taught you, forgive me. If I've parented you, forgive me. I asked my son, what was the stupidest thing I've ever said? And he went, "it's simple. The stupidest thing you've ever said, Dad, was when you were in an automatic and you didn't know how to drive it and you went, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to stall it." Apparently, you can't stall an automatic. I didn't know that. But he told me and he said, that was a stupidest thing I've ever said, which I thought was quite impressive.

Spend Time With Your Kids

Anyway, the Bible does tell us quite a lot about how to raise our kids. Some of the verses are cherry-picked a little bit out of context sometimes, in my opinion. The two I want to talk about today are one in Deuteronomy 6:7-8, where it says,

“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. ”

-- Deuteronomy 6:7,8

To teach your children diligently, to sit at home with them, be out and about with them, wherever you go with them, teach them.

And the thing that I've picked up from that more than anything is spending time with your kids. Spend time where you're with them, doing what they want, maybe where they set the agenda a little bit, not just being in the same place. Never waste a car journey. If your child, whatever age they are, needs a lift somewhere, take them, chat with them, hear what they're thinking and talking about. Let them choose the music so you know what they're listening to. I've learned a lot about a Popstar called Dave, through one of my kids. Absolutely fantastic lyrics. A real insight into what he likes. Don't waste an opportunity to be with your children, whether it is watching their TV, watching their sport, playing games, board games, whatever it is, computer games. If you're not into Roblox or fortnight but your kid is, try and find out a little bit about it so that you understand where your kid's coming from.

Build Up Your Kids

There's another great verse in Ephesians 4. That's in the New Testament. It basically says, build people up with your words.

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”

-- Ephesians 4:29

I grew up in the '70s and '80s, where it wasn't very normal or traditional to say positive things about children. Somehow they thought it would make them arrogant. "Children are okay, but we don't want them to have too much of a role or to dictate things too much." And I can see where they're coming from. But at the same time, I'm not sure you can say enough positive things to a child about them, building up their self esteem and making them feel self-confident.

The Bible uses the word edifying, which means to build up. You're trying to create people who are comfortable with themselves, confident about themselves, that they know that you love them, and if you're Christian, that they know that God loves them as well. It really will help anybody go through life knowing they're loved.

That's one of the things we've both learned, me and my wife, about fostering and adoption is how many kids have absolutely no notion that anyone loves them. They've got a lot of evidence that suggests that no one loves them. Tell them you love them. If you're not happy telling them, write it down in a letter, and when they're old enough, give them the letter, or the letters. I do that for my kids because I'm not always the best at expressing how I feel about them. So, spend time with your kids. Try and say positive things to your kids.

Are There Any Other Instances Of Children In The Bible?

Now, kids are mentioned all the way through the Bible. There's a lot about children. One of the stories that I like the best is the feeding of the 5,000 (Matthew 14.) You might know it. A bunch of people follow Jesus all day and they don't have anything to eat. There's no Subway, there's no Tesco Metro, there's no Londis. So they're all starving.

One little boy says, I've got my pack lunch. I'd love to know if he was on his own. Was he with his family? Well done for being so prepared. Do you think that he prepared it himself? Or do you think his mum sent it out with him? We've got two teenage sons. I cannot believe that they would have worked out that they needed a pack lunch, but then, you never know. Maybe I'm doing a disservice to this young lad who says to Jesus or the disciples, you can have my food. What a great sign of generosity. What a great kid. I'm sure Jesus would have sorted something out if that kid hadn't come forward with his offering of fish and loaves. But he did. His generosity enabled that miracle to happen. Never underestimate the power of a generous child.

What Does Jesus Say About Children?

There's another famous story in the Bible where loads of kids are wanting to come and be around Jesus (Matthew 19.) There's a horrible archaic translation, which says, suffer the little children, which is a really misleading phrase now because suffer means to experience pain but in those days, when that version was written, it meant allow.

So really what Jesus is saying is "allow". Let the kids come to me. There are a few things I want to say about that. First of all, in Jesus' time, children were fairly marginalised. It's a terrible patriarchy. There's men at the top, and there's women and children somewhere towards the bottom. Orphaned children and widows, so women without a man, are really low down. But time and time again Jesus elevates them, saying, no, everybody is important to me. Everybody. From the youngest child who's got no social power, because they're an orphan, right through to widows, who would also have no social capital. Jesus is very good at including strangers, foreigners, people who are outcasts. I could go on about that forever.

But anyway, he says, let these kids come to me. But now I want to turn that on its head a little bit and go great, allow children, let children, encourage children to be involved in whatever it is that you do. Whatever your church scenario you find yourself in, and family scenarios too, encourage the kids to be part of that.

What Was Jesus Like Around Children?

I wonder what kind of man Jesus was that the children wanted to be with this man. This is more of an observation, but what kind of people do kids want to be with? Well, they like being with people who they feel safe with. I think a lot of kids (though not all), have a discernment as to who's safe. They want to be with people who are fun, and they want to be with people who are interested in them. I think there's a role model there for us all. It's Jesus. He's the role model for us to look up to. He probably also had a good sense of humour. I don't know if he laughed. I know he cried, but I don't know if he laughed. If kids wanted to be with him, I'm figuring that he did. I reckon that he had a real interest in the way he spoke to them, I'm guessing, with a degree of respect. I think we need to make sure that we communicate with our kids in the same way.

Who Does The Kingdom Of Heaven Belong To?

I'd like to end by talking about a very famous verse from the Bible, where Jesus says, you need to have a childlike faith to enter the kingdom of heaven. This is the word childlike , ** not** __childish . If you're a child, you can be childish, but childish sounds a little bit immature. It sounds like you do silly things. You laugh at the wrong things perhaps. It's not the same as being childlike.

What does it mean to be childlike?

I'd like to give you an analogy about what I think childlike means. I've mentioned, possibly a few times with foster carers about one of the first kids we ever fostered who came to us. He was about three and a half. He'd been with us a couple of days, and we were beginning to get to know him very, very slowly. He was extremely cautious and nervous around us. He had very, very little language.

I took him to the park one day. It's only a few hundred yards and we walked there, and we got to the park. We were on the edge of the park, and he was staring at something. He went, "what's that?" He had a limited language. So I thought, oh he means, what is that? So I was looking at the park going, I wonder what it is. What is it that's exciting in this park? I realised he was kind of gesticulating, pointing at a tree. Ah, right, okay, it's a tree. So I said to him, "this is a tree". And he went "tree". And we walked up to it, and I touched it, and I rubbed it. He didn't do that though. He was scared of this tree. Then he tentatively put out his hand because I'd done it. He touched the tree. And he went "tree". He kind of flinched, because the bark is quite a sharp feeling, isn't it? He'd obviously never, ever seen a tree. He'd never touched a tree. It just makes you wonder where he'd been for the first three and a half years of his life. He spent 20 minutes with me patting the tree, touching it. We even sniffed it. He didn't lick it. I don't think. We were looking at the twigs and the leaves because it was November so they had fallen around the tree. We looked at them and we sniffed them, and we felt what they were like. He had this incredible sense of awe and wonder.

I've never seen anything quite like it because from his world, this was just amazing. This was unfathomable. This was incredible. Yet, there it was. It was true. There was a tree. We walked on a little bit further. Guess what? There was another tree. So we spent some time patting that, and we didn't carry on going around the whole park, because there were several thousand trees, and we'd still be there now, but he put his hand in mine, his little hand, and we walked home. There's an analogy there about him trusting me. I'm not gonna pretend that I'm God or Jesus. He also couldn't remember my name, by the way. He didn't know what to call me, but he'd known me enough and still trusted me enough to hold my hand and walk home.

I Am A Child Of God

I think if you went to court, and I'm not a lawyer, and said, is there evidence for Christianity being true or false? You'd struggle to prove it either way, in a court of law, because it comes down to a matter of faith. Like that little boy, just seeing it, trusting it and believing it. I'm not sure if that analogy will work for everybody but it kind of works for me because I saw it. And I just went, "Oh my word". He's never seen that before. Now he knows it's true. Now he's seen it, he's seen that tree.

Now. I'm going to end this talk with the last verse or the last line, which is " I am a child of God ", which kind of links in with what I've said. I know I've perhaps emphasised some of this for people who have got children, whether their birth, fostered, adopted. You may or may not have children, but you were at least a child yourself once, to somebody somewhere. But the Bible says that we are all children of God.

I firmly believe that the story of Christianity is for every human being. I think there's 7.3 billion of us on the planet at the moment. Every one of us is a child of God. If you want to find out more about what that means then get in touch with CROWD church, or if you're watching, ask somebody you know who is a Christian. Thanks for listening. I hope it made sense. I enjoyed myself anyway.