The Gospel Your Children Are Not Being Handed
Christ is the fullness of the gospel. He refused to be withheld from children.
Everything else in this is downstream of those two sentences.
He Refused to Be Withheld
Mark 10 tells it without softening anything.
People were bringing their children to Jesus so He would touch them. His own disciples, the men closest to Him, the ones who had watched Him work, rebuked the people for it.
They decided the children were too small for what He was carrying.
The text says Jesus was indignant. That word is doing a lot of work. He was angry with His own men. He told them to let the little children come to Him and to stop hindering them, because the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
Then He took those children up in His arms and blessed them.
Hold that next to Colossians 2:9, where Paul writes that the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily in Christ.
The fullness. Not a portion of it. Not an introductory version prepared for small hands.
The fullness came in a body, and children were allowed to walk up and touch it.
So the question of whether the gospel should be trimmed before it reaches a five year old was settled in front of witnesses. The fullness itself would not be withheld from them, and the men who tried to manage the access got corrected for it.
That is the whole argument. What follows is what to do about it.
Who Does the Handing Over
Read the first nine chapters of Proverbs in one sitting sometime.
It is one long speech. A father talking to his son.
Hear, my son, your father’s instruction in 1:8. Hear, O sons, a father’s instruction in 4:1. Chapter after chapter of a man sitting a boy down and telling him how the world actually works.
In 4:3-4 the father stops and tells you where he got it. When he was a son with his own father, tender and the only one in his mother’s sight, his father taught him and told him to let his heart hold fast these words.
The man doing the teaching is passing on what he was handed. Proverbs is a chain, and every father in it is a link.
Now look at what he teaches that boy.
Violence, and the men who sit around planning it. Debt, and how fast it takes a man down. Death. Adultery in chapters 5 and 7, in language most churches would not read aloud in a room with children in it. The seductress at the window. The young man walking toward her house at twilight like an ox to the slaughter.
That is the biblical picture of a father instructing his child. A man walking his son straight into the heaviest material there is, on purpose, while the boy is still young enough to be called my son.
The Handoff
Most of us gave this away without ever deciding to.
It happened by default. She knows the teacher’s name. She remembers it is Wednesday. She packs the bag and signs the form and asks about the lesson on the ride home. We drive.
And when somebody asks how our children are doing spiritually, we answer with the name of a program.
Scripture never assigns it that way.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 puts these words on your heart and tells you to teach them diligently to your children, talking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise. Four settings, every one of them yours.
Ephesians 6:4 could have said parents. Paul wrote Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 5:26 has a husband sanctifying his wife by the washing of water with the word, which assumes the man has some word to wash with.
Proverbs honors a mother’s teaching right alongside the father’s, in 1:8 and again in 6:20, and any honest man should say so.
Responsibility is a different thing from participation. The charge landed on us. And a responsibility does not transfer when the man carrying it stops paying attention. It sits there unmet while somebody else does what she can.
Here is the part that should bother you.
Once we stopped teaching them, we stopped noticing what they were being taught.
The Verse They Use on Your Kids
Somebody always brings up the milk.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3:1-3 that he fed the Corinthians with milk instead of solid food because they were not ready for it. That line gets quoted as a feeding schedule for children, and the quoting stops right there.
Read the next sentence.
Paul is angry. He is writing to grown men and women who should have been on meat years ago, and the evidence he gives that they are still infants is the jealousy and the fighting among them.
It is a rebuke of adults who quit growing. It has nothing to say about how old a child has to be before he hears the Word preached.
A verse about stunted men got turned into a policy about our kids, and most of us were not paying close enough attention to catch it.
You already know how milk works.
Keep a boy on the bottle past the point he needs it and he will keep reaching for the bottle. He keeps the pacifier, the blanket, the same soft thing he has always had, because nobody ever asked him to chew.
Milk exists to get him off of milk.
A man who never moves his son to meat has not been gentle with him. He has left him weak and called it care.
Every Assembly in Scripture Has Children Standing in It
Joshua 8:35. There was not a word of everything Moses commanded that Joshua failed to read before the whole assembly, and it names the women and the little ones as present for it.
Nehemiah 8:2-3. Ezra read the law from early morning until midday to everyone who could understand what they heard.
Deuteronomy 31:12-13 states the reason out loud. Gather the men, the women, and the little ones, so the children who do not know it yet will hear and learn to fear the Lord.
2 Timothy 3:15. Paul tells Timothy he had known the sacred writings since childhood.
And in Matthew 11:25 Christ thanks the Father for hiding these things from the wise and understanding and revealing them to little children. In Matthew 18:3 He says that unless you turn and become like a child you do not enter the kingdom at all.
Christ made a child the picture of how the kingdom is received. We made the child the exception.
What Shrinking It Costs
Take Luke 15.
A boy walks up to his father and asks for his share of the estate while the man is still breathing. He is telling his father he would rather have the money than have him.
He takes it, burns through all of it, and ends up starving in a pig pen envying the animals. He rehearses a speech on the road home about being taken back as a hired hand.
Before he can finish saying it, his father is running at him.
Now cut that down until it is comfortable.
What is left is a boy who made poor choices and came home to a dad who was nice about it. Easier to repeat back at the dinner table. Nothing in it a man could stand on thirty years later.
That is the trade every time. Sand off the cost, the hunger, the humiliation, and the scandal of the welcome, and you get something a child can summarize and cannot lean on.
They can tell, too. Children always know when they are being handled.
Then Choose Accordingly
This is where it costs you something.
You are responsible for what your household is taught, and that responsibility does not stop at the door of the building you drive to on Sunday.
If you sit under preaching that will not say hard things in front of your children, you chose that for them. Nobody made you. You did.
So go look.
Sit in the room. Listen to how they handle a text with blood in it. Find out whether your kids are in there with you for the reading or down the hall being handed something with the weight removed.
Ask what they are actually being taught, then ask your children what they heard, which will tell you more than any curriculum sample ever will.
If the gospel gets thinned before it reaches the young people in that congregation, you know exactly what you are looking at, and you know what it will do to your children a half hour a week for eighteen years.
I am not telling you to go start a fight in a business meeting.
I am telling you to take back the responsibility that was always yours, and to put your family under preaching that will not shrink the truth for them.
Pick It Back Up
Sit your kids next to you. Let them hear the preaching.
Then do the part nobody can do for you, which is the conversation in the truck on the way home.
Ask what they heard. Ask what they did not understand. Tell them what it cost you to understand it.
There is no curriculum for that. It only requires that you have been paying attention yourself, which is the real reason most of us avoid it.
And it does not stop at your own front door.
A man who will not teach his own children will not build anything past them.
Prepare yourself first, because no man hands over what he never picked up. Then your house. Then your church, where there are boys with no father in the room who are watching how you carry a Bible. Then your community, your nation, and whatever piece of the world God sets in front of you.
Every one of those runs downstream from a man who did the work at his own kitchen table first.
The fullness came in a body, and children were allowed to touch it. Anyone shrinking it now is doing something Christ would not permit His own men to do.
Give them the whole thing. They can carry more than you think.
Strong men. Strong homes. Strong businesses.
In that order, always, because a man who will not teach his own house has nothing to hand anybody else.