What kind of ambassador are you to children? We are ambassadors of Jesus, and Jesus intends that children know His love, be brought to Him, and that nothing hinder their relationship with Him.
• Children and childhood is a distinctively Christian concept that must be protected and cherished.
In this passage, like the one before, Jesus is taking a stand for the least in society. The divorce and remarriage passage that precedes this is connected to this one as a single teaching of Jesus overturning laws and culture norms that hurt women and children.
One of my favorite authors, who died recently, was Neil Postman. Some of you are perhaps familiar with this New York University professor through his work Technopoly or the classic Amusing Ourselves to Death. But my favorite work of his is The Disappearance of Childhood. In that book, Postman, not a believer himself but a non-practicing Jew, showed that childhood, as we know it — the enchanted, protected 1950s Walt Disney-like innocence — was something that did not exist before Jesus. Moreover, Postman’s thesis was that childhood is a Christian concept that took over the West when Martin Luther’s Bible was published.
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Postman said that children in the world, apart from Jesus and the teaching of the Bible, are second-class beings, if not worse. History and anthropology bears him out. Postman believed that the true mark of childhood is the protection of children from images and ideas that are adult secrets, as he calls them. But the Word-centered world that was created in the Reformation is being replaced by an image-centered world that is telling secrets too soon. Therefore, our children grow up too soon, thus his title, The Disappearance of Childhood.
The lesson today is that we are here, all of us as a church, to guard our children, assist our parents in the Christian nurture of their little ones in the Name of Jesus.
The Picture Holds a Key to Eternal Life.
The key is that the presence of children is a constant reminder of how a person is saved. It is not their innocence, for anyone who has ever been with a two-year-old can see the sin nature at work. Nor is it just the subjective aspects of childhood like trust or naiveté. It is one singular aspect of children that Jesus is pointing to as necessary to come into His kingdom. The key must be called helpless dependency. There is no other way to get into the kingdom of God.
Jesus said that you must be born again and in order to get into the kingdom, you cannot come with what you offer God. You must come helpless and dependant like a little baby and say, “It in only through you, Lord Jesus, through your righteousness and blood. Will you forgive me?” Some of you need to come to Jesus like a child. It is the key to eternal life.
The Picture Offers a Promise for Eternal Fulfillment.
