The Gospel Truth.

“When kids are young, you just need to put stuff in them so that when you shake them, they just throw up Bible.” - J.D. Greear

Read this quote in a Trevin Wax interview with J.D. Greear. Made me laugh and shout "Amen" all at the same time. I think the point he was getting at was that kids don't need to be learning morality in their homes, they need to breathing gospel truth. Morality tells us that we should "do this" or "don't do that." Gospel truth tells us that we have a loving God that wants us to know Him and be like Him so that we can enjoy the blessing of communion with Him and others forever and ever without the conflict of sin and pain and injury and death. The road to morality is abiding by the law and relying on our goodness alone; the road to Gospel truth is accepting grace from the hand of God and relying on the saving work of Jesus Christ and His Lordship alone. Morality ends in a story that's all about us; Gospel Truth ends in a story that's all about Jesus.

And our kids pick up on this vicariously through the way we teach them, correct them, discipline them, and love them. And we parents know the difference too - that outburst in the middle of the grocery store check-out lane or on the way out of the doors at church when our flesh reacts to the embarrassment of our child's behavior and we reach out and pull our child close, use a disapproving tone of voice and remind them of certain acceptable social manners that have no sure footing in Biblical truth. When our kids ask "why" and we respond with "because I said so" instead of taking a moment to root our instruction in the Word of God and give them one more connection to the reality and relevancy of the gospel. When we react with a little less than Godly love because we too are tired and ready for the comfort of our own bed, and - instead of humbly asking for their forgiveness and using the moment as an opportunity to teach them how to extend grace - we just pray that they will go to sleep quickly and forget about it by morning.

Our kids - like it or not - are "throwing up" only what they've eaten. And as an American (and especially Southern) society, we spoon-feed our kids morality lessons. We miss so many opportunities to extend them grace and forgiveness or ask them to extend grace and forgiveness to us, and then we wonder why they have a problem doing it at school with their own friends on the playground. We want scripture to be relevant to them, but we don't "teach them to [our children]" or "talk about them when [we] are at home and when [we] are on the road, when [we] are going to bed and when [we] are getting up" (Deut 11:19) the way that scripture commands. We want our kids to grow up to have a heart to serve others but we model selfishness for them, not necessarily by being selfish ourselves, but by ordering our family's world around serving their needs - their sports, their interests, their hobbies, their school activities. As parents, we lay our own lives down in "sacrifice" over the wrong altars, pointing our kids to worship everything that this world has to offer them and missing the burning bush completely.

And we do not do it intentionally. All parents (save a few) really do want what's best for their kids. Most Christian parents that I know really do want their kids to love Jesus. But sometimes, what I wonder is this: Do we want our kids to love Jesus because Jesus makes our kids more tolerable in the moment? Or do we want our kids to love Jesus because we want them to experience the blessing of a grace-filled relationship with Jesus for all of eternity?