The Word This Week
1 John 2:1...
I find it comforting John refers to those of us in His Church as, “little children.”
It has the possibility of many meanings, but first and foremost I am reminded of Jesus’ command we come to Him with the “faith of a child.” Childlike faith is easily attained but sometimes difficult to maintain.
As we grow in the knowledge of what faith even is, and in the love of Christ and His Word, sometimes our faith becomes more distant and ‘adult-like’ than ‘child-like.’ The reasons are many – and sometimes we can become hard on ourselves for our failure to keep things as simple as they need to be – but then along comes a man who has been through it all, a man of the stature of John, a man of many years of age - perhaps more than 90 years old – who cuts through all the extraneous, and addresses us simply as “little children.”
Being called a ‘child’ might be offensive in elite circles of Gnosticism and its inherent intellectualism and all its attempts to reach some sort of mastery of thought and philosophy, but it isn’t to me, and I hope it isn’t to you either.
One of the central tenets of what it meant to be a child was we obey the commandments of our parents without questioning the reasoning behind them or whether they were loving or not.
There was an inherent understanding that what mom and dad said to do was necessary – without really understanding why they said what they said. It was assumed on our part we didn’t have enough knowledge about what they were instructing us to do to disobey. It was only when we became an adolescent and left childhood that we began to question. Our growing disobedience was based upon our thinking we knew better.
Then we grew into adulthood, had children ourselves, and discovered how right our mom and dad had been about everything. They really did know better! This is called maturity. The knowledge we don’t know it all. The understanding there are many things beyond our comprehension. The willingness to yield to a knowledge greater than ourselves.
This is all a process which prepares our hearts for repentance, and for the love of Christ, which simply compels us to keep His commandments as, “little children.”
Pastor Bill
I find it comforting John refers to those of us in His Church as, “little children.”
It has the possibility of many meanings, but first and foremost I am reminded of Jesus’ command we come to Him with the “faith of a child.” Childlike faith is easily attained but sometimes difficult to maintain.
As we grow in the knowledge of what faith even is, and in the love of Christ and His Word, sometimes our faith becomes more distant and ‘adult-like’ than ‘child-like.’ The reasons are many – and sometimes we can become hard on ourselves for our failure to keep things as simple as they need to be – but then along comes a man who has been through it all, a man of the stature of John, a man of many years of age - perhaps more than 90 years old – who cuts through all the extraneous, and addresses us simply as “little children.”
Being called a ‘child’ might be offensive in elite circles of Gnosticism and its inherent intellectualism and all its attempts to reach some sort of mastery of thought and philosophy, but it isn’t to me, and I hope it isn’t to you either.
One of the central tenets of what it meant to be a child was we obey the commandments of our parents without questioning the reasoning behind them or whether they were loving or not.
There was an inherent understanding that what mom and dad said to do was necessary – without really understanding why they said what they said. It was assumed on our part we didn’t have enough knowledge about what they were instructing us to do to disobey. It was only when we became an adolescent and left childhood that we began to question. Our growing disobedience was based upon our thinking we knew better.
Then we grew into adulthood, had children ourselves, and discovered how right our mom and dad had been about everything. They really did know better! This is called maturity. The knowledge we don’t know it all. The understanding there are many things beyond our comprehension. The willingness to yield to a knowledge greater than ourselves.
This is all a process which prepares our hearts for repentance, and for the love of Christ, which simply compels us to keep His commandments as, “little children.”
Pastor Bill