Our friends at Athanasius Press have announced the publication of an exciting new catechism for our covenant children. Athanasius Press describes the new book as:
“The real heart of catechesis is to form in our children a covenantal identity, a sense of belonging to God and to the church. Our children need to be taught who they are in Christ so they can live faithfully in the church, family, and world. We must train our children in such a way that their whole lives will be a grand Amen to their baptisms.”
While many children’s catechismal tools exist, Lusk’s work is certainly of a wider, more “catholic” breadth, while remaining digestible for our youngest children. Notably, Pastor Lusk emphasizes a clear presuppositional message: “God has saved you; now be loyal to him.”
Pastor Lusk adds, “When we tell our children that God is their Father and that Jesus died for their sins, we are telling them something true and helping them internalize their covenant identity.”
Rich Lusk is the father of four and the Pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of Paedofaith: A Primer on the Mystery of Infant Salvation and a Handbook for Covenant Parents, as well as a contributing author to The Church Friendly Family, The Federal Vision, and The Case for Covenant Communion.
Any consideration of the Protestant Reformation in general–and Martin Luther specifically–would be incomplete without mention of Brother Martin’s views on the Christian family and his affection for children. Consider the following excerpt from Luther’s treatise (published in 1522) entitled The Estate of Marriage:
Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason (which the pagans followed in trying to be most clever), takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labour at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself? O you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful. carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.
What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, “O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers. or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labour, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight.”
A wife too should regard her duties in the same light, as she suckles the child, rocks and bathes it, and cares for it in other ways; and as she busies herself with other duties and renders help and obedience to her husband. These are truly golden and noble works. This is also how to comfort and encourage a woman in the pangs of childbirth, not by repeating St Margaret legends and other silly old wives’ tales but by speaking thus, “Dear Grete, remember that you are a woman, and that this work of God in you is pleasing to him. Trust joyfully in his will, and let him have his way with you. Work with all your might to bring forth the child. Should it mean your death, then depart happily, for you will die in a noble deed and in subservience to God. If you were not a woman you should now wish to be one for the sake of this very work alone, that you might thus gloriously suffer and even die in the performance of God’s work and will. For here you have the word of God, who so created you and implanted within you this extremity.” Tell me, is not this indeed (as Solomon says [Prov. 18:22]) “to obtain favour from the Lord,” even in the midst of such extremity?
Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, though that father is acting in the spirit just described and in Christian faith, my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith. Those who sneer at him and see only the task but not the faith are ridiculing God with all his creatures, as the biggest fool on earth. Indeed, they are only ridiculing themselves; with all their cleverness they are nothing but devil’s fools.
Notice that Luther’s vision of the Christian family does not presuppose an absentee father who sees the care of infants as “women’s work” that is somehow beneath him. Rather, Luther’s assumption is that the man who is following hard after Christ will take pleasure and gain sanctification as he rocks his newborn, washes it’s diapers, loses sleep giving baby comfort, and cares for baby’s mother in all tenderness. Luther also assumes that the man who does these things will inevitably face some scorn from what he calls “devil’s fools.”
As we pray for God to grant further reformation to the church in our day, we should pray that one of the evidences of that reformation would be men that mimic Luther’s views on tender caring toward their wives, their newborn children, and overall servant leadership in their households.
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Derek Hale has lived all of his life in Wichita, Kansas and isn’t a bit ashamed about that fact. He and his wife Nicole have only six children–four daughters and two young sons of thunder. Derek is a ruling elder, chief musician, and performs pastoral duties at Trinity Covenant Church (CREC). Derek manages a firmware lab for NetApp and enjoys reading, computers, exercising, craft beer, and playing and listening to music. But not all at the same time. He blogs occasionally at youdidntblogthat.tumblr.com.<>mobile rpg gamesкейсы продвижение ов
Does scripture allow us to fence the table of the Lord from covenant children on the basis of an ability to articulate propositional doctrine? Can I keep my baptized son from the meal because he cannot explain the intricacies of substitutionary atonement? No. For while communion may represent a whole package of difficult theological truths that could take a lifetime to understand, what is necessary for participation…every three year old covenant member should be assumed to possess.
Why do I say this? Let’s look at a passage of scripture that gives God’s call to church ministry starting at age three.
Three Year Old Levites
2 Chronicles 31 calls for Levites to begin holy work at the Lord’s house at the age of three:
11 Then Hezekiah commanded them to prepare chambers in the house of the Lord, and they prepared them. 12 And they faithfully brought in the contributions, the tithes, and the dedicated things. … [Certain men] were faithfully assisting him in the cities of the priests, to distribute the portions to their brothers, old and young alike, by divisions, 16 except those enrolled by genealogy, males from three years old and upward—all who entered the house of the Lord as the duty of each day required—for their service according to their offices, by their divisions.(2 Chronicles 31.11-16)
God expected Levites who worked in the house of the Lord do their work beginning right after they were weaned (age three). How does this compare to how we treat the children already marked out by God’s covenant in baptism, today? Do we assume them to be automatically capable for faithful ministry to the Lord? We should.
Baptism is the right fence, and we have already rightly brought our covenant children inside. But where some push for an intellectual fence, usually around twelve, our passage in 2 Chronicles 31 pushes us back out of the realm of making intellect a credible fence. It calls us back to the scriptural action of charitable presumption for the young in the Lord.
Too Faithful
Some want to bar children from the table until they can articulate their faith in the Lord in the right fashion, to the satisfaction of the elders. I have known of a child in one such church who was well trained by his parents in the truths of the faith. When he was interviewed by the elders, they thought his answers were too good – he was actually repeating the catechetical answers.
But to these guardians of the table, an accurate answer indicated that the answers were not genuine, because the child did not come up with them in his own child-like words. They failed to pass the child into the communing community within the larger number of the baptized in that church.
The child had been too diligent at learning according to the faith of his parents. Too ready to obey. This resulted in a flawless test, which, in their eyes could only indicate that the child’s obedience was practiced and not genuine. Did they not see this as fruit of faithfulness in that home?
But that test is nowhere found before the calling of young Hebrew covenant members to holy work for the Lord.
We Know Which Jesus
The prime worry of the people who hold out for crystaline doctrinal explanations is that the child may not have true faith, and that they won’t understand Jesus correctly before coming to the meal. They fear that somehow this defies warnings in 1 Corinthians 11.
Let’s imagine a child of our own church, baptized, and as usual, he is giving no troubling evidence that he is worshiping the wrong Jesus. He is just a child raised in our Trinitarian church. Should we restrict him from the table because we can’t know whether he is orthodox in his heart?
Should we just accept every claim to faith we hear? How do we know the child isn’t full of heresy?
There is an answer, and we can see it by comparing the children of our church to a man who wants to join our local body on the first day he visits. You would need to verify who this man is… what does he truly worship? Is he part of the Church?
Now of course, we should be able to reserve a right to judge when any random adult says “I love Jesus, let me join your church!” In that case, we still need to take pause to make certain he is talking about our Jesus, and not the Mormon one, or the Jehovah’s Witness one, because we do not know where this man is coming from. We need to see that he wishes to worship the Triune God of the historic (apostolic) church.
But the key point is knowledge of where a person comes from. For on the other hand, when a tiny baptized saint, and member of a household in our church says, “I love Jesus,” we must already be assured that they are loving the Jesus of that orthodox house.
In fact, if it is a child of our own church, let us act out of certainty that they could not under normal circumstances be referring to any Jesus other than our own Jesus. The child knows only the Jesus he is given in your body of believers. Are your church’s elders orthodox in preaching, and in guiding the child’s parents? Then be assured he is asking for your own orthodox Jesus.
If we question the heart intention of a child of our own church, we must likewise question his parent’s grown up orthodoxy, and even our own preaching. In such a case we would similarly be driven to absurdly question whether “I love Grand-Mom,” means what he thinks it means. But we know it is fully possible for a child to love Grand-Mom, and to mean it, even after rote learning of this phrase on the road right before entering Grand-Mom’s house at Thanksgiving. We would question an outsider, an insurance salesman who said, “Hey, I love grand-mom too!” But we don’t need to question our children, to accept their love as genuine though it has little intellectual formation.
The insurance salesman may indeed love Grand-Mom, but we should test it. We owe him no charitable presumption of love for her. Likewise, it world be absurd not to charitably presume our kids to love Grand-Mom.
We know which Jesus a baptized catechumen is referring to, no matter how young that disciple is. The baptism is of that church and through those parents. So that baptism implies the faith of that church is indeed the faith the child is attached to. And not merely sociologically, but also theologically…spiritually.
My Point
Of course this whole thing is an unnecessary exercise, because my point is not that I think we need a verbal profession before opening the Lord’s table to a young baptized eater. I believe the Bible tells us plainly that if a person is baptized and is an eater, then he or she should eat the common meal that is owned by all the baptized. (1 Cor 10 – one body, one loaf). We accept the normativity of faith in the womb (Ps 22, Ps 71, Ps 8).
Rather, my main point is that even if we were to ask for such a confession of verbally expressed faith before allowing the child to the food of the Lord’s house, we would have to work within the restrictions of scripture. And the Scripture will not let us ask for a test that is beyond the complete capability of a three year old. If he cannot pass our session’s inquiry, then we are defying the pattern set in scripture. Three-year-olds have holy work to do for the Lord.<>games for mobileподбор слов google
Is there a simple way to talk about child bearing that is robust enough to move the church in the biblical direction of “fruitfulness,” but which also takes into account the deeply sensitive areas of life that hide inside the soul of each couple in our body? I believe there is. I want to direct any curious readers to glance at the end of the post; that is where my 2 suggested rules are found.
Between Scylla and Charybdis
What is really being looked for is the right path between the one error of legalism, and the other error of antinomianism. Legalism is making up rules that God has not made. Antinomianism is pretending he hasn’t spoken when he has indeed. And viewing the question about promoting fruitfulness in the church through this filter helps us to come to some simple but powerful answers.
Because the Bible really does send us the message of wishing for many children in the church, but the life of the church really does contain many exceptional situations that would give us pause from each man pressing his neighbor and his brother with inquisition over why they have less children than he has in mind as godly, therefore we need to take into account what God has said and what he hasn’t.
What the Bible Does Say
Let’s quickly get the sense of pleasure the Lord has poured into his words about the expansion of Christian families:
Humanity, back when humanity as a whole was also the church as a whole, was told explicitly this commission:
“And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…”” (Genesis 1.28)
We do have it on good authority (from the wisdom of Solomon) that God blesses families that seek to expand with childbirth:
“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. 4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. 5 Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!” (Ps 127.3-5)
We do hear a general expectation that faithfulness is turned by God into growing families:
“1 Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways!… 3 Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table. 4 Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.” (Ps 128.1-4)
So it isn’t imaginary. But we must also keep in mind what the Bible doesn’t say, and what it does say about difficulties in this process.
What the Bible Doesn’t Say
The Bible doesn’t tell us an ideal number of children.
The Bible doesn’t forbid birth control, per se.
I am not giving verse references for these, since the Bible doesn’t command them. But we should take note.
What Else the Bible Says
Here is some other significant information to making a pastorally wise decision about how the topic is handled in church.
Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Samson’s mother (the wife of Manoah), Hannah, and Elizabeth all had something in common: They were godly and barren at the same time.
So the Bible’s generalized blessing about bearing fruit is not a categorical assertion that godliness begets large families. The Author (God) of the text is quite aware that women endure the pain of singleness, the pain of barrenness, and also in many of these cases the stigma and shame that comes with it. The Bible does not cast any shame from the Lord over these women who have been made to go without, rather it is the Lord’s compassion that hearkens to them in their prayers, and the prayers of their loving husbands.
Gen 16.17 The Lord blessed Sarah.
Gen 25.21 The Lord granted Isaac’s prayer for his wife.
Gen 30.22 The Lord remembered Rachel, and God listened to her.
Judges 13.3 The Angel of the Lord appeared to the wife of Manoah and spoke to her.
1 Sam 1.19 The Lord remembered Hannah.
Luke 1.13 An angel appeared to Zechariah, and told him his prayer for Elizabeth had been heard.
But God Doesn’t Always Grant These Requests
Similar to Hannah who spent time at the temple asking to have a child, we hear about a prophetess in Jesus day, a woman named Anna (which is exactly the same name as Hannah), who had been married only seven years before she was widowed, and then had lived to eighty-four years old still unmarried. She was devoted to temple life, and the Lord heard her prayers as well, but the answer of provision had been to give her the temple, and the answer of new children for her had been to let her live to see the dedication of baby Jesus, come to save his people from their sins.
So What Overall Have We Found About God’s Word and Childbearing?
God does want to expand his image and glory in the world through the fruitfulness of children coming out of Godly marriages.
We can expect this to be a normative quality to the life of faithful churches, but this is far from saying it will happen to all godly church members.
We can know along with scripture that many difficulties and challenges lie beneath the public surface of marriages in our midst.
THE REALLY NEEDED CAUTION
I think one more very efficient wise word is to be added in before we make a simple conclusion. Similar to the question in Romans of eating meat purchased in idol temples, the above findings would make us want to want the church to have fruitfulness, but might also make us cautious about messing with the conscience or the private motivations of other church members. So here is that biblical wise word to individual Christians:
“Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls,” (Romans 14.4).
The Conclusion
My conclusion in two rules (yes rules):
Rule #1: The church must love fruitfulness.
The church as a whole should have a public attitude of desiring children, of loving and encouraging children, of not speaking negatively of childbearing, and not complaining about their presence in worship. It must be okay in worship to preach about multiplication. It must be okay in conversation to rejoice that someone is pregnant. It must be okay to rejoice with adoptions. This will challenge many, many couples to open themselves to God’s blessing. Mere inconvenience or a preference for the good life is always trumped by the prime directive in Genesis 1.28 given for the glory of God. This is good for all of us.
Rule #2: The individual must not judge his neighbor about fruitfulness.
The church should preach that we need to let people be free to have their ups and downs without being hounded by nagging do-gooders trying to stir up the fertility in the next pew. This doesn’t mean a good friend could not encourage a person he is close to about biblical fruitfulness. We are free to confront a brother about a truly known sin, but in this area it requires being privy to a lot of information that average pew neighbors don’t have about each other. We might run into a rare time to put a finger on Genesis 1.28, but we cannot go home with simple ideas about how other members are faithful or not in the private of their lives, just because they look more like Jacob and Rachel than like Jacob and Leah.
Remember that people in your church have gone through much without sharing it all publicly, and many have lived much life before joining your flock. Men have had testicular cancers. Women have been damaged by abortions. People have surgeries, and medicines, and sometimes deep psychological problems they only barely keep at bay, problems which may even have come from receiving abuse as a child.
Rule 1 guards against antinomianism. God has spoken. Children are an inheritance and a reward.
Rule 2 guards against legalism. God is judge. Children shouldn’t be a whip for casual use on other Christians.
If God is indeed the one who opens the womb, then pray to him that he be the one to pour out multiplication on the images of God in the garden of your church. And pray that God would give us all self-control in the way we speak, and wisdom in seeing the serious needs of all the families and couples in our midst.
The straightest, safest path is never denying what God has said, and never demanding what God has not.<>оценка рейтинга а
The enemies of Jesus don’t like it when children get involved, because God has designed them as a weapon and as a reminder of God’s strength. If children are increasing, and if they are present amongst the worshipers, then they spell the coming doom of God’s enemies. They display the faith of his people, both in being faithful hearts themselves, and in showing off the trust their parents have in God. They are a tangible threat to godlessness. This is attested in multiple instances in scripture.
Let’s look together at a short Psalm (Ps 8) that helps us to see down into the inner workings of the war to build God’s kingdom – we will find out that one of the largest gears in the mechanism, one of the most powerful and necessary components in the wheels of the church, is the presence of children in God’s service of worship.
I expect this Psalm to be a good tool for talking to your children about their special job in the church service – and that job is: “to silence the enemy and the avenger.”
Before we can get a hold of this Psalm, we need a moment’s look at how God instructed rulership and kingdom expansion to come about in the first place – so turn to page one of the Bible and look down at verse 28.
God’s first command for his King, Adam, on how to rule was through a process of childbearing, and working with your children to bring the world under God’s reign.
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth,” (Gen 1.28).
See this list of five:
be fruitful
multiply
fill the earth/land
subdue
rule
PSALM 8 – The Weapons of Our Warfare
Psalm 8 is a worship song which is all about this very passage. Psalm 8 is about Genesis 1.27-28. Psalm 8 is about creation (“the work of your fingers,” v.3). It specifically mentions the principalities made on day 4, the moon and the stars, which Genesis 1 says are made over the earth to “rule over the day and night.” This is no coincidence: they are symbols of dominion, and the theme is all about dominion and ruling over the earth in this Psalm. Verse 6 says, “You have given [man] dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet…” And then it lists land, sky, and sea creatures. Just like Gen 1.28 does! This is a Psalm about taking God’s majesty and the glory of his name and his rule outward to the whole earth!
But remember, in Genesis 1.28, in order to rule, you have to be fruitful and multiply. In order to take dominion, the church has to have babies. And Psalm 8 dives right into baby-having as the first related action to the bringing of the kingdom of God’s majestic name:
“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. 2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.”
God gets the war for his glory underway this way – when the doctor spanks the newborn covenant member, that first gasp for air and the subsequent screaming – that is holy music. It shuts the devil up.
He can hear the majesty of God’s covenant name displayed over another life, and he is dumbfounded.
And we, like David, who sang to shut the mouth of the demons of the king of Israel, we sing. We sing David’s words to shut the mouths of the demons. We sing David’s words in Psalm 8 about the dominion of Genesis 1. And when we sing in church to make his name glorious with Psalm 8, then we confess in music that our babies are made as the work horses of the front line.
Tell your kids they have a job. That God has chosen them for glorious array in battle. That he has spectacles to make of enemies, and mouths of devouring adversaries that need to be shut. Tell them that they are needed in the Lord’s service of worship, and that no one else can take their place, and tell them that this we know for the Bible tells us so.
And if your toddlers are too young to follow the words of the Psalms in church, then have them make a joyful noise and hum. And if your babies are too young to hum along to the tune, just bring them to show them off. Show off your faith, and show off God’s promise. And don’t worry, they’ll make plenty of noise. You won’t have to manufacture that part.
Oh church! Oh holy dominion takers – open your ears for battle, listen as the kingdom comes at the noise of covenantal invaders, born to take up seating space in the sanctuary with car seats and diaper bags. Born to take up space in the worship of the King, edging out darkness with the chosen praise, ordained for your Sunday morning brush with the power of God saving the world.
And if you are unable to have children, or more children. If you are older, or widowed. If you are caught lonely and wondering what to do – then pray that the Lord would bring the kingdom, and that he would send a blessing of childbearing to your church. Help the parents of children to feel comfortable with the hard process of teaching babies to get a little more mature each Sunday. Help them not to fear the noise their children make.
Oh church, the noise of children in the sanctuary has at times been treated as a little lower than the angels. But let’s make it our job instead to crown it with glory and honor, as we hear the kingdom come.
I am not sure where I picked up the idea of fat-souled children. It could have been Angels in the Architecture. It may have been an article in one of the obscure periodicals I read. But the image has stuck with me. Just to clarify, the image in my mind is not some fat, lazy, bum living in his mother’s basement playing Halo. The image in my mind is one of contentedness and delight: My father napping in his easy chair after Thanksgiving dinner. My wife and I slipping into bed tired, but content after a hard day’s work. Sipping beer on the back deck after chopping fire wood. Finishing a large project. Spending the Lord’s Day with God’s people. Reading Beowulf in the dead of winter. These are a few of the images that come to my mind when I think of fat souls. My next two articles list ways I think we can raise fat-souled children, children who are content, who take joy in all God has done, who are not petty and dour.
The opposite of fat-souled would be lean, gaunt, under nourished, dying. When people see me do they see a soul overflowing with God’s goodness? Or do they see a dead withered tree that has no sap and no fruit? Many Christians have entered into the abundant life our Lord speaks of and yet their souls are barren, dead, joyless places. With this list I hope to give us and our children a path out of that type of life and into a place of fatness.
There are some points to make before I get to the list.
First, you cannot have fat-souled children if you are not growing a fat soul yourself. A fat-souled person loves God, delights in God, and delights in the world God has made and the people he has put here. If you are not working to become that type of person then your children will not look like that either. All instruction concerning children begins with “parent teach thyself.” This one is no exception.
Second, these are not instructions for making a machine that churns out fat-souled children. In other words, it is possible to do many of these things and still not have fat-souled children. We can take these things and use them to beat our children, go through the motions or do these things without love and joy. As in all of life, there are no automatics. But the things I list below, done in faith and love for God and neighbor, can help your children not have withered souls.
Third, I am not an expert at most of these things. Some I do better than others. Some I am still terrible at. Some I am learning to do better. I fall short of this many days and my children do as well. I make no claim to mastery of these points. The list is a sermon to myself and a target to aim at.
So without further ado, on to the list. The first four are the most important. After that I just put them down as they came to my mind.
Pray that God would make your children fat-souled. Pray that they would not be petty or shallow or self-absorbed. It is true that God alone works on the heart, thus prayer is essential.
Teach your children they are sinners. Then teach them that all of their sins are forgiven in Christ. Nothing, absolutely nothing, frees the soul like Jesus. Nothing frees the mind from anxiety like God’s goodness shown to us at the cross. Without Jesus our souls are lean indeed.
Teach your children about God’s character. Tell them about his holiness, his wrath, his mercy, his providence, his kindness, his chastening rod, etc. Teach them through the study of Scripture, but also teach them through your life.
Teach your children to worship with joy and gladness of heart. This includes the private worship of reading the Scriptures and prayer. But I am especially talking about corporate worship. Fat-souled children need worship that feeds them. They need to know they are meeting with God and his people every Sunday. They need to know that they were made to bow before God.
Teach your children to enjoy hard work. Hard work makes us fat-souled. Both blisters on our hands from raking leaves and weariness of mind from doing research can help make fat souls. Do hard work together. Your children should learn to work by themselves. But they should also learn to work as a family. Build something together. Make a meal together for someone who needs it. Improve your house by laboring together on a project. Even if the little ones cannot help much let them participate where they can. Make your home a place of productivity and not just consumption.
Teach your children to love all types of people. Show them how to love babies and the elderly and everyone in between. Teach them how to love the quirks in their brothers and sister and to delight in the differences between families. Look that family loves to play the accordion. That man wears his ties too short every Sunday. Too often we disdain differences instead of rejoicing in them. Find ways to help your children meet other nationalities and people from other areas of the country (except California :-)). There are wicked people out there. There are stupid people out there. But do not raise your children to be suspicious of everyone they meet or to be uncomfortable around different people. Teach your children that people are fascinating. And that means you, as the parent, must delight and rejoice in your child’s quirks. You must find them fascinating.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
