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An UNboring Gospel

 NOTE: This posting is in response to an article by Pastor Geoff Thomas that appeared in my Facebook feed today.  You can read it here.

Not long after I started pastoring, I found myself chatting with a lady in my church who had been teaching children for, oh, about a hundred years, and was frustrated at the kids’ inability to sit still in Sunday school.  I told her that I had recently heard someone say that “It’s a sin to bore children with the Gospel.”  Her incredulous look surprised me – until I realized that she thought that I was saying that it’s a sin to teach children the Gospel, because she assumed that the Gospel is inherently boring, and that there is no other way to teach it than to keep it boring. 

This is the first of several errors that Geoff Thomas makes in this article.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is absolutely, categorically, overwhelmingly not boring!  Shouldn’t that be startlingly clear to anyone who has found themselves staring into the holiness of God, comprehending the depth of their own sin – who has experienced their own death, felt the searing of the cleansing of God, and heard His voice speak to them with a life-giving and irresistible call? Oh, how I love Isaiah 6!  And how I LOVE to go back to that story – so much like my own – and be reminded again and again of the endlessly exciting and glorious Gospel!  How can anyone find that boring?  How can anyone think it’s OK – or, worse yet, imperative – to bore anyone – especially children – with this amazing news!  And how can anyone not repent when they realize that they have done such a thing?

The assumption that the Gospel is inherently boring has led to a dearth of Christ-exalting, God-glorifying worship and preaching.  At one end are those who seek to remedy the “boringness” of the Gospel by making it entertaining, or by twisting its purposes and promises to make them all about things that are not boring – like health, wealth, power and temporal happiness.  At the other end are those who decide that boring is good, and that being excited about anything – especially God – is sure to lead us away from a Godly, boring life.  The first errs by embracing worldly definitions of excitement and trying to morph the Gospel to match those notions.  The other errs when it refuses to find the beauty, joy and excitement that is inherent in the Gospel, and tries to redefine the Christian life as boring and insipid.

The one place where I must concur with Thomas is with his disdain for offering worldly entertainment to our children – and ourselves – as a remedy for boredom.  But I vehemently disagree with his assumption that entertainment is the only alternative to a boring Gospel or a boring life.  The far better answer is to fight the temptation to give in to boredom.  I know personally how hard that is. Boredom can actually be quite pleasant, as it gives us permission to do nothing, and to amount to nothing.  It lets us believe that, if our day-to-day experience offers nothing to excite us, then we should just accept it and remain bored, boring, and ineffectual for Christ. 

John Piper offers this remedy for a boring life and Gospel:

"My simple pastoral plea to you this morning is that you ... go to the word of God and let the Lord of glory speak life and energy and hope and zeal and passion and earnestness into your spirit. ... God calls you to invest your life in something great. There is not Christian warrant for the culture of acedia. Christ is too great for that. Boredom with Christ and his kingdom means we are blind. Open your eyes this morning and let him inspire in you afresh a passion for his supremacy in all things, including the cause of truth and life in our tired and decaying culture.”

I am convinced that if we are not igniting that kind of passion in ourselves, our people and, above all, our children, we have failed in our Gospel calling.

Geoff Thomas is right to come against a culture of entertainment, but he is sorely mistaken when he suggests that we must embrace boredom as a necessary part of life and the Gospel, and that we need to teach our children to do the same.  This only serves to create lazy, lethargic Christians who fail to fully embrace the joy and excitement of Kingdom living.

But that’s not all that Thomas does wrong in this article.  Regarding children, while he does make one valid point – that prior to hearing and responding to the call on their lives, children are unregenerate. This is true of adults as well.  But other than that, his view of children is tragically distorted and belittling.  He seems to think that children are not only unregenerate from birth (which, again, they are), but that they are unable to embrace the Gospel until they learn to be bored long enough to sit still without being a distraction to the adults and certainly without anything other than their folded hands in their lap and “sweetly learn to ... cry from their childish hearts to the Lord.”  But this poses two really BIG problems.  First, we must figure out how to convince “unregenerate” children to sit still for that long – and be sweet about it (which is nigh unto impossible), and second, we need to teach them to be bored (which seems to be Thomas’ primary thesis.)

But when I look for Jesus’ teaching about children, this is what I read:

 And they were bringing even their babies to Him so that He would touch them, but when the disciples saw it, they began rebuking them. But Jesus called for them, saying, "Permit the children to come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.  Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all." Luke 18:15-17 (NASB) 

There are four things that Jesus tells us about ministering to Children, and none of them are, “bore them.”

First, Jesus calls for them.  So it is with all of us.  None of us can begin to come to Jesus until He first calls for us.  Like Isaiah in the temple, we are dead in our sin, deaf in our ears, and blinded by the light of His glory.  He must make the first move.  We know this, and we act on this, when we evangelize adults; why, then, do we inflate our importance to think that, when it comes to children, we must set them up for salvation?

Second, Jesus commands us to cut them loose, to permit them to go to Him, even when they are very young.  My daughter came to Jesus when she was in Kindergarten – not even in our presence, much less at our prompting.  And she was baptized when she was 6 – some said it was too young, but the pastor who baptized her ran her through quite a one-on-one interview first and was convinced that she was ready.  So often, I see parents who set up way too many hoops for their children to jump through – hoops that only serve to hold them back from responding to Jesus’ supernatural call on their lives. 

Third, Jesus warns us to not get in their way as they run to Him.  A couple of days ago, I watched as my son-in-law coached my grandson to take his first short bike ride without training wheels.  I stood by the garage, and Matthew stood at the end of the driveway.  No one hovered over Isaiah as he tried – and failed – to ride the 50 or so feet.  And certainly no one set up obstacles to assure that he was really ready to ride, or that he really wanted to.  But hey, that’s just a bike ride – a little kid’s thing.  Coming to Jesus – that’s for grown-ups, and we need to make it hard enough that we know they are making a grown-up decision.  We must hinder them – just to be sure.  Right?  Jesus?  We do, don’t we?

Fourth, Jesus tells us to watch them; he doesn’t tell them to watch us: Jesus tells us to learn from Children. “The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”  Elsewhere (Matthew 18:1-3), when Jesus was asked, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven,” he grabbed a kid.  That’s not what we would do.  Rather, we would side with the apostles.  We would look at these noisy, hyperactive, immature, unregenerate little brats and see anything but the Kingdom of heaven.  We would hold them back until they are ready, quiet, patient, sweet and happy with being bored.  We would tell them to become good little ladies and gentlemen – like we all are – before they could be worthy of the Kingdom.  But Jesus – well, He always seems to get things backwards, doesn’t He?

And that’s especially true in his final lesson about the kiddos.  In case you missed it:  “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.” Or, again, from Matthew 18:3 “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” I find it very interesting – and not a little scandalous – that Jesus never tells children to behave like adults.  But He most certainly tells adults to be like children.  Or, “you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.” 

Yes, it is time to repent.  We need to repent of our stupid notion that children need to be constantly entertained, as that has raised a generation of adults that think they must be constantly entertained.  But we also must repent of the sin of boring people with the most amazing, exciting, glorious, wonderful thing ever set before us.  We especially need to repent of doing that to children, because in doing so, we have raised not just one or two, but many generations of people who run from the Glorious Truth and now pursue a false “gospel” that won’t bore them.

And finally, we need to repent of holding children back from Jesus with our belief that they are not simply unregenerate like the rest of the unsaved around us, but that they are SO unregenerate that they need to stop being children before they can go to Him.  We need to repent of holding them back until they learn important things in life, like how to be bored and like it.  We need to repent of our failure to watch them as they joyfully, noisily, energetically and with great abandon and utter lack of decorum run to the arms of Jesus.  And we need to repent of our refusal to learn about the Kingdom of Heaven from them, lest we miss it altogether.