I read this poem some years ago and saved a copy.  It is written by David Steele who was then an adjunct professor at San Francisco Theological Seminary.  His poem, based on Mark 10:13-16, is titled “Let the Children Come.”  I think you’ll see why I saved it.

       “There’s nothing as nice as some children

         every family should have one or two

         they are such a fine race when they’re kept in their place

        say… the nursery, the park, or the zoo.

       In his place the young child is delightful,

       full of fun, a most interesting buddy;

       but his yearning for action can cause a distraction,  

       when he has invaded the study.

       The office is no place for children. 

        They foul up our work with their fun. 

        So we make it a rule that they must go to school

        so their elders can get something done.

       Some children came searching for Jesus. 

       His friends were distressed…and inclined

        to think t’would be terrible to have fresh parable

        suddenly slip from His mind.

       So they tried to get rid of the children,

       surely no major disgrace,

       protecting their master from some great disaster,

       by keeping the children in place.

       “Let chose children come in,” Jesus shouted,

        and said something frightfully odd. 

        “They are bearers of grace and their ultimate place

        is right smack in the kingdom of God.”

       So the place of the child is the kingdom! 

       That’s what He so carefully taught. 

        So…the last time you did

        play some ball with your kid,

        you were closer to God than you thought.”

       Jesus told His disciples that the rightful place of children is right next to His side.  The sermon for this Mother’s Day morning is to help us learn how to bring them there.

       In Ephesians 6 Verse 4 Paul tells us: “Do not provoke your children but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.  We are called to do this because, as Psalm 127:3 points out, our children are a “Heritage from the Lord.”  Children are a stewardship entrusted to us by God.

       One of the most arresting statements made by Jesus during his ministry on Earth concerned the offending of children.  He said that it would be better for a person to have a millstone tied around his neck and be cast into the sea than that he cause a child to stumble. 

       That is an extreme position on contributing to the delinquency of minors.  But I think Jesus is very serious. He is also serious about the blessing of contributing to the growth of minors.

       A plainly dressed woman, almost a bag lady, was noticed to be picking up something in the street, a poor slum street.  A policeman watched her very suspiciously.  Several times he saw her stoop, pick up something and hide it in her bag.  Finally, he went up to her and with a gruff voice and a threatening manner demanded, “What are you carrying off?”  The frightened woman did not answer at first.  So the officer, thinking she must have found something valuable, threatened her with arrest.  The woman opened her sack and revealed a handful of broken glass.  “I just thought I would like to take out of the way of the children’s feet,” she said.

       How do we pick up the glass that would hurt the children’s feet?  Paul says that we do it by the way we bring them up.  The word he uses is ektretheo which means to nourish them, to “rear them tenderly.”  This nourishing care is to be characterized by two things, discipline and instruction.

       Discipline, paideia, is like the correction that comes to us from God.  This is discipline characterized not by harshness but by care.  This is the same word the author of Hebrews uses to describe the discipline that God exercises for us as his children.  The second word, instruction, refers to training by word and by example.

       Four hundred years ago a gardener set a young pine in one inch of soil in a shallow dish.  As the tree grew he trimmed each root and cut the branches back.  When he died his son tended the tree and so on down through nineteen generations.  The tree never outgrew its shallow dish.  Today it stands in the Kuhara gardens in Tokyo, a patriarch twenty inches high, much alive, with a twisted top three feet across.

       Several hundred years old and only twenty inches high!  A wonderful job has been done in making a tree miss its destiny.  The tree shouts a warning to us because a mind can be cut back just as the tree was cut back and made a dwarf.  If the generous spiritual impulses of the child’s soul are cut back and never allowed to grow as they might, a spiritual dwarf will be the result.

       God speaks to a child and a young person as clearly as He spoke to Samuel in the Old Testament.  When a child’s response to Christian teaching is minimized and cut back and other things are given greater importance, whether by word or by example, it is like cutting back the branches and roots of a tree.  A child so cut back might end up like the ancient tree in Japan, interesting in a curious sort of way, but a twisted approximation of all he could be.

       We communicate the Christian faith in many ways, the most important of which is the example we set.  It’s like the story of a family on a blistering hot day when they had guests for dinner.  The mother asked four-year-old Johnny to say grace.  “I don’t know what to say,” the boy explained.  “Oh, just say what you hear me say,” the mother replied.  Obediently the boy bowed his head and murmured, “Oh, Lord, why did I invite these people here on a hot day like this.”

       We must realize that we are the first Bible our children will ever read.  They will follow our lead.

      We also communicate the faith with the words we speak.

       In Deuteronomy 6 we find God’s instructions for the teaching of children in the faith.  Listen to these words and think about the way we should be communicating the faith to our children:

       “And these words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart.  And you shall teach them diligently to your daughters and sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.  And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals for your forehead.  And you shall write them on the door post of your house and on your gates.”

      Do you hear how this teaching is to be done?  It is not reserved for special home Christian training times as important as those are.  It is instead an ongoing process of modeling the life of the family of God for and with our children.  Certainly we must teach our children with words.  We should tell them often of what Jesus means to us.  We should show them the difference He makes in our decisions.  We should explore the answers to their questions with them.  But above all we must provide a model of what the Christian life should look like.

       We teach first of all by the style of our own commitment to Jesus Christ and what we are willing to do to make this a reality.

       There are some areas of Christian responsibility that we just cannot write a check for, no matter how much we give.  One example is in the Christian training of children and the tremendous influence parents have in this regard, more influence than even the best Sunday school teacher.

       A study discloses that if both mom and dad attend church regularly, 72 percent of their children remain faithful in participation.  If only Dad attends regularly 55 percent remain faithful.  If only mom attends regularly 15 percent remain faithful.  If neither attends regularly – if they drop off the kids and head for Starbucks -- only 6 percent remain faithful. 

       Those are some sobering figures.  They should remind us that there is often no substitute for a time consuming personal presence.  And in many ways, time is the greatest gift because time is the one thing we each have that is irreplaceable.

       We also need to model the joy of the Christian life.

       Don’t exasperate your children by the way you wear your faith.  It’s not supposed to make them or us itchy.  It’s supposed to fit.

       One reason that Paul perhaps told the Colossian parents not to “sour” their children is because they were practicing a Christian walk filled with little joy but countless rules and dos and don’ts.  It would be enough to sour anybody.  Believe me, it has.

        In a piece that appeared way back in 1973 but which still fits today, Erma Bombeck tells a story:

       “In church the other day I was intent on a small child who was turning around smiling at everyone.  He wasn’t gurgling, spitting, humming, kicking, tearing the hymnals or rummaging through is mother’s handbag.  He was just smiling.”

       “Finally his mother jerked him about and in a stage whisper that could be hear in a little theater off Broadway said, “Stop the grinning!  You’re in church!”  With that she gave him a belt on his hind side and as the tears rolled down his cheeks added, “That’s better,” and returned to her prayers.

       “What must these children think?”  Bombeck continues, “We sing, make a joyful noise unto the Lord while our faces reflect the sadness of the one who has just buried a rich Aunt who left everything to her pregnant hamster.

       “We chant, ‘If I have not charity, I become a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.”  Translated in the parking lot it comes out “and the same to you fella.”

       “Suddenly I was angry.  Bombeck writes, “It occurred to me that the world is in tears, and if you’re not, that you’d better get with it.  I wanted to grab this child with the tear stained face close to me and tell him about my God, the happy God, the smiling God, the God who had to have a sense of humor to have created the likes of us.

       “I wanted to tell him about an understanding God, one who understands little children who pick their noses in church because they are bored.  He understands the man in the parking lot who reads the comics while his wife is attending church.  He even understands my shallow prayers that implore, “If you can’t make me look thin, then make my friends look fat.”

       I wanted to tell him that I’ve taken a few lumps in my time for daring to smile at religion.  By tradition,  one wears faith with the solemnity of a mourner, the gravity of a mask of tragedy and the grim dedication of a rotary badge.

       “What a fool,” I thought.  “Here was a woman sitting next to the only light left in our civilization, the only hope, our only miracle, our only promise of infinity.  If he couldn’t smile in church, where was there left to go?”

       Discipline, certainly.  And also joy and celebration.

       We also bring up our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord by the opportunities we provide.  This includes enabling and encouraging our children to be a part of the church school and demonstrating its importance by our commitment to our own, ongoing Christian education.  It means having our children in worship with us and making Sunday worship a top priority – a much higher priority than youth sports.

       Next Sunday we begin a new five-week Sunday morning adult class on How to Spiritually Nurture Your Kids.   The class will help you understand both where kids are developmentally at different ages and how parents can effectively model and share their faith with their own children and their friends.   Laurie will take the lead the first two weeks and Bil will pick up on the Junior High, Senior High and College years the last three weeks.   The class will meet right here in the Fellowship hall and I hope anyone who cares about their children or grandchildren will be there.  There will be plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion including anything left hanging after last Sunday evening’s excellent Purity Night program.

        There is a Ziggy cartoon where Ziggy is sitting in front of the television and hears: “In viewing the following program, parental discretion is advised, but not really expected.”

       Well God actually does expect parental guidance from us. We are his stewards.  That’s why this class is so important.

       Some people say, “We will not influence our children in making choices and decisions in matter of religion.  Why not?  The ads will.  The radio will!  The school will!  The TV will! Their friends will.  Your neighbors will.  Businesses will.  I am not talking about brainwashing our children or practicing coercion.  I am talking about communicating the gospel of life to those whom God himself has entrusted to us.

       I have heard parents say: “I am not going to impose my religious ideas on my children, when they are 18 or 21, I’ll let them decide for themselves.”  But the fact is that the majority of people make their basic life decision, including religious faith, by the time they are eighteen.  If we do not give our children the “Words of eternal life,” someone or something else will certainly step in to fill the vacuum.  Witness the widespread use of alcohol and drugs and the growth of mind-control, highly disciplined cults. 

       As Christian parents, we should care for more for the response of our children to Jesus Christ than for anything else, their health, their intellectual vigor and brilliance, their material prosperity, their social position.  For only their relationship with Christ will finally last and will bring them and us to the place where our children become our brothers and sisters in the great “forever family” of God.  I am sure there is joy in Heaven when the teaching and the discipline of a Christian home leads, not artificially, but naturally, to a child’s own personal relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ.

       Do not provoke your children, but nurture them in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord.  That is God’s word to you and to me as Christian parents.