Pre-Evangelism For Your Children – 6 – The Analogy of Rituals, Part One

Parents are responsible for helping to form and shape a child’s overall mental map of reality. If they neglect to do so, there is no telling how the child will interpret the ‘facts’ of the gospel. Those facts are not autonomous, and the miracle of regeneration is not usually accomplished without the Spirit’s use of means. Jesus might have turned water into wine, but He had some servants fill the water pots first. In the case of a child’s regeneration, parents are those means, filling the water pots, shaping the imagination so that the Spirit will make use of that favourable disposition towards the Christian message.

We have considered how the parents’ piety, roles in the home and routines are critical to shaping the child’s religious imagination. We now consider a fourth powerful shaping force. Deuteronomy 6:8-9 says,

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

It is possible that Moses wanted Israel to do something physical, such as writing out some Scripture, since people did not have a copy of the Law for themselves. But more than likely, God was saying through Moses that Israel was to fill their homes with things that served as signs and reminders of God as the ultimate reality. The Israelite home was to teach and instruct love for God not only by the piety of the parents, the godly roles, the God-centred routine, but also by ritual.

Evangelical Christians hear the word ritual, and typically respond with nervous suspicion. For those who prize genuine conversion and piety, ritual has connotations of dead religion, empty ceremony or even hypocrisy.

What is a ceremony or a ritual? It is an event which carries special meaning, performed on a special occasion. Weddings are rituals, ceremonies done on special occasions. All that we do at that ceremony has meaning: the way the bride and groom are dressed, what music is played, what is said, and the use of symbolic rings. The same is true of funerals, birthdays, graduations and inaugurations.

If you read the book of Leviticus, you will find that the worship and service of God in the Tabernacle, and later in the Temple, contained elaborate ceremony. The Levites followed God’s prescriptions for the various rituals of cleansing and sacrifice to the letter. The Israelite’s life was filled with laws, rituals and ceremonies, prescribed and designed by God.  Here and there, God explained what the teaching purpose was of these rituals and ceremonies:

 ”that you may distinguish between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean, (Leviticus 10:10)

God filled the life of Israel with ceremonies that helped the Israelite to see the difference between worship and selfishness, between a life lived only for things under the sun, and a life lived with a perspective of things above the sun. To put it in modern language, God was rescuing the Israelite from practical atheism, from what we would call practical secularism. By clothing life in all kinds of symbols, God was frequently reminding and teaching that He was the ultimate reality.

Further, God knew that ceremony and ritual are some of the most memorable tools for teaching children.

  “And you shall observe this thing as an ordinance for you and your sons forever.   ”It will come to pass when you come to the land which the LORD will give you, just as He promised, that you shall keep this service.  ”And it shall be, when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’   ”that you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice of the LORD, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households.’ ” (Exodus 12:24-27)

Notice that God predicts that the ceremony will provoke a question from the child. That’s the idea. Any well-planned ceremony has all kinds of symbols and procedures and manners which have meaning. It’s the joy of children to observe and wonder, and the joy of parents to explain.

Inevitably, someone will say, “All that ritual belonged to the Old Testament. The New Testament is free of ceremony and form and ritual.” Not true. What is baptism, but a ceremony, a ritual, in which we use a symbol to convey a deep, transcendent meaning? What is the Lord’s Supper except a ritual, a ceremony, in which we use various symbols to convey special meaning? In fact, every Sunday worship service is a ceremony, in which we read the Scriptures, pray the Scriptures, sing the Scriptures and preach the Scriptures. Properly done, this ceremony will deeply shape the imaginations of children who have yet to grasp the realities of the gospel.

God is not against ceremony or ritual. He is against ceremony and ritual that points only to itself. He is against ceremony with evaporated meaning, performed by loveless, disobedient hearts. He is against ceremony which is unbiblical or promotes a false gospel. He is against additions or subtractions from prescribed worship.

Our next post will consider some of the rituals crucial for shaping a child’s imagination.

Pre-Evangelism For Your Children – 5 – The Analogy of Routines

A child’s view of ultimate reality does not come through one beautific vision, but through thousands of observations, experiences and lessons. As he grows, his first teachers of the nature of things will be his parents. Their faith teaches him what faith is, if it is desirable, and where he ought to place his. This is before he fully understands the gospel that his faith must rest in. Further, their roles of father, mother, husband, and wife provide a picture of authority, love, righteousness, sin, judgment and grace, before his mind has understood how these things relate to the gospel.

A third powerful shaping influence on a child’s imagination is a family’s routines. Deuteronomy 6:7 says,

“You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

Here God tells Israel that their teaching and talking about loving God (vv4-5) must take place when they sit in the house, and when they walk by the way, when they lie down and when they rise up. On one level, God is simply pointing out how this discipling relationship must take place formally and informally, indoors and outdoors. But in another way, God’s words suggest the rhythm and routine of life. When you sit in the house is the time of day when you are at home; when you walk by the way is the time of day when you go out. When you lie down is the time of day when you sleep; when you rise up is the time of day when you wake from your sleep. Here is a suggestion of a cycle of events, a routine, a rhythm of life – getting up in the morning, going out, coming back, lying down to sleep. Not only are you to teach about loving God routinely, but your routine itself communicates something. Your daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly routine teaches your family about ultimate dependence, ultimate devotion, and ultimate love.

For the Israelite, his daily routine involved reciting the Shema in the morning and in the evening. When he ate his meals, his restricted diet reminded him to put a difference between the holy and the common and he thought on God. When he worked the land, there were laws regarding the animals, laws regarding sowing, tilling and reaping, which caused him to think on God. If he went to transact business, there were laws about money and equity. When he went home, there were laws about ritual cleanness. Once a week, he was to cease work, for God’s sake.

And if he was anywhere near the Tabernacle, or later, the Temple, he would have seen a routine: a burnt offering twice daily, and a meal offering twice daily – one in the morning, and one in the evening – when the day’s activity began and when it ceased. There would have been a sacrifice every Sabbath, and a sacrifice at the beginning of each month. There were sacrifices at the special feasts of Passover, Pentecost, Day of Atonement, and Tabernacles. He was to go to the Tabernacle or Temple three times a year.

What did this routine communicate to him? God is at the centre of life. God is the ultimate reality. God is the One we love ultimately, because He is ultimate reality.

This is the opposite of secularism which tries to sideline God to the margins of life, relegating Him to a once-a-week appearance. Secularism has a daily routine in which God is essentially invisible, and practically irrelevant. Secularism has a routine which suggests that God does not matter. Many children grow up in ‘Christian’ homes that are practically secular. The routine reflects nothing of the idea that God is that family’s ultimate love.

A New Testament Christian does not exist under the same code as the Israelite. Jesus told us to abide in Him as He abides in us. The word abide just means to dwell, to live. We are to live in Him: live in His presence continually. When His words abide in us, and we are living before Him and in light of Him, then our  routines ought to have Him as the ultimate reality behind all we do.  These routines either have God present when you lie down, rise up, sit in the house or walk by the way or they do not.

Consider your home. How does each day typically begin? Is there anything of God in it? One of the Jewish traditions on Pentecost was to bring the children in early in the morning, and put honey on their tongues just before reading the Scriptures. Does the day start with some kind of reading of the Word and prayer? Is there some equivalent of the morning sacrifice?

What is the habit around mealtimes, particularly dinnertime? Who is honoured for providing – which is, after all, why Dad was out all day – working hard so that God would be pleased to bless the home with provision. What is discussed at the table?

What kind of music routinely plays in the background? What sort of movies or TV programmes routinely play on the screen? Is the tenor of life one of distraction, or one of reflection?

How does the day end? Is there anything of God in it? Is there perhaps some family worship, some thanksgiving prayers before bedtime, or some music played which honours God? Is there some equivalent of the evening sacrifice?

When the days of rest come around, what is the routine then? Critically, what are the weekly habits of the family when the local church meets? Too many parents miss the fact that regular worship teaches those little hearts through the routine itself. When an adult Christian remembers that ‘we didn’t miss a service’, he is not remembering the glorious preaching. He is remembering a rhythm of life that demonstrated God’s centrality to that family.

What is repeated over and over again is learnt, memorised, internalised, and usually, prioritised. The habits of your home become a kind of rhythm that your children learn to get in step with. Routines say, this is important. This is necessary. This is essential. Routines are a picture of what the cycles of life revolve around. 

If we want our children to believe that the most important thing in life is a reconciled relationship with God, then we need to think about our rising up, going out, coming in, and lying down.

Amidst the Ruins

“And this place would be packed on a Sunday?” said the boy, deliberately raising his voice a little, to hear the ghostly echo.

“Hm?” His father turned around from inspecting the wood carvings on a piece of fixed furniture. “Oh, yes. Standing-room only, sometimes.”

The boy’s footsteps along some stonework along the sides gave a rich, sonorous klop-klop. He enjoyed accenting his steps, and then craned his head up to see where a sandstone pillar met the arches above. “How long did it take them to build?”

“Well, that depends on who you mean by them. The builders? It took around 120 years for several generations to build it.” He gently slid his finger across the top of an ancient window sill and rubbed off the dust. “But they could not have built it in 120 years without many more hundreds of years of thought and work that went before them. You don’t just decide to build this in a generation or two.”

He went silent and hoped his son would dwell on that. Instead, the boy had found a squeaky pew, and was grinning as he got a rhythm of squeaks out of it by rocking back and forth.

Father sighed and went on looking, hands behind his back, gently strolling.

“So what’s it used for today?” the boy called out.

A gentle mumbling at the entrance gave the answer, and father motioned towards it. A tour group with brochures, cameras, and a soft-spoken guide had shuffled in, but their chattiness had become strangely muted as they came under the great vaulted ceiling.

“Unbelievers with a love of beauty, church history buffs, and the occasional eccentrics like me come here. Mostly just to admire.” And then, almost under his breath, “not to worship.”

His son had caught that. He was pretending to remain uninterested, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. “So why don’t we come here any more? I mean, if they were so popular, why did they stop using them?”

Father hated trying to answer a question like that to a fifteen-year-old’s attention span. He prayed. He paused. “One reason is that most people in the countries in which these were built began to believe a terrible lie about reality that made a place like this seem less real, and eventually, unreal. Places like this became an oddity.”

“And those who used to worship here?”

“They believed a different lie. They believed that popularity was more important than the meaning of this kind of thing. Eventually, since most of the surrounding unbelieving people thought of this kind of place as odd and unreal, the believers took the same view, to appear relevant. They abandoned these places, because otherwise they might have risked appearing odd and irrelevant.” He grimaced at his over-simplification.

“That’s why we go to a theatre with comfy seats every Sunday, right?” the boy said, trying to be funny. Dad didn’t laugh. He turned away and gazed at the Stations of the Cross pictured on the windows. The boy sensed his father’s sadness.

“It can’t be that hard to build something like this with the technology we have today. What took them 120 years could be done in less than five.”

The father sat on one of the pews, and motioned to his son to join him.

“Son, the point is not whether we can duplicate something like this. Sure we can. We might even be able to do it with more precision than they could have.” He pursed his lips and formed his thoughts.

“The point is: even if we did, who would come here? Do you think we could interest even half the worshippers in our local church to meet in a place like this?” His son said nothing.

“When this was built, grandfather told father who told son what this place meant. They had made it, and they understood it. They loved it not as a badge of refinement, or as a museum piece. It was the expression of what they and their great-grandfathers loved and cherished.

“It is not that we have lost the ability to make these things. We’ve lost the ability to love them. We’ve lost the ability to understand them and allow them to shape us. That ability doesn’t come to us because the church down the road decides to move from a shop-front to here. It comes because generation after generation believe and love the same things. After centuries of loving the same things, they develop better and better ways of expressing those loves and beliefs, and you end up with something like this, ” he said, looking up, and motioning in a circle.

He tried to pause to let all this percolate, but his thoughts were coming faster than he could wait. His tone became more intense.

“See, there’s a reason we meet in the buildings we do on Sundays. There’s a reason the churches that still hold to the apostles’ doctrine won’t be coming back here. Those lies that the culture believed and the lies that the church believed have irreparably broken our link to this. We can’t come back.”

An uncomfortable pause followed. His son swallowed and averted his eyes. “But…we’re here, aren’t we? You love it, and so do some others. That’s got to count for something, right?”

The father’s expression softened, detecting his son’s desire to comfort. They got up and walked slowly past the tour group towards the entrance. “Son, a few oddballs here and there don’t create things like this place. We might appreciate it, and learn to better love it. We can let it have a sanctifying effect on us. But it is no longer ours, like it was our forefathers’.”

At the entrance, they turned around one more time to take in the whole place. The secular tourists with their pointing and snapping were conspicuous in a place of worship.

Father finished his thought. “We know this, because most of those who call themselves the descendants of the builders of this place have no desire to return here.”

Pre-Evangelism For Your Children – 4 -The Analogy of Family Roles

How a child imagines ultimate reality is powerfully shaped by his parents. How his parents live out their faith provides the child with an ongoing example of what a relationship with God is like, what loving God looks like, and why it ought to be chosen over secularism, materialism, or practical atheism.

However, the family unit is far more than a set of exemplars of piety. The family is also a collection of living symbols. The home is an extended role-play, and an ongoing metaphor. Each member plays a role, and with that role comes corresponding relationships. These roles have analogues in ultimate reality. Husband, wife, father, mother, and child take on particular roles that illustrate invisible, moral realities.

In the home, the children observe this role-play for more or less twenty years. Though the mundanity of life hides it, family is teaching the children about ultimate reality. It is teaching about authority, and how it should be exercised. It is teaching about obedience and disobedience, the reasons for obedience, and the consequences of obedience and disobedience. It is teaching about love: that there are different degrees of love, and different kinds of love. It is teaching about gospel realities: sin, righteousness, sacrifice, service, grace and mercy, forgiveness, and trust.

Before your child has pronounced the word “God”, he has an idea of authority. Before your child has ever heard about hell, she has learned whether or not selfishness has negative consequences. Before your children have ever memorised John 3:16, they have observed some kind of love in the home.

Two areas are of particular importance to the religious imagination: the portrayal of the loving authority of God which inspires and expects both obedience and reverence, and the portrayal of the sovereign grace that both nourishes and cherishes the beloved. In other words, children need a vision of both God’s greatness and His goodness, His transcendence and His immanence.

Fathers (and mothers) aim to be pictures of a God who rules justly and fairly, but regards rebellion as a deep perverseness that must not be allowed to continue unchecked. The kind of obedience  God expects from us (immediate, cheerful, wholehearted) is the kind fathers aim to inspire and expect. Likewise, the father in particular wants to be a picture of a God to be revered, honoured and esteemed and who regards irreverence with the same deep concern. The kind of respect which a child will show to his Ultimate Authority must at least begin in seed-form with his honouring of his parents (and I might add, his grandparents, pastors, teachers, policemen, governors, and so forth). And, we hasten to add, there is a kind of deportment that inspires reverence  (Tis 2:2-3). Ideally, children will see a model of submission and reverence when they behold their mother in her role as a wife (Eph 5:22, 33).

Mothers (and fathers) aim to be pictures of a God who seeks to sacrificially meet the needs of those He loves, and regards them as precious. This nourishing and cherishing is to be true of husbands towards wives, and of fathers and mothers toward children (Eph 5:29, 1 Thes 2:7, 11). For that matter, biblical masculinity and femininity are more than biological realities or practical arrangements, they are shadows of unseen truths. When rightly lived out, children see copies of the true (Heb 9:24).

Shelves have been filled with books written on how Christian parents are to go beyond dealing with mere outward behavior, and aim instead for the child’s beliefs and heart desires. These books commendably exhort child-training to push a child to the gospel itself. Let us push further. Our goal is more than acquaintance with the facts of the gospel. It is for our children to imagine all the realities connected to the gospel properly, and to feel rightly towards those realities.

If we do our best to be obedient to the biblical roles in the power of the Holy Spirit, we fill our homes with something quite extraordinary: an ongoing, albeit imperfect, picture of the Creator who rules, but who also redeems and restores. Once again, children will learn not just that they are commanded to love God, but that loving God is good. They learn, if a relationship with Christ is like their parents’ marriage, then loving God is desirable. If God cares for them like their mother, then it is safe trusting God wholeheartedly. If God is as just and strict as their parents, then they need their sins forgiven. If God is a Father like their father, then they owe Him deep and joyful respect.

Preachers’ hyperbolic statements about Satan’s intentions to destroy the family are probably not far off the mark. To ruin the analogy is to ruin the child’s chance of picturing ultimate reality properly, robbing him of a right view of the gospel’s realities. To give a fairly appropriate portrayal of who God is, what He is like, what obstructs knowing Him, and how we come to know Him is to provide, in the words of J. Gresham Machen, favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel, which the Spirit may be pleased to use.

Pre-Evangelism For Your Children – 3 – The Analogy of Parental Piety

The first and greatest commandment is followed by a commandment to teach children to do the same (Deut 6:4-9). Our goal as Christian parents should be nothing less than to help shape our children so that they will, by grace, become ardent lovers of God. We have said this happens not merely by telling our children to love God, but by shaping the child’s imagination. Our concern in the next posts is how this imagination is shaped.

Probably one of the first analogies the child’s imagination receives is the analogy of his parents’ faith. This provides him with a picture of what it is like to be in a relationship with God.

Before a child knows anything about justification, penal substitution, or the nature of God, he knows what a relationship with God is like. Or at least, he knows what his believing parents express it to be like. The moral imagination of child is shaped by being exposed to his parents’ piety, and it is their example that gives him his first introduction to how God is to be loved, and if God ought to be loved.

This is probably why right after telling Israel that they are to love Him with all the heart, soul and might, God tells them that these words about loving God ultimately “which I command you today shall be in your heart.” That is, these words are to be internalised and understood and practiced by the parents themselves first. Following that, verse 7 kicks in.

“You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

Certainly, this teaching will take the form of direct instruction. However, our concern in this series is how the non-discursive, non-cognitive faculty of knowing is shaped. Certainly then, part of the teaching is the fleshed-out example of love for God seen in the parents.

Loving God ultimately can be thought of as ultimate dependence, ultimate devotion and ultimate delight. When we love God ultimately, we regard Him as ultimately reliable, ultimately valuable, and ultimately desirable. We do not trust, commit to, or rejoice in anything besides God as an end. All else are means: He alone is the end.

In a family, this kind of love for God is seen in very tangible ways. When in the middle of a health or financial or emotional crisis, Dad says to the family, “We can be very thankful for what God has given us. Let’s turn to Him now in prayer, and ask Him for grace”, that lesson speaks to little hearts in powerful ways. Gratitude and contentment say more than 100 sermons. When Dad says, “We’ve barely got petrol in the tank, but we know God wants us to worship Him. We’ll trust that God will enable what He commands.” And do you know what God loves to do when those little eyes are watching that act of ultimate dependence? Provide. Supply. Protect.

When the child is groaning about a sore throat on Monday morning, and Dad says, “Get out of that bed, and get ready, you are going to school!”, he is teaching the importance of education. But when the child has the same groans about a sore throat on Sunday morning, and Dad says, “Well, just take it easy and rest this morning”, he has taught something else. He has taught that education takes priority over worship. He has taught that our devotion to education ought to exceed our devotion to God.

When Mom will drive from this side of the city for swimming to that side of the city for tennis or ballet, to the other side for extra maths, and back again for soccer, and finally home, racking up a good 100 kilometres in the process, the child might learn that Mom and Dad like him to have activities. But when they say, “We can’t go to the Wednesday Evening service, it’s too much driving, and petrol is getting more expensive”, he learns about priorities. Petrol costs and driving time aren’t an issue if it is extra-murals or education, but very high hurdles if it is church. He has just learnt how committed one should be to God, and it is not an ultimate commitment.

Children know what we love. They see it when our eyes sparkle when we talk about what delights us. They see how we anticipate the things we really love. They see how we reminisce over the things we love. And they see how we connect those things to God, if we do. They see what our attitude is towards the things of God.

If Dad’s sighing heavily as everyone gets in the car on Sunday, but he’s cheerfully buoyant before the start of a rugby game on TV, he communicates which brings more joy. If Mom is humming away while she copies photos to Facebook and makes scrap-book albums, but looks like she’s eaten lemons during the singing of hymns, she communicates what brings her joy.

And make no mistake, those little eyes are on you in corporate worship – do you enjoy and understand those hymns, or do you just mouth them? Do you love God’s Word and read it with hunger? Do you communicate your relish for the Word before and after? They notice when you’re soaking in the Word, and they notice when you’re looking at your watch. And later on, they might remember that you don’t do that during a movie.

Before we tell them so, we show our children what we think is reliable, valuable and desirable. God says there is only One who deserves that kind of love. That should be the day-in, day-out message of our homes.