As God's fellow workers, we urge you not to receive God's grace in vain. For he says, "In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you." I tell you, now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation. - 2 Corinthians 6:1-2
I can't think of a more important, or dangerous, lesson than the one we taught this Sunday in 1st-5th. And even if you do not have children in that class, I urge you to consider carefully the topic of Salvation and how you present it to your children.
I believe the greatest danger in talking to children about God is to assume that they cannot understand or respond to the Gospel. The second greatest danger is to assure them that they are children of God when they are not.
Somewhere along the line, in trying to simplify how to respond to the Gospel, we over-simplified it to a single decision that changes everything forever. And so as parents, we are often hyper-focused on that moment and neglect the more important issue: how do we live for Christ day-in, day-out. That aspect of the Christian life is often reducted to little more than "try real hard to be good."
I am happy to tell you, though, that there is one solution to both problems: reflect on our need for the REAL Gospel everyday. The REAL Gospel is not about a single act, a single decision, a single prayer. Quite the opposite, the Bible makes it exceedingly clear that God is inviting us to a lifelong relationship of love, obedience and faith. To participate in this relationship, we must do three things DAILY:
A - Admit and Agree with God that in our pride, we have denied His power and His true right to be God. Instead we want to be in charge of our own lives and often make decisions to live in our way instead of His because we think we know better than Him. For those reasons, we are sinners who deserve His anger and punishment.
B - Believe that God's love and grace overwhelm His anger, that God's power overcomes the power of sin and death, that God's wisdom exceeds our own.
C - Commit ourselves to a CONSTANT leaning on the very love, grace, power and wisdom that made us want a relationship with Him in the first place.
While we are surely responsible to explain the Gospel to our children and to invite them to respond in a prayer of faith, it is essential that we not stop there. That decision will have to be affirmed and re-affirmed throughout their lives as they grow more and more independent of us. There will be days when you question whether they are really saved at all. But if we focus our children on a daily, dependent walk with God that invites His Spirit to live in us, forgive us and change us as we obey Him, then we can be confident that God will know exactly at what point your child became one of His own. And on that day, he will say to them, "I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws." (Ezekiel 36:25-27)
Until that day, may we parents all pray for the salvation of our children and may we strive to live out an accurate picture of the Gospel, not through our moral perfection or flawless decision-making but through our fierce, sincere and active love for God.
