In the month of May, we’re having a “Train up a Child” campaign—we’re hoping to be able to fill all of our children’s Bible class rotations with teachers through May 2019.
In conjunction with this emphasis, we studied the text above. We discussed how children weren’t highly valued in the world of antiquity for different reasons, which may explain why the disciples discouraged people from bringing them to Jesus. The disciples also probably had an inflated sense of their own importance, and they may have thought Jesus was too busy to take time for kids. There were badly mistaken, of course—Mark’s account demonstrates this more clearly than Matthew’s: “But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant . . .” (Mark 10:14). Jesus wasn’t happy with people who ignored children.
It must’ve been a memorable sight: the hands that fashioned this world into existence reached down and scooped up little kids and blessed them (“And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them,” Mark 10:16).
We applied this story to our church family: (1) Children matter; and (2) Children’s souls matter. Most of us have attended or visited churches with few children, and it doesn’t speak well of those churches’ future. At Hoover we’ve been blessed with a lot of young children, and God expects us to treat them as Jesus did: to love them and bless them. We have an hour or two each week to shape the hearts of these children, so we must take advantage of these opportunities.
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