Children at Church

Our pastor had a great message today!  He was preaching about a passage that appears in all four of the gospels where Jesus is instructing us to be as children when we go to God.  I thought he (the pastor) made a good point when he pointed out that so often we dismiss children from church to either go to the nursery or children's church, when in all actuality we should keep them with us in service if possible.  What better way for them to learn than to hear the same lesson as we do and ask questions about it?  Sure they should wait until after service to ask us and not interrupt the pastor, but wouldn't that be great?  For one thing, we would have to pay a lot closer attention to what is being said.  How can we answer questions if we weren't giving it a hundred percent of our attention in the first place?  Also it may help us to learn the Word even more because if we don't know the answer we would have to try to find out as well so we could give them a good answer! 

The pastor also mentioned how quick we are to say "if that was my kid..." given different situations.  For example a baby starts to cry during service, we might whisper to our spouse "if that were our kid we'd just go to the cry room!" instead of thinking about how we might minister to that mom or dad in that situation.   In reality you never know where the parents are coming from.   Maybe they just returned from the cancer ward with one of their parents in a terrible situation, or maybe they just lost their job.  Maybe they didn't teach their kids respect, but you never know.  The point is that it is all of our jobs to look after children.  We need to be praying for them that they will grow up knowing all about God, so that one day they can lead others to Him as well.  We need to make it our responsibility to ensure they know about Him.

There are so many directions you can take with this one simple message.  God wants us to come to Him as children.  Just like we know what our kids need or want, we still like to hear them ask for it.  God wants the same thing, that's what prayer is.  Another thing we heard today during the sermon is that on average children laugh 400 times per day.  Do you know how we adults compare?  Only about 15 laughs per day.  It's been said that laughter is the best medicine, maybe that's why adults seem to get sicker more often, we haven't been taking our medicine.