Presenting the Gospel to Children II | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and host of the

Behold Your God study series. Right now this is the second episode in a series within a series.

We've been discussing the Puritan influence on the Great Awakening and we've decided to take a little side trail for a few episodes to discuss particularly regeneration with young children.

As we started last week with the the story of James Lange, we're going to continue looking at some work by Robert Murray McShane.

This time it's a sermon that's published for children that McShane titled,

Reasons Why Children Should Fly to Christ. He starts the sermon talking about a lady named the

Countess of Huntington. John, who is she? The Countess of Huntington was a wealthy noblewoman in the 18th century.

She died about 60 years, 70 years before this and she was converted under the preaching,

I believe, of the Wesley's and was very supportive of the evangelical revival, which kind of was unheard of among some of the wealthy.

It was looked down on as kind of a group, a movement of maybe the lower classes.

Later, as she studied her Bible, she came to disagree with John and Charles Wesley about some of the doctrines they were teaching and aligned herself with the

Calvinistic wing, though she still maintained contact with them. The Countess of Huntington was used by the

Lord wonderfully throughout her adult life through her influence in the elite circles of England and Wales and also through her financial resources.

She was able to establish a number of chapels and so she could build a chapel in the

Anglican system. You couldn't just go be a traveling preacher on your own. You needed to be put into a parish or put into a church, appointed by a bishop.

It wasn't like a Baptist nowadays where you can just say, well, I feel called to preach and then you go gather a group of people and establish yourself as a kind of a self -made church.

It was much more structure and a more careful hierarchy there. One problem the evangelical men were having during the revival, men like Whitefield and later

John Newton, was a lot of the liberal pastors and leaders, bishops, did not like these men and their preaching and they barred them, made it pretty difficult for them to get a church anywhere.

One way they got around that was to become chaplains to wealthy patrons like a lady, a

Countess of Huntington. So she could basically pay the salary of a number of godly young men like Whitefield and he would be her official chaplain.

And then he could just travel and preach wherever he wanted. And if anyone said to him, you know, what right do you have to preach as an

Anglican minister? And he would say, well, I am the chaplain to the lady, the

Countess of Huntington, which he was one. But she had a lot of them. And so basically by building little chapels and appointing chaplains there, she kind of was able to establish a number of evangelically minded little churches within the

Anglican system, kind of unofficially, that would preach the gospel and not be so much under the thumb of bishops that disagreed with the gospel that they were preaching.

And so eventually this came to be called the Countess of Huntington's connection, a connection of churches.

Now McShane mentions her, not because of that, but because at age nine she saw a casket being carried to a grave in a procession.

And in the casket was a little girl her age, a nine -year -old. So being curious, she followed the procession to the grave and she saw the casket laid in the grave.

And following the funeral, she was really burdened about the condition of her own soul.

And that was one of the things the Lord used to eventually save her. McShane used that story to open this sermon to say that the children ought to, while they're young, flee the wrath to come.

Fly to the Lord Jesus without delay, he encouraged them. Escape for your life and do not look back.

And in this sermon, he just gives a number of reasons. Now many of the reasons are taken from Psalm 90.

It's a Psalm that Moses wrote, not David, and it's a Psalm that we know was written during the 40 years of being guided by God to wander in the wilderness, while the older generation, everybody 20 and older, died.

And everyone 20 and, you know, under 20 was growing up, watching the older generation die as a result, as a consequence, of not trusting

God and entering into the promised land when he told him to. So God doesn't give up on Israel.

He's merciful. He still will bring Israel in, but Moses, Aaron, and the older generation will not be allowed to enter.

So you can imagine that Moses is writing a song to God, writing a prayer to God for all believers to use in their worship.

And it's a prayer written while Moses watches the shortness of human life.

And it contrasts that with the eternality, the timelessness of God's existence.

I'll go ahead and read the Psalm for us before we look at what McShane says. He's not going to preach through the

Psalm, but he is going to use a number of the pictures that the Psalm gives us of God's eternity and man's short life.

He writes this, Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations, before the mountains were born, or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are

God. You turn man back into dust and say, return, O children of men.

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night.

You have swept them away like a flood. They fall asleep. In the morning they are like grass which sprouts anew.

In the morning it flourishes and it sprouts anew. Toward evening it fades and withers away.

For we have been consumed by your anger, and by your wrath we have been dismayed.

You have placed our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. For all our days have declined in your fury.

We have finished our years like a sigh. As for the days of our life, they contain 70 years, or if due to strength, 80 years.

Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow, for soon it is gone and we fly away.

Who understands the power of your anger and your fury according to the fear that is due you?

So teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom. Do return,

O Lord. How long will it be? And be sorry for your servants. O, satisfy us in the morning with your lovingkindness, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

Make us glad according to the days that you have afflicted us, and the years we have seen evil. Let your work appear to your servants and your majesty to their children.

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and confirm for us the work of our hands.

Yes, confirm for us the work of our hands. So the opening point that McShane makes from after reading that passage is that the first reason that children should run to the

Lord is the predominant theme of that psalm, and it is, run to Christ now because life is short.

You know, Psalm 90 uses the image of a man who's asleep, and life is like a dream.

And when we are to look back, you know, at the end of our lives, no matter how long that life may be, when we look back it will seem as a dream.

When you fall asleep and when you wake up, it seems as though no time at all has passed. No matter how long, maybe 70 years, maybe by strength 80 years, but what is that to eternity?

Yeah, he says also it's like a ship that's in a great river, and the current is strong, and the crew boards the ship, lifts up the anchors, unfolds the sails, the wind fills the sails, and the ship just sails down with the current of the stream, and that's the way life is.

And also like an eagle, if you've ever seen an eagle in its nest and it eyes a prey on the ground, the amount of time that it takes from the bird to take off or to be in flight, and then to swoop down and capture its prey is a flash, and that's life.

Yeah, he also mentions a mist or a fog. You know, you get up in the morning maybe if you live near a pond.

We have a pond close to our house, and sometimes in the mornings, especially when it's cooler, you know, you'll see a mist or fog, and it's kind of pretty, but if you want to see it, you got to go tell everybody, hey, come look at the fog now, because in a few minutes the sun rises and it melts it off.

McShane then gives, along with these pictures, these simple pictures of the shortness of life that are easy for children to grasp, he really presses the urgency by a couple of things.

First, he says, it is urgent for you to run to Christ now, because you know that death is near.

Now, we have to remember that in McShane's day in the city of Dundee, a lot of people were dying of disease.

Part of it was because a disease was sweeping the land, but part of it was because the living conditions in Dundee, and he is able to say to the kids a couple of pretty stark things.

He says, first of all, many of you, he said, have been at funerals, and you have watched your close friends laid in the earth, in the grave, and he goes on to say, many of you have more friends who are now dead, who have died, than you have that are still living, and he says, in a little while this church where you sit every

Sunday will be filled with new worshipers and new voices, and the new preacher will be preaching.

It is an absolute certainty that the children who are reading this sermon right now that he publishes will one day be in a grave.

Then the second thing he says is that the seriousness, the magnitude of this soul work ought to make you feel the urgency, and he argues in a way that I don't know that I've ever heard anyone argue.

He says this, you have a great work to do. Think about it. You have a soul to save. How short a time you have to do it in.

You have a wrath to flee. You have a Savior to embrace, to get to know.

You have to be born again. You have to receive the Spirit. You have to be made fit for glory.

It is high time, he said, for you to seek the Lord because even a long life is short enough to do all these things, so he earnestly presses them.

Seek God's true conviction of sin and seek an interest in Christ.

Plead with God. Satisfy me early with your mercy that I may rejoice and be glad all my days.

Now before we go any further in the podcast, John, it is very easy, and I know that some people, maybe aware, maybe unaware, can manipulate children by discussing the brevity of life.

Death is coming, and children naturally fear death. We don't want to emotionally manipulate or cause them to make some emotional decision, so how do we walk that line between bluntly and bluntly calling them to Christ and telling them life is short, but not manipulating them with that?

Yeah, well, I think there are a couple of things we can consider. One is the question, why not emotionally manipulate our kids into heaven?

And the answer is, there's a couple of answers. That one is that you can't. You can stir your child's emotions, and the fear of a lake of fire for any child would certainly drive them to make any outward decision that you call for.

Tell me what to do. Anything but that. But that isn't the same as conversion.

We can make converts, but they're nothing like the converts God makes. Also, that's not the way that God deals with this.

He does use the facts of a coming judgment, but He uses them in balance with a lot of other facts, and so I think that that helps guide us.

As parents, we want to give our children truth, but we give them truths in a wise way.

We give them truths in a balanced way, so while we mention the reality that there is a coming judgment, we also mention the balancing truth that there is a sufficient

Savior, that the God who will judge all sin and put all things right is the

God who is wonderfully willing to receive even a child at the throne of mercy and grace, the child whose only hope is a

Savior that died for them. So I think that as we deal with our children, one of the great guidelines is, are we giving them balanced truths?

But we ought to be equally concerned telling our children that Jesus is a wonderful Savior, and He'll make your life happy, and you'll have everlasting joy, and never telling them about a judgment to come.

I think that would be equally dangerous, so we take the Bible as our guide. How does

God deal with us? Well, a balanced diet of truth here, so we want to follow that way.

God is the best evangelist, so we follow Him. But also, you know, as parents, we ought to be wise enough not to make more of emotions than we should, so the child's emotions will go up and down.

We want to be consistent in presenting the same facts, whether the child is, you know, really bothered about the idea of hell, or whether the child is somewhat indifferent right now, and in the middle of talking to him, you know, you really feel like you could stop, and the kid would be glad, you know.

So we give them a consistent gospel witness, and we show them the happiness of belonging to Christ, so that the doctrine of an everlasting judgment is kept in balance, and while it does alarm them, it doesn't lead to a merely emotional decision.

We have to certainly keep that balance in mind, especially as we go on to McShane's next point, which is run to Christ because life is very uncertain.

Drawing other pictures that the Scriptures give us of life, it is like grass, or like a flower.

It comes up, and in the afternoon, it's wilted. You know, some people, and Moses writes this, some people make it to old age, maybe 80, but then there are others who are cut down when they're green, and you had mentioned that with, you know, in Ireland, in this, or in Scotland, pardon me, half the people in McShane's day died before they were even 20 years old.

Yeah, and that statistic of the city of Glasgow, which is just a little south of there, but even in healthier places away from the big cities,

McShane warns the children that less than half people make it to what we would consider middle age. Yeah, and the thing is, we look today, and we think, well, you know, infant mortality rates are so low, which they are, wonderfully low.

I mean, we still have infant mortality. Life, there's life -prolonging procedures today that these men and women could not even dream of, and yet still, life is short, and not, the only thing that is certain is that death will come for us.

What is uncertain is when it will come. McShane, then, in that second point, the uncertainty of life, kind of exposes some false hopes that a child would think.

Like, well, that's true, but I'm not really afraid. I'm not concerned about my own soul because of, and so he gives, he gives five things.

Let me give them to you really quickly. First, he says, some of you think that, well, I have plenty of time because I enjoy good health, but he reminds them, many die while in good health through some accident.

Second, some of you say, I have plenty of time, and I don't, there's no urgency to run to Christ because you, you belong to kind of a wealthier family, and remember, the area he's working in is pretty poor, and sickness tended to hit those homes.

So, you say, well, look, I live in a really nice home. I have nice things.

We have plenty of food, good clothes, and he says, rich people die as suddenly as poor people.

Third, some of you say, well, I'm, I'm safe, and I'm not gonna die soon because,

I mean, I haven't even thought about, I haven't prepared to die. I haven't thought about dying. It's kind of like, you know, in our day, when someone says, you know, have you thought about life insurance, and you kind of have this superstitious feeling, like, if I think about life insurance, that means

I'm getting ready to die, so I don't want to think about it. So, McShane says to them, you know what, most people die unprepared for death, so don't let that make you think that you're safe.

Fifth, he says, some of you think you're not gonna die soon because you're young.

That's probably the most popular, and he warned them, and, and what he says is pretty shocking.

McShane, at this time, has, has gone and visited homes with dying children so many times, like James Lane that we mentioned, and this is what he says.

He says, if you had stood as often as I have stood at the deathbed of a little child and seen their wild looks, their outstretched hands, if you had heard their cries of pain, then you would know how necessary it was to fly to Christ now.

So, he concludes the second point by saying, don't boast of tomorrow. You don't know what it will bring. Fly to Christ now.

Life is uncertain. And, and let me just add to that. I was discussing, we have a church member who is a hospice nurse, and she was telling me that she had stood at the, just very recently, at the side of a bed as a man was passing away who was not prepared.

So, don't buy into the idea that you can prepare later. Oh, you know, okay, well, if I make it old, then

I'll be ready. You, there are many elderly who pass away in hospice care just as unprepared as a ten -year -old child.

So, don't think that age will give you preparation. So, the third point McShane makes is that most people are saved, most fly to Christ when they are young.

Yeah, he's gonna make a pretty strong argument here, and I've heard this in our day, but I think it's kind of, it comes from a different theological standpoint than his.

So, he's not saying that, you know, we have the ability to convince young people, but we don't have the ability to convince older people.

Really, what McShane is talking about is that God is just as able to save a young person as he is to save an older person, and we don't want to be unaware of that because we can kind of allow those younger years, which are so custom designed by God while children are in our homes, are in our churches, even if they're unconverted, constantly under our ability to speak to them about serious things.

Don't waste those years thinking, right now it's not really important spiritual time for my kids because they're young still, but do what

Hudson Taylor's parents did. They said they laid up kindling in those early years that God would one day send a spark, and those great

Bible lessons and those things that they had taught their kids day after day then become a fuel for a

Christian life. Yeah, and in a lot of wisdom, McShane explains, he goes further into his point, saying why is it that it is typically younger people, and he says that as we grow, pride grows with us, and we come to the place where we feel we're too wise, we're too knowledgeable, we're too capable, we're too self -sufficient to need to be saved by the death of the

Son of God, and even when we look at times of the great revival, great awakening, and other revivals that have happened, we see that the

Lord does indeed work so often in young people. McShane points out that there are seasons of life in a soul, and one of those seasons for conversion is when you're young, but that's not the only season, fortunately for us.

There are other days that the Lord's day, the Sabbath, it's a great day. He calls it Christ Market Day, which

I think is a beautiful terminology, but another one that may be a little surprising is, he goes on to discuss how difficult times in our life is also a converting time.

God takes away what we love most, those things that we have clung to for comfort, for security.

He may remove them or expose them as weak and empty so that we turn to the beauty of Christ.

Yeah, he gives two other seasons or converting times, he calls it in the sermon. One is those times where God is particularly stripping from you all the things that you hoped in, so he's exposing your sin.

He's exposing the emptiness of your best efforts, and McShane warns them, look, this is a converting time.

This is a season of grace. Don't resist God during these times, and finally, youthful years.

This is the God that said, let the little children come to me. Don't hinder them. Don't forbid them, so we have a right to believe that even childhood is one of those converting times.

Yeah, the next point that McShane makes is, because it is happier to be in Christ than to be out of Christ living for yourself, and you know, a lot of the people who are hearing this sermon, as in our day, might look at this and say, well, you know, when you're young is the time to have fun, and so your wild oats, as we often hear, and then as you get older, then you start to think religious thoughts, but really, how much happier is that season of childhood in Christ than it would be to be out of Christ?

McShane says he knows that young life is full of gladness, and that is the very reason why childhood, while youth, young adultness, is the time to run to Christ, because it's far happier to be young in Christ, to be young in Christ, than to be young out of Christ.

Yeah, why waste the best years of your life, you know, the childhood years? There's vibrancy. You're full of life and energy, and McShane's argument is just counter, you know, it goes against everything that we hear, as you mentioned.

And one thing, too, so when we think about it, when you are an adult, there are so many, I want to call them distractions.

I mean, they are more than that, right? We have to work. We have bills. We have so many stresses, and when you're young, how amazing would it be?

There's so much time and opportunity to think upon, to dwell upon, time to meditate on the realities of Christ that pay dividends later in life.

Yeah, he gives a number of reasons that a young person would be happier running to Christ while they're still young, right?

So, first of all, he says Christ really satisfies. Other pleasures are offered by sin, but none of them endure.

And then there are nice things that God gives us, created things, you know, things that we can own, friendships that we can have, and he says these are good in themselves, but they don't really satisfy.

He warned them it's an awful thing to be happy while not in Christ, and he compares it to a man that's sleeping, you know, like imagine a man sleeping and having pleasant dreams, but he's sleeping in a house that is caught fire, and he will die in that house.

But right now he's pleasant, you know, he thinks things are great, and so he said childhood without Christ is like that.

Think, he says, of the pleasures that are in Christ. They are sweeter than the pleasures that are in sin.

Other pleasures leave us thirsty. Christ satisfies. He says not only that, but being in Christ makes all the other happinesses that God provides us, you know, what we call the common grace, the common gifts that God gives all humanity, whether you believe in him or not, you know, health and time and family and friends and things and food and sleep, and God is giving you all these things, but to enjoy them in peace with God, in a relationship with God in Christ, they are magnified far beyond what you'd expect.

So the next part, coming to Christ when you're young will make you glad your entire life when you think of sin, and McShane is really, really articulate with this and really shows a lot of wisdom because he does tell these children, look, sin will bring you a sense of pleasure, and it always does for a season and only for a season, but Christ will bring you joy that never ends.

Yeah, and he kind of draws it to a close by asking them this question, what happiness will sin bring you on your final day, or even just good things, created things that aren't

God? Outside of Christ, what will the world give you on that day? Everything you used to really enjoy.

Imagine a child, he says, on their deathbed, looking out the window, and they see kids playing that they used to play with.

What power will friends and fun have to cheer your soul at that moment?

Never again will you smile. Never again will you hear a joke. No friend will be able to stand beside you on the judgment day.

So consider this while you're young, he says, and run to Christ now. Then he mentions

John Newton, and he says, Newton wrote about a little girl who was a Christian, and on her dying day she said, if this is dying, it's a pleasant thing to die, and so just a wonderful, shocking, wonderful picture of even the worst that we go through, death, can be made pleasant if we're in Christ.

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Imagine there was a great king who loved his bride more than anything, and he's going to go on a long journey, and before he goes on that journey, he calls us, he calls you, he calls one man, and he says, you will be the steward, and you will take care of my bride.

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And in doing that, he's going to change her simple but elegant white robe into something a bit more eye -catching and flashy.

He's going to paint her face and change her hair and then parade her in front of carnal men in order to attract them somehow back into the kingdom.

When that king returns, what is he going to do to that steward? I'm sure he'll take his life.

He'll judge him most severely. He'll look at him and say, who do you think that you are, that you would do this to my bride, especially in light of the specific commands that I gave you?

And we can see the same thing today. We see so many men that are trying to transform, redress, repackage the bride of Christ so that worldly men might somehow be attracted to the king.

I think those men should be extremely afraid. When Uzzah reaches out to touch the

Ark, I mean, his heart, so to speak, is in the right place. He loves the

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Well, McShane ends his sermon with this, and this is how we'd like to end the podcast this week.

My little children of whom I travail and birth again till Christ be formed in you, if you would live happy and die happy, come now to a

Savior. The door of the Ark is wide open. Enter now, or it may be never.