Presenting the Gospel to Children IV | 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 author of the Behold Your God study series. Over the last couple of weeks, John, we're doing a series within a series.

We've been talking about your doctorate dissertation, Influence of Puritans on the Great Awakening, the Evangelical Revival, which led us to a discussion on the doctrine of regeneration and some of those deeper truths.

We spent a great deal of time on those, and so we wanted to take a few episodes to really hone in on, okay, so we've got these deep, beautiful truths of regeneration. Now, how do we explain them? How do we detail them?

How do we open a child's mind to those realities? We've looked at some help with Robert Murray McShane, with Edward Payson. This week, we're looking at a sermon by Philip Doddridge. Now, we've been using a book called The Theology of the Family, and we'll talk about that book in a bonus episode later, but the title of this sermon in that book is Teaching Children About God.

Now, if you want to go look at it online, you're likely to find the title Teaching Children Character by Philip Doddridge. Now, we'll link to that in the show notes of the episode. You can find that at Mediagratia .org, but John,.

Tell us just a bit about Philip Doddridge. Doddridge was an 18th century pastor and a little older, like Isaac Watts, a little older than the men that were the leaders of the Great Awakening there, the Evangelical Revival, men like Whitefield and Wesley.

Doddridge was a Congregationalist minister. He was also the, we would call him like the headmaster and the main teacher at a dissenting academy. At that time, if you were not part of the Church of England, which represented only about 5, 4 or 5 percent were not part of the Church of England, so non-Anglican Protestants in England and Wales, it's a very small part of the population.

And if you were not part of the Church of England, then you could not go to Oxford or Cambridge for your education, so they would have dissenting, those who dissented from the Church, non-conforming churches, so Baptist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, later Methodist.

These churches, these people would have their own academic academies, and so he was the head of one of those. He was close friends with Isaac Watts. He was a hymn writer and author. We have here a small old copy of his best-known work.

He's not that well-known as an author, but this is a very good book, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. He was the center of an evangelical network in his day that connected a lot of the older believers, like in Isaac Watts, with some of the young 20-ish year old leaders of the evangelical revival.

Watts was a little, he was impatient with these young guys. He didn't like some of the things he was hearing, some of the abuses that happened, so not necessarily what the young men promoted, but Watts would just say, you know, emotions were running too high, and Whitefield and those men would try to deal with that, but Watts was a bit crotchety at this time.

I think my sympathies lie a little bit more with the young men who were trying to guide it in a careful direction. But Doddridge was very friendly toward them and took a lot of them under his wing, so to speak, and helped them.

And so he kind of sits at the center of a network of godly men in his day. So really, just a very encouraging ministry. Never the superstar, so to speak, but a faithful man. And the things that he writes here, very balanced.

He kind of reminds me of a John Newton just 50 years before. A very balanced, wise counsel for parents. Yeah, and we can see a lot of that balance.

And even the way that he can really pierce with words in the opening paragraph of the sermon. And I'd like to just really read the first paragraph of the sermon. I very readily allow that no human endeavors, either of ministers or of parents, can ever be effectual to bring one's soul to the saving knowledge of God in Christ without the cooperating and transforming influences of the Blessed Spirit.

Yet you well know, and I hope you seriously consider, that this does not in the least weaken our obligation to the most diligent use of the proper means. The great God has stated rules of operation in the world of grace as well as in the world of nature.

Though He is not limited to them, it is arrogant and maybe destructive to expect that He should deviate from them in favor of us, in favor.

Of us or ours. Yeah, right off he really just lays out some basic facts that help clarify issues for us. We can kind of get tangled up in our theology. It's not that our theology is bad. It's that we're not great at holding it in balance.

And also we do live on a battlefield and it's hard to hold delicate truths in balance when there's always bombs going off around you, when there is an enemy constantly pushing you to one extreme or another.

And, you know, the wonderful picture he gives here is that God is the, ultimately is the supplier of all the spiritual good that our children need. But God has given us as parents the obligation of doing all by His grace that we can do to point our kids to Christ.

And so, you know, while we understand that God is behind everything, we are obligated to use the tools that God has given us to point our kids to Christ, to help them see the beauty of Christ and the majesty of Christ, the depth of their need and the way of response of faith and repentance.

And so he uses an illustration early on in this sermon. He says, we know, take the physical aspects of providing for our children. We know that God ultimately is the one that sustains human life. But God has given us the responsibility of laboring for food and clothing, of providing shelter for our family.

And so if we were to use as an excuse for laziness, the fact that God is the ultimate provider, and using that as an excuse, we don't make use of the tools that God puts in our hands, the strength He gives us, the abilities, the wisdom, the time of day.

And we don't work hard so as to provide for our children, food and shelter and clothing. If our children were to get very sick and die from lack of shelter and food and clothing, a human court would pronounce us guilty of negligence.

Now, if we were to stand at that court hearing and say, but I'm a Christian, and I understand what you people don't understand, and that is that God is the ultimate giver of all things, and God could miraculously have clothed and fed my kids.

I mean, after all, He sent a raven to Elijah. The Israelites for 40 years wandering in the wilderness, the Bible says their shoes didn't wear out. I mean, God could have done that. Well, He could have.

But to use that as an excuse for laziness, Todrich says, is wicked. And any just judge would pronounce us guilty. And if we used God's miraculous abilities as an excuse to cover our shameful neglect, He said it would even add guilt to our crime of neglecting our kids.

And so He gives a wonderful quote there. Let me read it to you. He says, it is just as absurd for us to flatter ourselves with a hope that our children should be taught about God and regenerated, or born again, and sanctified by the influences of His grace, if we neglect the wise and religious care of their souls in educating them.

So after kind of making the point, okay, there's an ordinary means of grace. There's just like regular meals that God expects us to feed, and regular clothes that God expects us to use in the raising of our children.

Well, what are the regular means that God anticipates and has given us to raise up our children to know Him, to pursue holiness and devotion? Well, He says this, we begin with the fear of the Lord, and teaching that to our children.

He points to Psalm 34 11. Come you children, listen to me, and I would teach you the fear of the Lord. And really, that is where we need to start. That is the best and the right starting place and stepping stone for our children.

Well, why? Because right notions of God can be implemented. Our children, one of the things they most early understand is fear. You show me a kid who's never been afraid of the dark, even though they've never seen a scary movie, and even though they've never seen anything to be afraid of, when the light goes out, there's a genuine fear there.

Kids understand fear, but when we point and we can say, there's a right and a proper fear of the Lord. Well, how do we do that? Well, we start, we show the greatness, and we show the goodness of our God.

Well, there's opportunity, even if it's a piece of mulch and a piece of wood, you can use nature, the small things, and yet night, you could go outside and see the stars and teach them the bigness of the universe, and both of those, the small micro and the huge macro to point to the realities of God.

If they say, well, how did these things come to be? Well, it's very simple. We point to God. Our kids can see books. Our house is filled with books, and they know those books were written by somebody, although they've never seen, and they've never met the authors.

They know that our house was built by people, although they've never seen those people, and so the reality is, whether it's a piece of mulch, or whether it's going outside and laying on a trampoline and looking up at the stars on a clear night, the fact that we have a good, kind God who created all of this can be given to the mind of a child.

Yeah, I think that that, you know, and Doddridge's suggestions there are very helpful. Show them the immensity, the bigness of God, but also show them the kindness of God, and that's where we start. If we tend to start only with, Jesus loves you, and He's come and He's died for your sin, so you don't have to be in a terrible place when you die, I think that the words become weightless to the kids.

You know, they cannot understand those words appropriately, even on a child's level, without having some child's level knowledge of God. So what is God like? Well, He's big, and He's awesome. He inspires amazement in our hearts.

Imagine being beside God when He called all creation into existence, or, you know, imagine God at the end calling all creation to judgment. So, you know, we can help them see the bigness of God, but as we do that, we want to be careful.

The goal is to inspire in their hearts not only a sight of God's bigness, but also of His, amazingly, of His kindness, particularly His kindness to those who have been born enemies of God, and those are not contradictory.

The holiness and the bigness, so majesty, purity, those are there, but also pity and compassion and grace and mercy, and those aren't incompatible. Think about what God said to Moses in Exodus 34 when Moses wants to see the glory of God, and he is not allowed to see the glory of God, but God hides him in the rock, and God allows His glory, that outward manifestation of His perfection, to pass by Moses, and after it passes by, in the afterglow of that, God pronounces certain things to be true about Himself, and these are things that are wonderfully, to us, they seem to be opposites, but they're not.

This is what it says, the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness and truth, who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.

So, while we have an opportunity day to day, hour after hour with our kids, we may not really recognize how significant those moments are spiritually. We may only think of the crisis moments as being significant, but the day-to-day moments, using them in little ways to help our young people to implant in their mind high and holy views of God.

He's big, He's clean, He is kind, and we want to show them that, you know, even the kindnesses that they're receiving in the family, the love of mom and dad, as imperfect as we are, even those are expressions of God's kindness.

It's God that provided mom and dad and the home and the food on the table, and Dodgers brings this little section to a close by saying it would be wonderful to give the children some set forms of prayer.

Now, we were talking about this before the podcast, how we can probably, all of us, remember little prayers that we just said over and over through childhood, and those prayers aren't bad prayers. So, you mentioned a couple to me.

What were the ones?

Yeah, so, you know, right before we eat, it's God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food, and then also the nighttime prayer, right? Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

Both of those are actually pretty good children's prayers. Nothing wrong with them, but I think, but what is Dodgers talking about when he says forms of prayer?

Yeah, I think that what we could do is say that it would be better, while those prayers aren't wrong, it would be better probably for a parent, you know, to look at passages of Scripture. You can think of the doxologies in the New Testament where Paul closes a letter with some wonderful statement about God.

Take that statement, and depending on the age of the child, you could boil it down for a very young child, for a child that can read, or even before reading age, you know, they can memorize beyond their comprehension, so they can remember words that they don't quite understand all that it is.

Let them memorize the Scripture, and you explain the content, but whatever level they're at, and however you feel it's best knowing your child's abilities, to give them phrases from Scripture, either those doxologies, you can think of the Psalms, just phrases that help them have an adequate understanding of what are the appropriate ways of expressing to God His bigness.

How did other people express that? And His cleanness, and His kindness, so as in a sense to be laying up kindling that one day God would send the spark,.

And that would catch fire. Yeah, that's exactly what that is. It is the kindling. We can see that so often, you know, in looking at ministers in the past. Charles Spurgeon, his mother would do exactly that.

She had him memorizing Scripture. She would pray over her children. She would plead with them to come to Christ. He gives the account of her pleading with tears for him and his brother to come to Christ.

The Wesley brothers, right, their mother instilling these things in these young men when they were very young men. She didn't allow this idea that childhood is a time where they can't learn and almost, you know, blocking them off.

No, she, both of these mothers are great examples that we can see and say, no, these young men were taught beyond their comprehension, but in a really helpful way. So that years later, when God did grab their souls and captivate them, all of this that was built up beforehand now caught flame and that flame grew brightly.

And that is the prayer for, for all, you know, every believer, every believing parent has that prayer for their child. So Dodgeridge goes on to the next point that children must be trained up in the way of faith in the Lord.

So we've, we've shown kids the greatness of God, but now how do we, what do we owe God? What are our obligations to God? There is a reality. And this is something where, you know, you mentioned earlier, if all we do is tell our kids, you know, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life and Jesus loves you.

And if that's all they know, they don't know the reality of rejecting God and the pleasure of embracing Christ. And so really what we have to do is teach them the reality of their sin, that their sin is not just what they do.

It's not just, okay, well, you disobey mommy and daddy. Well, that's sin. Well, you hit your brother or your sister. Well, that's sin. But really their sin goes deeper than just their actions. It goes into very much what they are, not just what they do, it's who they are.

And so how do we do this? We use the scriptures, the very means that God has given us. We read those scriptures day in and day out. And we've talked before about family worship. And that for us, that's one of those times where my kids will say, okay, wait, stop.

What does this mean? What does this mean about God? What does this mean about me? And that's been one of the best things, a just repeated reading of scripture so that the kids hear that they see it. And then there's the other aspect where it's outside of family worship.

And it's these little conversations that my wife and I have. We're talking about the sermons from Sunday. We're talking about the sermons from Wednesday. We're talking about what we're reading. We're talking about all of these different things.

And I never really grasp how much the kids hear of that until they will come up a day or two later and say, okay, you said this to mommy. What did that mean? And they'll ask questions about hell. They'll ask questions about heaven.

And again, we're using those means that God has given us. It's nothing extraordinary. It's nothing outside. And so, John, you have a great book that you recommend that really helps with this in the day-to-day life.

Yeah. Shepherding a child's.

Heart. It is helpful, particularly in the area you just mentioned. When a child disobeys, for example, when there's selfishness, when they're fighting over the toy or they're complaining about you asking them to do something, instead of saying to the kid, when you acted that way at Walmart, you embarrassed mom.

Or you acted like a baby. You acted like a baby. You're five years old. You acted like a baby. I remember a dad telling his sons. He was telling me that he had two boys, and they were kind of young school age, and they got into a tussle.

So he pulls the brothers apart and says, you know what? You have no self-control. You're like a little baby. You know what we do? You know why babies wear diapers? Because they can't control themselves.

Do you need to have diapers? And of course, the boys are horrified, like, I'm not a baby. Well, that's one way to approach it. But really, you're appealing to their pride, etc. You don't want to act like a fool.

You don't want to be treated like a child. You're acting like a child. But what the author of the is because there's something deeply wrong with us all, and it's this thing called sin. And there is only one cure for that.

There's only one who can really forgive that. Mom and dad can forgive you, but what about God? And there's only one person that can change that in us. So he uses those to shepherd the child to the cross, to Christ for forgiveness.

The name of that book is Shepherding a Child's Heart. Again, we'll put a link to that at mediagratia .org.

Now, Doddridge goes on and says that training up a child in a way that points them to Christ, faith in Christ, he really makes a big emphasis toward the end of this small pamphlet that he's written on our job of winsomely, of attractively presenting the facts of the gospel.

Now, we've shown them the bigness of God, but what about the kindness of God? Well, the kindness of God in the person of Jesus Christ, to show how gloriously pure God is, who doesn't adjust the rules for anybody, and yet how kind he is, and how strong he has been in sending his son to carry the law, to suffer the penalty, how Father, Son, and Spirit have all worked together as an expression of love for his enemies.

He says teach them about the holy wonder and joy of seeing Jesus Christ embrace the work of our Redeemer, and so he just goes into that, and he really waxes eloquent about just walk them through those great truths in a way that they can see through you how attractive.

Christ really is for the sinner. Yeah, and speaking of that, when you're talking to your children, lead them through the scenes of Christ's life. Talk to them, like we talked about in the last episode where he rebuked his followers for preventing children from coming to him.

Speak of him weeping and mourning with Lazarus's family as he was in the grave. Show them, you know, him feeding the five thousand, the pity that he had on the crowd as they had followed him all day listening to his teaching, and there was no food around for them, and he had pity and gave them fish and bread.

Show them, and then let them see, and they will see it, let them see the injustice of this innocent man being nailed to a cross to pay for crimes that he did not commit, but to atone for the sins of his bride.

Yeah, and then he says at the very end,.

He says, show them, explain to them Christ in his exalted state. He has been raised from the dead, victorious over death and sin. The Father has accepted the sacrifice, and now he has ascended and seated at the right hand of the Father, ruling over all things, and so he says, you know, at this final scene, show them the majesty of the enthroned Lord Jesus Christ, but he said also make it clear that he still has the same heart in heaven towards sinners that he had when he was on earth, the same pity, the same compassion, the same offers of mercy, and then end with explaining to them, you know, little by little, time after time.

I remember with our kids, especially our oldest son, repeatedly asking the question, like, so well, how does one even become a Christian, or what does God want me to do in response to this? So, after pointing them to Christ in the many ways that we've talked about, day after day, little by little, we continue to bring them back to the appropriate response.

Repentance. Faith. I turn my back on everything else that promises me happiness and cleanness, promises to fix me, and I turn to Jesus as I'm seeing him in the Scriptures here, and I put all my hope in that man, and, you know, so we're embracing a person, not just a plan of salvation, and little by little, you know, as the children are growing, you know, going deeper in what does repentance and faith really mean for us.

There are many ideas about God in our culture today. Many are not grounded in Scripture, and some are actually the opposite of what Scripture teaches. The best way to identify these ideas is to go back to the Bible and allow God to speak for himself.

Learn how God describes his character, his work in salvation, his definition of repentance, and much more through the 12-week multimedia Bible study, Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically. The heart of this study is its daily devotional workbook participants study at home in preparation for the small group session.

Each session is led by a video containing three segments. First, a biographical sketch of an individual from Christian history who was gripped by the reality of God you were studying that week. Second is a sermon from Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany.

Lastly, are interviews from contemporary Christian pastors and authors who help apply the lessons from the week. To learn more or to see what others are saying about Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, visit mediagracie .org or click the link in the description of this episode.

Well, before we end, we do want to say this. You may be a parent who thinks, okay, if I do all of these things, then God must save my child, and there is no promise here. There is no promise in Scripture, and there's no promise from Philip Doddridge or from us that do all of these things perfectly, and your child will be saved.

There's also not a guarantee that if you don't do all of these things perfect, then your child will certainly not be saved. The salvation of our children is the cry of every believing parent's heart, but we do trust in the hand of God for that salvation, for those salvations.

We're going to talk next week about how to grieve well and how to grieve properly over children who are not believers. If that's you, if you have grown children, teenage children, or even young children who have not accepted Christ, who have not repented, I hope that we have some help next week to go through that grieving and to be praying for those children.

But in the meantime, we wanted to end this week with a prayer by Philip Doddridge. He says this, O injured, neglected, provoked benefactor, when I think but for a moment of all your greatness and of all your goodness, I am astonished at this indifference which has prevailed in my heart, and even still prevails.

And yet this stupid heart of mine would make its having neglected you so long a reason for going on to neglect you. I beseech you, for your name's sake, to lead me and guide me. Let me not delay until it is forever too late.

O break this fatal enchantment that keeps my affections from you. Amen.