Episode 118: Part 2 of Let the Children Come to Me

To the Ruled Church Podcast.

Christ Is King, Not a Democracy

This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas? You see that one in Pechote, Mexico?

Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king.

You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Why Street Preachers Should Speak to Children

I definitely want to spend the rest of the episode getting to your wheelhouse here. I think it's a beautiful thought. And actually, I wonder if some people who street preach have even consciously worked through this in their own hearts.

So why don't you tell us about preaching to children, and number one, convictionally, why you do that, because we've already kind of laid that out. That shouldn't take long. But also, let me hear practically, what does that look like?

Thanks for asking. I want to piggyback on one thing you were saying, though, about hopefully the parents are teaching their kid the gospel at church.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I just want to add, and this goes into the next phase, is that some people don't. You have people in your church who sometimes it's just because they don't feel equipped. They don't feel gifted to share the gospel.

The same people that don't feel gifted to do evangelism, they're the same people that probably aren't evangelizing their children very well. And so although I want people to do that, I recognize that people are at different stages in their Christianity.

They're at different abilities to take a disciplinary situation and bring the gospel to bear on it with their child. And some people are better than others at doing family worship. And so for some of those kids that come to church, sometimes it's a kid from the neighborhood.

I don't know about your church, but in my church, we have regular groups of kids that aren't part of the church. Their parents aren't part of the church, but they come.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

They're invited to Sunday school, and they're given some candy at Sunday school, and we have a meal, and people are welcome to come to our meal after church. And so we get whole families of people that aren't actually Christian.

Some of them, they just like us, and they get the free meal, you know? And so you're preaching to those kids too. But on the street, when you go on the street and evangelize, and you're handing tracts to people, or you're holding a sign, and you're trying to talk to people, those are really good ways to evangelize, and I've had a lot of joy doing those things.

But rarely do you have a child come up and speak to you. And although I'll hold tracts out, and if a child walks by and takes them, you know, I don't withhold it from them, but a lot of times people will keep their kid from you when you're handing out tracts.

And I've had people approach me very angry that I handed their child something. And I can kind of respect the idea that, yeah, you don't want random strangers just giving your kids pieces of paper, you know, with text and images on it on the street.

But if you're on the street and you're preaching, everyone who's walking by you within the radius that your preaching's going is hearing what you're saying. That means that families, believers or unbelievers that have children with them are in the hearing of the preaching of God's word if you're a gospel preacher.

And so then what you end up with is you end up with, let's take a Ohio State Buckeyes game, you end up with hundreds of children who may or may not ever hear the gospel, they might not ever hear biblical preaching, maybe they're churchgoers.

And they go to a church where, you know, it's basically a rock concert with a TED Talk, right? And you get these kids walking by you and they're not jaded yet. They hear a guy standing on a street preaching and they think it's interesting.

What's he saying?

They're not like, oh, that's a kook, let's ignore him. They're just like, okay, what's he saying? And they'll listen. And I have so much hope that I will see hundreds, if not thousands of people in glory someday who will somehow be able to communicate back to me that they heard me preach when they were a little kid.

And their dad told them, cover your ears. Or their mom said, put your fingers in your ears and keep walking, buddy. He's a weirdo or whatever. I mean, I've heard the stuff people say to their kids when they walk by.

And I have great hope in that. And I think that that's a way to reach a lost generation. I think that if you neglect that, and like I said, you don't get that by standing there waiting for people to talk to you.

You don't get it by giving tracts to adults. You might be able to hold a sign, but some of the kids aren't reading the words on a sign. And I'm not sure if a dead baby picture communicates the gospel to a little kid either.

I know that people have the abortion signs that I think are useful at times. And so for me, for men to stand on the street and preach God's word, knowing that children will hear them is just like step one.

And then step two, and I'll let you comment on all this, is you have to preach to the children. If I just stand on the street and keep preaching with adult words, and you already, I'm gonna say dumb it down, I mean that respectfully, but you already removed some of the Christian terminology so that you can explain things in a way you think a non-church goer would understand the gospel.

And then when you start preaching to the children, you use a different vocabulary and you focus on different sins. And I talk, I will preach about obeying parents. And I will preach that Jesus, a little boy obeyed his parents.

He was submissive to them. And he did everything according to God's law for even a little child who disobeys his parents and needs forgiveness. So what do you think of that?

Repentance, Childlike Faith, and Preaching the Gospel Clearly

No, I think it's beautiful, brother. I think that we need to be careful even with words like repent. We, and so twofold position here. One, I believe we should preach repentance, the word repentance, the word repent.

Of course we should say that, Jesus did that. Also think that we should not assume that when we say you need to repent, that every person hearing that understands what that word means. So I love what you said there.

It's, you know, dumbing down for lack of better wording right now, but yes, you're saying repent. And what that means is you must turn from your sins. You must have a change of mind according to your, for your sin, a change of heart.

Of course, we know that only God brings that. God grants repentance as Acts 11, I think 28 says. But the fact of, and there's an overlap here between in the pulpit and then out on the streets. And that is, yes, there's an expectation that children are hearing you.

That's like, as you said, phase one, but phase two is actually saying, little boy, little girl, you need Christ. You need to repent and believe the gospel and then working through, you know, what all that means.

So I'm in agreement with you. Not only am I in agreement, I wish that we would, that more pastors and street preachers would think about these things and make application, you know, theology matters. So if we're reformed Baptists, particular Baptists, if that's what we are and that's our position, then why would we not have as part of our preaching a focus upon the little children?

You know, sometimes I don't want, we don't want to be the disciples in that narrative. We're like, hey, no, no, no, no, no. Hey, y 'all sit back, play with your toys. Let the adults are talking because the reality is, now look, this get us in a whole new category, but the reality is we believe that little boy, that little girl, if something should happen to them and they die on the way home from whatever event they're at and they don't have Christ, they will suffer under God's righteous judgment.

And yet here we are with the opportunity to bring them the gospel. And we should take advantage, utilize that.

And I think you agree with me on this one that there is some sense that there's an election of infants.

Of course, the confession, yes.

Yeah, that there's possibility of it. I preach it the way Spurgeon does a little more than others where I preach it more as all, but I think even though you might, yeah, I think even though you might hope that some little kids would fall under that umbrella, God didn't give us an age of accountability.

That's right. Yes, that's right.

So we preach to all the children as if hell's in the balance here.

Yeah.

And we teach them the truth of Jesus at an age when, I mean, let's face it, you can get up in the pulpit and if you taught about Santa Claus enough, every kid would believe it. And so you almost take advantage of the childlike faith that Jesus applauds when he walked the earth and you take advantage of that and you teach kids everything you can about Christ while they're basically gonna believe whatever you tell them.

And you lay that foundation in such a way that the necessary facts are there for God to change the person and give them the heart that will trust Christ and you fill them with the teaching of God's word so that if they do repent, they have some ideas of what to do.

I preached at Washington DC a couple of weeks ago, this would have been late March and there was a school field trip, it must have been, where there was about 80 kids just sitting on the National Mall or whatever it was, it was a big green area near the National Mall at least.

They were just having their lunch. I walked over and started preaching while a couple of little boys were super interested and came and were listening and this happened multiple times. I have two recordings of it, one with a little boy named Cooper and the other little boy, I didn't get his name but this boy was listening to me so intently and I stopped and I said, do you believe this?

And he said, yes. And I could tell he believed it and he just kept listening. It was really amazing how much joy you could see in this little boy's face. All his friends were running around playing, the teacher kept pulling them away from me.

It was crazy and I resisted the temptation to just start rebuking the teacher, like calling out millstones and things. I think I did resist, I think I resisted that temptation because what I decided to do is I'm just gonna keep preaching to this kid.

I was loud enough that even though he was pulling them away, I knew he could hear me, I could tell by the way he kept watching me, even when he got far away. I just kept preaching to this little boy and I preached, if you're a Christian, you need to submit to the authorities God gives you, be respectful and then I reminded him that no matter what, Christ will never leave him and I told him, you must cling to Christ and he will not let go of you and I don't know what's gonna happen to this little boy.

He didn't get my name, he doesn't, as far as I know, I don't know where he lives. He could have been from a far away school from even DC but I tried to preach to even this one soul, hey, here's something that might help you get through the day, here's something that might help you cling to Christ as you're persecuted for your faith in this, you know, maybe godless school where you attend, where all the other kids wanted to laugh and mock and you wanted to stand and listen and I think that other people heard it as well and there could be another kid there that I wasn't focused on, that I didn't notice who God's doing a work in that person's heart and so you preach to all, you preach specific things that help sinners to repent and help sinners to know how to live a life that honors Christ.

Preaching to Children in Public and the Objection of Parental Authority

Yeah, let me just address this, amen, everything you've said. I think of one objection that someone may say and I can be sympathetic toward the objection but I do think that we're gonna answer it. Well, brothers, what?

I just don't know that I have the right, you know, parents at this place with their children, I'm out preaching, that child's their responsibility, they're the ones in the authority over the child. I just don't know if I really feel comfortable addressing that child because they're a child.

They're under 18, they're, you know, is it okay? Do I even have that right to preach past the parents into the life of that child or not? Because in the story that we're using, the parents were bringing their children to Jesus and so in this scenario, outside the church, the parents aren't bringing their children to Jesus, they're just out at some event, whether I'm preaching at Harps or you're preaching in Washington or you're preaching at a Buckeyes game or wherever the case, the parents aren't bringing, and so do we have the right to preach to children?

That's an objection I have considered as you were talking about, let's go ahead and address that now.

I would say this, I'm okay being wrong on that and dying doing it wrong my whole life.

Yeah, yeah.

That's one of those ones, you know, I don't think I'm committing the sin of presumption that, you know, if I'm not supposed to preach to other people's kids in public, like Christ's gonna have to cover that with his blood because I don't see a restriction there.

I understand the objection, but I'm in public and I'm speaking to people in public and if you bring your kid in public, he's gonna see billboards of women in bikinis, he's gonna see drag queen story hour things at his own library.

There's all sorts of things that happen in public that we give tacit or implicit permission to our children experiencing it by simply taking them there. And so I would say that that's just part of the nature of things being public.

I'm not going on somebody's lawn and doing it and I'm not gonna go in a private school and force myself, I guess. You know, I do it in a public school. You send your kid to public school. But I remember years ago when I would go evangelize at a movie theater and I would stand outside the movie theater and as people came out, I'd try to talk to them and give them gospel tracts.

I was talking to these teenage kids at one point and this parent pulled up and picked them up and I think they must have told the parent what it was because they weren't mad at first. Then the parent came back, kind of angrily said, like, how dare you speak to my child, you know?

And I thought you just dropped your kid off at a movie theater where they no doubt were watching something filled with trash. And you're mad at a Christian guy that's telling them about Jesus. I just, to me, it was like water off a duck's back.

Like I can't, I honestly just can't take it seriously. And I see it more as this is God's way of gathering his elect. And if God has placed his elect in an unbelieving household, which is Baptist, we think is perfectly legitimate because it's not by blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God, that one could be born again.

If God's placed a little boy or a little girl in the house of somebody who's not gonna teach him the gospel and God has elected that little boy or little girl, his means of reaching them may be them hearing the gospel from me on the street, from receiving a Bible on Halloween, when their parents let them go house to house and take whatever the people give them.

I mean, you could go to someone's house and they could give your kid porn. Your kid can go to public school now in elementary and they're gonna see pornography on somebody else's phone.

The Church as a Household of Souls, Not Households of Families

Yeah, yeah, I'm in agreement with you. I'll start with something you said at the end and then kind of work backwards. But there's this mentality, there's a sort of a Presbyterian mentality that the church is a household of households.

And I think as Baptists, we should disagree with that. We may confess that ordinarily a church is made up of several households of converted families, praise God, but the church itself is the household and God is bringing in his people.

For example, we have a young man, exactly what you talked about, his parents don't come. Last year he was converted, he's a teenager. He doesn't come with his family, but he's part of our church, he's 17.

He's a faithful brother, a faithful young man. I mean, obviously he needs to grow, of course, as you would expect and understand. But the point is that, yes, I'm in agreement with you that God saves moms and dads and children at times, but sometimes he saves just the wife and sometimes he saves just the father, or maybe sometimes, I mean, you read the New Testament, that's what you get, that's the kind of exhortations, that's the way Paul's teaching.

But I would go back to this too and say, the world does not have the mentality or the objections that we bring up. Do I have the right, Disney is not sitting around wondering, do we have the right to press this LGBTQ agenda to these children?

They don't think that at all. In fact, they think that it's their duty, it's their great calling to press this upon children. So I would say shame on us if we're gonna let Disney out preach us, right?

So I do wanna be considerate of the fact that, and there's probably certain things like, look, we're not gonna, there's probably tertiary doctrines or whatever that we're, I'm not trying to force this upon your child or whatever.

I mean, like stick to the gospel as it were and repent and believe on Christ. I guess we could work through that. But the point that I'm making here is like, unashamedly, Christ is King. And I think it's a terrible analogy, but I think about that silly show, Parks and Rec, and I've never, I don't think I've ever seen an episode, but I've seen like clips and, but there's that guy, whatever his name is, Swanson or whatever, but he's going to the park and he's like, he's got a permit and it says, I can do whatever I want.

Well, Christians, we have a permit and the permit is not you can do whatever you want, but the permit is Christ is King. So.

Psalm 24.

Yeah, preach Christ.

The earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof.

Amen.

And you bring up the point, nobody opposes Disney preaching, right? Because they don't mind. And so ultimately it just exposes that we all understand that everybody is always preaching something, whether it's with their words, with their silence, with their actions, with their inaction, we're all always preaching something to everybody who encounters us.

It's just a question of who you're going to let your kids encounter. And I respect Disney's right to promote whatever agenda I frankly disagree with, and I think it's harmful, but I guess they have a right to make those kinds of movies with those messages.

I just have a right to not pay for them or watch them. And people don't have to send their kids to church, but.

I'd be fine if that kind of messaging was outlawed, but that's for a different discussion.

The Gospel, Boldness, and a Church That Welcomes Children

Yeah, there's levels of it that, you know.

But essentially I agree with what you're saying, like if preach, I said the other day in a sermon, it's not hard to preach or all you got to do is just open your mouth and, you know, speak loudly. But it is hard to preach faithfully, preach biblically.

But a lot of people are out there preaching, including companies, and a lot of people are giving messages. So let's take the only message that saves sinners and builds the kingdom, and that is the message of the gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Yeah, and what's important to note at this point is that we believe children can get saved.

Praise God.

So although you might, with your own child, you might say, hey, let's work out your salvation with fear and trembling for a little while before we baptize you and make you a member of the church. Okay, a lot of Baptist fathers treat it that way, and that's fine, but it doesn't mean you doubt their conversion or that they could have been converted.

It's just you want to make sure that they're walking with the Lord before you give them baptism, which actually should function as assurance to people. And so because we believe children can be converted, we want to preach to them on the street, in the church, in Sunday school, and in one-on-ones, when you're sitting there just chatting with someone.

And I think that because people are easily offended, we have, we've learned to walk on eggshells and to be careful. And you know that, what has that gotten us? It's gotten us an entire generation of people on college campuses that can't profess that an embryo is a human being worthy of life because we haven't preached certain truths in the presence of children for years and years.

And they have, but they've heard preaching from other sides of a lot of moral issues, right? Because we thought, well, if we call it murder, you know, I'm talking about abortion. If we call it murder, that can be kind of extreme or scary for kids, or maybe they don't get something.

It's like, no, it'll teach them that it's murder. And then when they're older, they'll remember that as the hope. I heard a testimony. I know you're going to say something, but I heard a testimony of a young lady who had had one or two abortions.

And then in her twenties, she got saved, I guess, or she at least realized the truth about abortion. I don't remember. And one of the things she said is that when she was a little girl, she said she wished that she had encountered street protesters or somebody who would have actually called it murder.

She said, if I would have known from a little girl that it was, I would have thought twice about it. She said, but I grew up with moms and aunts or whatever, people who just, they just went and did that.

It was just a normal part of life. She said, I never heard anyone say there was anything wrong with it. And she said, I wish when I was a little girl, somebody would have risked scarring me by calling it what it was.

Well, I just want to say, again, I want to start at the end here, but then I want to go back. I just want to say it's completely hypocritical and inconsistent because, you know, let's take Kyle Rittenhouse or let's take the George Floyd situation.

People on the left were not afraid at all to erroneously, even with children and teachers in their classrooms and stuff, they were not afraid to erroneously call those things murder. They're not afraid to indoctrinate children.

You know, it's not about indoctrination versus non-indoctrination. Everybody's after indoctrination.

And I don't even say this,.

I'm unapologetically after, and I'm trying to indoctrinate my children, right? Like we can work through what I mean by that. But the point I'm trying to say is like, everybody's after that. And so we need a less cowardly church and we're going through Acts right now.

And one of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church in Acts is boldness. And you see that, I think about 11 different times, it's explicitly said, but then you have other times where it says like, these men are turning the world upside down.

So the word boldness is not used there, but that is certainly a manifestation of the Spirit's boldness. And I think we're afraid, and there is, let's say this, there are jerks. There are people who are, they're just, they run this into a ditch.

We're not trying to be jerks, but at the same time, you can't be so afraid that you're not going to stand for truth, right? And then the other thing, and I've got to go soon because we've got my meeting with the brothers in Mexico, but I wanted to circle back earlier to something you said about your church.

And I just want to show how all of this should tie in together. So you said earlier about your church, and I feel like our church is like this too, is a welcoming church to children. And that's not having children's church, which I am convictionally opposed to.

It's not about having a children's pastor, a youth pastor, which I am convictionally opposed to, but it is about having an environment and a culture in your church that is welcoming the children. So let me just throw this out there, how this fits together.

So you've got street preachers that are out on the street preaching to children. And then all of a sudden you have churches that are open to welcoming these children. Oh, you're coming without your parents or maybe even members, or maybe there's even a bus ministry.

They're bringing these children to church and you see how that beautifully partners together where you're like, you have preachers out on the street who care enough about children to preach to them. And then you have churches that care enough about children to have a welcoming and open environment, a culture that love children.

And it all fits in together. I mean, you wanna make any comments to that or say anything?

No, just I think that you're right that our churches are similar in that way, where we value children. And I would just phrase it more generally, we value other people's souls.

Amen.

We value other people and we simply include children.

Amen, that's a great way.

Part of that group. I mean, we value older, we visit an old folks home. Not a lot of churches still have a ministry that does that. I think it says a little bit about your Christianity who you're willing to help and who you're willing to serve.

And I think that a lot of us probably need to grow in humility and realize that serving the least of these, Jesus wants us to serve children. Was in Hebrews 8, it says, for they all shall know me from the least of them to the greatest.

And there's something about the fact that in the new covenant, we know what the least to the greatest means, but there really isn't. We're all just sinners at the foot of the cross of a perfect savior.

Amen.

And the smallest child that walks up to you with a weird question at a county fair, he's as important as if a celebrity preacher guy walked up who could maybe help you out. Your character is often demonstrated by how you treat people who can't do anything for you.

And that's a way that we can all grow is by loving children. And I would add, children in the womb, I would add elderly people. These are people that God has given us consignment or commission to help and to serve and to bring into the family of God.

And I'm convicted to do it as well as you.

Luke, Zacchaeus, and Ministry to the Marginalized

Well, again, Luke's on my mind because we're going through Acts and it's under the inspiration of the spirit, of course, but Luke takes special care. And we're so afraid of these words because they've been wokefied.

Is that a word? They've been wokefied to death. But Luke is not afraid to show the ministry of the church to the marginalized, to the children, to the women, to the poor. How about this? The only place that we hear of this ungodly tax collector, Zacchaeus, is in the gospel of Luke.

And Luke just makes a point of those, again, for lack of a better term right now, marginalized. I know it's misused, but I think that's what you're saying. We're gonna care for souls. We're gonna care for souls because that's our commission.

That's our responsibility. And whether that soul is a child or an adult or whatever their ethnicity may be or whatever their age may be, or even if they're in the womb, particularly if they're in the womb, the most vulnerable among us, we're gonna care.

And if you don't care, well, that's a very, at best, that's a very terrible sign of your heart before the Lord. And at worst, it just means you're unconverted. So, wow, wow. I wanna say a great episode, but man, we may turn this into two episodes.

It helps me sometimes if I can get two for one. We'll see. I'll think through that. But brother, it's really a privilege to have you on.

You just pay me the same.

What'd you say? Yeah, yeah.

You pay me the same no matter how you cut it up. So that's fine.

Yeah, that's good.

I'm glad I have your blessing on that.

Anything else?

Hey, I really appreciate you, brother. I love you and Aaron and your family. I'm grateful for the Lord's providence in putting us together and our friendship over the years. You've been an encouragement to me.

Anything else you wanna say before we wrap up here?

Yeah, well, first, thank you for having me on. I enjoy just talking to you, brother, frankly, and talking about the Lord's work. But I would just encourage anyone listening, next Sunday at church, find a child and just talk to them.

Ask them, how was your week? Yeah, amen. What did you do this week that you remember? Ask them questions that aren't too open-ended where kids can't think. But ask them something. You know, what was your favorite thing you ate this week?

Kids would think those are neat conversations and they'll appreciate you. And I think that the second thing then is, is if you find it hard to care about the children and care about other people's children, then go to the Lord.

He's a forgiving God who's in the business of heart change. And if you realize, yeah, you know, maybe I don't care as much as Alan and Michael made me think I should. Ask the Lord. Say, Lord, give me this desire to wanna talk to other people's kids and minister to them that I don't have today.

And He can do it.

Amen, that's wonderful counsel, brother. I think that's great. I hope that, I haven't decided yet, but I hope that either this episode or these episodes have been a blessing to our listeners and would really make you think.

And if you have a pastor or an evangelist, you know, that is already doing these sorts of things, would you take a moment and just pray for them? Encourage them. I promise you, I promise you, they're not overly encouraged.

You know, they're not having too much encouragement. So be willing to say something to them and thank them or encourage them or send them a note or a text or just take them before the Lord and pray for them.

And the Lord would continue to bless them and help them because it's impossible to do these things apart from our gracious and holy God.

Amen? Amen.

Well, thank you guys for joining us on this episode or these episodes of the Rural Church Podcast. And we will catch you again next week.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poimos, the masterpiece of God.

How are you going to respond?