Me: Prodigal, who are you with?
Prodigal: This is Wayne and Shelby’s first grandchild and he is a boy!
Me: Grandchildren are precious and this one is very cute, I must say.
Prodigal: He is getting ready for bed, and we both could use a story to relax us.
Catherine Marshall discusses grandchildren I her book Beyond Our Selves.
When Christ’s apostles first started preaching, they insisted that every individual had to have a personal encounter with Christ and make the decision to accept His way-for himself. Judging from history, there must have been plenty of vitality in the first-century church-enough to shake the sophisticated Roman world to its depths.
Well, the years passed. After a while those first followers of Christ began to reason, These children of ours were born into a Christian family. They have grown up in the church and have been instructed in the faith. They were born Christians. Surely they don’t need any special experience of repentance as we did.
The church pews were soon filled with the sons and daughters of those first followers. But since the children had inherited their belief in Christ, they knew Him only secondhand. Perhaps it was not surprising that by the second century the vitality of the church had begun to decline. Proofs of God’s power became the exception rather than the rule. The pews were then filled with largely secondhand believers-grandsons and granddaughters. God has no grandchildren. God only has children.
I wonder how many others there are who have thought of formal church membership as a substitute for that direct Father-child relationship that God really wants of us? No wonder much of our religious life today is plagued by vagueness. Let us not mistake it: Entering in does take childlikeness. The door through which we enter into Life is a low door. And sometimes it is the humble and the needy who can show the rest of us the way.
Are you a grandchild or a child of God? Does your church activity substitute for a relationship? Why not have church activities that are based on your relationship with God instead of others? Sometimes God has to bring us low so that we can see just how big God is. It is then that we can start viewing our relationship with God as that child. Then he can become that Father and love us and care for us.
Psalm 116:6
The Lord preserve, the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me.
Jennifer Van Allen,
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
