Let The Children Come To Jesus (Child Dedication Service)

November 20, 2022 - Child Dedication Service - "Let the Children Come to Jesus!"

The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who lived from 1821 to 1881 said this: “The soul is healed by the presence of children”.

It is a rare and beautiful thing nowadays for parents to want to dedicate their children to the Lord, and to commit themselves to raising their child or children in the knowledge of God.

We live in a world that benefits from the values of the Christian faith that contributed to the formation of our culture - values like loving our neighbour as ourselves, caring for the poor, social welfare, even the founding of hospitals - but that same culture has largely left behind the God who is the author of life.

But we know that. And we press on as the church, called to be the hands and feet of Jesus and ambassadors of His grace and goodness. That is a high calling.

So is raising our children in a way that they have the opportunity to see our genuine love for God and the many ways that knowing God greatly improves life. Our children will choose for themselves when they are teenagers and young adults if they will follow Jesus, but we have the privilege of doing our best to raise them so that they know God.

Children are very, very important to Jesus. In His day, children were not considered central to religious life, and we see that reflected in the attitudes of His disciples, who were still learning the ways of Jesus. They tried to prevent parents and guardians from bringing babies to Jesus for Him to bless them with the laying on of hands.

They actually rebuked them, criticized them sharply, suggesting that the disciples really believed that the parents should know better. But those parents understood that Jesus had something good to offer their children.

And they’re right, of course. What is Jesus' response to the attitude of the disciples? Rather than sending them away, He does the opposite and calls the children to come close to him.

He calls the children to him to bless them and pray for them, and then uses that moment to teach an incredibly important lesson that we can imagine would have stunned the disciples and the rest of those present, because the lesson was opposite to what was commonly thought in their day.

There are 3 things that Jesus teaches here. “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them”. The way to Jesus is wide open for children. Jesus wants children to come to Him, to have a relationship with God through Jesus.

We aren’t to hinder or block children, to create barriers that make it difficult for them to come to Jesus. What hinders children from coming to Jesus? Well, right out of this passage we can see that adults can block kids by their attitudes toward them.

Adults can make assumptions - like the assumption that Jesus has no time for them - and these assumptions are personal errors or they can be culturally-learned. We need to make sure that we don’t put barriers around kids coming to Jesus.

For us in the church, as we gather to worship on Sundays, that means that we best not view children being children as just irritating. We best not see them as lesser than us.

I was at a church gathering a number of years back and I watched from the pew behind a woman and off a bit to the right, as she slowly became more and more irritated throughout the service by the children in the service who were asking questions of their parents, moving around the sanctuary; a very young one lets out a yelp over there.

And this middle aged woman was clearly on the verge of losing control of herself, showing with utterances of disgust how she deeply disliked the freedom the children were given at that church to just be children.

That taught me something. As disciples of Jesus, we need to learn to control both our inner dialogue and our responses to the children around us. Children are learning self-control and appropriate social behaviours - that’s a big part of the job of being a kid. We need to let them be children as they are learning - that means we need to embrace what children bring to our worship gatherings.

So you hear me now again saying that children are welcome to be children in our services. They are free to move around and, of course with their parents or guardians giving them direction, they are allowed to be here and to engage in our worship service as children.

We have Sunday school for the young ones, yes. Currently that’s every other Sunday, but we’re actively working toward having Sunday School every week. We’re rebuilding after the pandemic.