Men's breakfast

The first men’s breakfast of the year was held on Saturday 21st May at the manse. It was encouraging to have a couple of men present who were new to the church since the last men’s breakfast in November. We enjoyed both the food and the fellowship! The next one is planned for Saturday 9th July.

How our children come to faith

(A helpful article which illustrates some of the principles below is the interview with Margaret McPhail in the most recent issue of Good News, pp 5-7)

How our children come to faith
Stephen Smallman
P&R, 2006

P&R publishing have a helpful series of booklets entitled ‘Basics of the Reformed faith’. This booklet is particularly helpful for giving a covenantal understanding of how we should expect our children come to faith. It’s written by a grandfather who by God’s grace has seen all four of his children come to faith and marry Christian spouses.

Here are some highlights:

  • “In my pastoral experience, too many Christian parents are so focused on their responsibility for their children’s spiritual lives that their prayers are essentially, “Lord, help me do my job and fulfill my calling to raise my children in the faith.” They don’t stop and listen first to what God has told them about his commitment to our children” (p. 6)

  • “When we pray for our children and work with them in our homes and churches, God’s covenant-making and covenant-keeping should give us confidence that it is his purpose and plan to pass his salvation from generation to generation. In the Presbyterian tradition, we use the expression covenant children to describe their unique standing before God. That is a very helpful and biblical way to think of our children. Having this confidence in God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises is the most important single thing we can do for the salvation of our children. We should pray for them with earnestness, but pray with confidence because God has clearly revealed his will for our children and he keeps his promises” (p. 15)

  • “…Once we understand that regeneration is a hidden work of God, then we can pray and believe that the Spirit would begin that work very early in our children’s lives. It will probably be several years before our children express that faith in a public confession. But that doesn’t mean the Spirit hasn’t been at work from a very early point in their lives. I think many parents are particularly zealous to press their children to make some sort of “decision for Jesus” because they think that such a point marks the beginning of their spiritual lives. Actually, the beginning is the mysterious work that only the Spirit can do.” (p. 17)

  • “Do our children need to be converted? The answer to that is yes, as long as we don’t define conversion in terms of a particular kind of experience. In a companion booklet in this series, I have defined conversion in the words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism as “embracing Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel.” Based on this definition, our children most certainly need to be converted—but that conversion could be so much a part of their lives that they grow up never knowing a time when they weren’t embracing Jesus Christ freely offered in the gospel.” (pp 20-21).

  • “The matter of how to make sure that our children are “saved” is a source of real anxiety for many conscientious Christian parents. Concerned parents begin to “evangelize” their children as soon as they are able to talk...Then they proudly announce that Mary, at age three or four, has “received Christ as her Lord” because she prayed some variation of the sinner’s prayer or answered the call at a vacation Bible school or Sunday school meeting. Loving teachers or youth leaders ask our children over and over whether they are “really sure” they have accepted Jesus. After a while they aren’t sure—because they don’t know which time they prayed the prayer was the “real” time. One of my children tells about making up a “testimony” to finally satisfy his youth leaders that he was a believer.

    That is all well-intentioned, but I wonder if it is the best approach. How much of this way of dealing with children is a consequence of feeling that their salvation hangs on how effective we are in evangelizing them? I want to encourage you instead to start with an awareness of God’s wonderful promises and to rest in those promises. Of course we have great responsibilities, but that can’t be our starting place.

    If we build on the foundation of God’s promises and Jesus’ statement about our children, then we can view the salvation of our children from the perspective of faith rather than anxiety. And by faith, we then set about the privilege of raising our children “in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). The word that better fits this admonition is discipleship rather than evangelism. The earliest disciples were following Jesus even while they were learning what it meant to believe in him. Can’t it be said that our children are part of a family of Jesus’ disciples and that in that sense, they themselves are also disciples? As the family serves the Lord, led by the head of the household, the members of the family learn together what it means to embrace Jesus personally.” (pp 21-22)

  • “The term used in earlier generations to describe this more discipleship-oriented way of passing along the faith was Christian nurture. The question of how children come to faith received a great deal of attention in the Presbyterian church with the rise of revivalism in the nineteenth century. So much attention was given to dramatic conversion stories that the “boring” examples of people growing up and receiving the faith passed along to them by their families were considered invalid. In some ways it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because such ordinary means as family prayers, catechizing children, and faithful church attendance were being set aside to wait for the next great season of revival, many children were leaving the faith of their fathers” (p. 23)

  • In previous generations: “Christian nurture was, then, the appointed, the natural, the normal, and ordinary means by which the children of believers were made truly the children of God. Consequently it was the method which these leaders believed should be principally relied upon and employed for the salvation of their children.” (p. 23)

Why does God allow suffering?

Probably the biggest objection I hear to Christianity is the question ‘How could a loving God allow suffering?’ A few years ago the actor and comedian Stephen Fry made headlines after calling God ‘monstrous’. He said that he would like to ask God: ‘Bone cancer in children – what’s that about?’ Now Fry doesn’t have any children. As far as I know this isn’t something he’s experienced up close. But for many others, the question of suffering is very real. For those who’ve lost children, or received a devastating diagnosis, or suffered abuse or injustice at the hands of others, it’s far from a theoretical question.

If God really is both all-powerful and infinitely loving – as the Bible claims he is – why does he let suffering come into our lives? When he must have the power to stop it?

It’s not an easy question. And yet the problem of suffering and evil isn’t just a question that Christians must face. Because even if you ditch the idea of God altogether, suffering and evil are still a problem – just in a different way. If there’s no God and the universe is just random, then the problem isn’t why suffering and evil happen. The problem is why do they matter? Why should we expect any different?

Richard Dawkins declares that our universe has ‘no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference’. But if there’s no good or evil, why do we instinctively use those categories when we look at the world, and when we assess what happens to us? If it’s all just meaningless, where does our sense of justice and fairness come from? If it’s all just meaningless, why should we care about the suffering of another human being?

If there is no God, then your suffering is a lot less important than you think it is. In fact, it’s completely meaningless. There’s no point looking for answers, because there are none. So whatever our beliefs, the presence of suffering and evil are a problem.

What then of a Christian response to the question? It must begin at Creation. Stephen Fry asked in his interview: ‘Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’. Fry assumes that if there is a God, he created a world in which there is misery, injustice and pain.

But did he? The Bible actually tells us that God created a world with no sickness, suffering, misery, injustice or pain. A world which God declared was ‘very good’. Suffering wasn’t part of the original blueprint. Rather it came about as part of God’s punishment on the human race for seeking to live in his world and enjoy his gifts without acknowledging him.

And yet while that explains the presence of suffering in the world in general, what about the suffering we face as individuals? The believer can take comfort in words spoken by Joseph to his brothers, twenty years after they sold him into slavery: ‘You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good’. When Jesus was asked why a man had been born blind, he told his disciples that they were quite mistaken to try and link it directly to some specific sin: ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him’. His words reassure us that God has a purpose in our suffering – just like the skillful surgeon who cuts in order to heal.

Meanwhile suffering in the life of an unbeliever is ultimately intended to bring them to God. As C. S. Lewis famously put it: ‘God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world’.

One thing we can be sure of is that in our pain, God isn’t asleep or uncaring. Nor is the God of the Bible one who sits up in heaven making detached pronouncements about human suffering. Rather, the God of the Bible is the one who in Jesus Christ has come down. Who lived in this world of suffering, sickness and death. Who wept as he stood at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. And who ultimately would face not just the physical torture of crucifixion – but the wrath of God – in order that our suffering would only be temporary. So that we might escape the eternal suffering we deserve. The question ‘Why does God allow suffering’ must ultimately take us to the cross.

Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 5th May 2022

You can hear Stephen give a longer version of this answer in this talk from 2019.