Jesus said: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.”
I noticed the other day that Luke uses a different word for “children” here than either Matthew or Mark. Luke uses bre,foj==. Both Matthew and Mark use paidi,on==. (Again, you’d have to have the BW font to see that correctly – the words are brefos and paidion, for those without the fonts.)
A very interesting article on the advent of independent Christian Schools appeared in the Association of Christian Teachers magazine for Spring 2007.
I’ve just read (in the transcript online – I’d got home long before this point) Andrew Brown’s conclusion to the programme:
But what can we change? What should our arrangements be? We can’t disentangle the problems of children from those of adults. The government, too, sends families mixed messages. They are to be, in Gordon Brown’s great phrase, “hard working families”. But do the hardest-working families have the happiest children? The evidence suggests that they don’t and that it’s the family which plays together that stays together. In fact it’s hard to resist a rather heretical conclusion. Most of what we have seen as the peculiar horrors of modern childhood seem to arise from a lack of authority: they can, in shorthand, be blamed on the Sixties. But that was a complicated decade, with good as well as bad; and one of the distinctive attitudes of the Sixties was a distrust of money, and a belief that material success should not be the measure of everything. We’re never going to get away from a society that cares about status. But one in which status is measured only by material success makes us, and our children, needlessly miserable.
I had to laugh out loud in the car on the way home from standing committee last night. I often have Radio 4 on in the car, engine starts up for a ten minute journey, and I catch some snippet of something.
Last night, the programme was Analysis, looking at the UNICEF report that said Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in a developed nation. No, the laugh-out-loud (shortened to LOL, by the way) moment wasn’t the continuity reader accidentally calling us an undeveloped nation, although that was funny.
Looks like David F is about to deliver a splendidly helpful talk.
Yes, the notes on his blog leave us with a lot of gap-filling to do. But better to have these notes to fill the gaps in that not even have those. Thanks, David.
Rich Lusk points out in his fine book Paedofaith how the testimony of the Psalmists is of God being their trust since birth and even conception.
Psalm 87 gives another slant on this wonderful truth that the blessing of being one of the people of God can be traced back to the earliest days. (Thomas, and others who have studied the Psalms much more than I, please correct me if needs be!)
I've just stumbled across this article on paedocommunion.
http://www.paedocommunion.com/articles/lusk_for_the_childrens_sake.php
So, to remind me where to find it in future, I've put a link to it here. Excellent.
(Given he mentions post-mill, presumably if I come back far enough into the future, I will see Bible-teaching churches across the UK that welcome children in this way).
Extremely helpful quotation.
(OK, I can't resist writing this: James reads David who quotes Barb listening to Lusk quoting Leithart)
http://davidpfield.blogspot.com/2006/09/baptism-and-covenant.html
In particular, I've never before seen the conceptual link between the covenant community / elect distinction and the creature / creator distinction. Thanks David for fishing these things out for us.
Many thanks to Peter Davies, vicar at Audley for his permission to reproduce this morning’s sermon here. Very helpful, I thought, for how clearly he put things. Echoes of Rich Lusk at one point – which certainly is not a criticism!
I have to say that this familiar passage is such a shock to the system.
I found it in Morrisons the other day, at £3.99, called "My First Bible". It was with all the Mr Men books etc.
It has about 60 OT stories, and 55 NT ones. Each is short - one or two sides, with a well-drawn colour illustration. Looking at the stories that are hard to do (or hard to do right), like the fall, the healing of the paralytic, etc., it does a good job. Like it!
ISBN: 1873824831
Authors: Leena Lane and Gillian Chapman
