Thoughtful About . . . Honest Faith

Have you ever noticed how often children appear in the Gospels?

Have you ever wondered why?

Time and again, Jesus not only encourages children to come to Him, He holds them up as the examples of true faith.

In Matthew 21, after He’s just cleared the temple, the religious leaders chastise Him because the children were crying out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” after they saw Him healing the blind and lame, and He did nothing to silence them.

We just read this passage in our Bible study, and it was so interesting to take it out of that “Of course this is what happened” way of thinking and instead pose questions to ourselves.

If, in your church, some guy came in and touched someone who’d been ill a long time and they were suddenly better…if your kids or grandkids or nieces or students starting shouting, “Save us, Son of David!” (the literal meaning of Hosannah), what would you do?

Quite likely, you’d hush the kids, right? Probably with something along the lines of “Only God can save us, not this guy.” Even if he was a genuine healer filled with the Holy Spirit, we would not want our kids to cry to him for salvation.

Looking at it that way, you can see where these leaders are coming from. This was a disturbing thing to hear.

But even so, the kids cried out because of what they’d just seen Him do. And if we, too, saw miracles…wouldn’t it make you wonder about who this fellow was?

As we talked about kids and how quick they are to believe, we also realized that in part this belief comes from what they’ve been taught. And what do we teach our kids? Do we teach them our principles…or our doubts?

The Jewish families in Jerusalem at that time would have been instructing their little ones in the Law and the Prophets. They would have been singing psalms with them daily; including Psalm 118, from which “Save us, Son of David!” comes. Quite possibly, these kids even would have heard their parents muttering the phrase every time more news came about the oppressive Roman regime. It would have been a cry on their lips frequently, I think.

A cry the children wouldn’t know not to take literally. Because that’s not the way a child’s belief works. They hear our words, not our internal monologue about how God sure hadn’t saved us before, so who’s say if He ever would again. They learn our lessons, even when we don’t necessarily believe them anymore ourselves. 

These children who called out in praise to Jesus in the temple weren’t encumbered by their parents’ expectations of what a Savior should look like. All they knew was that Jesus healed. Jesus did the impossible. And they believed it because they saw it. Maybe they believed it just because something showed on his face that they weren’t cynical enough to doubt yet.

Children don’t just have a strong faith–they have an honest faith. They believe what they’re taught in a way the teacher rarely does anymore.

As I let these thoughts churn during our church service, I remembered that this was something I’d thought before, actually. Something I explored in A Soft Breath of Wind. My heroine, Zipporah, is touched with a spiritual gift that her family can scarcely take in. Because she was young, and she believed. It was at the core as simple as that. She believed what they’d taught her…far more than they themselves did.

Kids aren’t jaded yet. Kids aren’t cynical. Kids don’t have expectations for the way the world–and God–works. They quite simply believe what they say they do.

There’s such beauty in that, isn’t there? And such a lesson. How often do we say the words that are expected, but inside we don’t really expect anything to come of them? How often do we teach things without examining their truth for ourselves? How have we let our honest, childlike faith become cluttered and dulled by a lifetime of questions and doubts and misunderstanding?

Those children in the temple didn’t expect Jesus to save them from Rome, as their parents did. They just expected Him to do the impossible. And He did.

We have expectations when we pray. But like those parents in Jesus’s day, they’re tied up in our wants rather than the Lord’s. But how often is Jesus standing right there before us, already doing something far more miraculous, if only we have the eyes to see…and the heart to believe?