Acts 3:10

Acts 3:10

The architecture of the old Jewish Temple may serve us for a parable today. The truth that it suggests will be the harmony between a noble undertaking and a beautiful beginning that every true temple ought to have a beautiful gate. The importance of beginnings is the veriest commonplace of practical virtue. Think of the wisdom and love of God who has put the beauty of youth at the entrance of every human life, and especially now consider the child's religion.

I. The religion of childhood is not only possible, but it is the normal type of religion; is that which Christianity most contemplates; and that which, when Christianity shall have really entered into her power, all men shall accept as the very image and pattern of religion. The current idea of the Churches, that adult conversion is the type and intended rule of Christianity, comes largely from the fact that the first preachers of Christianity had of necessity to be largely occupied with men who had known nothing of Christianity in their youth. The evident design of God's creation, the comprehensive form of the incarnation, the clear presence in children of the power and the need of religion, these are the forces which, in spite of every tendency of the grown people to make children wait till they grow up, has always kept alive a hope, a trust, however blind, that a child's religion was a possible reality; that a child might serve, and love, and live for God.

II. What is the true character of the religion of a child? Certainly to be sweet and real, it must be the possession by God of the faculties and qualities that belong especially to childhood. (1) The first and most prominent of them all is the faculty of genuine, unhesitating, unqualified admiration. (2) Another thing in a child's religion is the perfect healthiness of his traditionalism, of his belonging to a certain sect, and holding certain opinions. Grown people often cling to the faith of their fathers controversially. Their love for it is mixed up with jealousy and spite and pride. A child knows nothing of all that. (3) The simplest and primary form of the presentation of the Gospel is the one which is preserved most truly and necessarily in the teaching of children. The child is a little Athenian, always listening for some new thing. And so the child is ready, if it can be rightly told him, to hear, above all the other messages that come to him out of this ever-opening and surprising world, the best and highest news of all, the Gospel, simply as glad tidings of the love of God and the salvation of the world by Jesus.

Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons,p. 127.

References: Acts 3:11; Acts 3:12. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iii., p. 459. Acts 3:12. R. W. Dale, The Evangelical Revival,p. 171.