“Suffer the Children”

This week my family and I entered into a season of prayer & fasting, along with some other Christians who we are connected with. Last night as I went to bed I asked God to show me the focus He wanted me to have for the fast, and as I slept I dreamt.
As with other recent dreams, I didn’t immediately understand what God was saying but wrote it down anyway when I woke – and in the process of writing, God explained what He was showing me…

In the dream I was involved in a production at a local theatre/ performing arts centre. The production was very clever and professional but very dry, and although it was being presented as children’s work, most of the children involved did not understand it (it had been taken out of their hands). I tried to help the children to find their voices but had to deal with a lot of opposition from those in charge, and the kids (who didn’t understand all the politics) initially loved the freedom of find their own voices but were often drawn back to the professional, reward-based activities of the production company.
Later on, after the production failed, new directors appeared, looking for new acts, but none were good (or professional) enough. I refused to perform for them but found freedom in dancing for myself, inside and outside the building, just for pleasure.

I felt what God was showing me was the overwhelming need for the Church to lose the ‘performance’ element. This has been happening during lockdown, but I believe is an ongoing struggle for many who are drawn to the freedom of the authentic but then tempted back into pleasing those in charge rather than thinking for themselves.
I also felt God point out the significance of my finding my own freedom in dance that was not for anyone else’s benefit, and I knew He was asking me to encourage others to do the same. In the coming season there will be no organised ‘performances’ that are going to be good enough in God’s eyes – it is essential that we each find our own dance – our own relationship with Jesus – our own way to express ourselves in freedom before God alone, the ‘audience of one’.

But I felt the strongest emphasis to the dream was that God was highlighting the children & youth, and how important it is for them to find their own way to express their own revelation of Who He is and their own relationship with Him. We need to acknowledge that they are called to a different culture and to find their own calling. In preparing for this fast it has been a real temptation for me to try to persuade my kids to engage in the way I think is most effective – and I have had to resist, and allow them to find their own way to connect. God has been very clear that He wants them to find His freedom and abundant life for themselves, and I must encourage but NOT get in the way.
As in Matthew 19:14 says, “Let the little children come to me, and don’t prevent them. For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven“. (Other translations say “suffer the children” – Lord, don’t let us see them as something to suffer!)

He reminded me of the account of Palm Sunday in Matt 21:15-17 (as shared here the other day), and how it was the religious leaders who got offended at the younger generation finding their own revelation and voice in worship.
We have to take great care not to insist that the emerging generation run with our revelation. Running with the revelation of the previous generation leads to religion.
Each generation – each individual – must run with their own relationship with God (hopefully built on & encouraged by the revelation of those who went before).
And I asked God to help me get the right balance between ‘training them up in the way they should go’ (Prov 22:6), and allowing them to find God for themselves. After He convicted me in a prayer group how we as a generation need to be taking the training of our children seriously and not just leaving them to muddle through by themselves, I asked if it’s possible to train a child in relationship without religion?

In response, He asked me to look more closely at Prov 22:6 –
“Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.” (NKJV)
The word ‘train’ was the one provoking me, so I looked it up and found that it is the Hebrew word ‘chanak’, meaning train up, dedicate, discipline, initiate.
But what I then found in the Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon (courtesy of BibleHub) really stunned me. If you compare the word with its Arabic counterpart you see a deeper connotation, where a midwife (or later a priest) would rub the palate of a new-born child with chewed dates or oil before it began to suck.
And what I felt God say through this was that so many of us have taken “train up” to mean behaviour modification but it’s actually about appetite-stimulation.
We have focused on the discipline aspect of training but completely neglected that our role in training is to show, not tell. This kind of training is less about “do as you’re told” and more about “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8)

So to train up a child in the way he should go is to allow our own relationship with Jesus to overflow before them, to whet their appetite for the path to Jesus and the mission ahead.
And that was the point that clearly emerged from my dream. We need to let our children find their own voices, their own relationship with God, and not get offended when it doesn’t look exactly like ours. Of course there will be elements that are the same – I’m not talking about changing what the Bible says – that is and will continue to be the firm foundation for all believers until the end of time (and beyond). But when our children pray differently to us, or use different methods of engaging with God, let’s not try to impose our ways on them, but let their new experiences and revelations complement and enrich our own.

And just as it is with our natural children, so must our focus be with our spiritual children: those we hope to introduce to Christ. The Church is undergoing a huge shift, venturing into a new era that none of us have ever known before. As our old religious mindsets are revealed and removed, may we remember that our children (natural and spiritual) are being born into the New – and none of us yet know what that really looks like. What we have taken for granted about Christianity may be irrelevant now, so let’s not expect them to look/ grow like we did.
May we be less concerned with imposing a set of behaviour-modifications on them, and more concerned about whetting their appetite for a relationship with Jesus.