Do You Tell Them?

“The Love of God is greater far, than tongue or pen could ever tell.” ~ Fred­er­ick M. Leh­man

The moment each of my boys were born I whispered something to them. “Jesus loves you.” Above anything else, above my own love for them, above their own esteem, I want them to know that Jesus loves them.

Some may consider it cliché, some might consider it unimportant or even understood, but it isn’t. When I see hurting adults, when I see hurting teenagers, when I see confusion, insecurity, anger and pride, I see someone who has a glitch in their understanding of how much Jesus loves them. Is that too simple? I don’t think so.

I would not argue that we can overcome everything simply by knowing Jesus loves us, but I would say that each time God makes a spectacle of his affection over us and shows off his abundance of love toward us we are given a greater capacity to overcome. Each trial we face, each temptation, each challenge, when met with an ever clearer understanding of His great love is much more smoothly overcome. The Love of God is greater than ANYTHING the world throws at us. It is the answer to all that we question and the cure for all that ails us. I have long believed that most sin can be brought back to an issue of insecurity and pride. If we knew the love of God as fully as is possible we would never be insecure.

Then let me say that I believe we are on an endless journey to be made more and more familiar with that love. None of us have arrived.

Why is it though, that we don’t KNOW as we should? It’s spelled out in the Word, it’s sung to us over and over as pre-schoolers in church, it’s a mantra that hasn’t lost it’s voice. Yet, many, many, Christians are walking around just a few ounces short of understanding His passion for them.

Is it enough for me to just tell my children that God loves them? I think it helps. I think the only way it sticks though is if there is a faithfulness to that message. Surely it is more than the telling, or there would be many, many more who navigate the road of life better. There must be a capacity to receive that message and that is the greater challenge as a parent.

I have friends who were not raised in Christian homes, and have not been Christians nearly as long as I have but walk in a wonderfully easy understanding of God’s love and share it freely with others. They weren’t whispered to in their sleep of God’s love, but they have been shown, whether through faithful Christians or even a consistent, loving and disciplined upbringing that love can be trusted. The capacity to receive the message is equally important to the message.

As parents, we must be filling ourselves with that abundance of God’s love for it to have the best effect. It must be flowing out of us and coloring everything we do. If it doesn’t, and if we are offering our children the message of God’s love without offering them anything that allows them to believe it, we are ruining the message and may as well stop giving it altogether.

One of the constants in my own life, something that enforced the idea of God’s love for me, was church attendance. I give credit to my parents for making church and church activities a priority over everything else. When I was a small child I only knew that we went every week, three times a week and any other time there was a Bible study or a “Sewing” or an outreach project. As I grew I noticed that not everyone thought it was as important as we did. As a teenager I enjoyed going to youth events and activities and the expectation was that I would go even when they conflicted with my softball schedule or a school event. I remember meekly coming to my softball coach and explaining that I could not be there for the practices because I had a church event. He looked frustrated. We both knew the penalty for missing practice, was missing the game and I was a key player on the team. I was first on the batting roster and played shortstop. He knew my family well enough to know that he wasn’t going to talk my parents out of their stance so he allowed me and the three girls I had invited to the event to have an extra practice before the event which would allow us to play in the game the following week. This discipline of going to church may seem trivial. It may seem like missing now and then for a “good” reason is not a big deal, and in and of itself, it isn’t a big deal. Had I missed that activity, had I missed a few Wednesday nights I would not be less knowledgeable of the things of God than I am now. What it would have done though is diminished the impact that the teachers, instructors, leaders and pastors had on my life.

Why?

If my parents believed it was that important to be there, than what they teach me must be important. If they had made church a negotiable choice my natural inclination would have been to believe what they taught me at church was negotiable as well.

Faithfulness to church attendance is just one area we have the opportunity to prove the message.
Another is in charity, in what we do for our neighbors and friends and how often we do it in front of and involving our children.

The capacity to receive the message is equally important to the message.

Do you tell your kids that Jesus loves them? I am confident most of you do. Do you whisper it to them each night at bedtime and pray over them as they sleep? Do you offer them His Words when they have a problem and comfort them with His presence when they have a need? Do you tell them only in words and songs or do you enforce it with faithfulness to Christian disciplines? Don’t just say it, make it believable in everything you do, in what you pursue and in who you hang out with. Please do tell them, but don’t stop there. Let love be the overflow in your life. Let walking in love be a natural result of receiving it regularly in prayer, in Bible study, in devotion and church attendance.

“Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.” ~ Ephesians 5:1-2 The Message Bible