I couldn’t wait for my class’ turn to go to the Library that day. It was no regular trip down the hall. This was the biggest event of the year for a fourth grader in 1982. Today was Book Fair Day! This was the day you saved credits and money for all year long. I used it to buy Christmas presents and erasers shaped like anything you could imagine, and who could forget the big pencil with the pointer finger on the end of it? I’m talking high quality stuff here.
This year was different though, I was finally going to get it! I had been looking at it for 3 years and dreaming of the year I could afford it, and today was that day. I proudly only bought one thing this year and it was for me. I finally had an autograph dog! It was awesome! Before I even got it home I had it covered with the names of friends and teachers that I liked. But not that one teacher… you know who you are…
I had “Auto” for a few years and still brought him out to the couch or threw him around the room with my Super Grover stuffed animal on great adventures. But I was getting older.
My dad had decided it was past time for me to be pressed into growing up and putting away my toys when I got done playing. The nerve of the guy! He told me “Put your toys away, I don’t want to have to tell you again.” He told me this not once, or twice, or… well you get the idea.. One day Dad upped the game. He made a threat that was just extreme to my mind, “If I see your toys laying out again, I will throw them away.” I mean come on!! Who does that? So I didn’t believe him completely, but I did much better. For a time that is. One day in a hurry I left my prized “Auto” out of my room. The first toy I had ever worked for. It meant the world to me.
I realized it while outside riding my bike. I turned into Lance Armstrong to get back to the house!! I am pretty sure I outran a few cop cars that day. Sure enough, I ran straight to where I had left him, and he …. was gone. I knew what had happened and with any luck he could be saved. I lifted the lid and there halfway down, yes I dug for him, Auto was safe. I pulled him out and cleaned off the shmutz from the trash and hid him away in my rom. I kept Auto for several years before he was laid to rest after a terrible washing machine incident.
Put away childish things
1Corinthians 13:11 is a verse that helps to round off the love chapter. Recently I thought deeper into what I see there. It made me ask the question, “What are childish things?” Dad had to teach me with tough love because I was a child and it was the only way I would learn. the verse says “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I understood like a child, I thought like a child”
Children need to be told, “Don’t touch the stove, Don’t play in the street, Don’t hit your sister, Go wash your hands, Wash behind your ears, Clean your room, Go to bed, Get up it’s time for school, You aren’t leaving this house like that.” We need to be micromanaged as children because we are young, weak, and we think like children. The verse doesn’t stop here however; it continues: “But when I became a man I put away childish things.” As an adult we know not to play in the street, but it is our right to do so if we choose. We don’t have Mom to wake us up for work, we have to own that responsibility ourselves.
We no longer have someone to dictate our decisions, they have become our own.
Parents struggle with letting go because they don’t want to see their children fail. But it is an abuse to the child to never let them grow up to own their adulthood and what that brings. We have to let go. Some kids fail at first then step up, some look like they have it together only to fall apart. But the truth is this. We can not judge our kids based on how they grow up. We all learn differently. At that point the choices are theirs and we need to be making our own choices to be healthy adults ourselves. I have seen many kids who are far more mature than their parents.
Think of it like this… The prodigal son wanted money, and drunkenness, and women, and social status. Until that is, “He came to his senses” Luke 15:17 Then he grew up.
The local church is just like any other parent who loves their child. They micromanage people’s decisions. “You dress this way for church, You can’t watch that, You can’t sing that, You must give your tithe to only this church, You can’t do, you can’t do, you can’t do.”
And then they wonder why there are no young people in the church. Most young people are for the first time making their own decisions in life. They just left being micromanaged and now the church says “Your tattoos are gross, Why did you get your nose pierced? You drank what? You watched what movie?” and the list goes on. Don’t misunderstand me, many things we have on the ‘Don’t List’ are there because they hurt people, ruin lives, and separate us from God’s presence. But by micromanaging, or judging as it were, we force young Christians to remain infants dependent on the local church to make and approve of all decisions. That’s not a church, that’s a cult.
We aren’t letting them grow up because we enable them to not make their own choices. And like a parent not letting their child grow up we abuse them spiritually.
Philippians 2:12
” Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
Guide them, yes, love them, yes, encourage them, yes. But LET THEM GO. Sure they will fail, but God’s grace is enough. And just like good parents the church should stand by them in love and be there when they reach out. If we have to put away childish things to grow spiritually, the church also must be a parent willing to let them work out their own salvation. Stop holding them back and set them free. Stop telling them what to do and ask them what they want to do. Jesus didn’t preach at Zacchaeus. He ate with him, and let the changes in him happen because he was in the presence of the one who changes everything.
When we put people in a box of our religious expectations we not only stunt their growth, but we leave them with an obedience out of fear and not one out of love and desire for pleasing God. Jesus set us free from religious rules and religious laws and micromanaged spirituality. We no longer have to sacrifice animals or stay in our homes on certain days of the week.
Before Christ we were children of religion. He came, and we are now men and women with the keys to the Kingdom, and full access straight to the throne of God. We now have a counselor who guides and convicts us for growth, it is no longer the religious people’s job, God took that over when the Holy Spirit came.
So put away your childish ways. Work out your own salvation daily and allow other to do the same.