Out of the Mouths of Babes
Dan Kunz
Several years ago, when our granddaughter was about five years old, my wife witnessed a touching, heartwarming, and hilarious sight. Just as she came around a corner in our house, she heard Mabel, in an almost pleading voice, saying to our yellow Lab, “But Ty, you’ve got to have JESUS in your heart!” Mabel was standing on the landing in our foyer and Ty was sitting at the base of the steps, listening intently to her “preaching”. Evidently, the preschool teacher at the Christian elementary school which Mabel attended, had been stressing the importance of that simple Gospel fact in her classroom that week. Mabel was simply sharing the Good News with a somewhat “captive” audience. Matthew 21:16 They said to him, “Do you hear what they are saying?” “Yes,” Jesus told them, “Have you never read, From the lips of little children and nursing babies you have prepared praise?”
Notice the message of the teacher and our granddaughter was, “You’ve got to have Jesus in your heart”, not “in your head”. For those of us who are life-long believers in Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we sometimes are so knowledgeable about the intimate details of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection, we may not fully embrace the emotions which come with “The Greatest Story Ever Told”! (Maybe it’s the German or Lutheran heritage many of us share!) Our born again brothers and sisters are sometimes more in tune with the anticipation and excitement of the Advent season, the heart-melting beauty of Christmas Eve, the sorrow and guilt of Lent, the anguish of Good Friday, and the soul-bursting thrill of Easter morning. Of course, it’s important to have what people sometimes refer to as “head knowledge”, but that doesn’t mean we should overlook or stifle our “heart knowledge”.
Having, appreciating, and sharing both our knowledge of the facts and our emotional reaction to them is truly having the “best of both worlds”. The joy of the shepherds, Mary and Joseph, and Anna and Simeon, is deepened for us when we understand the thousands of years worth of promises God made to his people, to send a Savior from sin! You can’t really grasp the enormity of Jesus’ suffering on the cross, unless you realize he’s paying the price for every sin that’s ever been committed in the history of the world! The glorious strains of “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” ring even louder when you realize that the hymn expresses your victory over death and the Devil, through the Resurrection of Jesus!
If you’ve been reading my blogs over the past couple years, you know I like to emphasize putting yourself in the picture, in the story. Using your imagination to be one of the shepherds, one of the five thousand, or one of the spectators at the cross, help you to experience the true emotions of the moment – and that’s a good thing. That emotional connection is important. God created humans with a heart as well as a brain. It is part of who we are and part of the image in which God made us.
As we complete our celebration of Christmas and move toward Epiphany, taking down the tree, packing up the decorations, and putting our Christmas presents into everyday use, doesn’t mean we have to, in any way, shape, or form, abandon the “joy to the world” that has filled our hearts for the past several weeks. It’s always Christmas for Christians, because of Christ!