Sermon Notes / Transcript

Scripture: Mark 10:13-16
Speaker: Daniel Coughlin

Scripture Reading: Mark 10:13–16

Our scripture reading today is Mark chapter 10, starting in verse 13, just a few short verses. This is God's word and it is eternally true. And they were bringing children to him so that he might touch them. But the disciples rebuked them.

But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, Permit the children to come to me. Do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.

And he took them in his arms and began blessing them, laying his hands on them. This is the word of the Lord.

Opening Prayer

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight. Oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Respectable Religion

So like the disciples, we all want to have a respectable religion. No one wants to come in here and be embarrassed. And so there's different ways that we process through that we think about this.

You know, respectable religion. We all have a different mindset of what that is. That might mean that at 10.30 on the dot, the pastor is not fixing the clock. He's up there at the pulpit ready to, you know, ready to go, ready to, ready to, you know, we have order.

And we have, you know, it's like a production, right? If you went to Broadway, like the curtain starts right then and the orchestra starts right now. And there's no, like, hiccups and failures and, you know, sneezes and all the things, right? It is smooth. It flows well. It's orderly.

It could mean that church happens and we never have prayer requests about people passing away and hardness and sin. We only smile and shake each other's hands and, you know, we have our little moment of greeting and then we all go off and we stop that little, you know, we have this, we have a church face.

We have church clothes and church face and we never have problems. We never get into the reality of our lives. That's one way to have respectable religion, right? Because you know what's not respectable religion?

Sin and struggling and problems and depression and illness and all the realities of living this life. Another way to have respectable religion is to have a children's church where all the children go away and we don't see them or hear from them. We adults just gather together and we have our respectable interchange where I respectably deliver the message and you respectably receive the message.

Thank you. That is exactly right, Hudson. There's different versions of this. There's the version of it that as a father, my respectable religion is for my children to all be seated. Like, you know, so they never say anything.

They never do anything. They're seen but not heard. They're respectable, right? It's along the lines of what the disciples had in mind. They love Jesus, right?

The Disciples' Mindset

It's easy to think like, it's easy to get negative on the disciples and see their failures and think that they were like some uniquely bad way to be. But what I want to drive home is that we all have this inclination. Like, you can love Jesus and still want like a level of sanitariness, a level of cleanness.

Like, we're having, you know, even in our Sunday school hour right now, to have mixed ages means necessarily that we're going to have some kids ask questions that the adults are like, oh yeah, I know the answer to that. I've been thinking about that for 40 years. And we're going to have questions that the adults ask and that the kids don't care about and probably won't care about for 30 or 40 years.

I think the disciples wanted to protect Jesus. And they wanted to keep the kids away from Jesus, you know, these small children who are, you know, clamoring up on him, right? Because what happens? I mean, children, I don't know what they ate then. Today it's chocolate chips or, you know, we had donuts this morning for Ian's birthday.

And so Autumn is eating her chocolate-covered donut. And guess what happens when Autumn eats chocolate-covered donuts? Chocolate goes everywhere, right? I mean, they're on her fingers or hands.

She doesn't have the wherewithal, the delicacies of an adult to know how to like hold it right so the chocolate doesn't go everywhere. So I just imagine, right, grubby little kids crawling on Jesus, smearing figs or whatever they ate, right, on his robe. But not just that, right?

I mean, when we talk downstairs, when we talk about, you know, when I'm teaching, you teach to adults typically different than you teach to children, right? There's a level at which I imagine the disciples are saying, you know, Jesus' time here. He is a great teacher. He should be reserved only to interact with the scribes and the Pharisees, right?

These intellectuals who are able to interact with Jesus. And, you know, they're the ones who need the teaching and the correction. The children, you know, let the women teach the children. Let the, you know, let the B team teach the children.

Jesus, his time is valuable. We need to protect and make the most use of Jesus' teaching. And so they said, oh, no, children, you stay away. You go away from Jesus.

Don't waste his time. Don't smear your hand, your grubby little hands on his clothes. Stay away from him.

Insiders and Outsiders

But I think at a different level, at a lower level, this actually exposes the hearts of the disciples.

Because inherent in that concern is we belong, they don't. Like, this is the inner circle. Jesus is ours. We're up there. We've arrived. We're established. We're worthy. The children are not. And this is how it always works with insiders and outsiders.

The insiders always want to protect their insiderness so that they can rise up in power. They can rise up in authority. They can establish, they can use their power. They can use their influence for their own gain, right?

Even if it's just a reputational gain, I'm an insider. You're an outsider. You stay away, little one. You coming in necessarily dilutes my power, right? It lowers, it spreads it out.

Because if anyone can have access to Jesus, even children, then what I have isn't quite so special.

Jesus' Response

Jesus was indignant. He was not happy with the disciples. He commands, let them come to me. Do not hinder them.

They desire their parents. You know, if you think about this, like, you can imagine the parents being like, all right, go on, guys. Go, go see Jesus. And Jesus is ready and willing to receive them and take them in.

And so, tells the disciples, let them come. Do not hinder them. And this is worth considering. Because what Jesus says, and this is why we're only doing just a few short verses today.

The Kingdom of God

What Jesus says about his kingdom changes how the Jews were thinking about the kingdom, or should have changed, how they were thinking about the kingdom, and how we should think about the kingdom. This isn't a new teaching, by the way. The idea that children brought glory to God.

You know, we could go back to Psalm 8. Psalm 8 says this, From the mouth of infants and nursing babes you have established strength, because of your adversaries, to make the enemy and the revengeful cease. From the mouth of infants and nursing babes. So, I mean, we really are talking about Hudson here, right?

I mean, even Autumn is older than that. She can talk. She has ideas. She can express coherently. We're really talking about, like, Hudson's age and younger. Like, where infants and nursing babes, like, they're not articulate.

They're not articulate in a way that we can understand them. But what God tells us is that they still glorify God in their unique, indiscernible ways. It's easy to think, to look at children and say, we can't understand their faith, so they must not have any. It's easy to look at, honestly, the elderly, you know, someone in a nursing home, and think, they can't express themselves.

They can't express their faith. And so what worth do they have? It's easy to think about the worth of another person just based on what they can communicate or do for you. Jesus clearly didn't see that as the case.

Let the children come to me. Don't hinder them. Don't get in their way. Bring them in. Let them come. Let them grow near Christ. It's easy to want to have some sort of level, some sort of, like, requirement for understanding.

Some sort of threshold for this is required for faith. Some educational requirement. Some knowledge requirement. To say, come to Christ. Then what do you do with people who never develop these things? What do you do with the elderly who lose their ability to think clearly and maintain it?

The Nature of the Kingdom

I think the problem with this is wrapped up in our idea of what church is and what the nature of the kingdom of God is. Because those are the words that Jesus uses here. Right? Do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

And then he doubles down and says, truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all. Because what we're tempted to think is that the kingdom of God is something, again, that is all about power and control and order and influence.

Right? I mean, if we go back, let's look at one of the promises of the kingdom of God. This is from Daniel chapter 2. Here it is. So the dream is true and its interpretation is trustworthy. So the idea, right, the reasonable idea that everyone had is that this kingdom of God that was coming was going to be like every other king, every other nation, every other kingdom.

Right? There'd be a king over it and he would take over by how? How do nations usually take over each other? Right? By war, by political power, by negotiating, by conquering one way or another. And so this was going to be how the kingdom of God came.

Was by power and might and by political influence. We're tempted to want the same thing today. You'll see there's a big push for this idea of Christian nationalism. If you're not on the internet, it's all over the internet and it's probably in other places as well.

But this idea that the church really has been delinquent. The church has failed in its mission because it hasn't exercised political influence. It hasn't established political dominance over the nation. And so the church has failed.

I think that's hard to reconcile with what we read about Jesus and the children here. Right? If the kingdom of God belongs to such as these children, what do we know about the kingdom of God? Is it about power and dominance and control and education? And I mean, is that what you think of when you think of children?

Is that what you think of when you think of infants and newborns?

Childlike Faith

Or, you know. Or let's think about Hudson here. If he has a want, what does he do? If he's hungry, what does he do?

He cries. If he has a bad diaper, what does he do? Okay. If he's stuck in his car seat and he's bored, what does he do? Okay. Have you noticed a trend here? Exactly. What? If he's hungry, he doesn't go make himself a ham sandwich.

If he has to go to the bathroom, he doesn't knock on the door and make sure no one's in there. And climb up himself. If he's in his car seat and he wants to get out, he can't just like, you know, reach in there, unbuckle it, and pull it apart.

What does he do? He's dependent. He cries out because what? Because he knows somebody's going to come around and do something for him eventually. What children do. That's what infants do.

They have one setting. It's, I have a need or desire. I cry. That's how they get someone. That's how they alert others to their needs.

That's how they express themselves. But listen, in that cry is faith. In that cry is faith that there is someone who can help me. And so I cry out.

Crying as Faith

You read stories about orphanages. There's some sad stories. There's some sad stories because eventually if a kid cries out and no one comes to help them long enough, they stop crying. Cry is an expression of faith.

Someone's here. Someone cares for me. Someone can help me. This thing that's uncomfortable. This thing that's bothering me.

I don't know what it is and I don't know what I need, but I need something. So someone help me. That's a childlike faith. That is how the kingdom belongs to such as these.

Listen, we know we have problems. We hurt. We sin. We fail. We fail ourselves. We fail our loved ones. There's a level at which we need to learn to just cry out to God and not have everything figured out beforehand. Right? When Hudson cries out, he doesn't know what he needs.

He's not sat down and thought, oh, my tummy's a little upset. I probably need to eat. It's just, right? Somebody do something. Help me out. Does that seem like the kind of kingdom? It's certainly not like any other nation that we know of.

Right? A nation of people who cry out. A kingdom of people who cry out. Nations aren't established by children. Right? I mean, that's Lord of the flies.

That's scary stuff. You don't want a nation ruled by children. Right? And yet, God says, the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. And unless, unless what? Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.

Dependence on God

This is entirely consistent with Jesus' teaching. Jesus calls us to be dependent. To call out on him and to receive him. Here, this is Matthew 11, verse 25.

At that time, Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent, and you have revealed them to infants. Infants. Yes, Father, for this way was pleasing in your sight. Hidden from the wise, revealed to the children.

Not respectable religion based on power and control and intelligence. And status. Right? What is it built on? Built on faith. The faith to go to Jesus. The faith to call out.

The faith to trust that a response, a provision will be made, has been made, is capable of being made. That's childlike faith. That's childlike faith. Right? Dependence. Trying out. In simplicity, he doesn't articulate his need. He doesn't understand his caloric intake from the last 12 hours. He doesn't understand.

Right? He just needs food. I'm uncomfortable and I need something. Give it to me. Do the thing. He trusts. There's a childlike faith.

To ask and expressing that asking through crying. I mean, it sounds so stupid to have a sermon basically on crying. But, I mean, it's faith. That's a faithful expression.

Faith is our humble reliance on God. Even without demanding a full understanding. We want to understand first and then have faith afterwards. We want to understand first.

We want to understand why and how. And then only after that, then we obey. That's not the order that God calls us to do things in. He says, come to me.

He says, obey. The understanding comes afterwards. This is who you are. This is who I've made you. This is who I've made you to be.

Come to me.

Faith and Growth

One of the ways that I see this express itself is that we look back on how we started in faith. And we tend to undercut the work that God has done in our lives. We look back on our lives at some weak beginning that we had.

And I just had a conversation with a man this week. So it's on my mind. But we look back and we say, oh, I made a profession of faith in my youth. I said I was a Christian.

Maybe I was baptized as a Christian at that time. But then what happened? I struggled. I backslid. I left the church. I left faith. I mean, this is a really common story.

So what was that first thing? Was that first thing anything real? And I think we have to be careful that totally discounting those starts, even if there was a time of sin, of denial, of backsliding. Because listen, God calls us to faith, not to perfect understanding.

He calls us to faith, which means we cry out. We ask God for help. We ask God for deliverance. We profess our faith in Christ.

And then what does God do for the rest of our life? God sanctifies us. He changes us. He makes us His. And so when we look back and we see that we didn't have understanding or we had a wrong understanding of who God was in the beginning, does that mean we had no faith?

No, it doesn't mean we had no faith. It means that our faith wasn't fully matured. Our faith wasn't coupled with complete understanding. You know what it was?

It was childlike. We didn't have all the knowledge and understanding because you can't start with having all the knowledge and understanding. That's something that God works in you through your life as a Christian. How about the man who turns away, who turns to sin, and then later on he comes back to the Lord?

What do you say about his faith? Well, it doesn't look like it was fully formed, does it? It doesn't look like it was all the way there, right? He returned like a dog to his own vomit and returned to his sin.

But then the Lord in His mercy what? Caused the plant to grow. The plant that looked like it was shriveled and withered and wasn't producing fruit. Well, it turns out, oh, 30 years later, here you go.

It is producing fruit. What do you say to that? Other than praise God for His mercy. Praise God for His grace that what looked like it was dead really had life in it.

A Warning and an Encouragement

Now this isn't, be careful. I'm not saying that if you've ever professed, you know, that you're forever and always, like, this is not a comfort for those who are rebelling against the faith they once professed. You must grow in your faith. You must return. God keeps those who are His.

And it is a scary thing to turn away from the Lord. It is a scary thing to profess faith and then to deny it later on. There is a chance that, like Esau, you will find no opportunity for repentance. But for those who do find an opportunity for repentance, for those who can turn back, is the grace and the mercy of God.

That those seeds that were planted and watered early in life, that looked like, have you ever had a plant that you've had that, like, withered and almost died and you nursed it back to life? It's the same plant, right? But it just revivifies, right? It comes back to life and turns green again and puts buds.

We have a lime tree that we've killed, like, three times. And that somehow is putting out, you know, leaves again and looks like a plant again. I have a corn plant, something kind of like these, at my office that somebody gave me right when my office started. And that has withered up and died and I've cut it back all the way and puts out a new shoot and it's beautiful.

The Shape of Faith

What I want you to see is that if you start with childlike faith, it's not a fully formed thing. It's not a thing that's been fully comprehended, fully understood. And I have a warning for you. If you have a faith that's fully understood and fully comprehended and fits really nicely in this box, God will likely pull you outside of that box.

And it can be scary if you're a very box-like thinker, if you're a very controlled type. God's, the growth that God works in the life of a believer is rarely, I was just helping Ian with math recently, so I'm thinking, is rarely linear, right? It's rarely like this, like this is what an ideal world our life would be, right?

I got to turn on and think about this, right? We start here and you start with faith and then your faith grows over time on like a perfectly straight line and you die where it only goes up. Not how the Christian life works. The Christian life works, you start with innocent, simple, childlike faith.

And some days are hard and some years are hard and some decades are full of trials and God in his mercy sustains those who are his children. There are some who fall away and never come back. You must grow. You can't stay a child. You have to grow in your experience and your understanding.

Otherwise, when the trials come, it's hard. It's harder than it needs to be. But childlike faith is the foundation. That dependence on God, that doesn't change.

But what changes is your growth and your understanding of who God is, what he's done for you, what he's really done for you, who you are, how much you need God. It's still childlike faith because it shows that dependence, that need, that simplicity. It's real. It starts real and immature and it ends real and growing.

Those are, that's what faith is. That's how faith grows. It bears fruit over time.

Baptism

One more things I want to say on this.

Because this comes up in baptism a lot. The question about baptism. You know, if someone was baptized early and then they fell away, do they then need to be baptized again? This conversation comes up a lot.

John 3 says this. Jesus says in John 3, he says, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. And then a couple of verses later, The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going.

So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. What we want to do is we want to have God in a nice, neat box that says, Here's the order of things, just like I said, and the graph line just goes up straight. But this denies how the Spirit works.

The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. There are situations, there are circumstances, where your baptism is before your real continuing profession of faith.

Water Baptism and the Baptism of the Spirit

But the correspondence, we have to keep two ideas separate. One is the water baptism itself that happens, right? We fill up the tub with water, you're baptized. That's the baptism by the water.

But there's also the baptism of the Spirit. And those don't always happen at the same moment. In fact, they rarely happen at the same moment. Usually what we're looking for is a profession of faith and an establishment as, Okay, this is, I understand what I believe.

It's a childlike faith, but I have some understanding of who my faith is in, who I am crying out to, and we baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, right? The water baptism signifies the spiritual reality that is true, that the Holy Spirit has washed you clean.

Those don't always correspond, right? Sometimes we baptize you and you fall away. You know, I think about in the last year we've had a baptism. And I don't know what's happened with the man.

He might come back in a year and say, Now I really believe. The Spirit, we have to trust that the Spirit is at work in people who have professed belief. We should call them to account. We should encourage them.

We should warn them. We should draw them back into the church because there is no life for a Christian outside of the church. We want them to be part of this living, growing faith. The Spirit, though, doesn't always work exactly at the same time that the water baptism works.

That's all I want to say about that. The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it's going. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit, right? The Spirit of God works in sanctification through the believer's life so that there are times that is spiritual growth and there are times that there are spiritual difficulties, trials.

One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism

But if we believe that he saved us, this is Titus 3, he saved us not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to his mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that washes us clean.

The baptism is the sign of that. It's the symbol of it. It's the outward expression of that inward reality. And especially if we believe that there's one Lord and one faith and one baptism, it means we don't need to go back and re-evaluate the beginnings, that we don't have to re-evaluate where we started.

The goal of faith is to be in faith, is to exercise that childlike faith and to continue on. Once you've made a beginning, even if there's stumbling, even if there's backsliding, to continue on in faith. Baptism's power is not limited to the moment it's given. The grace it promises is truly given by the Holy Spirit, and he gives it according to God's will at the time God has appointed.

And so that's why there's still hope for someone who's been baptized and who's left the church. Even someone who's denied faith, that they would repent, that they would come back, that they would be just like my lime tree, right? That it would look dead, that spiritually it would look dead, but that it would show faith, that it would show life, which is the heart of the gospel.

The Heart of the Gospel

It's not that we come to God by strength and maturity and understanding. It's not that we've got it all figured out and then we come to God. It's that God receives us in our need and our dependence and our trust in him. And then he grows that faith.

He takes the children in his arms and what does he do? He touches them. He lays his hand on them. And that was the typical way that blessings were made. Throughout scripture, you'll see this.

Laying on of hands is the transference of a blessing, the giving of a blessing. Jesus receives the weak and he blesses them. It's not the strong, it's the weak, the dependent. So we have to resist looking back on even our own lives and re-evaluating everything, putting up all these, you know, raising the bar of what does it mean to be a Christian?

What does it mean to put your faith in God? What does it mean that we baptize someone on a profession of faith that even if it doesn't continue on that nice linear progression throughout all their life? We need to be careful that we don't hinder those that Christ welcomes, which is the children, which is the, well, those that don't always add to respectable religion.

So we're going to have people that come that swear. We're going to have people that come that stink. We're going to have people that come that are needy and dependent in ways that are uncomfortable. Hopefully we have children that come.

I mean, these are all things, these are all ways in which we are commanded to go and make disciples of all nations. And people don't come to Christ all cleaned up and ready. They come needy. They come smelly. They come sinful. They come confused. Purpose, the threshold is that childlike faith, that dependence, that reaching out to God, that desiring to know who God is, to serve him, to be washed clean.

That's how we come to faith. That's what faith is. The understanding, the cleaning up, the sanctification, the growing in knowledge and understanding, that comes through life, just like it does with children, right? They grow in their ability to feed themselves.

They grow in their ability to clean themselves up. They grow in their ability to live independently and become their own person. That's the goal, but it's not the start. The start is dependence on God, needing to be washed clean by God.

That's what faith is. And so when you hear a baby cry, be reminded, be reminded that that is a call of faith, right?

Romans: The Spirit Intercedes

Let me read one more thing here. I thought I had.

Maybe I don't have it. I don't. You're saved from that. So now I do. Okay. This is the Romans.

I just didn't write down the reference, so I'm sorry. You'll just have to trust me. This is in Romans. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

This is Paul, the Apostle Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, who says, we, we, we, mature Christians, apostles, disciples, those who are trained, we don't know how to pray as we ought. We don't know how to ask for the things that we ought to ask for. We're children.

We're infants. We don't know. But the Spirit, the Spirit himself makes those requests. The Spirit himself is the one who translates, who takes what our groanings are, what our desires are, and he translates them into prayers for us. We don't know how to pray as we ought. So don't be surprised.

Don't be surprised when you don't understand. Don't be surprised when you don't even understand your own heart, your own desires. Trust in God to provide for you. Trust in God to be the real object of your faith and to provide for you.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we desire to be more independent and mature than we are, and that's dangerous. Help us to see our need for you, our dependence on you. Help us to trust in you and to walk in your ways. Help us to not look back and despise our starts and our failings, but to trust in you that you, who began a good work in us, will complete it.

Give us faith and trust in you, Father. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.