Jesus and a little child’s heart

I recently read a children’s book with a fictional account of Christmas, and the writer was describing the childhood of Jesus. It was so beautiful that it got my imagination of Jesus beyond the Bible. It brought the reality of Jesus as fully Man and God to my consciousness.

Then I began to think again: Do Christian children think of Jesus as a child? Can they relate any area of their lives with the Jesus they hear and read about apart from his story at the temple with the teachers of the law?

Well, if that is the only instance we hear about Jesus’s childhood, IT’S SUFFICIENTLY ENOUGH… SO GOOD!!!!

The Bible says in Luke 2:46-47

And it came to pass that after three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions.

What caught my attention was the “…asking them questions.” This is what is so true about every child… THE ABILITY TO QUEST. Mum, do you know that every child is born to “ASK”? One thing that was very obvious to us in the life of Jesus is the curiosity of Jesus. Jesus asked, asked and asked until the SCHOLARS marvelled. But that didn’t stop the answers from coming. The parents came to find him, and He still asked them questions. AMAZING!!!

Every child is born with a remarkable instinct to ask questions, except those that have been shut down several times by the very people who should have answered them. Either way, there are questions in their hearts about the world they live in. Someone needs to answer these questions correctly, so the child is not wrongly informed.

Phrases like “You ask too many questions.”,  “Please leave me.”, “I am tired of your questions.”, “I don’t know…” can lead a child to withdraw or to seek comfort and answers from inappropriate sources.

If your child is not asking, then begin to get worried. Why? We are in a generation that questions EVERYTHING ABOUT THE GOD we present to them. The problem is that if you don’t know the replies to give them, darkness will provide them with the response: THE WRONG ONES.

So you hear people say:

“But this child is a great Minister’s child. What happened?”

“This child had all the training. What went wrong?

I think the question we should ask ourselves is, Was that child led to finding God? or Was he or she given God without answering the QUESTS of his heart correctly? Were the questions answered about the God we present to them?

At a point in my life, I began to jot down questions my children asked me. Some were beyond the universe. So I began to pray that God answers those they didn’t even dare to ask.

Questions by children cannot be answered by head knowledge or what we heard from them without proper understanding. You, as a parent, you need to have a deep and correct understanding of the Holy Scriptures to be able to answer their questions beyond the surface by the Spirit.

Truth be told, the questions our children ask need answers beyond the surface. There is an intent to every question a child asks. If the root question is not adequately addressed, we end up raising a confused generation that thinks everything goes and accepts anything that comes their way without a firm stand of what they believe and know is TRUTH from God’s Word. They will be tossed to and fro like people without a bearing.

How then, mum, are you answering their QUESTS?

Leave a comment if you know more suggestions for answering or state some seeming outlandish questions children have asked you before and how you answered them.

See You Soon

Sandra Onojetah