“Learning to Walk with Jesus (Part I)”
Several years ago I came across a little book by Robert Fulgum entitled, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Fulgum suggests simpler is better—and if we would all just apply the things we learned in kindergarten, our society would be a better place to live. Here are some of the things he says we ought to do (remember, this is Kindergarten wisdom):
Play fair
Share everything
Clean up your own mess
Put things back where you found them
Don’t hit others
Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone
Flush
Hold hands and stay together
That’s pretty good advice and I think we all ought to do those things but I gently disagree with Fulgum’s title and his main argument, for two reasons. First, I have trouble with the word “all.” I learned a lot in kindergarten but that’s not all I really need to know. There are some very important life truths we don’t absorb in kindergarten. My other objection to the title is the word “learned”—it’s in the past tense. It suggests learning is something that can be finished. And I believe all of life is a learning process.
Since learning is core to Christianity, the reality is that
Everything we need to know comes as we learn to walk with Jesus
So even though Robert Fulgum falls short in his little book, he and Jesus do agree on one very important point. As adults, we need to recapture a childlike approach to life. In the last verses of Luke 9, as Jesus is walking along with his disciples, Jesus gives them five life lessons. As we walk with Jesus today, he is trying to teach you and me the same lessons. We will look at the first two life lessons today and study the last three next week.
If you are like me, you’ll agree that all we really need to know, we learn from Jesus as we walk with him. In each of these five life lessons we will learn something about Jesus and something about ourselves. Today we’ll spend most of the time on this first lesson.
Lesson One: Greatness
In the previous verses in this chapter, Jesus took three disciples up to the Mount of Transfiguration, and then came down into the valley of human suffering. There was a father with a demon-controlled boy and the disciples were unable to help him. Jesus stepped in and delivered the boy. As they are walking back toward Capernaum, the disciples got into an argument over which one of them was the greatest. I can’t help but think old Simon Peter was part of that argument. After all, Jesus chose him and two others to see his glory.
This argument was fueled by their continuing ignorance about the true nature and purpose of Jesus. They still thought Jesus would overthrow the Romans and set up a literal kingdom. They were jockeying for position in that kingdom—who would maybe be the vice-Messiah, who would be the prime minister, who would sit next to Jesus. It’s one of the worst aspects of our human nature. We all possess this drive for selfish ambition that we want to promote ourselves to the positions of power and prominence.
Jesus knew the disciples were arguing over this issue, but instead of rebuking them, he used a living object lesson to teach them the truth about greatness. He summoned a child and had the child stand among these grown men. Mark tells us Jesus took the little child into his arms and told the disciples that to be really great, they would have to become like this little kid. Here are two great lessons:
Jesus loves and welcomes children
We know Jesus loved kids and kids loved him. We read in Mark 10 some children tried to see Jesus, but some of the disciples try to shoo them away from the busy Master. When Jesus saw this, he became agitated, even indignant. He rebuked the disciples saying, Mark 10:14 “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” Then he took the children in his arms and put his hands on them and blessed them.
This was not common behavior. In the Roman culture, children were considered property and many were simply killed at birth if they weren’t quite perfect. Even among the Jews, it was unusual for an adult to pay attention to children. Children in that day were not valued. They were the smallest and most insignificant group in Jewish society. A very influential Jewish-theological book known as the Talmud said spending time with a child was a waste of time. One rabbi actually wrote “Morning sleep, midday wine, chattering with children…destroy a man.” But Jesus didn’t agree with that attitude. He welcomed children into his arms.
Probably the first song about Jesus many of us ever learn is, “Jesus loves me.” But one that closely follows “Jesus loves me” says, “Jesus loves the little children; all the children of the world; red and yellow, black and white; they are precious in his sight; Jesus loves the little children of the world.” How true!
Because Jesus loves children, we ought to love them, too. He said when we welcome children, we are really welcoming him!
I have always loved children and working with children. Nothing blesses my heart more than to kneel down and to hug a child or to have one of our children draw me a special picture. While you know we have invited a candidate to serve as a Pastor of Music and Youth, I believe it would serve this congregation well to one day staff a children’s minister. Perhaps we have never considered it for lack of resources, but if Jesus made such a commitment to children, shouldn’t we?
As I coached children’s basketball this winter or as I’ve been going to little league games this spring, I see dozens of kids playing sports and dozens more running around while their parents are correcting the referees and umpires. And I’ve found myself wondering if those kids on the court or field or just running around know Jesus. I wonder if they go to church anywhere. We have got to be a church that aggressively goes after children to introduce them to Jesus.
I want to say THANK YOU to the many of you who have heard God’s call to work with children. We are right now enlisting workers for our pre-school and children’s Sunday school departments. We don’t want to just fill those classes with warm bodies. Instead, we want folks who have sensed a call from God to work with these precious kids and to show them the love of Jesus. Many of you don’t feel qualified to stand up before a bunch of adults and teach the Bible. Well you may be a perfect candidate to work with our children. What do you need? You need to be a good hugger; you need to be able to sit in those small chairs, you need to have a love for Jesus and a love for kids and you’ve got to have a sense of humor because they will keep you laughing.
There was a teacher who was trying to write down the names of the parents of a new little boy who had come to Sunday School. She said to the boy, “What’s your daddy’s name?” He looked at her and said, “Daddy.” So she said, “What’s your mother’s name?” He said, “Mommy.” But this teacher was pretty sharp, so she came up with a brilliant way to get the information. She said, “What name does your daddy use when he calls your mommy?” The boy’s face lit up and he lowered his voice and said, “Baby doll.”
Some of you have been attending a Sunday School class, being blessed. Now it’s time for you to be a blessing. One of these days, if you are saved, you’ll be with Jesus in Paradise. Imagine standing there one day with Paul, Stephen, or Phillip. They say, “tell me what you did for Jesus when you were on earth.” You think for a moment and you say, “Well, I sat in a chair in Sunday school every Sunday.” Don’t be surprised if they give you a funny look. Some of you are new members of our church and you came in and decided to take a little time off from Christian service—that little vacation has now been extended far longer than you intended—it’s time to get back involved in serving Jesus. A great way to do it is to welcome and love children, the way Jesus did. If you think God is calling you to work with kids, call our church and just say, “I want to work with kids.” Somebody will get in touch with you.
That’s a lesson about Jesus, now let’s learn a lesson about us:
God’s view of greatness is different than this world’s
Throughout history, there have been many people who were great. Some even took the title. There was Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, and Peter the Great. Just like the disciples of Jesus, our human nature strives to be “the greatest.” I suggest the word “great” is so overused it has lost its impact. Even Tony the Tiger reminds us a certain cereal is GRRRRReat! We even use the word to mean just the opposite sometimes. If you walk out to your car one morning, late for work, and find you have a flat tire, you’ll probably say, “Well, that’s just great!”
Everyone wants to be the greatest. But greatness is relative. I heard about three restaurants on the same block. One of them was a large restaurant, which put up a huge sign bragging, “The greatest restaurant in this city.” Another huge eating establishment put up a larger sign boasting, “The greatest restaurant in this state!” The third restaurant was small, but the food was excellent. The owner placed a small sign in the window simply stating, “The greatest restaurant on this block.”
Americans are obsessed with greatness. I want all of you to answer at the same time out loud: Who is the greatest living baseball player? Who is the greatest living basketball player? Who is the greatest living golfer? Football player? Everyone has a different opinion. Let’s try another question: Who is the greatest living preacher? On second thought, don’t answer that one.
America is obsessed with the greatest. I had to Google to even remember that it was the 49ers who lost to the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, but I assure you the 49ers didn’t leave that game saying, “We’re number two! We’re number two!” No, it’s number one or nothing for Americans. That was the attitude of the ambitious apostles. They were arguing over who would be number one among their group. They were jockeying for power, position, and prestige. The attitude of wanting to be the greatest can be summarized in one word: PRIDE. Pride is the attitude which makes you want to be the greatest, and the attitude that makes you think you are better than others.
Someone said the difference between pride and humility can be seen in the difference between a dog and a cat. How many of you own a dog? When you come in, your dog will run toward you and wag his tail. And if you bend down and scratch him behind the ears, he will almost smile. Do you know what that dog is thinking? “My master must be a god!” How many of you own cats? You don’t own a cat; you just board it. A cat may not jump into your lap but they like to be stroked. Do you know what they are thinking when they are petted? “I must be a god!”
Pride is the attitude that makes you think more highly of yourself than you should. Pride was the sin that caused Satan to fall. He had “I” trouble. He said, “I will ascend to the throne of God. I will make myself like the Most High. I will be as great as God.” But God said, “You aren’t going up, old Lucifer. You’re going down, down, down.” The Bible says, James 4:6 “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Are you guilty of pride? Let me ask you a series of diagnostic questions to help you see if pride has crept into your life:
Do I continually think about myself?
Do I continually use the personal pronoun “I” in most of my conversations?
Do I listen greedily to what people say about me?
Do I insist on consideration and respect?
Do I sulk if people are not grateful for favors I have shown them?
Do I remember every service I may have rendered and expect to be appreciated?
Am I sensitive to slights, jealous, or envious?
Do I remember criticisms?
Consider the way Jesus stated it in Matthew’s account:
Matthew 18:2 (ESV)
And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them
Matthew 18:3 (ESV)
and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:4 (ESV)
Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
We must change. That means repent and become like little children again. What does it mean to be like a little child? Well, here are three great humility qualities of children:
Fun-loving
Some of us adults have lost the joy and the laughter that ought to be a part of our lives. We have become party-poopers and fuddy-duddies. A childlike spirit loves to laugh and have fun. What if we took this church’s name that we abbreviate as FBC and say to ourselves that it really stands for Fun Being a Christian?
Another childlike quality is
Total trust
Have you noticed children don’t worry as much as we do? Not too many children have ulcers. Children are trusting. That’s why we have to warn them to be suspicious of strangers, because of their trusting natures. When I was a kid, my brother and I were wrestling and the back of my head hit our coffee table and just wouldn’t stop bleeding. I was crying, certain I was going to bleed out, but my mother told me it would be all right. We kept up with the gash on the back of my head and because she said I would be all right, I believed her. I woke up the next morning and all was well with the back of my head, just like my mother said.
Do you know what I did after I realized my mother was right? I told my brother I wanted to wrestle again! Children are trusting.
Our society is so full of con men and scams we grow up learning to be skeptical. When it comes to the world, you should be careful. But when it comes to God and his Word, we should have that same kind of childlike faith in God and in his promises. The final quality is
Complete dependence
Little guys can’t drive and they don’t have money to buy their food or clothes. They are utterly dependent on others. The older we get, the more independent we become and we’re even proud of it. We can take care of our own needs and our own problems. We don’t need anybody else and sometimes we act like we don’t even need God. We need to be like a child and realize the very next breath we take is a gift from God. The next pulse of our heart is a gift from God. Every dollar we ever earn is because God has given us the ability to work. We must have that kind of complete dependence on God. Do you have a childlike attitude? That’s what true greatness is in the eyes of God. Let’s look at another life lesson:
Lesson Two: Acceptance
After their petty argument over greatness, I’m sure the disciples were deeply convicted and feeling uncomfortable by what Jesus had to say. It appears John brought up a totally new topic to simply change the subject! He complains he saw someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name. John didn’t like that, so he had told the man to stop because he wasn’t one of the chosen disciples. Look at John’s exact words in verse Luke 9:49, “he does not follow with us.” He probably expected Jesus to commend him for his action, but instead, Jesus uses it to teach a lesson. Jesus said, Luke 9:50 “Do not stop him, for the one who is not against you is for you.” What’s the lesson we learn about Jesus?
Jesus has servants we may not recognize
It’s so easy for us to criticize or minimize other groups of Christians because they are “not one of us.” We can be guilty of the same spiritual bigotry that infected John. In Acts 2 we see the beginning of the church; they didn’t have another name in front of church—they were just the church. That’s the way it was for over three hundred years. Then the Roman Empire embraced Christianity. Suddenly there was a new adjective. It became the catholic church, small “c,” which simply meant “universal church.” A few hundred years later, the Greeks broke away, forming the Orthodox Church based in Constantinople. So the church based in Rome became the Roman Catholic Church. No longer was it just the “church.” Those two groups became competitors and each claimed to have the full truth and each claimed the other group was wrong.
They didn’t have anything to do with each other because, like John, “they are not one of us.” So they built a wall to keep the other out.
Then, another group broke off from the Orthodox Church to become the Russian Orthodox Church, so the other group became the Greek Orthodox Church: more walls were built. A few hundred years later, some Christians “protested” the structure of the Roman Catholic Church, and this was known as the Protestant Reformation. It gave birth to a whole new group of adjectives: The Lutheran Church, the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Episcopal church, the Baptist Church. More and more walls were built as more and more splits and arguments took place. These groups opposed each other and even killed each other. Wars were fought over these adjectives. During the Inquisition, thousands of Protestants were hunted down and killed by zealous Catholics. Some Protestants killed Catholics.
Today, there are over a thousand different Christian groups. Everybody has his own set of adjectives. There’s a little church called the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of Jesus Christ of Pre-millennial Saints, Inc. Their sign is bigger than the church building!
Do you know how the Body of Christ got more and more divided through these past twenty-one centuries? Every time a man or a group disagreed with another man or group about doctrine or practice, they walked away and formed new little groups. They built another wall and added a few more adjectives before the beautiful word church. Our temptation is to reject and to resent all those other people because “they are not one of us.” Like John, we almost feel like we are doing the work of God when we say, “Stop what you are doing!! How dare you use the name of Jesus in a different way than we do!!” Jesus has all kinds of children in his family and most of them are not like us! We need to recognize that.
Anyone who __honors the name__ of Jesus is my friend
The key to this lesson is that John pointed out this stranger was casting out demons in the name of Jesus. I’m not advocating some kind of universalism that says any religion is okay. There is only one way to God and that is through Jesus—and Jesus alone. Jesus is not just one of the ways to God. He is not even the best way to God: He is the only way!
I realize many people and groups use the name of Jesus in a way that is not legitimate. Terrible things have been done in the name of Jesus. What a group believes about the Deity of Jesus is absolutely essential for fellowship, that’s what it means to honor the name of Jesus.
We still try to add all these adjectives, “Oh, he’s a charismatic Christian” I don’t want to have anything to do with him. “He’s a Calvinist Christian.” “She’s a Moderate Christian.” “He’s a fundamentalist Christian.” On and on it goes ad nauseum.
We need to realize those who don’t do it the way we do it are our friends, if they honor the same Jesus we honor. In fact they are more than our friends—they are our brothers and sisters!
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, was a revolutionary. He was an Anglican preacher who was kicked out of the Anglican Church because he started doing something new. He started preaching out in the fields and the streets. He started singing a bunch of new songs his brother had written, radical new songs whose tunes were taken from popular drinking songs like, “Blessed be the name, blessed be the name, blessed be the name of the Lord … ”
Wesley was criticized and ostracized by the official church. But I love his attitude about people who believed and practiced differently from himself. John Wesley wrote:
“I have no more right to object to a man for holding a different opinion from mine than I have to differ with a man because he wears a wig and I wear my own hair; but if he takes his wig off and shakes the powder in my face, I shall make it my duty to leave him as soon as possible.” … “I resolved to avoid that narrowness of spirit, a party zeal, that miserable bigotry which makes many so unready to believe that there is any work of God but among themselves.”
Did you know in eternity, God is not going to corral us into different areas? St. Peter is not going to have a loudspeaker saying, “Okay, let’s have all the Catholics over here, Baptists in this area, Methodists over here, Church of God folks in this corral, Church of Christ folks, to the left … ”
When real revival comes to our community, the flood waters of revival have a way of raising us up until all these man made fences are submerged under the flood of God’s mercy and grace. That’s when “heaven comes down and glory fills your soul!” Let’s learn that lesson and start loving and praying for other people who honor the name of Jesus, but aren’t “one of us.”
These are not just five disjointed teaching lessons Jesus gave. I believe they are all connected. When you become like a humble little child, you will be less exclusive of others. Have you ever noticed little children on a playground? They seem to play together just fine, irrespective of anything about the children. Yet, when they grow up, it’s only then that they learn to not socialize based on the influence of things like race, ethnicity, or gender.
I think they had it right as children, don’t you? Think about the precious little children in our church. They get out on the playground and have such fun with each other. They don’t ask each other how many acres their parents own. They don’t inquire about where their parents graduated from college or where they work or how much money they have. They just play together. That’s the kind of childlike spirit Jesus was talking about.
Some of you need to repent and become as little children again.
One of our members overheard her four year old granddaughter pray, “Thank you God for sending your Son Jesus to die on the cross for us. I’m sorry that you had to do that!” A simple prayer but it’s profound.
There’s a story of a little girl named Kate. Kate was four when her baby brother was born. Kate began to ask her parents to leave her alone with the new baby. They worried that, like most 4-year-olds, she might want to hit or shake him, so they said no. Over time, though, since Kate wasn’t showing signs of jealousy, they changed their minds and decided to let her have a private conference with the baby. Elated, Kate went into the baby’s room and shut the door but it opened a crack, enough for her curious parents to peek in and listen. They saw her walk quietly up to her baby brother, put her face close to his, and say, “Baby, tell me what God feels like. I’m starting to forget.”
Have you grown older and forgotten God? It's not too late to return to the one who created you.