"Teaching from Matthew 19:13-15, Let the Children Come to Me" Matthew 19:13-15 Sunday Morning Worship Service

But Matthew 19, verses 13 through 15, the children were brought to Jesus that he might lay his hands on them and pray.

Matthew 19:13–15

The disciples rebuked the people, and Jesus said, Let the children come to me and don't hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.

He led, laid his hands on them, and went away.

It was a few years ago, well, more than a few years ago now, where one of my daughters came home from kindergarten and was telling us about somebody in class who was out of control, was her words.

The kid was out of control.

Deidre and I asked if there was something wrong with the child, and my daughter just said, No, I just don't think his parents love him enough to discipline him.

And that was a comment more profound, of course, than my little daughter knew.

Deidre and I looked at each other, and we felt a lot of emotions at that point.

One of the emotions we felt was of sort of vindication.

This child had received more than her fair share of discipline.

And to hear her say that she understood that, talking about another kid, of course, but to hear her say that she understood that as a sign of her parents' love for her was tremendously encouraging and also obviously true.

You see this in the middle of Matthew 19 here, when children are brought to Jesus, the disciples were rebuking them, but Jesus said, Let them come to me, don't hinder them.

And of course, there's two encounters here that bookmark this whole section of Scripture.

If you flipping your eyes back to the beginning of Matthew 18, the disciples came to Jesus asking, Who is the greatest?

And Jesus took a child and said, This is the greatest.

You have to enter kingdom like a little toddler, a little kid.

What goes from that narrative is a long line of family illustrations.

So Jesus takes up a child and says, This is the most significant person in the kingdom of heaven.

In fact, he says, the only people in heaven are like this child.

He goes from that to warning in verse 7 of Matthew 18: don't cause these little children to sin.

Whoever leads a new believer, now the analogy shifts from little, you know, a toddler to an immature believer.

It becomes about life in the family of God, and immature believers can easily be led into sin, just like a child could easily be led into sin.

And God will judge people who lead children into sin.

And from there, he goes and talks about how you have to go find children.

Children are like sheep.

If you have a believer who is stuck and lost, you have to go fetch them and bring them back.

And he says in verse 14, because that's the Father's will for his children.

So in verse 10, it's the little ones.

This line in Matthew 18, verse 10, don't despise one of these little ones.

Matthew 18:10

Then he gives the sheep illustration and says, God is in heaven watching out for these little children.

The family illustration keeps going in Matthew 18, verse 15.

Matthew 18:15

If your brother sins against you, deal with it.

Bring the offense to him, let him know about it.

And then in verse 21, we're all slaves of God.

We're all serving the King.

He's the father of the house.

We work for him.

In verse 35, the end of Matthew 18, Jesus says the slave analogy is about us and our relationship to our heavenly Father.

Then in chapter 19, he talks about marriage in the church, how husbands and wives will be married, and how God is concerned about marriage, especially as it relates to the children, how people will prefer their own happiness, their own life, and leave their family, leave their spouse because of godless reasons or selfish reasons.

And God will judge that.

That's the beginning of Matthew 19.

And then it ends, that whole section ends with Jesus going back to the children.

In fact, it's the same verse, the same line he says in verse 13 is exact, or verse 14 is exactly what he said back earlier in Matthew 18, verse 10.

Matthew 18:10

And so when you put it all together, every believer is obviously a child of God.

We come into our salvation as little children.

We're received into the church as little children, impressionable, highly moldable, with the Spirit of God dwelling in us.

The church cares for us and shapes us and causes us to grow in the Lord.

Part of growing in the Lord is that we are brothers and sisters with each other in the church.

Every believer is a fellow brother or sister.

And, you know, you're snowed in today.

You'll be snowed in likely tomorrow, many of the families as well.

You will have an ample chance to live this out.

Kids will get on each other's nerves, locked inside of a house for 48 hours.

There will be conflict, not of course conflict between husbands and wives.

They do not get on each other's nerves, but the kids might get on each other's nerves, and that becomes the pattern for us that we're a family of God, brothers and sisters, and we sin against each other.

And if you sin against each other, you of course see first, can love cover this sin?

Can I overlook this sin?

If love cannot cover, if it's detrimental to the family, harmful to the child of God, harmful to your brother, harmful to his earthly children as well, then you intervene and you confront.

And when they repent, you forgive them.

A person who refuses to confront sin, who refuses to go after the lost sheep, or a person who says something like, Oh, you know, we're gonna look the other way on this sin, we're gonna let them wander their own way.

That's equivalent back to the child who's not loved enough by his parents to be corrected.

The heart of this whole section, from the beginning of Matthew 18 all the way through the middle of Matthew 19, the heart of this whole section is that there will be correction inside of the household of God, and that it's correction because of how much we love each other.

Do families have conflict?

Of course they do.

I'm not asking you to point at the person who's the cause of most of it.

Please don't do that.

But do families have conflict?

Of course they do.

Do parents correct that conflict and deal with that conflict?

Of course they do.

And it's very easy to imagine parents that refuse to do that.

The parent comes home from work and there's chaos in the home and they don't want to intervene in it.

They just want to let it go.

A parent who's at home during the day and the children are misbehaving and tearing apart the house.

They're not under control, and the parent is not dealing with it.

They're on their phone talking to their friends or texting with their friends or concerned about things outside of the home, and they let the home get away from them, and their spouse comes home and he doesn't want to get engaged with it, and it's just it's turned over.

The inmates are running the asylum, the kids are running the home.

That's not a loving home.

Or I think of a scenario where the husband comes home from work and the mom says, Do you know what your teenage son said to me today?

At that moment, it's your teenage son said to me today, and how disrespectful he was and how rude he was, and all of this.

And imagine a dad who says, Okay, but I'm not interested in dealing with it.

I love him too much to correct him.

I love him too much to deal with it.

Think of how unloving that is, first of all, to his wife, but think of how how unloving it is to the kid himself.

And it's a certain perverseness to saying it's unloving, but calling it loving, saying I love them too much to correct them.

In Matthew 19, that's what Jesus says is hindering the children from coming to him.

That keeps people away from the kingdom of God.

Refusing to correct sin, that's the main thread that runs through chapter 18, verse 1, all the way through chapter 19, verse 15.

Refusing to correct sin in the family, refusing to deal through discipline and discipleship with people in the family, ruins the family.

Ruins the family.

Hebrews 12, verse 7, for it is discipline that you have come to endure.

Hebrews 12:7

God is treating you as sons.

For what son is there whom the father doesn't discipline?

If you're left without discipline in which all have participated, then the scripture says you are illegitimate children and not sons.

If your parents don't discipline you, Paul says you're not being treated like legitimate children.

They're not caring about how you turn out.

And that's because scripture says that discipline shapes the child, it corrects them.

It's a course correction, it steers them into the mold that they should become and grow into.

God does that with his own children.

So this analogy from we all being brothers and sisters in the Lord and part of the family of God all the way to little children in the home, that analogy fits very, very well.

As children of God, we're shapable and moldable by influence.

As children of God, we sin against each other because we're part of a family.

And that should not be surprising.

It should not be surprising that Christians sin against each other because brothers and sisters sin against each other.

But God is a loving father who deals with that sin.

Imagine God saying, I love my children too much to correct them.

Proverbs 29, verse 15, the rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame upon his home.

Proverbs 29:15

Proverbs 23, verse 13.

Proverbs 23:13

Don't withhold wisdom from a child.

If you strike him with a rod, he's not going to die.

But if you turn him over to his own desires, he likely will die.

The point is this that's not the way God treats us.

God loves us in us to correct us and to steer us.

One of our elders told me a few years ago about somebody who wasn't being corrected by his parents, who was uh left the home and was just leading a ruckus of a life.

And this is way before any of the riots, way before, you know, this is probably the mid, it's probably 10 years ago or so, the 20 teens somewhere.

He said, listen, a child who lives his life like that is as likely to get killed by police as he is by one of his friends.

He's just gonna live his life however he wants until he finally meets an authority that's not going to get pushed around.

That's what Proverbs means when it says a child who's not corrected is just delivered over to his own desires.

In contrast, a child who's loved is shaped by discipleship and discipline both.

And discipleship and discipline, they're from the same root in English, not the same root in Greek, but in English, they're very similar to the same word.

Perhaps you've noticed that before.

There's some differences, of course.

Discipleship is, you know, a teacher to a student, and discipline is a parent to a child.

Discipleship teaches you understanding and life patterns, and discipline forms your character.

Discipleship instructs you, discipline corrects you.

Discipleship produces you into a Christ-conformed life.

Your life looks like him.

Discipline corrects you from errors and steers the creek to the right ocean, so to speak.

But in both cases, the the child is the learner.

In both cases, the person is formed in their actions, in their thinking, and in their conduct.

Now, God doesn't merely teach us, but he forms us through discipline and discipleship both.

Discipleship teaches us what to learn and how to live.

Discipline trains us how to live it out without sinning.

The final product of discipline and discipleship is maturity.

When all is said and done, God is building us into a person who is mature, more Christ-like.

And again, the analogy to parenting is perfect for this.

You know, when a child comes into a family when they're born, you of course love infants and you they're so tiny, I get surprised every time I see a new infant how small they are.

Oh my goodness.

And it's such a joy.

And the child goes through stages, of course, the first few years of diapers and all that, which seems, you know, lack of sleep and it seems exhausting, and you kind of can't wait for the next phase.

But your goal as a loving parent isn't just to get out of the diaper phase and and all that.

Your goal as a loving parent is to form that child into Christ-likeness, into a mature person.

And of course, as the teenage years come and they eventually leave the home, you think, oh, I'd give anything for the for the baby stage again, anything to hold them when they were small.

And, you know, we say that, but you know, we also don't really mean that.

We're thankful for the product if the child is growing up in the Lord.

And that is true of life in the church.

Nobody wants to stay an immature believer in the church.

We want the church through discipline and discipleship to steer us into maturity.

I praise God that there are people in the church that love me enough to tell me when I'm sinning, that love me enough to steer me in the right direction and that would come correct me if I was walking in sin, that love both me and my wife and my family enough to engage in our lives if there's patterns of sin that are hurting my kids.

And, you know, if you see patterns of sin in my life that are hurting my kids, I hope none of you would be foolish enough to say, oh, we love Jesse's kids too much to correct Jesse's sin.

You recognize saying that out loud, it's not loving, it's it's hindering.

That's the word in verse 13 or verse 14.

It's hindering people from coming to the Lord to refuse to steer them.

And of course, the disciples don't get this.

The disciples start this by arguing if James or John are the greatest in the kingdom, so to speak, and they end this by still trying to keep the kids away from Jesus.

They don't understand it.

But when you read this whole flow of Matthew 18 to 19, you understand what Jesus is teaching.

We are children of God and we need to be shaped.

Shaped into maturity, and it's for our own good, of course.

Yesterday I went and visited one of our church members in the hospital who's fighting pancreatic cancer, and he's um spiritually, he's strong.

Physically, he's you know, he's sick, he's in the hospital, of course, but he told me that he still has fight left in him, that he wants to fight this all the way through, that he has he has more energy.

He's not he's not giving up.

He's not giving up.

And it's it's an odd thing facing that kind of cancer.

You're at a point in your life where you say, I want to fight, I want to win, but also he doesn't know what's wrong with him.

They can't even do the you know the right tests until later this week.

And so he's just stuck there saying, I want to fight, but I don't know what to do.

And I asked him how he's doing spiritually, and he said, I'm I'm I'm doing very well spiritually.

He said, I believe in the power of the resurrection from my head to my toe and with every fiber of my body in between.

I mean, that is an exhaustive answer.

Well, where does that come from?

I mean, that's that that comes, that's a mature answer that comes from a life being led well in the church with people who love you enough to disciple you and correct you and steer you into that kind of maturity.

We sat down together in the hospital and I read to him Psalm 92, which is the passage I read earlier for a scripture reading.

At the end of Psalm 92, it says, the righteous will flourish like a palm tree, grow old like a cedar in Lebanon, bear fruit in old age, full of sap and green.

Well, green is the young branches.

They're green, the small branches are green, the baby branches are green.

But the scripture says, for the life of maturity, at the end of your life, your body is weak, the outer tent is wasting away, but the inner man is renewed.

That's the sap analogy.

That your branches on the outside are breaking and fallen off, but inside you're strong with the life of Christ in you.

Now that does not just happen to someone.

That is the statement of a mature believer.

Nobody becomes like that without having had people in their life that love them and steer them and nurture them.

When Jesus says the children, such to them belong the kingdom of heaven, he's making a statement that every believer enters the kingdom as a child of God.

Fortunately, the church loves us enough to grow us and help us mature.

The heart of this whole section of scripture, I keep calling it church discipline.

I don't even mean church discipline in a negative sense.

The heart of the section is not punishment.

It's a family that refuses to let sin win.

It's a family that refuses to let sin tear apart the family relationships, refuses to let sin divide husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, refuses to give the devil a foothold, refuses to let sin take over the house.

When a child goes astray, they go and get them.

Of course, people wander away and they are given over to sin and they reject correction, and not every lost sheep comes back.

Every brother and sister in the Lord is exactly that.

Your brother and sister in the Lord.

And hopefully, as you sit around your house today, around the fire or go sledding today or whatever, you remember that you care for each other.

Your brothers and your sisters, you love each other.

Your parents, you love your children.

Your children, you love your parents, and you love each other enough to correct each other, to steer each other, and to form each other into maturity.

The refusal to do that is hindering people from coming into the kingdom of God.

Lord, we're so thankful that you loved us enough to give your son for us, that you love us enough to treat us like real children, to steer us, to correct us, to mold us, to form us into the image of Christ.

I'm so thankful for parents in our congregation that love their kids.

We don't discipline out of anger, of course not.

We don't discipline out of you know to inflict pain, we discipline out of love.

An idea to shape hearts into the maturity in Christ.

Give us as elders wisdom in how to lead a church like that.

Give us, as every believer, this ministry of reconciliation, Paul calls it.

Every believer has been granted this ministry of restoring people to the image of Christ.

And guard our congregation, we ask, even on this snowy Lord's Day, we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, iBC.church.

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Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

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Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.