Spiritual Immunizations & Quaint Religious Charms

I believe that the unbelieving world, as opposed to the church, can at times give us the greatest insight into what is lacking in our Christian faith.  This is one of the reasons I love reading secular books (and should more often).  This time, a message hit me not from one, but three angles in the past week.

Last weekend, in a great sermon on godly parenting, Joel gave an interesting illustration that’s stuck with me all week. He made the rather bold point that if we, as parents, are just giving our children a little tiny dose of Jesus we may be doing them more harm than good. We may, in fact, be preventing them from wholeheartedly trusting and following Christ as adults.

Consider immunizations.  When we give someone a flu shot, we’re actually giving them what?  A little tiny dose of the flu. Give them just enough and it will keep them from getting the full-blown flu.  The natural reaction of the body is able to ward off and render harmless the flu virus.  Is it possible to immunize our children from Jesus?  Studies have often shown that those who are soured most on Christianity are not those people who have had no exposure to church and the Bible,  but rather are those who, as children, either had bad experiences in the church or parents who sat in pews on Sunday but showed zero evidence of living out that faith the other six days of the week.  They had a tiny dose and therefore were apparently immune to the full-blown effect of the risen Lord.

Why is this?  Because a parent who models a half-hearted or Sunday-morning faith is essentially saying, “I know all about this Jesus guy and He’s not significant enough for me to actually change my life.  It’s just not that big of a deal.”  That, friends, is a scary message to give our children.  It’s not just that we haven’t given our children enough religious experience, it’s that we’ve proven by our lives that there are no real-life implications of believing in God.  Kids aren’t stupid. Why would they want to believe in something that doesn’t matter?  So they abandon ship.  Of course, they hold this stance only until they have their own children.  Then they decide they want their children to “have religion”, so they wind up doing the exact same routine as their parents.  No real faith, just going through the motions.  And in these motions, another generation is immunized from faith in Christ. Frightening.

Along this same vein, a paragraph from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood stuck out to me tonight.  Dillard, a secular author, beautifully articulates this from a perspective outside of my own.  Here she reminisces her fond memories of summer Presbyterian church camp:

“The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana!  Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it.  They didn’t recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world.  Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them.  By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.” (p. 134)

Did you READ that?  I read it over and over. The women is a literary genius, of course, but she’s also hitting the nail on the head, and the conviction is well-earned.  If our lives have not been transformed, utterly and completely transformed by the power of the gospel, then what are we doing teaching it to our children?  The gospel is scandalous; its claims are spectacular, it is “wild opposition to the world”.  How tragic it would be if we taught our children to study Christ’s claims, “commit them to memory, and ignore them.”  Wow. Is that not what we are doing when we ourselves ignore them?  Are we not then merely giving our children’s lives a “serious tint” and giving them “quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms”?

That is cause for fear, parents. For all Christians, for that matter.  The friends, neighbors, co-workers in our lives learn about Christ the exact same way our children do--by watching us.  That is reason to evaluate the way that we live out the gospel, to get on our knees and spread God’s Word before us and pray, “Do this to me!  Do this to me!”  We must not immunize our children from the beauty of Christ by living as if He matters little or not at all.

In the middle of all this I am also reading The Hole in our Gospel by Richard Stearns.  I’d rather you read it yourself than hear me do it injustice in a summary, but in short–this one man’s life was transformed from success to significance when he put into practice the claims of Christ and followed the clear calling on his life.  He boldly asserts that we will not be able to reap a harvest of souls converted to Christ until we cultivate the spiritual field of hearts by living out the gospel of love, compassion, and social justice in our world.  How many thousands of lives have been touched simply because this one man decided to really act on the claims of Christ. It is humbling, challenging, inspiring.

Few of us need to learn much more.  We just need to do what we know.  My prayer, my goal, my personal challenge, is to obey every Word that I read each morning. That might mean reading less. 🙂  But I pray that our children would be more than spiritually immunized and have more than quaint religious charms thrust into their hands. Let’s ask God what that means for us today.