Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me

The only being that exists who deserves implicit trust is God. Why shouldn't we trust Him implicitly? Has He ever lied? Has He ever broken a promise? Has He ever uttered a falsehood? His Word is truth.

Trust it! More than once I've heard someone say, I don't need doctrine. I don't need to study theology. I want to have a childlike faith.

But there's a big difference between a childlike faith and a childish faith. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and thank you for joining us for this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Each Lord's Day, we're working through a sermon series that R.C. Sproul preached through the Gospel of Luke. And today we come to a moment in the ministry of Jesus that probably called His disciples by surprise. He corrected them after they rebuked those who were bringing children to Him. So what does it mean then to come to Jesus like a child?

Here's Dr. Sproul. This morning we're going to continue our study of the Gospel according to St. Luke, and we're in the eighteenth chapter, and I'll be reading beginning at verse 15 and reading through verse 17, and I'd ask the congregation please to stand for the reading of the Word of God. And then they also brought infants to Him that He might touch them.

But when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to Him and said, Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of God. Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it. Again, this is a very brief statement from our Lord, but nevertheless one that is exceedingly important as He sets before us necessary criteria for entering into His kingdom, criteria that we should not overlook or neglect in any way. Remember that this is the unvarnished Word of God carrying the fullness of His truth and His authority.

Please receive it as such and be seated. Let us pray. Again, our Father and our God, we need Your help to have a correct understanding of Your Word, and not only that we may understand it with our minds, but that it would go beyond our minds to our hearts and to our souls, and change us from within. For we ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen. Before I look at this text this morning, I'd like to take a few moments to do a historical reconnaissance that might shed some light on the profound significance of these words that Jesus gave to His disciples so long ago. I'm thinking of going back to the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation, which resulted in the greatest fracture of Christendom in church history. And when we examine the root causes of that Protestant Reformation, we see that there were several issues on the table, but there were two that were more significant than all of the rest. The first, which is called the material cause of the Reformation, was obviously the central issue of the debate, namely the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Luther, of course, observed that that doctrine was the article upon which the church stands or falls. Calvin called it the hinge upon which everything turns. Early Packer called it the atlas upon which everything depends. We remember Ann Rand's famous novel titled Atlas Shrugged, and I forever think of that image as one of the most provocative images I've ever seen in print.

If you can imagine mighty Atlas with the globe of the world on his shoulders, and all of a sudden he just goes, and there goes the world. Well, that was the idea in that metaphor, that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is not some secondary or tertiary theological consideration, but it has to do with the core of the gospel itself, so that without this doctrine you don't have the gospel, and without the gospel you don't have the Christian faith. And so we can see why this debate was so furious in the sixteenth century.

But lurking beneath the surface of the grand debate, the material cause of justification was the second matter that provoked the division, and it was the question of authority. When Luther was defending his doctrine of sola fide before the magisterium of the Roman communion and was engaged in debates, for example in Leipzig and Heidelberg and other places with the prelates and theologians of Rome, constantly he was asked this question, Brother Luther, how can you believe this doctrine that is rejected by holy mother church? And we look throughout church history and we see that church councils and papal encyclicals all affirm a doctrine that you're denying. And so you see here the issue was the question of authority, and even later on when the final council came at Wittenberg at the imperial diet called by Charles V, when Luther was called to recant of his works, you remember what he said, revoco?

You want me to say revoco? I recant unless I am convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason. I cannot recant because my conscience is held captive by the Word of God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other.

God help me. And the Reformation was off and running. Now after the Protestant Reformation took place, the Roman Catholic Church didn't roll over and play dead and acquiesce or surrender to the dictates of the Protestant movement. But rather they brought forth what historians called the Counter-Reformation, the response to the Reformation. And the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century was three-pronged. It had three distinguishing aspects to it. The first was the Spanish Inquisition, where those who had departed from the church and embraced Protestant doctrine were captured and subjected to forms of torture that would make the contemporary debate about torture insignificant. That was once in Rothenburg, Germany, where they have a whole museum filled with the implements and machines of torture that were used in the Inquisition, and they were absolutely ghastly.

But that was only the first prong. The second prong was the creating of a special order of priests to deal with the intellectual issues and academic issues that were in dispute with Protestantism. And that particular order of priests was founded by Ignatius Leola. One of the ironies of church history was that the day that Ignatius Leola entered as a freshman at the University of Paris and matriculated that hour, he was dressed as a beggar. And as he was walking on the campus to become a freshman that very same day, another Frenchman was leaving the campus holding in his hand the certificate of his doctor's degree in theology.

Whether they brushed shoulders or saw each other, we don't know. But the man who was leaving with his PhD was John Calvin, who would be Leola's greatest adversary in his lifetime. That was the second prong of the Counter-Reformation. The third and surely most important prong of the Counter-Reformation was the calling of an ecumenical council, an ecumenical council meaning bishops from all over the world would come together to make decrees that would be definitive for the church, such as what happened at the Council of Nicaea, what happened at the Council of Constantinople, what happened at the Council of Chalcedon, what happened at First Vatican Council and Vatican Council too in most of your lifetime. This was an ecumenical council that was called and held in Trento, Italy, which is called the Council of Trent. And there the church defined her doctrine in their view infallibly for all time.

It took several years to complete their work in many sessions. The most important one was the sixth session in which the church defined once and for all their doctrine of justification, which was reaffirmed as recently as the Catechism of the Nineties, and also to put their anathemas on false doctrines of justification. And so in the sixth session of Trent, Trent defined her doctrine of justification and gave twenty-some anathemas against heretical views of justification, including the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, a formal statement saying, if anyone says that we are justified by faith alone and so on, let him be anathema, let him be damned. And that decree of damnation has never, ever been rescinded and still exists today.

But my concern this morning is not justification. Exactly, because I'm always concerned about justification, but rather about the secondary issue, that of authority. In the fourth session of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the holy Scriptures were indeed the Word of God, infallible in error and inspired and all of that, but that on the same plane as Scripture was the tradition of the church. So you had a dual, a double standard or source of divine revelation, the Bible and the church traditions. So the Council of Trent itself would have as much authority as the Bible. But with respect to the Bible, the church rejected the Protestant doctrine of private interpretation of the Bible. Let me read for you very briefly, I won't put you to sleep if you're not there already, a very brief statement from the fourth session because I want you to get this. Furthermore, the church wrote, to check unbridled spirits, it decrees that no one relying on his own judgment shall in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation, has held and holds and so on.

But you get the idea. Now in this statement, when the guns of Rome are fired at the Protestant view of private interpretation, they miss their target altogether. Neither Luther or any of the magisterial Reformers said that any individual has the right to distort the Scriptures according to their own conceptions. The doctrine of private interpretation says that we all have the right to read the Bible for ourselves and to interpret it for ourselves. But with that right comes the awesome responsibility to interpret it correctly.

So that's a dead miss. But then what they go on to say is this, that while one can presume to interpret them contrary to that sense in which Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation, we never have the right to interpret the Bible in any manner that differs from the way it has been interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church, according to this counsel. Now again, if you go back in the church history and you look at the doctrine of justification, you'll see that perhaps the most significant person in church history with respect to the doctrine of justification was the ancient theologian Saint Augustine. Luther was a member of the Augustinian order of monks, and it was from reading Saint Augustine that he was awakened to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Calvin's favorite theologian was Augustine.

So the Reformers, with respect to questions of salvation, all followed Augustine. But with respect to the doctrine of the church, they departed from Augustine because Augustine in the early years said that Holy Mother Church is to believe and obey and to be given a faith that he defined as a fides implicitum. Now what does that mean?

And who cares about that? The idea there is that people are to submit to the teaching of the church with an implicit faith. That means if the church says it, you believe it, that's the end of it. You trust the church implicitly. That's one doctrine I wish we still had, at least at Saint Andrew's, that whatever I said, you believed it implicitly. But there's nobody in this room who thinks that's happening around here.

No. You don't have to be afraid. You know, everybody knows that I'm not infallible. They know that I make mistakes, that they know that they're not responsible before God to believe everything that I say or preach or teach without question. You're not supposed to have a slavish dependence upon my authority.

We know that. On the other hand, you are held responsible by God to give serious consideration and weight to what your pastors teach you and preach to you, knowing of course they're not infallible, but they have been trained and tested and are responsible to teach you accurately the Word of God. And even though you may disagree with them with impunity, you can't just dismiss our teaching out of hand. That's the other side of the coin. Now what's all that have to do with this text that I read this morning? Well, before Jesus had this brief discussion with His disciples, He had given the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, which we've already looked at. And that question came down to the question of justification. You remember the two men went into the temple to pray, and one stood there looking up to heaven saying, Lord, I thank you that I'm not like other men and so on, especially that I'm not like that miserable tax collector who's standing way back in the back. And then, you know, the tax collector wouldn't even raise his head to heaven, wouldn't come close to the holy place, and simply said, Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner. And Jesus said, that man went to his house justified.

And then He ends that parable with these words, if you recall, everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. And the very next portion of the text that Luke gives us is this incident of parents bringing their children and trying to get close to Jesus and to have Jesus touch their heads and pronounce His blessing upon Him. And this is why when Jesus is trying to preach, Jesus is trying to heal people, here are these parents interrupting Him, trying to push to the front of the crowd with their little ones tagging along so that Jesus can bless their children. And the disciples are annoyed. What are you doing?

Can't you see the Master's busy? He doesn't have time for your little kids? You should have left them at home with a babysitter, taken them to a childcare center if you were going to come here to hear Jesus. And so they're angry and trying to prevent the little ones to come to Jesus. They brought infants that He might touch them, but when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. Well, if it was time for rebuke, it wasn't for the parents that were bringing their infants. It was for those who were trying to prevent them.

And so Jesus called them to Himself, and He said, let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them. Do not hinder them. Don't prevent them. Don't get in their way. Let them come. Bring them to Me. Now this has radical implications for infant baptism, but I'm not going to carry those out this morning.

I'll save that for some other time to stir you up. But this is what Jesus is saying. They want to come close to Me, and they want My blessing.

The parents want Me to put My hand on their head and pronounce a blessing upon them. Now you know, Jesus didn't believe that He could place His hand on a little kid's head and just by that save them. Jesus believed justification by faith more than Luther did. But He did want these little infants set apart where they were consecrated, where they would be in a place where they would grow up in the understanding and the nurture and the teaching of the things of God. But what gets me in this passage is this. Don't forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of God. And assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.

Let them come. Gentlemen, I've been training you as My disciples, but you haven't gotten it yet. These little ones belong to My kingdom. Those who are like these little ones for such belong to the kingdom of God. He doesn't say that everyone who's an infant is automatically in the kingdom of God.

That's not what He's saying. But He is saying that people who are in the kingdom of God have to be like these infants. They have to be as little children. Now when Jesus said you have to be like a little child to get into the kingdom of God, I have to scratch my head because the Bible teaches a whole lot more elsewhere about being like children. How many times have you heard people say to you, I don't want to study doctrine. I don't want to get involved in the complexities of theology and that sort of thing. I want to just have a childlike faith. Well, dear friends, there's a huge difference between a childlike faith and a childish faith. And the New Testament rebukes us when we want to stay as children. We are told to be babes in evil, not grown-up, sophisticated, for adults only kind of sinners. But the sins that we have should be the minor sins that are associated with little babies and little children, not gross and horrendous sins that adults commit. And so the apostle says, be babes in evil but in understanding. Be adults.

You can't be satisfied with milk. That's for infants. But as you grow into adulthood, you want to dig deeply into the Word of God to the meat of Scripture and be nurtured by the meat of the Word of God. Paul himself, when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I acted like a child. Well, when I became a man, I put away childish things. So what in the world is Jesus talking about here? How are we to be childlike? And I think it's what relates to that whole question that I just went over in detail about authority and a fides implicitum.

I know that we talk about the terrible twos and so on with respect to our little kids, but for the most part, our little ones when they're two, don't give us sophisticated arguments against our authority. I was watching at the supermarket yesterday while Vesta was in there buying food, and I sit there when I don't have anything else to do, I sit there and watch and see how people observe the stop signs. And I counted seventy-nine cars at the stop sign. Two of them stopped.

Seventy-seven treated them as opt signs. They're optional. You don't really have to stop for them. But anyway, while I was counting stop sign offenders, by the grace of God, I'm not the police. But in any case, I'm counting that, and I watched this man come out across the parking lot with like a three-year-old little boy, and he had him by the hand. The little boy didn't even know where he was. He was looking all over the place, and his father had to keep pulling on his hand to get him to come along, you know. But he wasn't fighting, kicking, and screaming against his father.

His father was leading him across a street where there was traffic, and the little boy trusted the hand that held him. He trusted him implicitly. That's what it means to have a childlike faith. You don't trust me implicitly. You don't trust the church implicitly.

You don't trust the government implicitly. But you do trust God implicitly. This morning in our liturgy when we had our confession of sin followed by our assurance of pardon, the minister read these words from 1 John, if we confess our sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I love that verse, and I hate that verse. Because when I was a young man, I had a guilty conscience about something, and I talked to the minister, and he took me to this text.

He says, the Bible says, if you confess your sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So I read the verse, and I said, I still feel guilty. And he said, well, let me give you another verse to read. And I said, okay. And he handed me the Bible, and he pointed to the same verse. He said, now read that one. And I said, that's the one I just read. He said, read it again.

If we confess our sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. How do you feel now? I said, well, I still feel pretty guilty. He says, okay, let me give you another verse.

I said, okay. Gives me the same verse. How many times does God have to tell you that if you confess your sins to Him, He will forgive them before you believe Him? It's one thing, I've said this a thousand times, it's one thing to believe in God, but what Christianity is all about is believing God. It was the prophet Habakkuk who said first, the just shall live by faith, or the righteous shall live by trust. Three times that verse is repeated in the New Testament with respect to our salvation, which means to be justified by faith, means to be justified by trusting what God says. That's the biggest problem we have in our lives.

We don't believe what He says. We would prefer to sin than to obey Him because we don't believe that if we obey Him we can be happy. Not once in the history of the human race has sin brought happiness. It's brought pleasure, but never happiness.

And when God gives His law, it's not because He's a killjoy, it's because He loves us and He knows what is good for us because He does all things well and He's saying to us, trust Me. Trust Me with your life. Trust Me with your vocation. Trust Me with your marriage. Trust Me with your family. And He wants from His children – fides implicitum, an implicit trust.

Now guess what? The only being that exists who deserves implicit trust is God. Why shouldn't we trust Him implicitly? Has He ever lied? Has He ever broken a promise? Has He ever uttered a falsehood? His Word is truth.

Trust it. That's what Jesus is saying here. If you don't give that kind of trust to God, you're never going to enter the kingdom of God. And so He takes this opportunity with the little ones to say to the big ones, learn from the little ones because this is how My kingdom is established. Recently I've been rereading the great Puritan writer Jeremiah Burroughs' book entitled Gospel Worship.

It's one of my favorite books. It talks about what true worship looks like. True worship always involves preparation, that you don't just come into the presence of God without some forethought of where you're going and what you're going to be doing there. And he goes back to the Old Testament where God calls Moses up to the mountain to receive the law, and he says to the people before he goes, consecrate a fast among the people, have the people wash their clothes and prepare their souls lest they come profanely, and when they touch the mountain they die. God says a thousand times in the Bible, draw nigh unto Me. We're to come close to Him.

We're to approach Him. Just like these little kids came to Jesus. But at the same time we're told who it is before whom we're coming near. Every Jew in Palestine that went to synagogue knew that God is omnipresent. Moses certainly knew that God was omnipresent. There was nowhere where God wasn't. David said, where should I flee from Thy Spirit? If I send to heaven, you're there. If I make my bed and shield, you're there.

I can't get away from you. You're everywhere. And yet God had to make a tabernacle and a temple where He said, this is our meeting place. This is My dwelling place, not because God's location is fixed inside of a building. But He said, there's a special place that is holy ground.

Come near to Me. That's why when you walk through that back door, you leave the world, you leave the profane, and you come into the presence of the holy because God has says, come on in, come into My presence, hear My word and trust it. That was R.C. Sproul from a sermon he preached at St. Andrew's Chapel in central Florida. And as you heard today, God can be trusted. But where has he spoken? He's spoken in His word. And that's why Dr. Sproul was so diligent in preaching through entire books of the Bible line by line so that we could hear the truth of God, hear the promises of God. And these sermons formed the basis for his expositional commentary series. And today for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, you'll receive lifetime digital access to his commentary on Luke's gospel. Because it's digital, it's easily searchable, so you can quickly find Dr. Sproul's commentary on whatever verse you're studying in Luke. So I encourage you to visit renewingyourmind.org and to give your donation today. Next Sunday, we'll meet a man who seemingly had it all, power, influence, money. But did he have eternal life? So I encourage you to join us next Sunday as Dr. Sproul continues his study through the Gospel of Luke here on Renewing Your Mind.