Christian children mainly need to be taught the doctrine, precept, and life of the gospel: they require to have Divine truth put before them clearly and forcibly. Why should the higher doctrines, the doctrines of grace, be kept back from them? They are not as some say, bones; or if they be bones, they are full of marrow, and covered with fatness. If there be any doctrine too difficult for a child, it is rather the fault of the teacher’s conception of it than of the child’s power to receive it, provided that child be really converted to God. It is ours to make doctrine simple; this is to be a main part of our work. Teach the little ones the whole truth and nothing but the truth; for instruction is the great want of the child’s nature.
[Charles Spurgeon]

 

Little sinners.

I was fond of the phrase before E was born.  I was fully prepared to see nothing good in her: how could there be any redeeming characteristic in one who is unredeemed?

But she surprised me.   My little girl likes to share.   She tries to please us.   She tries to cheer me up when she thinks I’m sad.   She tries to help.   She is, in a word, sweet.   How can a sinner be sweet?   Is she so full of guile already that she only plays at sweetness to manipulate us?   I can’t believe that a 12-month-old is capable of orchestrating such deceit.   No, I think E is teaching me anew what an unregenerate sinner looks like–what, perhaps, God’s common grace means in the life of the unsaved.

And so this great adventure of motherhood is already not quite what I expected.   Hardly a day goes by that I don’t learn something new, or marvel again at the things I first encountered yesterday.   This is the tale of our journey–of mine, of my husband’s, of E’s, of the tiny little one yet to arrive, and of any others God sends our way.