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Title:
“The
Disciples and the Mothers”
Author: Charles H. Spurgeon
“Come, ye children, hearken unto me:
I will teach you the fear of the LORD.”
Psalm 34:11
I have sometimes met with a
deeper spiritual experience in children of ten and twelve than I have in
certain persons of fifty and sixty. It is an old proverb that some
children are born with beards. Some boys are little men, and some girls
are little old women. You cannot measure the lives of any of us by our
ages. I knew a boy who, when he was fifteen, often heard old Christian
people say, “The boy is sixty years old: he speaks with such insight
into divine truth.” I believe that this youth at fifteen did know far
more of the things of God, and of soul travail, than any around him,
whatever their age might be. I cannot tell you why it is, but so I do
know it is, that some are old when they are young, and some are very
green when they are old; some are wise when you would expect them to be
otherwise, and others are very foolish when you might have expected that
they had quitted their folly. Talk not of a child’s incapacity for
repentance! I have known a child weep herself to sleep by the month
together under a crushing sense of sin. If you would know a deep, and
bitter, and awful fear of the wrath of God, let me tell you what I felt
as a boy. If you would know joy in the Lord, many a child has been as
full of it as his little heart could hold. If you want to know what
faith in Jesus is, you must not look to those who have been bemuddled by
the heretical jargon of the times, but to the dear children who have
taken Jesus at His word, and believed in Him, and loved Him, and
therefore know and are sure that they are saved. Capacity for believing
lies more in the child than in the man. We grow less rather than more
capable of faith: every year brings the unregenerate mind further away
from God, and makes it less capable of receiving the things of God. No
ground is more prepared for the good seed than that which as yet has not
been trodden down as the highway, nor has been as yet overgrown with
thorns. Not yet has the child learned the deceits of pride, the
falsehood of ambition, the delusions of worldliness, the, tricks of
trade, the sophistries of philosophy; and so far it has an advantage
over the adult. In any case the new birth is the work of the Holy Ghost,
and He can as easily work upon youth as upon age.
Some, too, have hindered the children because they have been forgetful
of the child’s value. The soul’s price does not depend upon its
years. “Oh, it is only a child!” “Children are a nuisance.”
“Children are always getting in the way.” This talk is common. God
forgive those who despise the little ones! Will you be very angry if I
say that a boy is more worth saving than a man? It is infinite mercy on
God’s part to save those who are seventy; for what good can they now
do with the fag-end of their lives? When we get to be fifty or sixty, we
are almost worn out; and if we have spent all our early days with the
devil, what remains for God? But these dear boys and girls,—there is
something to be made out of them. If now they yield themselves to Christ
they may have a long, happy, and holy day before them in which they may
serve God with all their hearts. Who knows what glory God may have of
them? Heathen hands may call them blessed. Whole nations may be
enlightened by them. If a famous schoolmaster was accustomed to take his
hat off to his; boys because he did not know whether one of them might
not be Prime Minister, we may justly look upon converted children, for
we do not know how soon they may be among the angels, or how greatly
their light may shine among men. Let us estimate children at their true
valuation, and we shall not keep them back, but we shall be eager to
lead them to Jesus at once.
In proportion to our own
spirituality of mind, and in proportion to our own child-likeness of
heart, we shall be at home with children; and we shall enter into their
early fears and hopes, their budding faith and opening love. Dwelling
among young converts, we shall seem to be in a garden of flowers, in a
vineyard where the tender grapes give a good smell.
* * *
Excerpt from Chapter III, “Come Ye Children, a
Book for Parents and Teachers on the Training of Children” Charles H.
Spurgeon
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“Heavenly Notes 2003”
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