Category Archives: Children

Childlike humility in the pulpit: Such a rarity

Posted on by
Reply

“Except you are converted and become like children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

What’s lacking in the great majority of religious experts–of all tribes, all beliefs, all everything!–is a childlike humility.

I’ve sat across from the salespeople hawking Jehovah’s Witness and Mormon doctrine door to door and been amazed at the sheer gall and arrogance of these know-it-alls.

I’ve sat in the auditoriums and classrooms when prophecy teachers were spreading out their charts and telling far more than they could ever know, pronouncing their anathema upon anyone daring to believe otherwise and taking no prisoners in the process.

I’ve sat in massive conferences among thousands of my peers and heard ignorance spouted as truth but camouflaged with alliteration and pious phrases and encouraged and affirmed by thundering echoes of “amens” and “hallelujahs”.

–In every case, I longed to hear someone say, “We see through a glass darkly….”  (I Corinthians 13:12).

–To hear someone say, “I have not arrived. I press toward the mark….” (Philippians 3:12-13).

–To hear someone say, “We do not know how to pray as we should….” (Romans 8:26)

–To hear someone say, “That which I am doing, I do not understand.  I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).

Where is the childlike spirit we hear so much of in the Word?

1) I can hear someone say, “Well, we enter the kingdom by that spirit, but thereafter, as we learn and grow, we become teachers and instructors and gain confidence and are allowed to become more bombastic.”

Rubbish.

Continue reading →

When hope is all we have left

Posted on by
Reply

(This is reprinted intact from this website from March, 2010.) 

They called the other day and invited me to speak in chapel at a local Christian high school. I was delighted and told them what I usually do.

They said, “That’s fine. But another time. This time, we need something else.”

What I often do in high school assemblies, I told her, was to set my easel up on the gym floor and get two or three students out of the audience and caricature them. Then, for the piece de resistance, stand the principal before them and sketch him/her. After that, give them my 10 or 15 minute talk on lessons learned from a lifetime of drawing people on the subject of self-image, self-acceptance, and faith in the Lord who made us.

She said, “That sounds great. And we’d like to have you back to do that sometime. But we need something else from you this time.”

“One of our students is dying,” she said. “And it has shaken the entire student body. We need you to minister to us.”

The next day the student went to Heaven.

Today is Friday, the chapel service is Tuesday morning.

Get that? This Sunday is Palm Sunday, the next Sunday is Easter, and in between we’re going to have a service to talk about death and life.

Continue reading →

What immaturity does and what to do about it

Posted on by
Reply

“For the things which  are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Sketching this kid, I asked how old he was.

“I’m 9,” he said.

Then, making conversation to keep him focused, I said, “Do you like being 9, or do you wish you were 12 or 13?”

I thought I knew the answer. Children always seem to want to be older than they are.

“I like being 9,” he said. “I’m still a kid and can still get by with a lot of stuff.”

Now, there’s a 9-year-old worthy of the name!

We all start out in life as immature. The trick is not to grow attached to what should be a temporary status, to camp out there and resist growing up.

I heard about a two-year-old who rebelled when her parents announced plans for her third birthday party. “I’m two and I don’t want to be three!”

Eventually, after she had stubbornly made that point over several days, they canceled the celebration and went right on saying she was two years old.

Some people love being babies.

The immature–those claiming squatters’ rights on juvenility–are all around us. They will go into debt for expensive toys while skipping payments on the mortgage. They will pour hundreds of dollars into shiny wheels for their pickup when the children need dental work or the family lives in a shack.  They live for their own pleasure and grow pouty when asked to consider others.

Pity the person married to the immature. Pity the employee whose boss has never grown up. Pity the pastor sent to shepherd a congregation of two-year-olds.

Pity the congregation saddled with an immature pastor!

Continue reading →

My first Bible

Posted on by
5

The year was 1948, I was eight years old, and we lived on a mountaintop in
West Virginia.  My coal miner father, Carl J. McKeever, was thirty-six, a hard worker, and dedicated to his family of six children to the extent that he would occasionally double back and work a second eight-hour shift down inside the mines.  This was the year, incidentally, that a photographer for the Saturday Evening Post took dad’s photo and gave it half a page in an issue the next year on “The Bloody Price of Coal” (which dealt with mine safety, or lack thereof).

I was the fourth child and third son.  Now, I need to say that Dad did not go to church, even though my wonderful Mom had all six of her brood in the local Methodist church every Sunday.  Dad’s language would have made a sailor blush, and the whippings he administered to his children were legendary (and would probably get him arrested these days).  Dad would often spend Sundays in front of the radio listening to preachers, something I could not understand for someone who was not living for God and made no pretense of it.

So, imagine my puzzlement when one Saturday Dad said to me, “Come on and go with me.”  Nothing more than that.  So, I accompanied him as we walked the path off the mountain down to the railroad tracks at the bottom.  We walked past the tipple and bathhouse, past the company store, and on up the tracks toward the nearby town of Sophia, WV, perhaps a mile away.  Not one word was spoken as I recall, and I had no idea what this was about.

In Sophia, we walked into the “dime store,” probably a Woolworth’s.  Inside, Dad asked a clerk, “Where are your Bibles?”  She showed him and we walked over.  He said to me, “Pick you one out.”  I was so stunned I said, “Sir?”  He said, “Pick you out a Bible.”

Continue reading →

Perfectionism: The cruel burden we place on each other

Posted on by
Reply

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect….” (Matthew 5:48)

First, let’s get the theological argument out of the way.

Let’s make this perfectly clear: God knows you are not perfect and will never be this side of Glory.

And even clearer: “God does not expect sinlessness out of you and me. He is under no illusion about us.”  See Psalm 103:14 “He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust.” And Romans 3:10 “There is none righteous, no, not one.”

Got that?  The illusion of sinless perfection is all ours, my friend.

We read Matthew 5:48 and come away with the erroneous conclusion that God ordered us to be perfect, that perfect means sinlessness, and therefore we can be sinless.  But since we cannot achieve perfection–no one you know has ever pulled it off–then He has given us an impossible standard to live by, one that crushes us and frustrates us and forever disappoints Him.

The result would be that we forever live with a disgusted God and in fear of the celestial woodshed, the destiny of children who bring in failing grades.

Yuck. What kind of theology is this?  And yet, you and I know people who believe this and call themselves Bible students, serious disciples of Jesus, and even evangelists (“sharers of the good news”)..

Now, let’s drop the other shoe here… Continue reading →

The question is not “where is God?” but rather, “Where are you?”

Posted on by
Reply

In her World War Two novel, His Majesty’s Hope, Susan Elia MacNeal tells of a German nurse, Elise, who learns that a Down syndrome child in her care was abruptly discharged and bused to some distant hospital where she was later reported to have died of pneumonia. Elise decided to look further into this suspicious matter.

Donning her nurse’s uniform, Elise boarded the next bus carting children to the hospital in question. All the children on board, she noticed, were blind, deaf, epileptic, retarded, and similarly handicapped. The nurse in charge seemed callous and uncaring, and administered a sedative to “help the children rest.”

At its destination, the bus was met by authorities who instructed the children to disrobe for a shower. Doctors examined the children, marking those with gold fillings in their mouths with a large X on their bodies. As they entered the shower room, a large metal door slammed behind them and latches were thrown. That’s when Elise realized what was happening.

The children were being gassed. Exterminated.

“You’ll get used to it,” said an orderly to the stunned Elise.

She ran outside the building and vomited on the grass.

Later, on the bus ride back into Berlin, Elisa asked the other nurse, the hardened one, “But what about the fifth commandment? ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”

“That’s no commandment of God’s–just a Jewish lie, meant to keep us weak,” she said. “We don’t need to follow it any more. Besides, it’s not killing, it’s euthanasia.”

Continue reading →

A good story will make my day. And your sermon.

Posted on by
5

The only thing I love more than hearing a great story is to be the one telling it.

I have good company in my devotion to the story. It forms the outline of every television soap opera, sitcom and cop show and most of the movies. It fells forests to supply paper for an unending outpouring of novels, all with a story to tell. It connects with people as nothing else does.

In My Reading Life, novelist Pat Conroy drops story upon story upon the reader, more than any single book I’ve read in a year.

Conroy tells of the time an agent for his publisher took him as a young, up-and-coming author to call on booksellers and attempt to market their latest line. The publisher wanted the budding author to see how difficult it is to get bookstores to take their publications and display them prominently. On the third day out, the agent suddenly turned to Pat and said, “You’ve seen me do this. Now, let’s see if you’ve got what it takes…. We know you can write a book; now let’s see if you can sell one.”

Conroy was game. He gave it a try. Addressing the bookseller, he launched into the chatter he’d heard from the agent, making the case for each of the new works coming from the publisher. Then he came to his own book, The Water is Wide. He described it.

The store owner said, “Who gives a d–n?”

Conroy was stunned. The man said, “What should my readers care what happened to a bunch of black kids on an island no one’s ever heard of?”

Continue reading →

The pastor’s Christmas Eve message?

Posted on by
Reply

A pastor’s Christmas Eve message will have a flavor all its own. Because of the relaxed nature of the evening, the sermon is often directed toward the child in all of us. Hence, the following….

My friend Annette loves to pass along to me her assignments.  Her Mississippi church frequently invites her to give a talk on this or that, and she messages for my take on that subject. She uses nothing I do verbatim, but I suspect some of my responses provokes creative ideas in her.

Some of the most interesting pieces on our website were instigated by Annette.

The other day her message said, “I have to explain the Christmas story to children ages 4-11 in my church. Help!”

I began by assuring her that I am not the best one to ask about this.  I’m fast approaching birthday number 75 and my youngest grandchild becomes a teenager in February.  Furthermore, women explain things to children better than men do.  But always eager to assist, I jotted down a few thoughts for her.  And that’s when something occurred to me.

All the people sitting before the pastor on Christmas Eve will be children.

Some will be old children, with white heads (or bald ones), while others will be younger parents and adult singles. And there will be “children children” by which we mean toddlers, preschoolers, the whole bunch.  But the thing to keep in mind is that everyone sitting before the pastor is either a child now or has been at one time.

Childhood is one thing we all have in common.

Continue reading →

Cartoonists, liberals, abortion, and me

Posted on by
1

I’ve been thinking about cartoonists, abortion, and theological liberals lately.

My friend Diane was sitting in a doctor’s office when a young woman came in to ask about an appointment.  She wanted an abortion, she said, because she had plans for Labor Day weekend and wanted to get this done.

After a quick conversation with the receptionist, she left.  My friend sat there in shock and then began to weep.

Diane and her husband Mitch are in line to adopt a baby due soon.  To say they are excited and prayerful does not begin to describe them. Seeing the callousness with which that young woman wanted to be rid of her baby because “I have plans for the weekend” left Diane broken-hearted.

At this point, some in our audience will quit reading.  They already “know” where it’s going and know they do not wish to go there.

That’s why there is little authentic conversation about abortions today.

And, may I say, I understand that.

Continue reading →

Perhaps the most profound thing our Lord ever said

Posted on by
Reply

“Except you are converted and become like children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

What’s lacking in the great majority of religious experts–of all tribes, all beliefs, all everything!–is a childlike humility.

–I’ve sat across from the salespeople hawking Jehovah’s Witness and Mormon doctrine door to door and been amazed at the sheer gall and arrogance of these know-it-alls.

–I’ve sat in the auditoriums and classrooms when prophecy teachers were spreading out their charts and telling far more than they could ever know, pronouncing their anathema upon anyone daring to believe otherwise and taking no prisoners in the process.

–I’ve sat in massive conferences among thousands of my peers and heard ignorance spouted as truth but camouflaged with alliteration and pious phrases and encouraged and affirmed by thundering echoes of “amens” and “hallelujahs”.

In every case, I longed to hear someone say, “We see through a glass darkly….”  (I Corinthians 13:12).

Continue reading →