We’ve probably all been a situation where we reach the point
where our heart’s not in it. Regardless of our technical skill or experience,
the excitement isn’t there. It happens among talented young athletes and among
seasoned professionals, and no amount of coaxing can re-light the fire.
This intangible is called allegiance, and while it’s
probably the best direct measure of spiritual growth, it’s also the hardest to
measure precisely, and the hardest to stimulate.
The Bible makes clear that our connection with God is not
based on begrudging servitude, but on allegiance. It’s a heart issue:
“You shall have no
other Gods before me.” – Exodus 20:3
“Love the LORD your
God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
– Deuteronomy 6:5
“The Lord your God
will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may
love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.” –
Deuteronomy 30:6
“The Lord says: “These
people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their
hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they
have been taught.” – Isaiah 29:13
“Even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with
fasting and weeping and mourning.” Rend your heart and not your garments. - Joel 2:12-13
“The mouth speaks what
the heart is full of.” – Matthew 12:34
“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
– Jeremiah 29:13
God demands loyalty. What’s striking is how many times the
command to love God “with all your heart” appears in Deuteronomy, which is a
book of the Law! The Law of Moses outlined the Israelites’ duties to God, yet
at its core, the Law was meant to produce inward – not outward –
transformation.
How do you make this happen? It can be hard enough to
maintain our own spiritual enthusiasm. How would we stimulate that in kids? First,
the difficulty of this task should prompt us to go slowly and with the
appreciation that ultimately, you can’t.
You cannot directly steer someone’s heart, any more than you can get someone to
fall in love with you or force someone to love baseball. All you can do is try
to win them.
So it begins with this: do we believe God is winsome? Do we
believe God is actively in pursuit of all people? Is our conception of
“following God” basically moralism, where we walk the straight-and-narrow
because that’s what God wants? Or is it an adventure, keeping up with the God
who’s active?
Kids will never fall
in love with rules. Neither will adults. “Goodness is its own reward”?
Sometimes. But the overwhelming message of life is that life’s not fair;
therefore, grab every advantage you can, because you don’t want to end up with
the short end of the stick. The Christian life is not “living according to biblical
principles.” That reduces Christianity to just one more ethical system in which
we’ve been given the rules and we strive our best to live them out, and when we
fail, we try harder. I doubt anyone who lives that way can develop much
allegiance to God, because that’s a relationship fueled by guilt and
obligation.
No, the only God people can develop a deep allegiance for is
the God of yesterday, today and
forever. We need to appreciate what he’s done in history, yes, because it is
the roadmap of his character. We need to look forward to his return. But we
need to follow the God of now.
That’s why teaching kids Bible stories isn’t enough. It
familiarizes them with the God of then,
but doesn’t necessarily build loyalty for the God of now. I can admire Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, but day in
and day out, would I be loyal to
them? Am I thinking about what they would have me do and who they would have me
be? The closest I can come is allegiance to the ideals of those historical figures – but ideals are static.
“What did Jesus
do?” is only useful insofar as it helps me answer the question, “What would Jesus do?” Still better is, “What
is Jesus doing?” We need to talk about what God is up to, because apart from an
acknowledgement or awareness of that, God just becomes a character in a
storybook. I find that more often than not, Christian kids lack the language to
do that. They know generally that God wants them to “be good”, but beyond that
have a hard time identifying specifically putting their finger on how God is
working or might work in their lives. We can overdo God-talk in a way that
turns kids off, and it’s wrong to speak of God’s activity as if our comfort and
convenience were his reason for being.
The key is to teach kids to recognize what in accordance with his character as revealed
in Scripture God is still doing, today, in them. That’s something they can
get excited about, as they see their own lives in a line with all of humanity
as characters in a salvation story. God is doing different things in everyone,
but ultimately he’s doing the same thing: accomplishing the reconciliation of
the whole world to himself.
The Christian life is lived in union with Christ. There is a
supernatural element to it. By definition, a spiritual life cannot be lived in
the flesh or just by our own willpower. If what we’re teaching is a code of
ethics that could be followed by anyone – Christian or non-Christian – then by
what right do we call it Christianity? Allegiance
will develop when kids are convinced that God is not far off, but is right
there with them – guiding them, strengthening them, providing for them,
correcting and shaping them. Leading kids to know this sort of God is hard
work. But ultimately, it’s the only kind of God I can have allegiance to.
