The Thing My Child Said

She was six and it was a Wednesday and they were in the car.

That is all the setting there is. Nobody was praying. It was not a moment. They had been talking about a swimming lesson.

And her daughter said something, in the flat matter-of-fact voice that small children use for enormous things, about somebody they both know. Two sentences. She looked out of the window while she said it and then went straight back to the swimming lesson.

And the mother said: that is a funny thing to say, love.

And laughed. And put the radio on.

That was four years ago. She has thought about it approximately every week since, and she has never told a living soul, and she has never once mentioned it to her daughter, who almost certainly does not remember saying it.

And here is why she laughed, which she has worked out since and which took her about two years.

She laughed because she did not have anywhere to put it.

If she had taken it seriously in that car, she would have had to do something, and she did not know what. So her mouth produced the thing that closes a subject, and the subject closed, and the radio came on, and four years later it is still in her.

So let me ask you.

What did a child say to you that you have never repeated to anybody?

He quoted a psalm back at the people who wanted it stopped

There is a scene in the temple in the last week and it is chaos, and in the middle of it there are children shouting.

The people in charge are already unhappy about everything else that has happened that day, and then there are children calling out in the temple courts, which is exactly the sort of disorder that finishes people's patience, and they come and complain to Him about it.

Do You hear what these children are saying?

And He does something that is, if you think about it, quite provocative. He does not defend the children, or explain them, or ask them to be quieter.

He asks the professionals whether they have read their own Bible.

Yes, replied Jesus, have you never read, From the lips of children and infants You, Lord, have called forth Your praise?Matthew 21:16

Notice that He does not defend the children and He does not explain them. You are holding something you did not know where to put, and the Holy Spirit never had an age limit on the word all.

He quotes a psalm at them. And He does not soften it.

Now sit with what that scene is actually doing, because it is not sentimental and we have made it sentimental.

Nobody in that story thinks the children are sweet. That is a modern idea imposed on it. The complaint is that something inappropriate is coming from a source that is not supposed to be a source, and Jesus' answer is that the Scripture they have read a thousand times says exactly that this is where it comes from.

Hear where you stand, four years on from a Wednesday.

You are not a mother who nearly took a six-year-old's chatter too seriously. Scripture puts a psalm about the lips of children into Jesus' own mouth in an argument with people who wanted it stopped, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people never once excluded a source because of its age.

And I want to say something very careful here, because there is a way of preaching this that turns a house upside down and I am not going to do it.

Nothing in this message is telling you that what your daughter said was from God. I do not know. You do not know either, and you have been honest enough about that for four years, which is more than most people manage.

And nothing here is asking you to go and tell her she said something significant, or to build anything on it, or to treat a small child as a channel. That would be a burden to put on a ten-year-old and I would not do it to her.

What I am saying is much narrower.

The laugh was not a judgement. You have treated it as one for four years, as though the fact that you laughed settles what it was. It does not. A reflex is not a ruling. You laughed because you had nowhere to put it, and having nowhere to put a thing is a fact about the shelf, not about the thing.

The word says praise has been called forth from the lips of children, and it is not a metaphor in that psalm, and Jesus quoted it as an argument rather than as a nice thought.

But you are not a mother who nearly took a six-year-old too seriously. The complaint in Matthew 21 was that a sound was coming from a source that was not supposed to be a source, and He answered it by opening their own Bible at the place that says otherwise, and the Holy Spirit never put an age limit on the word all.