For the parent who answers at bedtime and carries it downstairs afterwards.
It's 8:20, the lamp's off, and the plastic stars on the ceiling are doing the thing they do for about twenty minutes before they fade.
She's seven. You are sitting on the edge of the bed with one hand on the duvet. She asks it in the small voice that only comes out after the light goes off, wanting to know whether she has to believe it or whether she's allowed not to.
You sit there. The plastic stars are a faint greenish color. Somewhere downstairs a tap is dripping that you have been meaning to see to since August.
You say something true and gentle. It takes about forty seconds. She says okay and turns over. By the time you are at the bottom of the stairs you're carrying it, and you carry it for the rest of the evening.
What you're carrying isn't the question. It's a sentence saying that a child who had Sunday mornings wouldn't have needed to ask, and that the asking is something you did to her.
Every verb in that passage is something a parent can do, and her answer is not one of them. It is written that the instruction that way on purpose, and the Spirit takes the part no parent was given.
Two Jobs, and Only One of Them Is Yours
There's a confusion at the bottom of most parental guilt about faith, and it's worth taking apart carefully.
Job one is to put the words in front of her, in the house, at the ordinary hours, honestly and often. That's yours. It's specified, it's achievable, and you can be assessed on it fairly by anybody.
Job two is what she does with them. That belongs to her, and it also belongs to God, and it has never at any point belonged to you. No parent in history has been able to produce belief in another person, including parents with three services a week and a grandmother who prayed.
If it could be produced by effort, the households that tried hardest would have the highest success rate. Anybody who has watched a few families over thirty years knows perfectly well that they don't.
You can probably name an example without trying. A family that did everything available to them and lost three of four. Another that did almost nothing anybody would recognize as effort, and kept every one. That pattern has been visible in every generation, and no system of parenting has ever explained it away.
You have been carrying job two downstairs every evening. It isn't yours to carry, and its weight is exactly the weight of something that was never assigned to you.
You hold the speaking and never the result, because the result was never handed to you. Scripture tells parents to teach and talk without once making them responsible for the child's answer, and the Spirit does what no parent can.
Teach, Talk, and Nothing About Outcomes
Here's the passage, and it's worth reading for what it doesn't ask of you.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (KJV)
Every verb in that sentence is something a parent does. Keep them in your heart, teach them, talk of them, at four times of day. All of it is action available to you on an ordinary Tuesday.
There's no clause about the child believing. No instruction to secure an outcome, no measure of success, and nothing at all about what the child is supposed to do in response.
Those words went first to parents entering a land full of other gods, where a great many of their children would in fact go astray, and God gave them this instruction anyway.
That detail is doing real work. He knew the outcome in advance and still wrote the instruction in terms of what the parent does. If the measure had been the child's response, the instruction would have been unfair from the day it was given.
You're asked for four actions you can actually take, and none of them is her answer. Scripture's instruction assigns the talking and withholds the outcome, and the Spirit takes the part you were never given.
She Asked If She Was Allowed
Say something tender about the actual question, because it's a better question than you realized in the dark.
She didn't ask whether it's true. She asked whether she's allowed not to believe it, which is a question about you rather than about God.
She was checking whether her place in this house depends on agreeing with you. That's a frightened and very human thing for a seven year old to want to know, and the fact that she could ask it out loud tells you something good about how you have handled her.
Whatever you said in those forty seconds, what she was reading was the tone. She wanted to know whether the room stays warm when she doubts. She turned over and went to sleep, which suggests she got her answer.
A child who is anxious about a reply doesn't fall asleep four minutes after receiving it. She'd have kept going. She'd have asked a follow-up, or wanted the door left wider, or come down twenty minutes later for water she didn't want.
She was asking whether the room stays warm, and she slept, which tells you it does. The written Word's instruction puts the words in a household rather than in a condition of belonging, and the Spirit made your tone the answer she needed.
I Am Not Telling You She Will Believe
Be honest, because a promise here would be a lie and you'd eventually know it.
I can't tell you what your daughter will believe at twenty. Her will is hers. Nobody gets to promise you an outcome for another person, and I won't do it to make an evening easier.
Nor am I telling you that Sunday mornings would have stopped the question. They wouldn't. Children in those rooms ask it too, usually in the dark, often without telling anybody, which is a worse version of the same night.
What I want off you is the sentence you carried down the stairs. Not the love that produced it. Not the wish for certainty about her.
The Asking Was the Fruit
The turn here reverses what you carried downstairs, and it costs nothing to accept.
You've been reading her question as a symptom of something missing. If she had more, she wouldn't ask. So the question is the hole, and the hole is yours.
Turn it over. A seven year old asked her parent, in the dark, a genuine question about God and about her own freedom, and expected an honest answer. That's a child for whom this subject is safe, open, and hers to think about.
You cannot manufacture that. It's the fruit of years of talking at ordinary hours in an unguarded house, which is precisely the thing the passage asks for and precisely the thing you've been doing without counting it.
Her question is the fruit of your house rather than the hole in it. Scripture's instruction asks for the words at every ordinary hour, and the Spirit has grown a child who can ask in the dark.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Nothing here is being demanded of God. You are in Christ, He is in you, and the Spirit carries an agreement He Himself made possible. The outcome belongs to Him alone.
Read it once, out loud, to nobody.
Every verb in that sentence is something I can do, and her answer is not one of them. Scripture stands written, that I keep these words in my heart and talk of them at every hour of the day, and there is no clause anywhere about the child believing. The Spirit takes the part I was never handed. I am not carrying her answer. She asked me in the dark whether the room stays warm, and she turned over and slept, which tells me what she heard. I give the outcome to God and put down what was never mine.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
