“…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:23-24)
“…now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:22-23)
Our deepest theological discussions in our Church are never in the midweek Bible study: they are always in the questions the children ask us in Sunday Club. This week’s doozy from 11 and 12-year-old boys: “How does God view our sins if we didn’t know we were committing a sin? Does he treat them differently from other sins? Are they less serious?” The context was an exploration of the story of Jonah that the teachers had only just started reading. They’d only got as far as Jonah heading for Tarshish instead of Nineveh.
How do you navigate the minefield of theological definitions and biblical interpretations that your own mind has just been blown into by these questions? And how would you distil your answer into an immediate, accurate, satisfactory, understandable, child-level response, in two sentences, and then get back to the lesson you’d planned?!
Our Sunday Club leaders did a great job on the hoof of keeping it simple. “All sin is sin and all sin is serious. And, whether you knew it was wrong or not at the time, it can all be forgiven if you own up to God and let Him handle it.” There’s time after the lesson to sit with a cup of coffee and a plate of custard creams and debate: the classifications of sin into commission, omission and ignorance; your personal experiences of sin, of confession and of forgiveness; issues of repentance and restoration. And there’s also time to praise God for children who are willing to ask the kind of questions many adults ignore, never ask in the first place or just bury deeply. And above all a time to pray for these preachers and evangelists and theologians of the future!