I once asked Delaney, a children’s director in Nevada, for her best piece of wisdom for children’s directors. It didn’t take her long to say, “People don’t change as fast as you need them to. So you can either walk around mad at the world, or you can change how you think about people.”
What Delaney shared resonated with my own experience as a human. People frustrate me, and I have two dozen wonderful plans for how everyone ought to change. But here’s the deeper truth: I frustrate everyone around me, and they, too, have wonderful plans for my life. And even though I always felt a profound calling to the children of my church and am blessed with a God-given personality that has a higher than average tolerance for the particular ways children aggravate me, each passing year I found myself in greater need of the gospel of bearing with one another.
The apostle Paul exhorts us to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Ephesians 4:1-2). If I had to pick one “theme verse” for children’s ministry, this would be it.
In the context of that passage, bearing with one another is the summation statement of Paul’s posture as one who is a “prisoner for the Lord,” as he calls himself at the beginning of verse 1. It’s the posture of someone marked by traits of humility, gentleness, and patience. The Greek word used here is anechōmai. In other verses (1 Corinthians 4:12; 2 Corinthians 11:20; 2 Thessalonians 1:4), it carries the meaning of enduring. In other places in Paul’s writing (Acts 18:14; 2 Corinthians 11:4; 2 Timothy 4:3; Hebrews 13:22), it even carries the connotation of suffering.
Make no mistake, bearing with one another is an invitation to difficulty. But it’s also a more beautiful way of life. When we bear with someone, we meet them in the sacred space where God is still at work in them and in us. When we bear with someone, we stand in agreement with God that people are worth sacrificing for. Bearing with one another is inconvenient and unnatural as we are asked to put the needs of others before our own, just as Jesus did for us.
When we see the burdens of any person, whether a child or an adult, and choose to bear with them instead of trying to fix them, we come alongside them in gospel work. Every time we choose to bear the burden of another, we do so knowing that someone else is bearing with us, and that, ultimately, Jesus bore all our burdens in his body on the cross.
When the gospel of bearing with one another isn’t consistently affirmed, preached, and taught, churches often fall prey to impatience with children. But when adult church members see that children are just as in need of the forgiving grace of God as they are, it’s possible, if not plausible, that children will know how much God treasures them through the love they experience in the church.
We need our pulpits and Sunday school classes to return to the biblical teaching of what John Newton referred to as habitual tenderness: “He believes and feels his own weakness and unworthiness, and lives upon the grace and pardoning love of his Lord. This gives him an habitual tenderness and gentleness of spirit. Humbled under the sense of much forgiveness to himself, he finds it easy to forgive others.”2
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2. John Newton, “Letter VI. On the Practical Influence of Faith,” in The Works of the Rev. John Newton, ed. Richard Cecil (New York: Robert Carter, 1844), 124.
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