Like to see yourself as others see you? Don’t bother looking in the mirror – look at your children: they’re more like you every day. But be warned – there’s pain as well as pleasure in seeing yourself in your children. Although it’s heart-warming to see your best side, it can be horrifying to see the side you’d rather hide.
The good news, though, is that psychologists now tell us that environmental influences play as big a part in character forming as hereditary factors – maybe more so. Which means, mercifully, that children aren’t stuck for life with Dad’s and Mum’s personal imperfections.
Children are great copycats. Quick to mimic their elders, they watch, and then they copy, which can be more than a bit embarassing. Unconscious of what they’re doing, they’ve a way of getting through to adults without really trying, and in doing so, sometimes show us our true selves.
When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, He was fulfilling a well-known prophecy. The people welcomed their king, just as Zechariah had prophesied they would. They shouted “Hosanna!” and spread clothing and palm branches in His path.
But later, after Jesus had cleansed the temple of the profiteering merchants and money-changers, the children did inside the temple what their parents had done out on the road: they shouted “Hosanna to the Son of David!” The priests and scribes were indignant – “Do you hear what these children are saying?” they asked, testily. We know that Jesus had listened.
“Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have perfected praise.'”? This scripture silenced them, just as the psalmist had prophesied it would. (Psalm 8:2)
Which certainly shows that none of us have to be perfect in order to say or do something perfectly. Spontaneous praise does not require spiritual maturity. Otherwise, the children’s praise in the temple would have been dismissed by the Lord as merely childish behaviour.
In fact their uninhibited expressions of welcome and joy demonstrated just how unnatural it is for humans to remain silent in the presence of Divine Majesty. When God’s human creation is silent in his presence, even the stones cry out! (Luke 19:37) Those who refused to participate in welcoming Jesus were soon to witness the end of praise and worship as they had known it, when worship “in spirit and in truth” replaced religion. Their opposition accomplished nothing. “Look”, they cried forlornly, “the world has gone after him!” (John 12:19)
All of which underlines the importance of the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians to “be imitators of God as dear children…” (Ephesians 5:1) The Greek word translated “imitators” (“followers”, KJV), makes it clear that we are to “mimic” our heavenly Father’s kind, loving, forgiving nature, in the same way that children copy their parent’s behaviour – as the children did in the temple. It would not have entered the minds of the adults that the hosannas they shouted out on the road would later be echoed by their children in the hallowed precincts of the temple. But that’s the way it is with children!
So let your little “angels” run free! They’ll find their way into places that have long lost sight of joyous, exhuberant, uninhibited exclamations of praise to the Lord. But before your children do what comes naturally to them, you need to be the very model of an uninhibited praiser yourself. Like the children who saw their elders shouting praises outside Jerusalem, and then imitated them in the temple, your sons and daughters need to see you do it first! What you do spontaneously, they’ll do naturally.
“Hosanna to the Son of David!” Once you begin praising the Lord, and your children get into the spirit of it, you never know where it might end!