Gospel In The Everyday

This post is part of our “Gospel In The Everyday” series. Read our introduction to the series here.

Spring has sprung.

Hallelujah!

This winter was our first with a toddler – it felt like it lasted years not months! Seemingly endless rain, wind and bleak grey days forced us to spend many a Saturday in an artificially lit, soulless soft-play centre. Don’t get us wrong, we love soft play – our little one is occupied while we eat cake: what’s not to love?! But surely most would prefer to sit outside a stately home in the pleasant afternoon sun – cuppa in one hand, scone in the other? (Yes we are being stereotypically British here… but we’re unashamed).

So, given the recent upturn in weather, we’ve really been trying to make the most of it.

Daffodils, ducklings, blue skies! It’s almost like we feel more human by being able to step outside and feel the sun on our face, the grass beneath our feet and the stick in our mouth (no we don’t have a dog – it’s the child who’s partial to a good stick at the moment).

Speaking About God Through Spring

One of the greatest joys of spring, however, is the opportunity it gives us to talk about God.

God’s attributes are wonderfully displayed by the beauty of this season:

• He’s kind and generous, giving us good gifts like sunshine and cherry blossom.
• He’s creative, designing the intricacy of the bluebells and marigolds.
• He delights in beauty and is the source of all pleasure, as seen in the frolicking of the lambs and the dance of the bumble bees as they skip and bounce across the meadow flowers.

So much about this season indicates joy and life – fauna and flora are teeming, wiggling, bursting with life – and all of this points to the kind and generous character of the mastermind behind it.

Worship Through Spring

In case you’re thinking that using these things to talk about God is overdoing it a bit, consider this: Worship happens all the time on a sunny day in Britain.

“Isn’t this weather glorious!”

 “Oh look at the baby animals, aren’t they gorgeous!”

“Strawberries! Yummy!”

But often, if we look into our hearts, our worship is of the things themselves. And we can very easily pass that on to our children too. We sometimes fail to see that these good gifts all point to the self-giving, delightful creator behind them. As the puritan Jonathan Edwards said, the universe is “full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words.” So if spring is so beautiful, then just imagine how lovely he is!

Why not determine, next time you experience one of these joys of spring with your children, to point them to the glorious giver behind it?

“Look at the little ducklings that God made, aren’t they beautiful!”

 “God loves to give us things like strawberries, because he loves to see us enjoying delicious things – that’s just the sort of God he is.”

 “Look at the variety of the things that God has made – those graceful butterflies, and this slimy, wiggly worm, he’s so inventive!”

This is all exciting, but we think we can go even further.

Spring And The Gospel

More than simply talking about attributes of God from spring, there are also opportunities to chat about the gospel.

In spring we see a powerful illustration of the resurrection.

Winter can be bleak. Chilly winds, snow-laden scenes, hibernating animals and naked trees. The darkness creeps into the daytime, pushing the daylight out. All around is death and decay, as many plants and wildlife don’t survive the drop in temperatures. The frost comes to kill, and it comes to stay for months on end.

But then one day, after a long silence, when light and life are almost forgotten, new life suddenly begins to break through. Buds appear on the tree. Green shoots start to poke through the hard ground. The birds find their voices once again. Rays of sun break through the clouds, the temperatures rise, and we all know the seasons are changing and spring is on the way.

C.S. Lewis captures this beautifully in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Enjoy this quote below of when the White Witch’s curse of an endless winter is suddenly broken by Aslan’s presence.

“Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away all together. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops […] “This is no thaw,” said the dwarf, suddenly stopping. “This is Spring. What are we to do? Your winter has been destroyed, I tell you! This is Aslan’s doing!”

Through allegory, C.S. Lewis cleverly plays with how winter turning to spring pictures the coming of Jesus. It’s a beautiful scene. It’s a scene followed by the stone table which makes spring possible.

Winter turns to spring because of the reality that the stone table represents.

Do you remember that reality? Do you remember that scene? Let’s go there now.

Early one morning, while the dew was still on the ground, and the morning mist lingered in the air, a band of heart-broken women journeyed to the tomb of a beloved friend. They had come to love this friend deeply, they had followed his teaching, supported his ministry out of their own means, experienced his demeanor of gentleness, acceptance and love. They had come to believe that this teacher was God’s Messiah. But, just a few days before this, the unthinkable had happened. Their beloved leader had been brutally executed on a Roman cross. They had seen the way the sneering Pharisees had falsely accused Jesus, how the jeering crowds heckled for his execution, how the mocking soldiers viciously taunted and assaulted him, and how after all this, he had been nailed to a wooden cross to suffocate to death. The sun was eclipsed. The source of life had been mercilessly killed.

But the story didn’t end there.

As the women approached the tomb they were filled with confusion. The stone blocking the entrance of the tomb had been rolled away.  The tomb was empty. Jesus was gone. Mary Magdalene spoke to the gardener through tear-filled eyes. “We are looking for our Master and we do not know where they have put him.”  The gardener simply replied with one word, “Mary.”

At that moment, her world was changed forever.

She recognized that voice. The man standing before her was he. Jesus was alive! The impossible had happened. Grief turned to joy. Death turned to life.

It is the best possible ending (or beginning) to an epic story. The resurrection gives believers hope. Jesus has defeated sin and death and hell. When death touches the son of God, death itself dies.

Through this death and resurrection, we too have the hope of resurrection. We have hope that we who are dead in sin can be made alive. And spring beautifully reminds us of this.

Spring declares new life, resurrection hope, life emerging from death.

As the light nights return, we’re reminded of the certainty that the darkness in our hearts is being dispelled by the light of the world.

As the green shoots break through, we’re reminded of the green shoots of new life in our hearts as the Spirit transforms us.

As the Sun heats up and hard ground begins to melt, we’re reminded that the Son has broken through the clouds, and our frozen hearts are being melted.

Winter is over. Spring has come. Aslan is on the move.

Why not point your children to the gospel this spring?

“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

1 Corinthians 15:55-57

“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, ⁵ made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved.”

Ephesians 2:5

Spring has sprung.

Hallelujah!

What do you talk to your children about?

I’d imagine for most of us the conversations that we have with our children range from the sublime to the ridiculous!

Perhaps your conversation with children involves you asking them what they did at school, and them replying “nothing”? Isn’t it strange that they never do anything – you’d think someone would have noticed by now!

It could be that you talk to them about what they’re doing at that particular time – narrating their life as it happens (just in case they happen to miss something!)

Or maybe it’s simply telling them what they need to do (or not do!) “Please pick up that entire car collection that you’ve just dumped on the floor and spread across the house.” “Please don’t stand up while I change this impossibly pooey nappy.” “DO NOT put everything smaller than your fist into your mouth!”

Depending on the age of your children, the things that you talk to them about will no doubt vary.

Speaking About The Gospel

But how easy do you find it to speak to your children about Christian things? How easy, in general day-to-day life, do you find it to speak the truths of the gospel into your child’s life?

We’re not talking about the set aside times that you may have with your children to disciple them – perhaps a family devotion, or a time of Bible-reading and prayer before bed. Those are wonderfully precious and important times for the spiritual nurturing of our children. At some point we’ll definitely have some musings on different children’s Bibles etc.

Rather, we’re talking about speaking about God – chatting about the gospel and a Christian understanding of the world in the normal activities of life – as we go about living in the day-to-day.

Speaking to our children about the gospel in this way isn’t something that necessarily comes naturally to many of us, but most  would like to do it more often and more naturally. We certainly would.

In light of this we thought we would, from time-to-time, publish a new entry to a series of blog posts called “Gospel in the Everyday”, to help all of us think about how we might do this.

The Biblical Basis For Gospel In The Everyday

The Bible teaches that God has fashioned and ordered the world in such a way that the things we encounter in it speak to us of him and his attributes. Here’s what King David says in Psalm 19:

“The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
 Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.”

Do you see what he’s saying there? He’s saying that God has designed the world to reveal something about himself. It’s what’s known in theology as “general revelation” (as opposed to “special revelation” – God’s supernatural, deeper and fuller revelation of himself in the Bible and ultimately in Jesus).  God is speaking – not audibly, but speaking nonetheless, through his world. We just need to be listening in order to hear it.

Here’s how Paul says it in Romans 1:

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities
– his eternal power and divine nature –
have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made”

What does this mean for our parenting? It means that as we go about life, we are bombarded with opportunities to speak to our children about God. But often we’re so used to ignoring these signs ourselves that we find it difficult to interpret them and speak of them. But they are there.

• They are there as we encounter the beauty of a creation that speaks of the splendour of the God who created it.
• They are there as we feast our eyes on the rich palette of colour of an autumn day which speaks of a God who isn’t simply pragmatic, but loves to create beautiful things for our enjoyment.
• They are there in the culture we engage with (even children’s TV and films!), in which image-bearing humans seek to represent truth as they offer interpretations of general revelation (without even realizing it).
• They are there in the chaging seasons; in a sunset; in a beautiful gospel-mirroring act of kindness; in a simple glass of water.

The Example Of Jesus

Jesus took this even further. Very often Jesus simply observed the world around him and drew parallels to spiritual truth. It’s fascinating to look at the way that Jesus engaged with the physical things of the world and used them to talk about matters of spiritual significance. But as Jesus engaged with the creation, he often drew out much more than we’d normally expect from simple “general revelation”. General revelation can never reveal to us the gospel or knowledge for salvation. But Jesus, as the source of special revelation, was able to take these things much further, and draw out the depths of the gospel as he went about his day to day life in creation. He did it all the time. Here are just a few examples:

• Using water, with the woman at the well (Jn 4:1-42);
• Using agricultural observations with the parable of the sower (Mk 4:1-20);
• Using the unworried, but nevertheless fed and clothed, ravens and lilies (Lk 12:22-34);
• Using salt and light, in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:13-16).
• Using bread and wine, at the Last Supper (Lk 22:7-23)

We are fortunate as Christians that we can use “special revelation” (the Bible and Jesus) to guide and add depth to our interpretation of “general revelation”. As fallen humans, general revelation is never able to give us saving knowledge (Romans 1 and elsewhere makes that clear). But we who have saving knowledge can engage with the things of general revelation and draw out echoes and glimpses of the gospel (just like Paul does in Acts 17, and elsewhere). What a joy to be able to do that day-to-day with our children as we go about life with them.

That’s exactly what this series of posts aims to help us do. The aim is to get us – Scott and Cathy – thinking (and hopefully help you to think, too) about how, in the everyday interactions with the world that we share with our children, we can point them to truths about who God is, and share with them the truths of the gospel. We’ve gone fairly deep into the theology behind this series in this introductory post to show why we’re doing this, but the future posts in this series will be very practical, looking at specific opportunities we might have with our children.

We hope you find them helpful!

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