Violin, Cricket, Chess and Christ

What this is about

The author of this site heard a sermon. As he reports it, the preacher warned parents not to let violin, cricket, chess and karate crowd out their children’s “time alone with God,” because those activities cannot give them “a relationship with Jesus.” The preacher is not named here. Many good people say the same thing.

The author has no quarrel with prayer or Bible reading. His quarrel is with what the warning takes for granted: that time alone is what makes the relationship, so that anything which uses up the time puts the relationship in danger. He set down a thesis to be tested: “The New Testament presents union with Christ as a gift received through Baptism, Word, Supper, and faith, not as a ‘relationship with Jesus’ built up through private devotional time.”

So there are two views. On the first, being joined to Christ is given. God gives it, and a Christian prays because he already has it. On the second, it is built. A person makes it by putting in the time. Both views want children to pray. They disagree about what the praying is for.

The short answer

The words the Bible uses

The sermon spoke of “a relationship with Jesus.” That word is not in the King James Bible, in either Testament. Nor is “personal.” Nor is “quiet time.” That does not make them wrong. The word “Trinity” is not in the Bible either. But it is worth asking what the Bible says in their place.

Its usual phrase is “in Christ.” Paul uses it all the time. He writes to “the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi.” He says, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.” It is a place. You are in it or you are not, and you are in it along with everyone else who is.

The Bible’s pictures say the same. Jesus says, “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” Paul says, “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.” A member is a limb. He says that God sent his Son “that we might receive the adoption of sons.” And he compares Christ and the church to a husband and wife.

Look at what these have in common. A branch does not have a relationship with the vine. It is part of it. A limb is part of a body. An adopted child is his father’s child from the day of the adoption. He did not earn it by the hours he spent with his father, and he does not lose it on a day when he sulks in his room.

The modern word gets one thing right. The tie is personal. Paul says, “that I may know him,” and speaks of “the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” But in everyday speech a relationship is something two people build, and it is as strong as the time they put in. Friends who stop meeting drift apart. The Bible’s words say something else: who started it, who else is in it, and that it holds on a bad day.

Here are eight phrases heard in church. Which are in the King James Bible in those words?

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Given first, then commanded

The “built” view is about order. First you put in the time, then you have the relationship. So look at the order in the New Testament.

Paul writes to the church at Corinth, which he is about to correct on nearly everything: “But of him are ye in Christ Jesus.” “Of him” means “from God.” It is God’s doing that they are in Christ. To another young church he says, “ye are complete in him.” These are not advice. They are statements about ordinary Christians.

Then come the commands. Jesus says: “Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me.” The word “abide” means stay. It is the word used when the travellers at Emmaus say, “Abide with us: for it is toward evening.” They were asking him to stay. Nobody can be told to stay in a place he has not reached. Jesus is talking to branches, and he tells them not to leave.

The other commands are the same. “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him.” The receiving is done. The walking is how to live in it. “Grow in grace.” Grow in it, as a child grows up in a family.

So there is real work to do, and a Christian’s prayers can go cold. But the New Testament says “you are in Christ, so stay.” It does not say “spend the time, and you will get in.”

There is also a warning. “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered.” A branch can be lost. But notice that it was in the vine. The warning is about leaving something you were given.

Where the Bible says it is given

If Christians are in Christ, how did they get there? The New Testament names three places, and one hand that receives.

Baptism. Paul writes to Rome: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” To Galatia: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” To Corinth: “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body.” He had never been to Rome. He expects them to know it already.

The Lord’s Supper. “The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body.” “Communion” means a sharing. One loaf makes the people who share it one body. That is why this cannot be done alone. The first Christians “continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.”

The Word. “Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.” And: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” In the King James Bible “you” means more than one person. The word lives in a church that reads it aloud, preaches it and sings it.

Faith is the hand. Paul prays “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” Luther put it in a sentence about Baptism: “my faith does not make Baptism, but receives it.” A gift can be really given and not received. And where does faith come from? “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

Two fair objections. First, plenty of baptised people show no faith. That is true, and every church that takes Paul at his word says so. Simon the sorcerer was baptised, and Peter told him, “thy heart is not right in the sight of God.” The gift has to be received. Second, many Christians hold that baptism is a sign of a union God gives when a person believes. This page does not settle that. But notice that even on that view the union is given by God, once, through faith. Nobody’s confession says it is built up out of hours.

What about reading the Bible alone? It is one way of hearing the Word, and a good one. Timothy knew the Scriptures “from a child.” The oldest Christian rule about mornings, from about the year 215, says to pray on rising and to go and hear God’s word taught at “the church, the place where the Holy Spirit abounds.” Then it adds that if there is no teaching that day, “let everyone at home take the Bible and read sufficiently in passages that he finds profitable.” So private reading has a real place. It is not the place where a person is joined to Christ.

Here are six verses. For each, say what the verse itself names.

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Praying alone

The sermon had good texts on its side, and they should be heard. Jesus prayed alone: “in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.” He told each disciple to do it: “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.” A Christian who never prays alone is disobeying him.

But look at two things. Jesus was the Son before he prayed. The voice at his baptism said “Thou art my beloved Son” first. And his command says “pray to thy Father.” The disciple has a Father before he shuts the door.

Every church quoted on this page teaches children to pray every day. Luther’s Small Catechism of 1529 tells a household how to begin the morning: “In the morning, when you rise, you shall bless yourself with the holy cross and say: In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. Then, kneeling or standing, repeat the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer.” It ends: “Then go to your work with joy.” The child’s first words of the day are the name he was baptised in. It takes about three minutes.

So the two views do not differ about whether a child should pray. They differ about what she is doing. On the “given” view she is a daughter talking to her Father. If she misses a day she has left a good thing undone, and she is still his daughter. On the “built” view the prayer is where the relationship is made. If she misses a day it is weaker, and after enough missed days there may be none.

The best writer on the other side was A. W. Tozer, an American pastor. In 1948 he wrote that “God is a Person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can.” Much of that is true. God is to be known. But Tozer was writing to people who were already Christians, and urging them to enjoy what they had. He called the new birth “not an end but an inception.” It is when his teaching is shortened, in a sermon, that it turns into “the time alone is what gives you the relationship.”

Cricket, and what really gets crowded out

The sermon set cricket on one side and Jesus on the other, as if they were after the same hours. Paul does not see the week that way. Straight after the verse about the word of Christ he writes: “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” If a child is in Christ, she is in Christ at the crease. It is not a room she leaves when she picks up a bat.

The Bible is not embarrassed by play. When the prophet Zechariah pictures Jerusalem with God living in it again, he says, “the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.” Jesus himself “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” The Psalms say, “play skilfully.”

The sermon could have quoted Paul: “bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things.” That is a real ranking. But in the same chapter Paul is arguing against people who treat God’s gifts as rivals to God, and he says: “every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.”

Even so, the preacher’s worry is not foolish. Time is limited, and good things do push out better ones. In one of Jesus’ stories some seed is “choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life.” So what does the New Testament say must not be crowded out? It names three things: meeting together as a church (“not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together”), teaching at home, and prayer. Churches meet on different days and at different hours. What matters is being there, above all for the Lord’s Supper, which can be received nowhere else.

The sermon named the third and said nothing about the first. Think of a family with two children. One has a violin lesson on Tuesdays. The other plays in a cricket league with matches at the hour of the family’s church service for half the year. The violin costs nothing that Christ gives. The cricket takes the boy away from the place where the word is preached and the bread is broken. Cricket does not compete with Christ. A fixture that keeps a family from the service competes with church, and with the Lord’s Supper most of all.

Here are six situations, all made up. Does the activity push aside something Christ gives?

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What the churches say

The full dossier asks five traditions the same questions and quotes each from its own official documents. They disagree about a great deal. On this question they are close together.

Two of those are surprises. The Catholic Catechism uses the very phrase “personal relationship,” and then rests it on Baptism. So the phrase is not the trouble. What it is built on is. And the old Baptist catechism gives the same list of means as everyone else. The idea that time alone builds the relationship is not the historic evangelical position. It belongs to the twentieth century. One study found that “personal relationship with Jesus” came into wide use only from about the late 1940s.

Fairness requires the other side. The newer way of speaking arose because there really were churches full of baptised people who seemed not to know God at all. The old answer to that was to tell a person, “You are baptised, so pray.” The newer answer is, “You do not pray, so perhaps you have nothing.” The first calls a son home. The second tells him he may not be a son.

What to tell a child

The two views give a child two different sentences. One is, “You must build a relationship.” The other is, “You belong to Christ. Keep coming.”

Think of the days when the difference shows. She forgets to pray for three days. On the first view she has let something slip, and the longer the gap the harder it is to go back. On the second she says, “I forgot. He is still my Father,” and prays tonight. She prays and feels nothing. On the first view it is not working. On the second, feelings come and go, and what was promised to her has not moved. At fifteen she doubts everything. On the first view the relationship was something she made, and if she has stopped making it there is nothing left. On the second, the font, the creed and the table are where they were.

The old catechisms all begin with the second sentence. The English Prayer Book taught a child to say that in his baptism “I was made a member of Christ.” Luther gave Christians a sentence for a bad day: “Nevertheless I am baptized; but if I am baptized, it is promised me that I shall be saved and have eternal life, both in soul and body.”

“Keep coming” is half the sentence, and it matters. Belonging is not permission to drift. The same Prayer Book tells the child that he needs God’s help, “which thou must learn at all times to call for by diligent prayer.” So a child on the “given” view has just as much to do. He prays, he comes to church and to the Lord’s table, he learns the faith. The difference is that he works from what he has been given. He does not work towards it.

Check it yourself

Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last is the one that matters.

1. 1. Read John 15:1–10 and Ephesians 1:1–14. Count every “in Christ,” “in him” and “abide.” Which sentences are statements, and which are commands?
2. 2. Read Romans 6:1–11, Galatians 3:26–4:7 and 1 Corinthians 10:1–17. What does Paul say happened to his readers? What does he warn them about?
3. 3. Read Matthew 6:5–13, Mark 1:9–11 and 1:35, and Luke 10:38–42. Whom is the disciple told to pray to? What was Mary doing?
4. 4. Read Colossians 3:16–4:1 and 1 Timothy 4:1–8. What does “whatsoever ye do” cover? Who is Paul arguing against?
5. 5. Write down one ordinary week for your household. Do this one. When is the family in church? When does it pray? When is it at practice? Then ask which activity, if any, takes you out of church, and for how many weeks of the year. Find out what your own church teaches that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper give. And tell your children, in plain words, whose they are.