My wife and I recently had our third child and sometimes it seems like he will not stop crying. In theory this is a simple matter, right? A baby cries so you either change it, feed it or hold it. But sometimes I do all those things and he still won’t stop crying. I know what many of you reading this are thinking: “Yeah, David, that’s what babies do. You should have been prepared for that. Just have to patient while he grows out of it.” And you’d be right.
The apostle Paul tells us that new believers are like infants; and sometimes it seems like they, too, never stop crying. They come to us with bad attitudes, disrespectful language, wrong thinking, spotty attendance, misconceptions about the church and about God, and (shocked
gasp) skepticism. Do we show them patience while they grow?
We enthusiastically welcome someone who decides to give their life to Christ. But then, when they don’t think, talk, act or show up like we think they should, we get judgmental. Sometimes my wife and I like to go eat at one of those nice restaurants where people don’t usually bring their kids. A place where grown-ups can go and there are only other grown-ups so that they can sit and talk without kids fussing and crying and spilling things. The kind of place where the host or hostess just wouldn’t know what to do if a child was brought in. The body of Christ has many
churches that fit that description.
We can have a hard time understanding why someone doesn’t just “act like a Christian” after they’ve gotten saved. Or why we can give them advice and they don’t take it. How it is that you can explain something and then a week later it’s like they never heard a word you said. Why we can help them see the mess that they’re in, how they got there, how to get out, and how to avoid getting back into it; and then two weeks later they’ve made the same dumb decision, or never left the mess in the first place.
I changed my son’s diaper once, and a few hours later – I had to change it again! After I changed him I fed him a bottle. Three hours later he’s screaming for more food. I picked him up and held him until he fell asleep but a little while later he’s crying to be picked up again. And – might I add (with a huff) – that I never once got an ounce of appreciation from him. Each time these things happen, I change him again. I feed him again. I hold him in my arms and comfort him again. Because that is the kind of care a baby requires.
As he grows there will come a time when he will have to learn how to avoid a mess by using the toilet. He’ll need to learn how to feed himself.
And he won’t need me to hold him as much (although, hopefully, still sometimes). The end result of all this is that he will someday have the patience, the maturity and a great enough capacity to love that he will be able to provide a baby with all that it needs to grow. If we took Paul’s analogy to heart, and cared for our “baby” Christians the same way we care for our flesh and blood babies – imagine what kind of church we could have.
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