Foreign. Let's turn to Matthew chapter 18 in our scriptures. We're in the second week of a three week series, three part series called Let Them Come. It's kind of focused on three interactions that Jesus had with children or with he and his disciples had with children. But it's instructive for us to understand not only who's the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, which we talk about here today.

Hint, I'll kind of give you a clue. It's, it's children, but it's not just children. It's people who approach the kingdom of heaven with the mindset of a child. That is part of what this three part series is based on, but it also has something to speak to us about a lot of different things and we're going to touch on some of those here today that are quite important. So we're going to read Matthew chapter 18, verses 1 through 14.

At that time, the disciples came to Jesus saying, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? He, Jesus called a child and had him stand among them. And he said, I tell you the truth, unless you turn around and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself like this little child is the greatest the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a child like this in my name welcomes me.

If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a huge millstone hung around his neck and be drowned in the open sea. Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks. It is necessary that stumbling blocks come, but woe to the person through whom they come. If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.

And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into fiery hell. See that you do not disdain one of these little ones, for I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven. What do you think? If someone owns a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the 99 sheep on the mountain and go look for the one that went astray?

And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he will rejoice more over it than the 99 that did not go astray. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that one of these little ones would be lost. I've got so many thoughts and observations on this passage. Every time I read it. The first thing that is on my mind this morning that really struck me as I was studying for this recently was that Jesus just in response to this question, I mean the question isn't about kids.

The question is about who's the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And then Jesus calls a little child over. That means that wherever Jesus was, there was always kids around him. Isn't that something? He didn't have to say, hey, somebody go round up a child somewhere, get a family and say, hey, can we borrow your kid for a prop for a minute?

There were kids always around Jesus. He loves children. Jesus loved having kids around him. And so he, he says, hey, come on, you know, like come over here for a second, will you? And the kid just randomly came up.

They didn't have any fear around Jesus. There was no trepidation, there was no judgment. Like I was doing little kid stuff and is Jesus going to judge me for that? Jesus just welcomes the child over and the child stands in their midst and he says, look at this kid. You see this one?

This, this. You have to become like this child if you want to be great in the kingdom of heaven. You actually have to humble yourself like this little child. You see having, having the, the humility of a child is the willingness to admit even things that we like to keep hidden. Times, times when, when, when something that we would say, hey, that's a private detail, keep that private.

Kids just share it. There's always jokes about what the kids say when they go up to kids church about what their parents said on the car ride in or what they did last night or said this morning. And the kids, kids workers have the best time like kind of getting dirt on their, their families. You know, it's fun, it's great. But I tell you, I used to love and I actually did it just this morning.

I walked upstairs for a couple minutes and just kind of watched the kids and just enjoyed seeing them upstairs. I used to do this when I was on staff years and years ago at a church. Part of my job was going throughout the whole building and counting everybody that's there. Churches like numbers. We like to count how many people are at each different thing.

We also have to report on it. So we have to do this. But I loved it because it got me to be able to go into the nursery and then the kids church room and get to just not only take numbers down. But it got me to, to see those kids and to just see how they were enjoying life, how they were playing with one another, sometimes fighting with one another, how they were hearing the stories that their, the children's. Children's pastor was teaching them.

It would remind me that sometimes the simplest, just the simplest, most obvious way to understand the story in the Bible is the best way. And people like me that get up and preach are always looking to complicate it with things that are like, oh, I got to share a deep insight with you. And then Jesus says, humble yourself and become like a little child, or you won't even see the kingdom of heaven. But if you do humble yourself like this child, you're actually the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Now, his disciples were talking about how they would have the greatest positions of honor.

Who is going to be elevated in authority over the other disciples? They wanted to have a pecking order, a hierarchy. They wanted to have some type of a thing they could look at and say, well, I said to do it, so you have to do what I say. And Jesus says, the kids don't organize themselves that way. In fact, if there is a child that tends to kind of bully their way into that position, people either submit to that bully and just because they would, rather than fight against them or push against them, they'll just do what that bully says, or they just say, no, you can't do that to me.

You can't control me. I'm not going to do that. I think we need a little bit more of that in our world today. There's a lot of times that we're told to do something or to be something by whether it's media, social media, government, church leaders, whatever it might be. And they're telling us, well, you've got to, you've got to do this thing or be this certain way.

And instead we, we just. Either we react in one of two ways. We either just do exactly what they say, or we go the full, like, anarchy route and say, you can't control me. But Jesus is saying, you don't get to have those positions in the kingdom. If you want to understand greatness in his kingdom, approach the kingdom like a little child.

Approach the kingdom of heaven with the mindset of a child, the love and acceptance that a child has. And then he says, if you welcome a child like this in the name of Jesus, you welcome him. Have you ever wanted to be closer to Christ? See, Jesus tells us a couple different ways. One is to welcome children among you to welcome children means you're welcoming Christ Himself.

Somehow he's saying that he is in their midst. When you welcome a child in, it's as if you are welcoming Christ Himself. The other times where he talks about it is he says, when you take care of the sick, the poor, those that are imprisoned, things like that, when you take care of folks in those situations, it's as if you were doing it to Jesus Christ himself. In fact, he says that'll be a basis of judgment at the end of all things. When he says that, when you did that to the least of these people among you, it's as if you did it unto him, to Christ himself.

So when we see that person, I don't mean the scam artist panhandlers, you know, the ones that, you know, they're really just not in need, but they're doing this anyway. I mean, people that are really down on, not just down on their luck, they're dragging the bottom. There's no way for life to get much worse than it is. And when you reach out a hand to help them, it's as if you're doing it to Jesus himself. So Jesus gives us those two different things.

He says, for those who are the poorest and in the worst shape among you are those who are the most innocent children among you. When you welcome them or when you care for them, you're doing it to Christ himself. So Jesus wants the children to be around him, but he wants us to approach the kingdom of Heaven like children. He wants us to approach our relationship with him the same way a child does. Have you ever noticed a child, when you ask them a question about the scripture, they answer it very straightforward, very honestly.

They don't get too deep into it. They just talk about the whole thing. Last night I was doing Bible story with Emma and she wanted to do the Prodigal Son story. Well, she didn't want to do that. She wanted to talk about something else.

And I said, I got an example for that. And she said, is it the Prodigal Son? And I said, yeah, it is. And I said, do you know why? And she said, well, I don't remember much about it.

And I said, well, what do you remember? And boy, this was one of those times I wished I had recorded it. I mean, she went through point by point by point, almost, almost word for word, told me the story that Jesus had told of the Prodigal Son. She told every bit of it without missing it. I guess I've been doing my job.

Well, I love that Story. And I teach it a lot, and she remembers it, and so she went through. But then it was my turn. Cause, you know, I'm a preacher. I'm going to dig into it a little bit.

I said, now do you know why it was so important that the father loved both of his boys the way that he loved them? You see, the one prodigal, the one that took all of his inheritance, he says, dad, give me the money that will come to me. In other words, when you die, I would have an inheritance. I want it now while you're still alive. And he took it, and he went off to a far country and he squandered it on wild living.

It doesn't say what. It just says that's what he did when he found himself so poor that he hired himself out to feed pigs. And he was hungry for the scraps the pigs were eating, but nobody would even share any food with him in that time. He said the scripture says he came to himself. In other words, he had been absolutely insane.

He'd been absolutely crazy. But now he came back to himself. He came to his senses, and he. He said, I can at least go and be my father's servant. Because his servants have food, shelter, clothing.

They're. They're provided for. I could at least go and be a servant and be provided for. So he runs. He goes back home, and his father sees him from a long way off and runs out to greet him and then treats him like a king.

And so the way. And so I shared with Emma, and I'm sharing with you that in that case, what Jesus was doing in the story is he's showing that the love of that boy's father, the love of that father was. Was so extravagant, it did not matter what his son did. We call it unconditional love. We call it the kind of.

The kind of love that. That there's nothing you can do that makes it less. There's nothing you can do that makes it more. That father loved his son regardless of anything his son did. That's a lesson that I have to learn.

But I was trying to teach Emma about unconditional love. That's why I had brought that up last night. And saying, I love you no matter what you do. I told her, there's nothing she can do that would cause me to love her any less. I said, but also there's nothing you can do to cause me to love you anymore.

Although my love for her grows almost daily, there's nothing she can do to actually make that happen more she can't earn my love. She can't merit my love for her in a greater way. That's not why I love her. And in the same way, though, in the rest of that story, you see, there was the other son, the brother, and they're throwing a great big banquet for the prodigal who returned. And yet the brother's still out working in the fields.

Nobody went out to tell him to clock out early and come on in for the party. He shows up late to the party and then refuses to go in because he's really mad. He'd never even had a small celebration with his friends. But now his brother, that took half of their family's livelihood and squandered it. Now he's home and they're throwing him a party, and the father goes out to greet him and he says, my child, don't you know that everything I have is yours?

In other words, there's nothing that you've been able to do. You think you've been working so hard this whole time that you could earn my love? You think you're earning your place in this family. You think that where your brother ran off and left his place in the family behind, you think that you have to solidify your place. But my son, you've had the whole thing this whole time.

Everything I have is yours. Literally, whenever he divided his assets, he didn't just take half of them and give them to the one son and then leave the other half here. He actually divided his living between them. He's officially retired at this point. But yet that.

That older brother thought that he was still had to work like a servant. And he'd been doing that this whole time. You see, the father was trying to say, I've loved you so much, and you've never quite picked up on it. Now, judge for yourselves. You can just read the parable as Jesus taught it and take it as a kid did and love it.

You can dig in and you can get that knowledge and dig in like an adult, like a thinker, like somebody wrestling with this parable. But Jesus says, if you approach the kingdom like a child does, you'll enter it. You'll see it somewhere. You and I have to not dumb ourselves down, but we have to remove ourselves from our intellect at some point. I'm not saying that intellect is bad.

It's very good. But at some point we got to say, okay, I got all that. That's a little bit more up here. We just come to it and we look at the story and what do we see what are the pictures? We see a son that runs off, parties, loses it all, finds himself dirty feeding the pigs and says, wait a minute, it's time for me to come home.

He comes home and his father runs to greet him. Emma thought that he'd been sitting there for maybe a week on the porch. I was like, I think he was gone a little longer than a week. But she just sees a dad sitting there on the porch all week thinking, my son's going to come home soon. I think it'd been months or years, it's irrelevant.

But she's just picturing like, here's dad sitting on a rocking chair, like, he'll be back, he'll be back. And I'm starting to put my mind into what her eyes are seeing in this story. See, I've got to approach the kingdom, I've got to approach the scriptures. I've got to approach life. If Jesus says, I want to see the kingdom of heaven in the midst of where we live, I've got to approach it like a child does.

I wonder where you might in your life have over complicated things, overcomplicated religion, thought that you had to earn your way through life. Do you think any of these kids thought they had to earn the love of Christ? Do you think any of the kids that were around him were wondering which one of them was the best kid, the strongest kid, the most, the kid that had earned the most? None of them are thinking that way. They're just happy to be in the presence of Jesus Christ.

And they know that to be with Christ matters to them, that something about the way he loves them is important. So many times I think we forget that or we get lost in that. Well, moving on down. Jesus, he shifts a little bit, but he's really. What he's setting up, what he's talking about is he's saying he knows it'll be something that'll happen.

He says, when you adults get in the way of the kids that are coming to me, I take great offense at that. Jesus says, you'd be better off now. He says, take a millstone. Now they had these, these millstones. He means the upper millstone, as if it matters.

Millstone was this thing they would have like a big round rock that was kind of flat and then they would have like this kind of. I think it's conical shaped. One on a thing and it would roll and it would spin around and it would, it would crush the grains and make wheat and things like that. It was a mill. They would Mill their grain with these things.

And usually a person would. Or an animal would kind of walk it around and it would. They would just keep throwing grain in there and it would keep crushing it. He said, you'd be better off if you just hooked a rope or a chain to one of those millstones and then threw it in the water and it pulled you in with it. You'd be better off killing yourself, is what Jesus said, than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.

You remember the WWJD bracelets? What would Jesus do? Everybody always thought nice, warm, happy thoughts about those. What would Jesus do? Some of the pictures of what Jesus does or says to do are a little stronger than we like to picture, isn't it?

Going into the temple courts with a whip, whipping animals, sending people out, flipping their tables over. Could you imagine it, Jesus doing that right outside in the lobby or something? Because he was right outside the temple. Sometimes Jesus did things like he would curse a fig tree and tell it to wither up and die. And it did.

Sometimes Jesus called people a brood of vipers, like a pit of snakes. In other words, who was the first serpent? The first snake is Satan. He's saying, you're an offspring of Satan. You live amongst a bunch of other slithering snakes.

He was talking to the Pharisees and the priests. He was talking to the religious leaders saying that you guys are in league with Satan. Sometimes WWJD is a little harsher than what we want it to be. It's a little. Jesus isn't quite as soft as we want to picture that.

He is right. Jesus here, he says, you would be better off killing yourself than causing a child to stumble. Those are heavy words. He doubles down on it. He says, you know what?

If you got a body part that's going to lead you into sin, you're better off not having that body part. If you've got a hand that's causing you to sin, you're better off cutting that off. Now, anybody who says, oh, I always have to take the Bible literally. Have you ever met one of those or been one of those or currently are one of those people? You don't have to raise your hand.

I mean, you can. We're all recovering, right? Like, we're all sinners saved by grace, and God is healing us of these things in our lives. Come on, liven up a little bit. You guys hear me?

This is hilarious. Jesus says, if your arm, your hand is going to cause you to sin, to cut it off like a shop teacher. I don't know. You know, Anyway, sorry. You ever met a shop teacher with all their digits?

There's a guy that works at Emma's school, and he's missing just, like, a couple digits on one, like, his ring finger. And I've got two theories. Either he used to teach shop in a former life, or his wife said, the only way you're getting out of this is if that rings, you know, comes off your finger and you're, you know, you gained too much weight and it's stuck on there. Like, mine is. Like, I can't get it off.

He's like, I'll cut the finger off to get this thing off. I don't know. Anyway, it's just because it's his ring finger. I just got to get you laughing, thinking again. Okay, ready?

Now we just did a little mental exercise. Woke your minds up. Hear this. Jesus is not being literal in the sense of telling us to maim our bodies. However, he's trying to use drastic language to get us to understand.

You would be better off to enter into the afterlife. Hang on, Jesus. Like, how are you doing? Like, I did what you said. I didn't plan on doing this.

Sorry I did what you said. He's like, whoa, okay, like, let's talk about that for a second. Like, I didn't. I wasn't saying it, but I was telling you do things as drastic as necessary to push sin out of your life if that sin would keep you from heaven. You see, if you're involved in something so much.

Like, he talks not just about hands, but he says, your eyes. We look at so many things every day. There's some things that you see that you wish you hadn't seen. There's some things that you see that you wanted to see. And then you keep looking too much at it.

One of the biggest struggles or addictions in our world is pornography. And it comes in so many forms. It's not just images and videos that are on the Internet. I'm watching a reel on Facebook, just these little videos, and there was a commercial that popped up after it. I won't describe it to you, but I was utterly shocked a that it was right there in the open.

It definitely shouldn't have been. It was more than R rated in what it was presenting, and it was just for a couple seconds. But that image is now seared into my brain. Now the question is, what do I do with that? Do I say, lord, I didn't look for that.

I didn't want to see that. Now, could you help me Put that out of my mind. Or. Or do I double down and say, I want to see more of that. I want to click on it and find out more?

See, pornography finds its way into people's hearts and minds in that way. By the way, not to get too out there with it, but when your mind is aroused in those ways, it actually reprograms the way your mind thinks, and it draws you into addictions quicker and more in depth than you would have ever planned on it doing. You see, you're open to suggestions in your mind at that point. Jesus is saying in situations like that, you would be better off if you didn't have eyes than for your eyes to lead you into sin that might drag you into hell. Now, hold up.

I don't want to suggest, and I'm not suggesting that if you are a believer, if you're a Christian who has accepted Christ as your savior, that if you commit a sin, that it will keep you from heaven or keep you from Christ. I'm not saying that at all. The blood of Christ covers all of your sin. If you're in Christ, though, you're a new creation. The Bible tells us, and it says, the old has gone and the new has arrived.

So we leave behind those old ways, those earthly ways, those evil ways, and we walk in the light and life that Christ offers us through his Holy Spirit. And so as we do that, we need to leave sin behind. And Jesus says, if your hand, if your eye, if some body part is causing you to sin, you're better off to enter heaven missing body parts, because by the way, God can restore that. And I believe we all will have restored, renewed whole bodies in heaven. Amen.

Some of us feel the need for that now. We're like, please, can we have a taste of that here? That's why we pray for healing. That's why we pray that our bodies would be healed now, because we. What we're actually looking for is a taste of heaven on earth.

What we're actually saying is, lord, I know that this is a short time, but it feels like a long time to go through life with some of these limitations, these aches, these pains, these brokennesses in our body. Lord, would you provide healing so that I can experience your heaven here on earth? But Jesus is saying you're better off missing a few parts of your body if it means you can walk in holiness. So if you do something that causes a child to be pushed away from Christ, you'd be better off jumping into the sea with Italian boat shoes. You Know those concrete shoes that they would put on?

Guys, you know, you'd be better off having Italian boat shoes, sorry to any Italians or whatever. But anyway, you'd be better off, you know, doing that, you know, taking a long walk off a short pier with some really heavy shoes on your feet than pushing a child away from Christ. It's pretty severe. To be clear, Jesus is not promoting suicide or self harm at all. This is not to be taken extremely literal, but it is to be taken extremely seriously.

Make sense? I'll move on. So Jesus continues on. We're down in verse, verse 10. He says, See to it that you do not disdain one of these little ones.

For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.

Does he mean guardian angels? Okay, I'm going to take a quick poll. Who's been told that we all have a guardian angel. Keep your hand up if you. You'll be okay if you believe that that's true.

Keep your hand up if you believe that's true. All right, now raise your hand if you're like, you guys are all full of it. You guys are silly. You're not going to do it, are you? I should have done it the other way around.

Whichever one I asked first, the other people weren't going to answer no matter what. Because if a bunch of people said, that's, that's, nah, there's no way, then you're going, I'm not going to admit that I believe it. It'd be like if I said, who believes UFOs exist? And be like, yeah, okay, maybe, yeah, who, who believes that they've been on one. Most people are gonna be like, I'm not answering if I do believe that, you know.

So actually the new question now has become, who believes that UFOs are actually aliens from another planet? Because now we're like, well, maybe it was China, maybe it was our government, maybe it was blah, blah, blah, you know, of course UFOs exist. It's just something that we haven't yet identified. I don't know what's on it. I don't know if it's new tech or a different life form.

I don't know, who knows? It's always controversial. It's fun. Jesus, he says that, he says that children have an angel in heaven. It seems like he's suggesting, and I don't think that it's wrong to understand it in this way.

Seems like he's suggesting that we do have an angel assigned to us and that those angels Present themselves before the Father in heaven. To me, this tells us a couple things. One, we don't have communication with that angel. There's nothing in scripture that tells you to talk to angels or to try to connect with them. In fact, that would be something that the scriptures would tell us not to do.

However, there are scriptures that would tell us that we should ask that God would continue to send angels to protect us. Things that are in the unseen world. And you know what? This isn't really crazy. Some people say, oh, angels.

That seems crazy. Does it? Because, I mean, there's a whole bunch of TV shows about people looking in haunted houses and using electronic equipment and all this stuff, trying to see if there's spirits from the underworld or something like that. It's not too crazy to think that there might be angels and that God would care enough about us that he would send angels to protect us, angels to be with us, angels that might. Might somehow keep harm away from us.

But he also says that these angels report to the Father in heaven that they see the face of God. It tells me that we have not only a direct line to God through Jesus Christ, who is our mediator, but that we also have kind of a. A little added representative. Now, I know there are people. I know there's groups like maybe Roman Catholics and things like that that say, well, there's.

There's saints and there's Mother Mary and there's people that we can speak to on behalf of us. I'm not trying to poke at them, but I will say the scripture doesn't suggest that there's ever any person that has lived and died that is now in the presence of God that intercedes on our behalf. But the scriptures do tell us that we have angels that see the face of our Father in heaven and that Christ is our intercessor before the Father in heaven. And that is enough. Because Christ lived as one of us.

Christ walked this earth and lived as a human being, and he experienced everything. By the way, Jesus was a child too. When he speaks about welcoming children, he was once a child that was welcomed. He remember he was 12 years old, sitting at the temple, speaking with the religious leaders. I wonder how many of them were saying, like, can we get this young dude out of here?

Can we get rid of him? Actually, they were engaged with him. It's fun to talk to kids about the Bible. It's fun to talk to them about what they believe about God, what they believe about heaven, what they believe about life. It's really challenging to us Sometimes we've gotten so set in our ways and so set in all these things that we're not open anymore to new things.

Children have imaginations. They believe a lot of stuff that we might say is ridiculous. And yet they're open to understanding the things of God in ways that we've closed our minds off to because of years of hardness, hardening hearts, closing off our ears. Jesus tells us to not only approach heaven like a child, but also to welcome the little ones. He says their angels in heaven always see the face of his Father in heaven.

So then he shows us just how valuable a kid is. You see, I always read this story, this little bit where Jesus talks about the 99 sheep and the. The one that walked away. And I've. I don't think I've ever heard anybody share it in context.

The context is about children. Jesus says, there's a shepherd. He has a hundred sheep. I don't know if that's a lot or a little, but it seems like somebody that might take care of sheep. 100 seems like a good number.

Fair enough. I don't know the significance beyond that, but it's a good round number. It's nice to work with round numbers sometimes. And. And he's got a hundred sheep now.

He's got a hundred of them. And it says that basically his job is to care for them, to make sure that they're taken care of. Psalm 23 tells us what a good shepherd does. Leads him to flowing water, leads him to green grass, makes him lie down in pasture or lie down where it's safe, and, and to feed in green pastures. This is what a good shepherd does.

He cares for the needs of his sheep. But then sometimes the sheep will get away. Sheep aren't known for being smart. They're not known for really being, like, resilient in a lot of ways. They actually, if they get into the water, their wool will get so heavy that they'll just fall like, and drown.

You know, like, it's just not good. They really need human help. They really do. And so he's saying the shepherd, their job is to keep the sheep. But then he starts counting one day, and he only counts 99.

Now he realizes one had gotten away. I don't know how you track down that sheep without, like, a dog, you know, to track it or something. But somehow the shepherd makes the decision that it'll be better if he goes after that one sheep and leaves 99 left. Now, a 1% loss in a business is. You want to avoid that, but I'd rather have a 1% loss and risk maybe losing, say, 10 or 20 more percent of other ones wandering off.

The more that wander off, the harder it's going to be to corral them all back in. So I'm going to say, well, let's just let that one go and keep the 99 that are still here. I'm going to focus on them and I'm going to pay a little better attention and I'm going to learn my lesson. That's what I'm going to do. That's my mindset on it.

But I'm not a shepherd. So Jesus has been called the good shepherd. He seems to understand things about shepherding. And what he's saying is, he says that this shepherd makes the decision to leave the 99. In fact, he says it in such a way that it seems like it should be obvious.

He says, will he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go look for the one that went astray? It's as if, like anybody else that was familiar with shepherding would say, well, of course that's what he's going to do. Except I don't think that it's that obvious. And Jesus is making a point. He's like.

He's saying, it should be that obvious. It should be obvious to you that we're going after the one that was lost. See, we're not the church for the 99 that are here. We need to be a church for one that has wandered astray, and we'll go after that one and will lovingly bring it back. And he says that he rejoices over that one.

He rejoices over the one that went astray and that he was able to bring back in. In another Gospel, it says that he, when he finds it, he'll put it up on his shoulders and he'll carry it back and speak lovingly and soothingly to it. He won't. He won't dis. He won't speak disparagingly to it and say, why would you do that?

I can't believe you would walk off. I can't believe you would do this to me. He says, I'm so glad you're back. I'm so glad you're mine. You see, shepherd, understand a sheep's voice.

They know his voice. They come to the voice of their shepherd. They only recognize that one. I saw a video of this. They do a lot of shepherding in New Zealand, but they don't have fences around their pastures.

Actually, it was told by one of Their shepherds in New Zealand that the reason they don't need these is they just dig really deep wells that tap into really good, clean, cool water and that keeps the sheep nearby. There's something to learn about that for the church. We need to be a place that. That is a place where people can just get a nice, cool, refreshing drink, something good for their lives. But the other reason that they don't need fences around their pastures in New Zealand is because the sheep truly do know the voice of their shepherd.

That's universal to any country. But they just. This is the way they do farming there. And they showed a demonstration of that. There was this flock and they all looked the same to me.

But they had people that would call certain sheep by their name. They had three or four different people doing it. But then the shepherd of that sheep called them and that sheep would come and he would call them by their names and they would start coming to him. It didn't matter who called the name of that sheep, they wouldn't show up. But when the shepherd called them, they arrived.

It's like when somebody has a lost dog and they put the signs up and they say, he comes to this name. No, he doesn't. He comes to you calling him by that name. If I start calling a stray dog by that name, he's not going to do anything. He doesn't understand that.

Because I'm not the master of that dog. I'm not the one that owns him. I'm not the one that loves him and cares for him. So, Jesus, speaking about shepherding, he's talking about these sheep, and he says, when one goes astray, the shepherd is going to leave. Of course he's going to leave.

And everybody's thinking, no, he's not. Why would he do that? It's an unsure thing. You start doing calculations and wondering how many sheep might get lost during the time that you're gone looking for him. I mean, there was a story in the Bible, in the Old Testament of King Saul, the first king of Israel, and he had gotten sent out to find three of his father's donkeys because they had wandered off.

And so he and his servant are going to find the donkeys. They're gone so long. Now he, his father, starts wondering, they found the donkeys. Now they're wondering, where is the son and the servant? It's actually pretty funny because donkeys are also called a jackass.

And the point of the story is saying, who's the jackass now? Like, the donkeys are back now. You're still out. Oh, come on. Are you guys really upset about that?

Really? It's not even a cuss word. And so anyway, like, it says it in. Some of you guys read King James Bible still. It's in there, you know, like, it's a play on words.

It's a joke. We got to be able to read the Bible for the hilarity that it is. It's setting up a. A poetic narrative saying, like, the. The donkeys are back, but the jackasses are still out.

Get it? Like, your father's worried about you now. So anyway, all right, dock my pay if you want.

So Jesus is saying, of course we're going to worry about the ones that got away, but the point is you're more valuable than sheep. And then he says, in this upside down language of the kingdom of heaven, the ones. Because, remember this started, who's the greatest? The ones that are at the top are the ones that we put on the lowest level. Kids don't provide any value to the church in terms of, like, they're not the ones that are coming in and cleaning and cutting the grass and fixing up things that are broken, or they're.

They're not the ones bringing in the big offerings that are paying the bills and keeping the lights on and all those things. What are kids going to do? We're not. We're not organizing a volunteer group of kids that's going to go out and talk to the neighborhood and bring all their neighbors in and all that stuff. That's the human hierarchy.

But Jesus says, you want to know who's greatest in the kingdom? It's children. And then right underneath it is people who humble themselves like a child, who approach this life like a child does. Those are the people that are greatest in the kingdom of heaven. So if you want to see it and you want to understand it the way Jesus is talking about it, you have to somehow transport your mind out of your shoes and into the shoes of a child and say, I want to experience that.

One of the best ways you get to do that is volunteering. For our kids group, we have people that can volunteer whether it might just be sitting in the hallway. And many of you do. Sitting in the hallway, being a hall monitor, helping the kids down to the bathroom, all these things. It might be teaching Sunday school class.

It might be working with the kids in some future way that we haven't even dreamed up yet. It might simply be going to neighbors that you don't know them very well, but you see that they have children and inviting them to church. It might be the next time we have an event where we welcome the public in targeting families with kids to volunteer to that and just to love on those kids and say, you guys are important and we have a place for you here. You see, Jesus says the most important ones, it's not me, it's not you, it's the children. And if we do anything, if I do anything, if I lead the church in such a way that kids don't feel welcome so that we feel like we have our place, it'd be better off if I would go ahead and cut off my arm, pull out my eyes, or jump into the sea than to push kids away from Christ.

See, he'll leave 99 of us to fend for ourselves if it means to bring one stray child back. We have an opportunity to grow a church that values the life, the love of children. And we're doing pretty well. We have a long way to go. It starts in our hearts, it continues in our giving, and it proceeds through our willingness to embrace children and say, this is the most important thing.

Not me, not what I want, not any of our programming. Children are the most important thing. Jesus says if you want to see him and live in his kingdom, to welcome the child that's in your midst and remember where Jesus is, there's always children around him. So if you want to be in the presence of Christ, welcome children to be around Sa.