A little girl sings,

"Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so."

In fact, it’s not really the Bible that has taught her. It is her parents or her friends or her church. The Bible will come later.

But, too often, we will use the Bible to do just the opposite. We will use it like a Robert’s Rules of Order. We will threaten our kids with it. We will pervert it into a history book or a science text when what it is really is a song, a poem, a work of art that reaches out with the beautiful truth that Jesus really does love me and you and all the world.

Once a kind and wise man pulled me aside after a particularly boisterous sermon and said,

"Just because you say it loud doesn’t make it true."

Such wisdom reminds me that just because we say it over and over and over again doesn’t make it true, either.

The truth is always known in the doing.

If we proclaim that God loves all people but then put requirements on who the church will accept, we separate the church from God...and from our kids as well.