Children of Peace

You may have said the same thing to your child four hundred times, and none of it seems to have landed. Or your children are grown, and you lie awake adding up everything you got wrong.

There is a children's song nearly everybody knows, though few people know where it came from. The words "Jesus loves me, this I know" first appeared in 1860 in a novel called Say and Seal, written by Susan Warner with her sister Anna. In the story, a man holds a dying little boy who asks him to sing, and these are the words he sings. Anna Warner wrote them for a child who was not going to grow up. So the song is more than a nursery rhyme. It is what you say when your own teaching has run out and Someone greater has to hold the child.

Isaiah says the same thing in older words: "And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children." God is speaking to His people, pictured as a woman who could not have children and was left alone: "Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear." Now she is promised more children than she can count. So this verse is a promise that God will restore His people, and it was never meant as a method for parenting. Look at who the teacher is. It is the LORD. Your words are one voice among the many voices God is using, and the peace that follows is His work.

That brings relief, and it also carries a warning. If your children's peace is not made by your teaching, then it is not destroyed by your worst year either. You were never the last line of defence. But do not take that too far. A voice God uses is still a voice, and the child in the next room learns more from what you are like on a bad Thursday than from anything you have said four hundred times. So keep speaking, keep living what you say, and leave the deepest teaching to the One who promised to do it.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 137 is Unprofitable Servants (Luke 17:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna