Little Boys; Big Lesson

On two separate Wednesday evenings I have attempted to help two different 6 year old boys memorize and understand a verse: “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.” (James 2:10 ESV) For some reason the children’s book uses the UK edition of ESV, replacing the word “guilty” with “accountable.”

As you can guess, that’s a mouthful for a young kid. Rarely does he use the word “accountable,” much less read it at this age level. But hey, we are here to learn. And, the boys, amazingly, have little trouble understanding the concept.

If I tell you that I’ll pay you $10 to go out in the yard and pick up 100 sticks, would you do it? The boys say yes, and would like to go out right now and work on the project rather than sit in this room and work on this verse. And so I ask, “If you put in front of me a pile of sticks, and I count them, and there are only 99, do I owe you $10. They instantly understand that the “counting” matters (the core of the word “accountable”). I’m surprised that they have not suggested just breaking the longest stick in half and solving the problem, but that’s another article. And they get it. 100 means 100.

When mom bakes cookies and says, “Don’t eat the cookies!”, are you in trouble if you eat just one. The boys know. “Yes.” The more sophisticated among us might say that we didn’t eat cookies (pl.), just cookie (sg.), and mom should have said don’t eat any of the cookies if that’s what she meant. But the boys know that such sophistry will not fly with mom, nor with God.

The point, then, of the verse, is clear, though the memorizing and the saying of it, for 6 year olds, is quite a chore. And the point is vital. My condition before God as a sinner, which the Bible assures us is universal, is not due to the biggest, baddest sin that you or I have ever committed. And if you happen to have avoided certain big, bad sins, you are in no less peril. Since, for instance, that unnoticed offense of doing good from wrong motives or with a bad attitude can be the one failure that renders you guilty or accountable of violating the whole law. 

The point is not that I have to work harder to clean up the lesser messes, since I am clearly not even aware of all my failings as accurately measured by God’s law. No, the point is that I need a Savior who will pay my penalty and forgive all my sins. And that’s a point that 6 year old boys can grasp, and perhaps grasp better at than at 60, when we grow up into practices of parsing and sophistry.