God has placed within human nature a natural capacity to believe in Him—what theologian John Calvin called the “sensus divinitatis.” This innate ability to believe is most clearly seen in children, who trust God naturally without needing evidence or proof. When Jesus truly loves someone, as He did the rich young ruler, He offers them not just forgiveness or blessings, but the invitation to follow Him personally. The greatest expression of Christ’s love is His desire to share Himself and His mission with those who trust Him like children.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] Sometimes it’s helpful for us preachers to have a title of the message that you’re going to give, to give some ideas as to where it’s meant to be going. And the one that I’ve got given for this morning is, What Jesus Gives You When He Really Loves You? What does Jesus want to give you when he really loves you? And part of how we’re getting to that talk from the Scriptures is not only the passage we’ve looked at with regard to Jesus blessing the children, but also in the passage from Mark it follows up with one which is almost the exact opposite. In a sense, it’s about an adult who comes to Jesus and has trouble really clicking with Jesus, but the passage does say that Jesus loves him.

[00:00:58] And that’s the part that starts in the second part of the passage. Now, what we have here is Jesus talking about the children and how they are to be brought to him. And he displays, as he always does with children, that tremendous love for them. And there’s also a recognition by Jesus that there’s something that children have. There’s what he would long to see in all of us. And it has to do with what is faith. It has to do with the heart of belief, which is not something which is an effort on our behalf for which we should get a clap, but something that’s just natural to how God has made us. What lies behind this is an understanding of human nature as God has made it.

[00:01:56] You may not be aware, but I wrote a doctoral thesis which was about the facts, that there is within the human nature, human makeup, something that God has implanted in us, such that believing in him is natural. There are people who pontificate, who teach, who try and lead the intellectual side of humanity. Belief is something that you must do very carefully. If you were to go up to Mount Coot-tha, and before you get to go up the steeper parts, there’s that beautiful, it’s an astrodome, I’m not sure what the proper name is, but you can go in there and they give you the capacity to see the stars. And you can lean back and have a beautiful view of all the stars above. And there’s an announcement or there’s a commentary that runs parallel to what the pictures show you.

[00:03:02] And a part of what they often say there, and I don’t know whether they still do since the last time I went and had a look, is the idea that you don’t really have the right to believe any more than what you have the evidence for. That actually is a philosophical position which is called Evidentialism, and there are people who are Evidentialists philosophically, who are Christians, There are people who are evidentialists philosophically who are not Christians, either anti-Christian or agnostic or whatever. Part of what the idea of being an evidentialist is, is that the nature of belief is your evidence that you’ve tested and trusted. Now that’s not a bad idea for some parts of our life and it is the case that the government questions older fellows like me as to whether or not we have the eyesight to still keep

[00:04:07] our license and I’ve discovered that I had to go and get tests to prove that I could still see alright in order to get my license renewed. And that’s not a bad idea because I think we’d have an awful lot more crashes if you let all the older people go on driving when they really weren’t capable. Evidentialism has its place and in fact the Bible teaches all sorts of things about God and seeks to provide us with evidences. But what it doesn’t do is negate the fact that how God made the human being has within him a natural capacity to believe in God. John Calvin was a theologian who put that into words, he’s got Latin words, the census de vinatadis, it just means the sense of the divine, that is naturally within people’s

[00:05:04] hearts by creation. And while your humanity is operating naturally and while you don’t suppress that operation by your ideas yourself or by the society’s doctrines and dogmas, while you let yourself experience what the census de vinatadis, that sense of the divine, produces in you, believing in God is natural. And one of the ways you can see that operating is just look at little children. You don’t have to convince them about God, you might teach them about him a bit, but their belief in him is just natural. And that census de vinatadis though, can be suppressed. There was a very famous philosopher who wrote up what is talking about how you understand

[00:06:01] knowledge and where it comes from, that science of knowing and what you can know and what you can’t know. And he’s an expert in that, around the world probably the most leading philosopher still alive. And he’s the one who noticed John Calvin speaking about this natural way that people can believe. It doesn’t have to rest on evidences. You can believe naturally that’s what Jesus is picking up because he’s the one, the Bible tells us who lights every person coming into the world. He’s the person who is the author of not only future salvation, but he’s the author of existence

[00:06:43] and creation. He’s the one who made us in the first place. There isn’t anybody sitting here or me included who wasn’t made by Jesus Christ. He is the one through whom the Father made the whole of everything. He’s the one at whose word all the stellars, the constitutions, the stars all sprang into existence. He’s the one that even made what it is to have light and darkness. He actually made the light and the possibility of there being day and night before he made the sun and the moon to have our capacity to have them day and night distinguished. God said let there be light and there was light.

[00:07:27] And the Bible uses that as a metaphor of the fact that Jesus is the one who also is the one who makes life and light is a metaphor often in the scriptures about life and where there’s light you have life is actually true of within people who study plants, the necessity of light. For there to be life when you have a big rainforest, what happens or doesn’t happen down at the bottom of all the coverages with enough light all sorts of insects can’t exist and only some can. And some plants grow without as much light and others don’t. And all the trees seek to get up to where there’s the light, the canopy where the light is had within the leaves.

[00:08:09] If you could understand from biology just how much it speaks about the things that God has made and if you were to believe the scriptures, it would show you wonderful things and that’s what the Bible speaks about how creation speaks to us about the hand that’s made it. That hand is a person in the beginning was the word, the Bible says the word being the expression of the trilite, the expression of God, the outspokenness of God, the one who is the one that speaks on behalf of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This one he was in the beginning with God, the Father. He was the one who was with God, but he also was God. This Divine One, the Son, the eternal Son and he’s not just another version of the Father with a different face on but he is another entity. He’s a person. That’s why we talk about the three persons of the

[00:09:09] Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. When Jesus was baptized and he came up out of the water there was heard a voice. It was the voice, the Gospels tell us, of the Father and the voice said, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. If ever you wanted evidence that we have got a try in God though he be one God, there’s a Father who spoke and there’s a Son who pleased him and there’s a Holy Spirit that came upon him. In that moment, it is one of the revelations of the Scriptures about this one God in three persons that we worship. And this one God, the Father, loves the Son and sent the Son and the Son has a capacity to express that love and it happens in this story. Now let’s read it verse, we’ll go to verse 17, the second part of it, not the bit about the

[00:10:10] children but down the storyline that follows. It’s amazing that these two events are put alongside each other in our Gospels. And as he was sitting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. That was a pretty big hint. I don’t think the man picked it up but Jesus is God. It doesn’t mean that he is the Father, the Father is the Father and he’s the Son and the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit but they all share in what is our one God. You know the commandments, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not be a false witness, do not defraud, honor your father and mother. And he said to him,

[00:11:05] teacher, all these have I kept from my youth. And the next little bit, Jesus looking at him. Loved him. I don’t want you to get glide over that. Jesus loved him. Now what does it mean? I think Jesus loves everybody doesn’t he? The Bible tells us that God loves everybody, for God so loved the world. But what does it mean here to say Jesus looking at him loved him. I think he’s describing the sense of love in Jesus’ heart at this man as he hears him say that he’s been trying to keep the commandments. So point worth noting in the New Testament that Jesus loves it when we seek to follow what we’re meant to be doing when we obey the commandments, but what is also to be observed is that that’s not the total story nor is it the very most important thing.

[00:12:11] And Jesus says to Him, You lack one thing, one thing you don’t have, one thing you lack. Go and sell all that you have and give it to the poor and you’ll have treasure in heaven and come and follow Me. I meet people who try to make it a thing that, to be a Christian, you’ve got to give away all of your money. missing the point. Jesus didn’t say this to everybody. He did say it to this fellow who had a problem with his awareness of all of his money and giving him all the comfort because he was rich. He said this to this man, but what they also don’t miss is that Jesus is not underlining about the money as much as he wants the man to be free to come and follow him. And when Jesus really loves you, do you know what he’d try and help you to do? He’s

[00:13:05] learned just to follow him. He’s in the business of calling people to come and know him and he’s in the business of wanting to enable us to learn step by step to follow him. And that’s the most important thing. And all the fact of needing to learn to be obedient to Jesus and to walk with him is not like a burden that somehow some poor religious people get put on their shoulders and oh boy, I wish I was free to go and do my own thing. That’s just a sinful ignorance. Know when Jesus gives his best to the people he loves, he’s calling them to follow him. The nature of love is that love doesn’t just want to do things for the person. Love wants to give yourself to them. And the Jesus who died on the cross and paid for your sins, he did what was necessary for you to be forgiven. But the heart of his love is not just to do that for you, but it is to clear the way of your guilt and your sin that you could come to him

[00:14:18] so he can love you. When you love someone you don’t just want to do things for them. You want to give yourself to them. And Jesus saw him trying his hardest. This is one thing you lack, Get rid of all the monies’ trust, just come and follow me. The emphasis of what he was opening up as possibility for that man was the joy and the wonder of following Jesus. He becomes the reward of following him. I want to tell you the Christian life is the most exciting, the most wonderful. I want to tell you that though it has its difficulties and you sometimes get into trouble Some people might persecute you, in our country not yet, but there are lots of difficulties we have being Christians amongst a group of people who don’t like the commandments of

[00:15:13] Jesus but nonetheless that’s not the biggest part of it all. The biggest part is him and when he begins to manifest himself to you there is such a joy. Don’t pity the missionaries these people who go overseas and you think those poor things and we stupid church people send them out and use tea leaves, tea bags, think we are doing them a good turn, don’t send your news tea bags, they are not really wanted. But anyway that’s another point. But the thing is that don’t pity the missionaries, envy them because God gave them some way to be especially, not everybody is called to be a missionary, but those that are have a special opportunity to live out following Jesus because listen, Jesus is the first missionary.

[00:16:13] He came from heaven. He came to rescue us and the missionaries who go, go because they are emulating him and they are letting his searching out for lost people work through them. He’s sharing his wonderful mission with us. There is nothing more spectacular, there’s nothing more joyful, there’s nothing that gives you a bigger kick when suddenly something happens and you get put alongside someone on an airplane and they start talking about things and you tell them about Jesus. I like bus stops for that reason. I learnt that trick from a fellow in Adelaide who was a student in my dad’s college and he was a personal evangelist par excellence. He used to go into the Adelaide railway station and he took me along one day. I led my first person to

[00:17:11] Christ on the Adelaide railway station being tutored by this bloke. But what his trick was that he looked up and he looked down … I don’t know if they still do it, but they used to have what you call platform tickets that you had to get… You looked up and saw on the electronic board where your train would come in and you’d buy a platform ticket to to sit in where that part was. But it also gave the information when the train was coming. And he’d look up and see, aha, all those people sitting on platform four are waiting for a train that won’t be here for 45 minutes. They’ve got nothing to do.

[00:17:53] And he’d go down and talk to them about Christ. And he took me down there doing that. And he got talking to this bloke, a young man. And as he’s talking, he suddenly told me to stay aside for a bit. And I was over by a wall watching what he was doing. I was meant to learn from him. And then he called me to come over. As I walked over, he says this is Jimmy, which I was told back then.

[00:18:16] He’s taking over. And then that bloke walked off. My friend walked off. And I’m standing there. And I’ve never done this before. And I’ve never led anybody to Christ before. But the fellow became a Christian and came back to the student’s church and subsequently got baptized and joined in. I was so stoked. What a joy! Jesus is in the business of showing his love to people.

[00:18:48] And when he enlists you to play a little part, I think the other guy did most of the talking, although I just finished it up, but I played a little part, and I’ve been stoked ever since. That when Jesus shares his ministry with you, he’s actually sharing the seat of his love. He’s sharing the purpose of his endeavor and mission, and it’s the greatest privilege in all the world. One of the reasons of church life, people of the church always amazing folk, and they get summoned into little jobs, they seem to be doing a lot, and they have a lot of their time taken up and there’s extra things that are put on.

[00:19:42] You might be singing with the people over here, but now you’ve got to practice after Church. This sort of happens, and there’s all sorts of things that occur, But do you know that there’s such a joy of being in God’s church and knowing that He’s using you? And the more mature you get as a Christian and the more you know Jesus, the more you understand that He gives His best to those who follow close on. Jesus wants you to know that He loves you and He loves this fellow. But you know when He told him to go and get rid of his trust in possessions and just come and follow him, the fellow went away sorrowful because he had a lot of money. He missed out. I just want to share with you the fact that I know by experiment of watching my own parents and then myself,

[00:20:51] giving myself over to this joy of being involved somewhere in God’s program. Sometimes you don’t have much money, sometimes you do. Sometimes you have a great rich enrichment with people. Do you know when I went to study to get prepared to be in the ministry? Something like 30 years ago, it’s so long back I can’t even get the figures straight. But I met a group of people with whom I had prayer and we became close. And do you know I’m vital to my wedding which happens about five years later in Sydney. They flew out. They paid their own fees. They flew out. I got them driving the cars. These three American boys had a bit of trouble about what side of the road to drive on.

[00:21:49] But Michelle got there in the end. And one of them contacted me and said he goes around the world and giving out tracts of winning people to Christ. He had some financial sustenance. He’s got rich relatives. Some of them have got oil wells and stuff. But he spends his time travelling the world. He says, I want to come and see you. And he came to give me a visit and the fellowship we had over there all that time back has not dissipated. There is a great joy. There’s a great comradeship. There’s a great wonderful thing. I’ve had some of the most blessed times of my life involved in Christian projects. Beach missions that make you exceedingly tired because you get up at six o’clock and work like slaves all day long and you’ve paid your own money to do it. But you have the joy of seeing the gospel get through to people. Beach missions are fantastic. Well Christian camps where you likewise are involved in giving of yourself and sometimes you get people telling you you didn’t do it too well.

[00:23:04] You’ve got to put up with those that don’t agree with how you do it. Then you run back to Jesus and find out whether he likes how you do it. I want to tell you with that little exchange that happens when I get with Christ it isn’t whether he likes what I do. It is me telling him that I like what he does. And it’s a fantastic thing to be involved in this life’s adventure of following Jesus and discovering that he gives the best of his love to the ones who so volunteer. It doesn’t mean you all should become missionaries. It means you should all ask Jesus what he wants you to do in following him. And this story line immediately after about the children is very commentative. Commentating, I’m not sure of my English, about the very nature of faith. Because the thing about those little kitties is it’s natural to them when they’re little. Often they only get their problems of is this true is it not when they’re getting older.

[00:24:20] But faith is the sort of thing that doesn’t come because it rests on your wisdom. There’s something that is instinctual to the human heart to believe God. And that philosopher I told you about, he wrote and I did my PhD dissertation about his ideas. And my history professor, philosopher, fella down at Macquarie Uni wanted me to find case studies of this census divinitatis turning up in philosophical history or history of people’s ideas. And I had to find six case studies right from all the Christian things. I limited it to the Western church. And I found six times where we often worded differently because it’s in very philosophical dress. But the same idea kept coming out. And my thesis was that if it keeps coming out it’s because it’s there. At least it’s historical evidence that the possibility of there being a census divinitatis is actually the truth. So I had six different people. But the last one I picked was that very philosopher and Alvin Plantinga, he’s in his 80s now he’s still alive.

[00:25:42] And I wrote up about him and I went to town on him because I’d studied him mostly and it was his ideas that sponsored all of this, how he copied John Calvin. And when I wrote up about him my supervisor who was a very learned man said I can’t, it’s a bit above my head. And he wasn’t sure what he’d do being supervisor because he didn’t want to let it go through and get criticized by other people if it was not right. So he telephoned or emailed I think Alvin Plantinga and said well you’d be one of Jim’s markers. And he said he gladly was and he did and I passed. And that is something which is now I’ve discovered in Apologetics, one of the leading ideas. He started a whole train of thinking that got dubbed as Reformed Apologetics. But it’s not one that relies on you have to have any evidence and you don’t have any right to believe anything more than what you’ve got the evidence for. It relies on that it’s natural to believe in God and he had a second step in it that the Holy Spirit that the Bible speaks about helps you to believe. And those two ways, one because the human heart’s been made to believe and two because the Holy Spirit can bring you a conviction.

[00:27:02] I want to finish with one verse which is from the great faith chapter in the book of Hebrews. You probably heard about the chapter about all the people who had faith. The first two verses talk about the nature of faith. Faith is the assurance, thing that makes you convinced of things expected or hopeful. There word hope means things you believe are going to happen but you don’t know the evidence. Faith is what gives you the assurance. There is some spiritual, it says it’s a conviction of things not seen. If someone says to you, I can’t believe it, if I don’t see it, they don’t know that faith will be the answer to that because by having a trusting what God says, there’s something of the human heart that resonates with the voice of God,

[00:27:53] He’s the one who’s voice when He speaks, you somehow know He’s getting through because He made you and he’s the God of all the world and when He speaks something in us knows it’s God. And when he speaks, you either believe or you don’t believe.’ The Gospel comes with power, just like this, that when people hear the message of how Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he came into the world with a purpose taking on humanity, that he might qualify to pay for our sins and to go to the cross and bear our sins and suffer the wrath of the Father on him for your sins and mine. Because of how Jesus has dealt with your sins, you can be forgiven, you can come to God, come to Jesus. You don’t have to stay away in fear. Come to Jesus because he loves you, he died for you. And when you come to him and you feel faint and unable to be a Christian, he knows that. Just ask his help. He wants to help you.

[00:29:00] The conviction of things unseen and that Christian life that might have seemed to you is completely impossible. Jesus can make it work for you. And faith is when you, like a little child, just start trusting him. I’ll finish with one last little illustration. I used to do Bible studies in different places that I got invited to do and there was a woman who worked in high schools voluntarily getting, setting up Christian little study groups. And she was like a personal evangelist who tried to win the teenagers to Christ. And then she started a Bible study in her home. She used to get me to come along and speak at it. There’d be informal Bible studies. I was 18, 19. So she found that handy. But she had a husband who was doing his PhD. He was not a Christian. He respected his wife. She was one of those women who got tremendous courage and get up and go. And so he didn’t stop what she was doing, but he used to sit in the

[00:30:13] background and he’d either smoke a cigar or a pipe and that was like his flag saying, I’m listening and seeing what you’re doing, but he didn’t go along with it. But he listened to the gospel and he came to Christ. And you can be someone who’s studying at the highest level like he was. He was a brainy man, but he had to trust Jesus. Now, they had a little child. A little child in that age of two, two or whatever. They had a neighbour that they were trying to talk to after he became a Christian. Both he and she tried to win the neighbour. The neighbour wasn’t interested. One day the child was out in the front yard and he began to swing on the gate while the neighbour was cutting flowers and stuffs. And the little boy started singing,

[00:31:10] Jesus loves me. This I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong. They are weak, but he is strong. And the lady of the house, the high school helper, the lady I told you of came out. And she overheard her little son singing to the man. And she didn’t know whether he’d get angry and thought that she’d send him out to do it.

[00:31:44] So she came over ready to not apologize, but try and help the scene. And the man says, don’t worry. He does a lot better than you do. Because the little child had captured the truth. There’s something innate in believing in God. There’s something wonderful about the good news of the love of Jesus. And in that song that the little kid sang, the man got the message.

[00:32:15] I don’t know whether he became a Christian or not, but he told the mother he does better than you do. Can I encourage you to understand from this Bible passage that the God that loves children and understands how they just naturally believe is the God that sent his son and who wants to love you in a special way when you learn to believe in him. Let’s have a word of prayer. Oh, Father, I think I do know why this passage moves me.

[00:32:59] It’s that little comment that when the man told of all the things he was trying to do to get eternal life and Jesus was telling him that he lacks one more important thing, the Bible tells us that Jesus loved him and said, come, follow me. And, Father, my prayer this morning is that Jesus will be speaking to hearts, and he’ll call some from this morning to ask to follow him. May they sometime during the day recognize this Jesus and reply to him in a way that he wants to hear, we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.