S. P. C. K. Sermons Luke 2:40 And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was on him. Notice a few things which are remarkable in our Lord's Childhood, and which are too often wanting in that of others. 1. His obedience to His earthly parents. 2. A childhood of privacy and seclusion. He was kept in the background, not paraded by His parents as an instance of precocious excellence or intellect. He drank in the pure breezes of heaven, and was in secret. 3. A genuine thirst for improvement (ver. 46, &c.). How unlike that raging appetite for mere amusement which begins in our days so early, and has turned the very literature of the young into a jest and plaything. What we seek is something to make us laugh, something which may present to us the ludicrous side of everything, and turn away from us the real and the sobering. What Christ sought at the age of twelve years was knowledge, and He sought that knowledge in the courts of His Father's house. 4. A spirit of docility. He sought knowledge even from men little qualified, indeed, to impart it, but who yet occupied the position to which it belonged to teach. 5. Christ's childhood was stamped with a sense of duty, and elevated by a lofty aim. A sense of His relation to God, of the meaning and responsibility of life, of a work to be done on God's earth in which He was Himself to be a fellow-worker with His Father — these motives had already dawned upon Him at that young age, and gave an unwonted seriousness to a childhood in all else so natural. 6. Notice the testimony which Christ's childhood bears to God's patience in working out His purposes; to what we may call the gradual character of God's works. "In due time" is written upon all of them. 7. Our Lord's early life was the consecration, for all time, of what are regarded, by way of distinction, as the more secular and the humbler callings. (S. P. C. K. Sermons.) Parallel Verses KJV: And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him. |
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