A little boy, with sad heart and tearful eyes, wended his way out into the field and sat down on a log where he thought no one would see or hear. “All these things I have been told about Santa Claus are only lies … and stork’s don’t bring babies at all … I wonder if there’s any truth in what they tell me about Jesus.”
Reader, this little boy was not the writer of these lines, but he has my deepest sympathy. I barely escaped a thrashing as a boy of ten for telling my younger brothers and sisters there was no truth in the Santa Claus story. Do you suppose I ever regained the respect I lost for my father through that incident?
As I remember my past experience, I think I would have been saved at a very early age had it not been for the lies told me in the name of Christianity.
This little boy continued to muse on his mental and spiritual disaster, “Papa and mamma tell me lies about Santa, and about babies, and about many other things; but if l tell them a lie, I get a whipping … I wonder how old little boys must be before it is right for them to tell lies. What is there so wicked about being born that papa and mamma must lie about it?”
There is never any reason for telling lies to children or for treating them in such a manner as to give them a horror of sacred things.
Do you wonder that your children grow up without faith in Christ when you tell them lies? If you are to prudish to tell your children the truth about the origin of life, why tell them a lie? They will find out sometime, and usually from a morally degrading source, and then their confidence in you is destroyed.
The Lord Jesus said, “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea” (Mark 9:42). In view of this solemn passage, I plead with you, “Don’t lie to the children.”
Christian parents, God has given you the blessed privilege of training your children so that they will want to know Him and be saved as soon as they are old enough to understand the Gospel. Don’t give them such a false conception of God that they will want nothing to do with Him. How solemn then is your responsibility to so live before them that they will not get a false conception of Him and be lost.