Silence is Deafening

When my daughter was three, and when we were new to our neighborhood, she would play out front and yell across the street to the then eleven year old neighbor boy, "Do you know Jesus in your heart?" My wife and I would encourage her in this questionning, and it would continue until the boy made his way across the street to our front porch. Then, finally, she would ask in a more quiet tone, "Do you know Jesus in your heart?"

Though not a Gospel presentation, my daughter's question was an attempt to determine if this boy was a Christian. His response, day after day, was always the same, "I think so."

On one or two occasions, I would deepen the waters by explaining that "no one is perfect," and the boy would wholeheartedly agree. Then I would say that the only way to receive eternal life and gain entrance into the kingdom of heaven is to believe in Jesus as Savior. The boy was not a churchgoer, and he acknowledged that he didn't "know too much about the Bible." Strange. I hadn't even mentioned the Bible.

The bottomline is that, on these one or two occasions (out of the 20-30 days on which my daughter would ask the question), the boy would leave our front porch having heard the Gospel that Jesus died to save sinners and was raised from the dead for our justification (Romans 4:25), yet he responded with mere apathetic intellectual assent.

On the days since then, his answer to my daughter's question has not changed from, "I think so," despite my mention of 1 John 5:10-13 (...that you may know you have eternal life).

Here lies the problem. My daughter, now four, no longer asks the question. Has she forgotten? Has she been subconsciously disuaded by the boy's apathy? You know, I wish it were one of these, but I fear most that her cessation has resulted from my silence on the matter. You see, I've never asked the question to the boy, his parents, or any of our neighbors for that matter. Like father, like daughter. At age three, she would do as I said. She would be encouraged and yell across the street. But at age four, she would do as I do. And the silence is deafening.