mouths of babes

chapter one

let no man despise thy youth

The warrant comes first, the permission the young are so often told they do not have, because the Word of God gives it plainly and I want it settled before we take up anything harder.

Paul wrote that to Timothy, a young man he had set over a church full of people older than himself, and it is a striking thing to say. He does not tell Timothy to wait until his hair goes grey before he opens his mouth. He tells him not to let anyone hold his youth against him, and then he tells him how to make the objection melt away, which is not by arguing but by living, by being an example so plainly godly that a man would be ashamed to sneer at it. The point is not that the young are wiser than the old. The point is that youth, all by itself, is not a disqualification from carrying a true thing, and the Lord has never once been shy about proving it.¹

Look at how often He has done it. Samuel was only a boy, sleeping in the house of the Lord, when the word of God came to him in the night, and it came to him precisely because old Eli, the priest whose eyes had grown dim, had gone deaf to it. The Lord passed by the seasoned man and spoke to the child, and the child had to carry a hard word back to the old man in the morning. David was the youngest of all his brothers, left with the sheep because no one thought to call him in, and while the grown men of Israel stood frozen and trembling before the giant, it was the boy who saw plainly what the Lord could do and went and did it. Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign and still a young man when he tore down the idols his elders had bowed to for a lifetime. Daniel and his friends were youths in a foreign court when they held a line that older and wiser-seeming men had already surrendered. And a young girl named Mary, barely more than a child by our reckoning, carried the Lord of glory in her own body and sang a song that the church has not stopped singing in two thousand years.²

Youth, all by itself, is not a disqualification from carrying a true thing, and the Lord has never once been shy about proving it.

So do not let anyone tell you, and do not tell yourself, that a young person has nothing true to say until the calendar says otherwise. That is not the biblical picture. Truth does not check your age at the door. When the Lord has given a young soul something out of His Word, that soul may speak it, plainly and humbly, to the young and to the old alike, and the grey-headed man who will not hear a true thing merely because a young mouth said it has a problem of his own that we will name honestly in its place. The warrant is real. Hold it. But do not hold it by itself for even one page, because the very next thing Paul said to that same young man is the thing that keeps this warrant from turning into a disaster.

chapter two

not a novice

For here is the other blade, and it is in the same apostle’s hand, aimed at the same young person, and if you take up the first word without this one you will do real harm, most of all to yourself. When Paul laid out who ought to be set into the leadership of a church, he put in a warning built specifically for the young and the eager.

A novice. The Greek word is neophutos, and it means literally newly planted, a seedling, a thing only just put into the ground. You can hear our own word neophyte inside it. And Paul’s reasoning is worth slowing down over, because he does not say the novice must wait merely because he lacks information, as though the trouble were only that he has not read enough yet. He says the danger is that he will be lifted up with pride and fall. The peril of the newly planted is not mainly in the head. It is in the heart. It is that a young soul handed responsibility too soon swells with it, and the swelling is the very thing that topples him.³

And this is the truth about youth that the young can almost never see in themselves, though they can see it plainly enough in each other: youth comes bundled with a drive, a confidence, an energy and a certainty, that arrives years before the judgment needed to govern it. The strength shows up first. The wisdom to aim the strength shows up later, if it shows up at all, and it shows up slowly. So the young man is handed a powerful engine and no brakes and a road he has never driven, and he feels, sincerely, entirely ready, and that very feeling of readiness is itself part of the danger of the arrangement.

The strength shows up first. The wisdom to aim it shows up later, and it shows up slowly.

So hold this beside the last chapter and do not drop either one. Being right about a thing and being ready to lead on it are two different arrivals, and they do not come on the same train. A young person may see a true thing clearly, truly clearly, and still not yet have the seasoning to be trusted with the weight of acting on it alone, and there is no shame in that; it is simply what being newly planted means. The seedling is not a failed tree. It is a real and living thing at the beginning of a long and slow becoming, and the worst thing you can do to a seedling is demand it bear a full harvest in its first spring. It will not strengthen the plant. It will snap it.

chapter three

youth and age, and why you get one

Underneath the whole booklet lies one plain fact of how God made a human life, and once you see it you will understand why the young and the old are forever talking past each other.

Read that slowly, because in a single verse it hands you the whole architecture. There are two goods here, and notice that they are given to two different people at two different seasons of life, and notice that the Holy Spirit does not treat this as a problem to be fixed but as a design to be understood. The glory of the young is strength, energy, drive, the capacity to do and build and go and endure. The beauty of the old is the grey head, which is not merely hair gone white but everything the white hair stands for, the wisdom and the judgment and the settled knowing that only a long life under God can grow. Two goods. Two seasons. And here is the part that aches: you do not get both at once.

This is the quiet grief underneath so much of human life, and it is worth naming honestly rather than pretending it away. The young have the strength and lack the wisdom. The old have the wisdom and have spent the strength. Everyone, in his heart, wants both at the same time, wants to be able to do all that youth can do with all that age has learned, and that particular combination is simply not on offer this side of the fall. When you are young enough to have the energy to change the world, you do not yet have the wisdom to know how, or whether you should, or what it will cost. And by the time the wisdom has come, the knees have gone, and the very strength that would have carried the wisdom into action has quietly drained away. It is one of the surest marks that we live in a fallen and broken world, this cruel little law that the two things we most need together are handed to us apart, and never at the same time.

For it was not always so, and it will not always be so. In the garden, before the fall, there was no such thing as the body wearing out while the soul grew wise; there was no decay at all, no clock running down, and whatever the accumulating of wisdom would have looked like in an unfallen world, it would never have cost a man his strength to gain it. And the very word Scripture keeps using for old age tells you which way God means us to see it, for the grey head, the hoary head, is called in the Proverbs not a burden and not a decline but a crown, a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness. The world sees age as the thing that takes your strength. Scripture sees it as the thing that finally hands you the crown.⁴

The two things we most need together are handed to us apart, and never at the same time. That is the fall, written into the shape of a life.

So what is the answer, if no single person is ever given both at once? The answer is that God never meant them to live in one person. He meant them to be joined across two, the strength of the young married to the wisdom of the old, the grey head directing what the strong hands are still able to do. That is the whole design, and it is why the generations were meant to be knit tightly together and not sealed off from one another in their separate camps. The young were built to be aimed by the old. The old were built to be carried out by the young. Pull those two apart and you cripple them both, and that is very nearly what our own age has managed to do.

chapter four

rehoboam

The whole of this was lived out once in a single story, one of the most sobering in all the Scripture, the textbook case of a young man who had this exact choice set before him and chose wrong, and a kingdom paid for it forever.

When Solomon died, his son Rehoboam came to be made king, and the people came to him with a reasonable request. Your father laid a heavy yoke on us, they said; lighten it a little, and we will gladly serve you. And Rehoboam, newly come to the throne, did a wise-looking thing: he asked for counsel before he answered. He went first to the old men, the ones who had stood before his father Solomon while Solomon lived, and asked them what he should do.

There is wisdom, grey-headed wisdom, the fruit of long years of watching how power and people actually work. Serve them, and they will serve you. Bend a little now, and you will hold their hearts for a lifetime. It was the counsel of men who had seen a great deal and had nothing left to prove. But Rehoboam did not like it, because it did not flatter his strength, and so he did a second thing that looked like diligence and was in fact the search for a better answer than the true one. He went and asked the young men.

And mark who they were, for the text is careful to tell us: the young men that were grown up with him, that stood before him. His own generation. His friends. The ones who thought as he thought and wanted what he wanted and would tell him what he was already hoping to hear. And they told him to do the opposite of the old men entirely, to answer the people with a boast and a threat, to tell them that his little finger would be thicker than his father’s loins, that where his father had used whips he would use scorpions.

He forsook the counsel of the old men and took the counsel of his own generation, and the kingdom tore in two, and it never healed.

And the kingdom tore in two that very day, and it never healed. Ten tribes walked away and never came back, and the split that began in that one room ran on through the rest of the Old Testament like a crack through a wall. Now hear the thing carefully, because it is the whole point. The young men were not villains. They were not wicked schemers. They were simply young, confident, loyal to their own, and wrong, wrong in the ordinary way the young are wrong, which is not by malice but by never having lived long enough to know better. And Rehoboam preferred them precisely because they said what his strength wanted to hear. He did not lack counsel; the good counsel was right there in the room, offered first, plainly spoken. He despised the grey head and reached for the voice of his own generation because it flattered him, and it cost him half of everything. That is what the second chapter warned about, wearing a crown and sitting on a throne. That is a novice, lifted up, falling.⁵

chapter five

the handoff that broke

Bring this down out of the ancient story and into our own day, because the design we saw in the twentieth chapter of Proverbs, the strength of the young joined to the wisdom of the old, has been quietly broken in our time, and broken at both ends at once, and a great deal of what ails the young and the old alike traces straight back to it.

God’s arrangement for handing wisdom down the generations is written all over the Scripture, and it is astonishingly hands-on. The old were to teach the young, deliberately, personally, face to face. Hear how the apostle lays it out for the church, in the letter to Titus, where the word he uses for what the older women are to do is sophronizo, to train, to school, to bring the younger to soundness of mind.

And it runs the other way through the whole of Scripture as well, the command to teach a child the Lord’s words when they sat in the house and walked by the way and lay down and rose up, the one generation telling the next the works of God so that a third generation not yet born would know them too. It was never meant to be an occasional lecture. It was meant to be the constant, close, daily pouring of the old life into the young one, the whole household and the whole church knit together across the ages of the people in it.⁶

Now look at what we have instead. The handoff is broken at the top, because a great many of the old, in our comfortable age, have quietly retired from the task altogether. Not merely from their jobs, which is one thing, but from the teaching, having decided that their later years are a reward to be spent on their own leisure and ease rather than a harvest of wisdom to be spent on the generations coming up behind them. The grey head, which Scripture calls a crown and appoints to teach, too often takes itself off to its own pursuits and leaves the young untaught. And the handoff is broken at the bottom too, because the young, finding no one ahead of them pouring in the wisdom, do not therefore sit quietly and wait. They cannot. They are young, and they are full of that God-given drive and strength we have already named, and it has to go somewhere, so they rush headlong into the vacuum and take up things they are in no way ready to carry, with all the energy in the world and none of the seasoning, and no grey head anywhere near to aim them.

The old have vacated the teaching, and the young have rushed into the vacuum, and the wisdom that was meant to flow downhill simply pools at the top and is lost.

Do you see what has happened? Both halves of the design have quit their post. The old have vacated the teaching, and the young have rushed into the vacuum, and so the wisdom that was meant to flow downhill from age to strength simply pools at the top and is lost, or never gets poured at all, and every fresh generation is left to relearn by its own hard falls what could have been handed to it gently across a table. It is a tremendous waste. A whole treasury of hard-won wisdom goes into the grave with each generation of the old, while the young a few feet away reinvent the same painful mistakes their grandparents could have spared them, and the two never quite meet in the middle where God meant them to.

chapter six

chronological snobbery

Now I must turn and speak straight to my own, to the young, and name a sin we are peculiarly prone to and almost never notice in ourselves, because it hides so well under the flattering name of progress. It is the quiet, settled assumption that newer is wiser. That because a thing is old it is therefore behind us, and because we come after, we come above. That the men and women of the past were simply less enlightened than we are, and that the direction of time is the same as the direction of truth.

There is a name for that reflex; a wise man of the last century called it chronological snobbery, the uncritical belief that whatever is out of date is on that account discredited. And it is everywhere among the young, this notion that the old teachers, the old books, the old saints, were dear enough in their day but have surely been outgrown by now, that we stand on a higher rung simply by having been born later. It feels like sophistication. It is nothing of the kind. It is not being ahead. It is in fact one of the purest forms of pride there is, and it is pride aimed, of all directions, backward, at people who cannot answer, most of whom knew things we have entirely forgotten.⁷

The young soul most certain he has outgrown the past is nearly always the one who has read the least of it.

And here is the irony that ought to stop a young person cold: the one most confident he has outgrown the wisdom of the past is very nearly always the one who has actually read the least of it. He has not weighed the old saints and found them wanting; he has simply never read them, and mistaken his ignorance of them for having surpassed them. For if he did go back and read, he would find something humbling waiting for him. He would find men and women who spent whole lifetimes on their knees over the very Book we skim, who could read the Scriptures in the very tongues they were written in, who thought more deeply about God before breakfast than we manage in a week, and who were tested and refined by hardships that would flatten most of us inside a month. They are worth ten of the loudest voices of our own moment, precisely because time has tested them and they have lasted, while most of what is loud today will be gone and forgotten inside a generation.

So I will say to my own generation what I most need to hear myself: go back. Read the ones who came before. Sit at the feet of the seasoned and the dead, the teachers and preachers and saints whom time has already sifted, and let them correct you, because they will, and you need it, and I need it. The fact that they are old is not a strike against them; it is very nearly a credential, for it means they have already been weighed by the years in a way that no living voice, however clever, has yet had the chance to be. Newer is not wiser. Very often newer is simply younger, and we have already seen what youth is, and what it is not.

chapter seven

earn your stripes

So what, then, is a young person actually to do with all of this? If the warrant is real but the danger is real too, if youth may carry a true word but must not be lifted up into ruin, if wisdom cannot be had except by the slow growing of years, then what is the young soul to do in the meantime, today, while the years have not yet done their work? The answer is the least fashionable word in the language, and the truest, and I will not dress it up. You must earn your stripes. There is no other way, and there was never meant to be.

For wisdom is not downloaded; it is grown. It cannot be handed across in an afternoon like a set of facts, because it was never merely a set of facts; it is the slow, deep knowing that only comes from having lived, and failed, and been corrected, and gotten up, and tried again, under God, over years. There is no shortcut, no seminar, no book, not even this one, that can pour thirty years of seasoning into a soul that has only lived twenty. The Lord grows wisdom the way He grows an oak, slowly, ring by ring, through seasons of sun and seasons of storm, and the young soul who demands to be an oak by Tuesday has misunderstood what kind of thing an oak even is.

Hear what the writer says there, for it is the whole thing in one line. The mature, the ones able to take the strong meat, got that way by reason of use, by exercise, by long practice, the senses trained over time to tell good from evil the way a seasoned hand tells by feel what a beginner has to stop and measure. There is no arriving at that except by the going. And so the young person’s task is not to manufacture a wisdom he does not yet have, nor to pretend to it, which fools no one and endangers everyone. His task is to submit to the process: to sit under those who are ahead of him, to receive correction without sulking, to serve long before he leads, to do the small and unglamorous and unnoticed work faithfully, and to let the Lord do the slow thing He is doing, in His own time, without trying to tear the fruit off the branch before it is ripe.⁸

Submit yourself now, in the low place, and He will lift you in due time. The exalting is His to do, and the timing is His to choose.

There is the whole posture, and there is the promise folded inside it. Submit yourself now, take the low place gladly, be clothed with humility, and God Himself will exalt you in due time, in His time and not in yours. The young soul who grabs at the exalting before its season, who insists on the grey head’s authority while he still has the seedling’s roots, gets Rehoboam’s end. But the one who is willing to wait, to serve, to be taught, to grow slowly under the mighty hand of God, gets something far better: he becomes, in time, the very thing the next generation will need. The one who was poured into becomes the one who pours out. The seedling becomes the oak that the young can sit under. And the broken handoff we spoke of, that whole sorrowful waste of wisdom lost between the generations, begins to be mended, one faithful young soul at a time, who was humble enough to earn his stripes and then stayed near enough to hand them on.

So take the true thing God has given you and carry it, plainly and without shrinking, to the young and the old alike; the warrant is real and you need not despise your own youth. But carry it low to the ground, pointing always away from yourself and toward the ones who taught you, sitting under the seasoned and the dead, waiting on the Lord’s slow and certain work, refusing to grab for the crown of a grey head you have not yet earned. Hold both. That is the whole of it. And the Lord, who has all the time there is, will grow you into everything you are trying too fast to already be.