A child who loves God will progressively grow in true obedience to parents—generally quick to obey (without the persistent eyeroll, sigh, or stomp) because he or she desires to please the Lord. This child (though certainly not perfectly) will show honor for his or her parents through facial and vocal responses, as well as actions, in an increasingly God-pleasing manner.

Christian parents have the responsibility and privilege to bring their children up “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6:1–4). One of the challenges—perhaps the most difficult—is teaching our children not only to obey, but also to love God.
Children who grow up in Christian homes and churches are somewhat similar to children who grew up in the covenant community of Israel. Jewish parents were to circumcise their sons at eight days old as a sign of the covenant between God and Israel. They were to love God themselves and teach God’s word to their children.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut 6:4-9; cf. Deut 11:18-21)
God also required that each Israelite born into the covenant “circumcise” his heart through personal faith evidenced by love for God and obedience to his word.
And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good? Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn. (Deut 10:12-16)
As New Testament believers, with the law having been put aside (cf. Gal 3:23–29), we are not required to circumcise our sons. The New Testament does not require any rite that places our unbelieving children in the “church community.” Only a believer with a credible profession of faith and repentance is baptized and added to the church in the New Testament.
And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”. . . . So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2:38, 41-42)
The difference between the Old Testament covenant community and the New Testament church is clear. But the similarities in bringing up children in both of these contexts are notable. In both, parents love God, and they teach their children about God and their responsibility to love and obey him as well.
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Two themes dominate the hymn the Tongans sang 160 Pentecosts ago: the universal reach of Jesus’s reign, and the unrivaled blessings of that reign. The risen Christ is on the move, undeterred until his blessed foot treads every coastland and continent, every inland and island, from Israel to England to Tonga. The Tongans sang because Christ’s reign had reached even them, and because his was the kind of reign to make one sing.

On Pentecost Sunday 1862, as Western eyes watched civil war rip through America, an event just as momentous unfolded half a world away, hidden from every headline. Some five thousand men and women, many of them former cannibals, gathered on a South Pacific island to worship Jesus Christ.
George Tupou I, the first Christian king of Tonga, had assembled his citizens as part of a ceremony commemorating a new code of laws. And there, “under the spreading branches of the banyan trees,” writes George John Stevenson, with the king surrounded by “old chiefs and warriors who had shared with him the dangers and fortunes of many a battle,” five thousand voices sang,
Jesus shall reign where e’re the sunDoes his successive journeys run;His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,Till moons shall wax and wane no more.
For centuries, the sun had run from east to west, the moon had waxed and waned, over a Tonga without Christ. His gospel had not yet reached Tonga’s shores; his kingdom had not yet touched Tongan hearts. But now, a new nation rose to sing his reign.
First Missionary Hymn
Although the words were not in the Tongans’ mother tongue (the song having been taught to them by Methodist missionaries), few lyrics could have described the situation in Tonga more fittingly. For by 1862, the hymn told their history.
“Christ’s Kingdom Among the Gentiles” — or, more commonly today, “Jesus Shall Reign” — has been labeled by some “the first missionary hymn.” Almost a century before the modern missionary movement, before William Carey sailed to India, and Adoniram Judson to Burma, and Hudson Taylor to China, and Methodist missionaries to Tonga, the English minister Isaac Watts (1674–1748) penned a hymn of Christ’s coming reign: a reign that would reach islands far beyond Britain and gather tongues far different from English.
To look out over unreached lands and sing “Jesus shall reign” is always a cry of faith, but Watts needed far more faith than we do today. The mustard seed of the kingdom had grown large by 1719 (when Watts published the hymn), but its branches had not yet spread far beyond the Western world (Matthew 13:31–32). It was not the kind of tree we see today, sheltering multitudes of peoples far south and east of Europe and North America.
Nevertheless, Watts knew his Bible — and in particular, he knew Psalm 72, of which “Jesus Shall Reign” is a Christian paraphrase. And so, by faith he sang of the day when “the whole earth [would] be filled with his glory” (Psalm 72:19).
Song in the South Seas
Two themes dominate the hymn the Tongans sang 160 Pentecosts ago: the universal reach of Jesus’s reign, and the unrivaled blessings of that reign.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, March 24, 2023
The difference between my protesters and those berating Judge Duncan is this: Mine had not lost sight of the fact that they and I both share a common humanity. Nor had they lost sight of the purpose of public discourse: to persuade opponents to change their views for the better, not to terrify them into silence. Why has this become such a rarity in our modern world? One argument is that we have coddled the younger generation and made them incapable of handling any views with which they disagree.

Many First Things readers are no doubt sadly aware of the disgusting treatment of federal judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School last week. Duncan was visiting campus to give a lecture sponsored by the Stanford Federalist Society. But his talk was disrupted by students who heckled him for his rulings on LGBT issues. Not only was Duncan subject to the now-traditional vile personal abuse from the pampered students who inhabit the lecture rooms of the nation’s most elite institutions, he was also treated to a lecture by the dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion (who else?) on what an evil person he is. While Stanford’s president has since apologized, it remains to be seen if the apology for allowing behavior inconsistent with the school’s policies will lead to the obvious consequence: the firing of the DEI dean for her own bizarre rant. If a senior administrator who so clearly undermines school policy is allowed to continue in office, the apology is meaningless.
Student protests and threats to speakers are not a new thing. There were student strikes at the universities of Oxford and Paris in the thirteenth century. Martin Luther, arriving in Leipzig to debate John Eck in 1519, surrounded himself with an armed cortège of Wittenberg students, anticipating trouble (or perhaps hoping to precipitate such) with the locals. Nineteenth-century Russia witnessed a surge in student radicalism. Dostoevsky’s The Devils provides a literary portrait of such, and the close connection between the term “intelligentsia” and revolutionary politics reflects this period. 1968 was not so much a novelty as a particularly intense example of a tradition. What Judge Duncan experienced at Stanford, while disgusting, is no innovation.
Yet protests do not always need to be obnoxious, like the one at Stanford. Some weeks ago I was myself subject to a protest while speaking at another college. The protesters, upset at my views on LGBT and Pride issues, organized opposition to my presence. But this group was different from the Stanford mob. My protesters attended my lecture, listened politely and even laughed at my jokes, asked some good questions, and then at the end left the lecture theater to hold a gathering elsewhere on campus. At no point did I feel disrespected as a human being. Far from it.
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