Out Of The Mouth Of Babes

When my son was 3, we went to a restaurant where I guess you could say “the town drunk” was dining. Are you old enough to remember when drug abuse was hardly existent in small town America and the drunks were known by everyone?  Well, my then 3 year old, which I was holding on my hip, blurted out the truth of the matter! He wanted to know, as we were standing in front of a known alcoholic, “Mama why is his nose so big?” As the words were pouring from his little lips, I harshly (unknowingly) slapped  his mouth with my hand to stop the procession of words, that we all knew anyway, that His nose was grotesquely large due to alcohol. But in my Southern, always polite upbringing, that surely would not have been proper to explain the obvious to the obvious!

I wrote about recently one of my favorite children’s books when I was a child and I was humored to read Jonathon Cahn’s exhilarating take on the same book in his new book, The Josiah Manifesto, where he wrote about The Emperor’s  New Clothes.

“The story is told of the emperor deceived into believing that he was wearing invisible garments. He paraded himself naked before his people. Everyone went along with the deception and praised the emperors new garments until a little child blurted out, ‘The emperor has no clothes!’ and the spell was broken.”

“It is human nature to follow the status quo. But when evil and falsehood take over a culture, the tendency to follow becomes an instrument of darkness. Without the many who followed the status quo, who went along with falsehood and evil, who did and said nothing to resist, the darkest powers of modern times, from the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union to that of the Third Reich, could never have risen.”

“The righteous must be willing to be first in breaking the taboos of falsehood and dogmas of evil. They must be children who dare to say, ‘The emperor has no clothes!’”

“Maybe it’s time to do away with ‘polite company’, and speak the truth of the matter. The emperor would have been spared great humiliation had someone only been brave enough to tell him the truth. Instead, all those around him covered for him and in the end he looked and acted the fool and nothing good came out of a silly, naked emperor for a leader. Sin always reaps it’s just reward and it’s time we bring it out into the open. Right at the foot of the cross in humble, contrite, shameful surrender.”

The Lord sent me to his home to tell him the Gospel. He died a few years later. I never knew what he did with the house call God made on him that day, but he heard and saw with his eyes the Word. Speak truth today to save yourself and your family. It’s the only way!