Ask Jesus into Your Heart

What you may hear

Not from the front, usually. In passing, as the ordinary way of speaking:

“Has anybody here asked Jesus into their heart yet? Because that’s all it takes — you just open the door and let him in.”

Or to one child, kindly, at the craft table: “Do you want to ask Jesus into your heart? You can do it right now, in your head. He’s waiting.”

Why it matters

This is the phrase, not the ritual. Entries 1 and 2 handle the prayer and the invitation; this one handles the sentence that survives after both have been dropped, because it sounds like nothing at all.

Three things are wrong with it, in ascending order.

It makes Christ passive and the child active. He is waiting outside; the child opens; the transaction completes. Every arrow points the wrong way.

It has no means attached. Christ arrives by an act of imagination, in a place nobody can inspect. Ask a child afterward whether Jesus is in his heart and he has nothing to check but a feeling, which is where this whole family of errors always lands.

And children take it literally. A seven-year-old told that Jesus lives in his heart will believe exactly that, and the belief will not survive an anatomy lesson. What replaces it, usually, is a private suspicion that the whole thing was a story for children.

What to do instead

Speak of Christ arriving from outside, at places you can point to.

1. Use the external language the Catechism uses. He comes in the Word you are hearing. He came in the water with your name in it. He comes in the Supper, given for you.
2. Point at things in the room. The font is in the building. The book is on the table. A child can be walked to a font; he cannot be walked to his own heart.
3. Keep the indwelling, lose the invitation. Scripture does say Christ dwells in us by faith. The error is not the dwelling; it is making the dwelling something the child arranges.
4. When a child asks whether Jesus is in his heart, do not audit him. Answer with what is outside: “You’re baptized. He said so himself, and he doesn’t take it back.”

One line you can actually use

“You don’t have to let him in. He came and got you, and he brought water.”

If the student asks

“So Jesus isn’t in my heart?”

Do not answer no. The child is not asking a doctrinal question; he is asking whether he has been left out.

“He is. But not because you asked him in — because he came for you and made you his own at your baptism. That’s why you can be sure of it. If it depended on you asking right, you’d never stop wondering whether you did.”

An adult asks it differently: “Isn’t this just semantics?” It is not. Ask them where they would send a doubting person to check — and let them notice that the phrase gives them nowhere to send him.

The confessional citation

Binding:

• Small Catechism, the Creed, Third Article — I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him; the Holy Spirit calls by the gospel. Decisive, and the plain contradiction of an invitation model.
• Augsburg Confession V — the Spirit is given through the Word and sacraments as instruments; the article rejects the notion that the Spirit comes apart from the external Word. “Ask him into your heart” is precisely a coming apart from the external Word.
• Small Catechism, the Sacrament of the Altar — given and shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins. The direction of the whole sacramental grammar: toward us.

Supplementary, not binding under the AFLC standard: Formula of Concord II on the bound will.

Scripture: John 6:44; Ephesians 3:17 — the dwelling is real, and it is by faith rather than by invitation.

What not to do

• Do not police the phrase in ordinary conversation. Correcting a grandmother at a potluck for saying it about her grandson will cost you the classroom and gain nothing.
• Do not deny that Christ dwells in believers. Overcorrecting into pure externalism leaves the class with a Christ who is nearby but not theirs.
• Do not make the correction a vocabulary rule. The goal is that children know where to look, not that a banned sentence goes unspoken.
• Do not tell a child his earlier asking was pointless. He prayed to Jesus. Jesus heard him. The problem was never the child’s prayer.