Teaching Should be Adapted to the Condition of the Mind
John 16:12-15
I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.…


A careful mother or teacher will treat a child's mind with great tenderness and reverence; she will be careful to excite interest before gratifying it, to gratify it in such degree as its capacity will admit. She will not think of the mind of her child as of a large bag into which all the odds and ends of knowledge that are swept up from the table of common life can be thrown at random; she will think of it as a delicate and beautiful mechanism to be handled with tenderness and respect and one mistake in dealing with which may well be fatal. How well a lady writer has told us how she was taught by her mother. "I asked mother one day who God was, and I was told to come again the next day and at the same hour, and I came and repeated the question, and she told me to wait another day and then I should be answered, and then, when my curiosity was raised to the highest pitch and when my sense of the importance of the subject was immensely enhanced by its repeated postponement of an answer, I came once more and my mother explained in words which I shall never forget how great and awful and beautiful a Being God is and what He has told us. And all this she did in simple words and as a child's mind could bear it." Such a lesson as that she was not likely to forget, and it was never forgotten.

(Canon Liddon.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.

WEB: "I have yet many things to tell you, but you can't bear them now.




Human Capacity the Measure of Divine Communication
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