The Scandal of Childlikeness
If your church hosted a Vacation Bible School this summer (or will soon), maybe the energy and laughter and general craziness reminded you of your own childhood. We have to intentionally remember what it’s like to be a kid—it’s easy to forget as we journey through adulting—and VBS helps us do that. More broadly, the division between adulthood and childhood is never more apparent than in the summer—right now…
I’ve worked at home, full- and part-time, for the last 25 years. When I first made the switch, I was worried about my boundaries. When would work end and the rest of my life start? But it turned out to be one of the greatest decisions of my life. I learned how to be highly productive at home, and I got to see my daughters grow up and be an active dad in their lives. We have a community pool in our neighborhood, and when they were little, my daughters often bounded into my office to ask me if I wanted to go swimming with them. “No,” I almost always said, “I have to work—it’s still the middle of my workday.” During the summer, my daughters often slept in way past 9 a.m. Me? I was often up at 5:30. For several summers my daughters went to a local drama camp. And me? I had my own personal “drama camp” every day at work.
These were continual reminders that I had left childhood—and therefore childlikeness—behind. And that’s a bit a problem, because Jesus said this in Matthew 18:1-4:
“At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: ‘I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’”
The Childhood In Which We Have to Grow
What does Jesus mean when He tells us—“Unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”? Well, I think that means we’ll never live like Jesus lives if we don’t figure out what “become like little children” means in our everyday life. The Kingdom of Heaven is a foreign land to us, with it’s own patterns of behavior, values, and way of life. Jesus is a native, showing us what his “homeland” is like by His words and actions—“the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28). It’s as if His home is Japan, and we’ve just moved there—He’s revealing the culture and help us to understand its customs and practices.
So, I guess we’d better get cracking on “becoming like little children,” right? During a sermon at my church, I asked for any kids in the sanctuary who’d be willing to show us what a cartwheel looks like—I invited them to cartwheel down any aisle. Five or six kids jumped out of their seats, eager to show us how it’s done. And, since we’d now seen multiple examples, I invited any adults who were willing to show us their cartwheel technique. Crickets…Of course, adults are often physically limited in our ability to play the way kids play. But the deeper limitation goes beyond our physical ability. Children have a freedom that both bothers us and attracts us—why do they have this freedom, and we don’t?
My wife and a friend once surprised me by taking me to a Denver jazz club for my birthday. It was an intimate setting, and I felt a kind of crippling self-consciousness as we settled into our seats, just a few feet from the stage. My wife and friend playfully urged me to loosen up and, well, groove a little. But I just couldn’t escape my adult prison. Somehow, in the moment, I remembered Jesus’ invitation into childlikeness. As an act of worship, I relaxed my body and my mind and my emotions and… grooved a little.
Childlikeness is a thing of beauty in an adult—because it requires something not required of children, who practice it naturally. For an adult to be childlike, it requires a kind of naked trust in Jesus. And this is exactly what is so hard for us to do. In his novel David Elginbrod George MacDonald writes: “There is a childhood into which we have to grow, just as there is a childhood which we must leave behind; a childlikeness which is the highest gain of humanity, and a childishness from which but a few of those who are counted the wisest among men, have freed themselves in their imagined progress towards the reality of things.”
What Childlikeness Looks Like
We can’t grow into spiritual maturity if we are trapped in “the childhood which we must leave behind.” The Pharisees never left their childishness behind, and we are like them when we act childishly—our pettiness, nitpicking, narcissism, ignorance, and cruelty—the things that must be left behind. But there is, as George MacDonald says, “a childhood into which we have to grow.” Jesus said exactly this in His encounter with a respected and curious Pharisee named Nicodemus: “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” Most of us, I suspect, would be just like Nicodemus in this encounter—our response, like his, would be: “Huh?” How can we do what you’re telling us to do, Jesus?
So, what does this childlikeness look like? Well children…
- Believe in what they can’t see—This means kids are “given to metaphysics,” as George MacDonald says. That means they have no trouble believing in things that seem fantastic, or can’t be seen at all. They believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and leprechauns as easily as they believe in Jesus.
- Are relaxed when they’re “under authority”—When a parent is in the room, as long as that parent loves and cherishes them, they feel safe and secure. They exercise a kind of casual trust in their parents.
- Love to be cherished—When my daughter was playing soccer, every game ended with a cheering “parent tunnel”—the girls would run through the tunnel, over and over, as we celebrated them. They not only delighted in how we cherished them, they invited it.
- “Bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things”—One gift of childlikeness is the persistence of hope. For most kids who have not experienced a trauma, hope is like breathing. And this kind of hope fuels how we love, by the way.
- Are willing to risk—Because they don’t yet understand the consequences of risk, kids take a lot more chances. We think of “youthful risks” pejoratively, but a kid who stops somersaulting through the house because she broke her arm has lost the joy that risk brings.
- Offer ridiculous generosity—Because they don’t understand the cost of things, kids often express their love through impossible acts of generosity. My youngest daughter once offer her piggy-bank savings to help us buy a new car, and my oldest daughter put all her savings in a plastic bag and spilled it out on the counter of the car-repair shop—she insisted on contributing to the repair costs.
- Are un-self-conscious—Little kids don’t seem to care how others might interpret their particular expressions of identity. When she was very little, our youngest daughter Emma would, on occasion, run naked through our fenced backyard for no apparent reason.
- Live in a continual state of wonder—Since so many things are new to them, kids are often surprised and delighted and in awe of everyday miracles. Walt Streightiff says: “There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.”
The progressive wounding we experience as we grow into adulthood forms our soul into a clenched fist—we are cautious when little children are reckless, tense when they are delightfully goofy, calculating when they are obedient, suspicious when they are trusting, undermining of authority when they are grateful for it, stingy when they are ridiculously generous, stiff dancers when they are wild, and insecure when they are un-self-conscious.
The Path Into Childlikeness
The path ahead of us seems impossible, just as “born again” seemed impossible to Nicodemus. That’s because Nicodemus, like us, has an “application” mentality when “attachment” is really what Jesus is offering…. The best way to understand the application mentality is through this common definition for growing as a disciple: “Understand the biblical principle, then apply it to your life.” But we cannot “apply our way” toward childlikeness—we must attach our way to it. Jesus tells us: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). When we attach ourselves to Jesus like the intimate bond between a brance and a vine, we are describing a journey toward relational intimacy, not a determination to try harder to be better Christians. And attachment, just as in all our relationships, comes from getting to know the person better, then (finally) giving our most precious gift to that person—our trust.
But our trust is dependent upon our knowing, and we don’t know Jesus as well as we think we do… Here are three simple practices that have helped me to attach to Jesus and learn to trust Him more deeply—the fruit is a palpable childlikeness in me…
- Ask the Oprah Question: In the back page of every issue of O Magazine, Oprah Winfrey asked a celebrity friend to answer this simple question: “What do you know for sure?” I love this question so much that I morphed it into an attachment question: “What do I know for sure about Jesus, based on what I observe about Him in this passage?” This requires us to slow down and pay better attention to Him, and to His heart, when we’re reading or studying Scripture. For example, what do you know for sure about Jesus when you consider this short passage: “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:37-39).
- Ask the Jesus Questions—After the feeding of the 4,000, on the road near Caesaria Philippi, Jesus asks His disciples two questions: “Who do others say I am?” and “Who do you say I am?” These are questions that can become like breathing for us, whenever we’re interacting with others, facing a challenge, reading Scripture, or pondering our way forward.
- Practice the Silence—Before you pray or sit down to read the Bible, first ask the Spirit to reveal the truth about Jesus to you. Jesus promised that the Spirit would teach us everything about Jesus that we don’t understand. I recommend putting your Bible on your lap, then asking the Spirit to surface a Scripture reference or passage in your mind. See where the Spirit leads, and receive what you encounter as from Jesus.
In the end, when we attach ourselves more deeply to Jesus—the Vine—we share in His lifeblood more and more. And God is, at his core, childlike. I love this lyric from Tonio K’s song “You Will Go Free”:
You’ve been a prisoner
Been a prisoner all your life
Held captive in an alien world
Where they hold your need for love to your throat like a knife
And they make you jump
And they make you do tricks
They take what started off such an innocent heart
And they break it and break it and break it
Until it almost can’t be fixedWell I don’t know when
And I don’t know how
I don’t know how long it’s gonna take
I don’t know how hard it will be
But I know
You will go free
Rick Lawrence is Executive Director of Vibrant Faith—he created the new curriculum Following Jesus. He’s editor of the Jesus-Centered Bible and author of 40 books, including his new release Editing Jesus: Confronting the Distorted Faith of the American Church, The Suicide Solution, The Jesus-Centered Life and Jesus-Centered Daily. He hosts the podcast Paying Ridiculous Attention to Jesus.
