7.
Jesus
Loves The Little Children…
"…All
the little children of the world…Red and yellow, black and white; they are
precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
Why does He love the children
so much? Let’s see what Matthew can tell us from his first-hand observations of
the Lord:
13 Then
children were brought to Him that He might lay His hands on them and pray. The
disciples rebuked the people, 14 but Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me and do not hinder them, for to such
belongs the kingdom of heaven.” 15
And He laid His hands on them and went away. (Matthew 19:13-15)
The
kingdom of heaven belongs to the little children? Heaven is a “pediarchy”? (I just made that word up: it would mean a
government run by children.) Read on – here is Matthew 18:1-4 à
1 At that time the disciples came to Jesus,
saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 And calling to him a child, he put him in
the midst of them 3 and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless
you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is
the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
We are to be like children in order
to enter heaven? The cynic would say, “Oh, let me start wearing diapers and
pooping my pants again!”, but of course that’s not what the Lord had in mind. In verse 18:4 He explains his
meaning clearly: “Whoever humbles himself like (a) child” is saved and
exalted.
Let’s look at these qualities of children: Humility. The first definition I found
of the word is “A
modest or low view of one’s own importance”, using “modesty”, “humbleness”,
and “meekness” as synonyms. Children are born essentially powerless,
and acquire control over their own environment very slowly over the
course of their childhood. When you’re always under the auspices of grown-ups (at home, at school, everywhere), it’s
easy to have a certain ‘humbleness’ or ‘meekness’ about yourself.
Yet most children hardly seem to be modest or humble –
they’re more like puppies or kittens, romping freely from place to place,
feeling safe wherever they romp – why?
Because those grown-ups in their lives have been consistently benevolent and caring: they’ve grown up
in an environment without fear of abuse, and so they have a desire to explore,
to grow, to learn, and to discover. Most of all, they have
the desire – no, the expectation!
– to love,
because that’s what they’ve been surrounded with in their short lifetimes.
The children Jesus wants us to emulate are these: humble,
loving, seeking to explore and discover because they have benevolent and caring grown-ups
taking care of them, providing that safety net for them to leap from.
JESUS is that benevolent grown-up for US. We are to be like
those children because we live in the same environment as they do! Just as they
have their loving father (and mother and
possibly school teacher and other family and community members) looking out
for their well-being, relieving them of much of that responsibility, so WE have
OUR loving Father looking out for OUR well-being.
It is only when we leave those boundaries of His
love and protection, thinking we can take care of ourselves without His help, that
we are no longer like those children, and we become less childlike: less open, less willing to explore and grow and learn and discover and love
because we’re now busy being self-protective.
We think WE have to be the ones to defend ourselves and our well-being; we
over-value the accumulations in our
life, the “stuff” that gathers and works its way into the intrinsic worth part of our brains, and we become dependent on our external
valuations rather than the internal one from God. We have removed that connection with the Lord;
the place where the Holy Spirit used to reside within us is now vacant, and we
find we spend the majority of our time and effort trying to fill that God-shaped hole in our souls with
“stuff” and “praise” and “money” and “prestige” and other external supposed
sources of self-worth.
The solution is obvious when the problem is described this
way, of course, but for a lapsed Christian (especially
one who doesn’t realize he’s lapsed!), it’s hard to see. [Harder still for someone who’s never been
a Christian and never felt what it feels like to have that Holy Spirit filling
the gap in their souls.] The adversary works hardest to blind people like
these from seeing the problem, and encourages them to keep looking for more and
more destructive ways to fill that
hole: casual sex, drugs, alcohol,
physical risk and self-abuse, and down the rabbit hole they go.
My late wife Melissa could have given you both sides of
this conversation. Growing up, she lived in a tremendously abusive home; her
father left when she was seven (she never
saw him again after age twelve); her stepfather abused her emotionally,
physically, and sexually for years; and they moved many times into more and
more dysfunctional situations. (Not
really an aside – we met in high school, and at the time she didn’t know how to
handle a relationship that wasn’t dysfunctional. Whenever we started to grow
closer, she’d run away in fear of a relationship she didn’t know how to deal
with. This went on for ten years before we finally gave up.)
After she found God, she ended up in a marriage with some
similarities to her childhood (not a
surprise; we all seek the familiar); it was only when he left her that she
begin to heal from all of those years of dysfunction. We finally married each
other in 2010, twenty-nine years after we
first dated, and by then the Lord had been able to heal the God-shaped hole
in her soul enough for her to be ready for a non-dysfunctional marriage. It
took her more than four decades to become the child Christ wanted her to
become, but she was that open, loving, growing person the Lord teaches us to be
for the four years we were married until her death in late 2014. My children –
her stepchildren – got the benefit of her growth, and were brought to the Lord
more by her example than mine.
†
The Lord wants us to be like humble children in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven – loving, trusting, open, growing,
discovering, joyful…
Are we providing that kind of environment
for our children in our homes?
Are your
children in a home where they feel like they’re safe?
Do
they feel like they can ask you anything?
Are
they encouraged to explore and grow and learn?
Are
they free from abuse and danger?
Do
they have these conditions at their school, or at the other places they
spend large amounts of time: day care,
relatives’ houses, activity locations (like the YMCA, dance studios, recreation
centers, etc.)?
Sometimes,
it’s hard to tell from the inside – remember
the old saw about the frogs who would boil to death if you turned up their heat
slowly enough that they never realized it was turning deadly in there until it
was too late? – but take a look at the way your children act and react. If
you’re not seeing reflexive defense mechanisms, shutting down verbally
or emotionally, emotion management issues, that’s a good sign. (Serious suggestion: If you’re unsure but
worried, contact a social work organization in your community and ask for their
assistance in evaluating your children’s situations, especially when you’re
worried about sites other than your home.)
None
of this is meant to worry you, and my apologies if it did. We asked what God
the Father wants for His Children, and the answer is for us to be like
children; we asked what that truly meant, and discovered its root signs: Being loving, trusting,
open, growing, discovering, and joyful. Then we
translated this to our relationship with our own children, and looked at
whether we were providing that environment for them.
If we have the Holy Spirit filling His space within your
soul, we can relate to the little girl visiting with her father after Sunday
School:
Little Girl: Daddy?
God’s really big, isn’t He?
Daddy: Yes, sweetie. He’s really big.
Little Girl: And He’s
inside of me, isn’t He?
Daddy: Ye-yes, honey. God is inside you.
The little girl thinks about this before answering.
Little Girl: Then
He’d have to show through, wouldn’t He?
Yes,
Little Girl. He would show through,
in everything we do. Once you have faith, your good works
will show through in everything you do.
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