In our journey towards faith, Jesus invites us to adopt a child’s perspective. A worldview full full of wonder and trust.
Not a pursuit of ignorance or naivety… but a deep and profound trust in who our Father is.
Consider Matthew 18:3, where Jesus
says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Adult minds often overthink. We complicate faith with our worries, our skepticism, our cynicism. We question and doubt, not always out of curiosity, but sometimes out of fear.
But Jesus…
He calls us to a different way. To a faith that marvels at the mysteries of God. To a trust that looks beyond the visible and tangible. To be open to a new experience, a new way to be human.
Many fondly remember the profound simplicity of being a small child who believes their dad can do anything. That’s the kind of trust Jesus asks of us.
In Luke 17:6, He says,
“If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.”
R.C.H. Lenski beautifully captures this sentiment:
“As the flower in the garden stretches toward the light of the sun, so there is in the child a mysterious inclination toward the eternal light.
Have you ever noticed this mysterious thing that when you tell the smallest child about God, they never ask with strangeness and wonder, “What or who is God — I have never seen Him,” but listens with shining face to the words as though they soft loving sounds from the land of home.
Or when you teach a child to fold their little hands in prayer that they do this as though it were a matter of course, as though it was opening for the child that world of which they had been dreaming with longing and anticipation.
Or tell them, these little ones, the stories of the Savior, show them the pictures with scenes and personages of the Bible — how their pure eyes shine, how their little hearts beat.”
Lenski points us back to the heart of faith.
A childlike faith.
A call to simplicity.
To trust.
To wonder.
To believe, like a child, that our Father can do anything, and to live as if that was true.
The Importance of Childlike Faith in The Way of Jesus was originally published in GoodLion Theology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
