Childlike or Childish?
Just over a week ago on Sunday, September 29th, 2019, I had the opportunity to speak at my home church, Church of the Cross, in Hayward, California. The message came from a mixture of things that have been stirring in my heart and spirit for a long time, and it felt good to organize those thoughts into a cohesive message. If you’re interesting in seeing the live, video evidence, check out the YouTube video here.
Since I had this message all written out already, I wanted to share it with my friends and followers here on my blog. So, for today’s Musings Monday, I’ve edited the sermon to fit as a written article (as the original was intended only to be delivered out loud).
It’s longer than my average post, but I hope if you have the time to read through it, you will be encouraged.
So, without any further ado…
Childlike or Childish?
It’s going to take awhile for the title to make sense, but bear with me. I have a lot of scripture I want to share, along with some specific teaching about the dynamic of our relationship with God, which will lead into a more clear application, but first…
I want to tell you a story.
Story Time!
Just over four years ago, I became an uncle. My older brother Trevor and my sister-in-law Melanie had their first baby in 2015. She was born in August, but I wasn’t able to be there because of my work schedule, but I knew I wanted to see them and meet my niece as soon as possible.
I wound up flying up to Washington for Thanksgiving weekend, and I got to revel with this baby in the joy of being an uncle.
I don’t remember all the details, but one of those days, something happened that stuck out in my spirit that I will never forget. I don’t remember if we were heading home ofter a church service, or what we were doing that day. All I remember was being in the car, and it was dark. And as a zero-years-old infant, my sweet, precious little niece didn’t want to be in the car.
She was fussing. Then, she was crying. She wanted to be out of the car, but obviously, we needed to drive to get back to their apartment.
While she was crying, my brother Trevor began to sing. He had created a lullaby, just for her, and while he sang, that familiar voice, with that comforting tune caused her to calm down. When he sang, she wouldn’t cry. But as soon as he stopped singing, she would start crying again.
So, anyone who’s spent time with babies might be able to predict what happened next: Trevor sang this lullaby for the entire remainder of the drive home.
I never told Trevor this, but this moment always stayed with me. You see, while Trevor was singing, God dropped this into my Spirit: just as my brother, a father, sang over his crying child, God, my heavenly Father, was singing over me.
I was the child in the car seat.
He sings over me and delights in me and comforts me. He takes me where I need to go.
But he doesn’t actually give me what I want. I want to be comfortable. I want to be out of the car. I want to be in a new situation. But God, my good, good, heavenly Father is a Wise Father.
He doesn’t always give me what I want, but He always gives me what I need.
He gives me Himself. He gives me His presence. He answers my prayer by singing over me and leading me to where His wisdom leads…but He doesn’t ever answer my prayer in the way I want Him to in that moment.
This reminds me of a particular account in the Bible…
The Point
John 5:1-15 (HCSB) says,
After this, a Jewish festival took place, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. By the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem there is a pool, called Bethesda in Hebrew, which has five colonnades. Within these lay a large number of the sick—blind, lame, and paralyzed [—waiting for the moving of the water, because an angel would go down into the pool from time to time and stir up the water. Then the first one who got in after the water was stirred up recovered from whatever ailment he had].
One man was there who had been sick for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew he had already been there a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to get well?”
“Sir,” the sick man answered, “I don’t have a man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I’m coming, someone goes down ahead of me.”
“Get up,” Jesus told him, “pick up your mat and walk!” Instantly the man got well, picked up his mat, and started to walk.
Now that day was the Sabbath, so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “This is the Sabbath! It’s illegal for you to pick up your mat.”
He replied, “The man who made me well told me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’”
“Who is this man who told you, ‘Pick up your mat and walk’?” they asked. But the man who was cured did not know who it was, because Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
After this, Jesus found him in the temple complex and said to him, “See, you are well. Do not sin anymore, so that something worse doesn’t happen to you.” The man went and reported to the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.
A few things strike me in this story.
One, Jesus didn’t actually give the man what he wanted or expected. Think about it. The man is waiting by the pool. He’s been watching this pool for years, maybe decades. He knows a way to get healed, but he can’t quite get there himself.
“If I just get to the pool, maybe God will see me, God will hear me, God will heal me.” It was a process, a formula for healing, just beyond his grasp. He wanted to get in, get healed, get out, and go on with his life.
But here comes Jesus.
When the man prayed all these years, he wasn’t expecting Jesus to be his answer. He wanted someone to help him for a few moments to get him into the pool, but Jesus circumvents the pool.
The pool is an important, memorable aspect of this story, but let’s not forget: Jesus didn’t care about the pool. The man poured his heart out to Jesus! Gave Jesus his life story, confessed to Jesus his one desire—to get into the pool fast enough to get his healing, all just beyond his physical capabilities.
But Jesus didn’t give him the pool. Jesus gave Himself. The man wasn’t healed by the angel stirring the waters of Bethesda, and the man was not healed by the thing he’d been waiting years for. He was healed by the person of Jesus Christ.
Remember, the man picks up his mat, following Jesus’s instructions. Jesus tells the man to sin no more. Now, the man has to tell the religious leaders that it was Jesus who made him well on the Sabbath, which is entirely inconvenient. Now this man’s on the Pharisee’s watchlist.
He’s now on Jesus’s side, and don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the man was grateful. But I wonder if everyone would be grateful. Like, if Jesus has the power to heal, if Jesus is all-powerful, if Jesus listens to my prayers, why didn’t he just take me to the pool like I asked him to?
Because the point of the healing wasn’t the healing. The point of the healing is Jesus.
This is true of all of Jesus’s miracles. The point is never the miracle itself. The point is always Jesus. More specifically, it’s Jesus showing His glory and authority through the power of the Holy Spirit to reveal the heart of the Father. Every miracle shines this glory on our radiant, Triune God.
Every miracle.
We see this when Jesus heals the paralytic in Mark chapter 2. A man is paralyzed, so his friends take him to Jesus, but because the crowd is so big, they can’t actually get to Jesus, so they sneak up to the roof, dig a hole in the roof, and lower the paralyzed man down to the feet of Jesus. But instead of Jesus immediately healing the guy and moving on, he starts by saying, “Your sins are forgiven.”
OF course, that’s a very controversial thing to say, and Jesus reveals his point after he lets the religious folk fester for awhile. When he finally addresses them, he says,
“Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, pick up your mat, and walk’? But so you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” He told the paralytic, “I tell you: get up, pick up your mat, and go home.” (Mark 2:9-11, HCSB)
In this miracle, the point is not the miracle. The point is Jesus.
Same thing when Jesus fed the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. Everyone saw the miracle and Jesus became even more famous, until he deliberately offended them. Do you remember this? He told them they needed to eat his flesh and drink his blood. He told them I Am the Bread of Life. People were following Jesus for the food and the healing and everything he could give them, BUT THAT WASN’T THE POINT.
Jesus made it abundantly clear: I am your bread! I am your sustenance. If you get the miracle for the sake of the miracle, you missed the point. If you get the healing for the sake of being healed and going on with your life otherwise unchanged, you missed the point.
The point of everything is the person of Jesus! And when you put your faith in him, you are trusting in his personhood, not in the stuff you want him to give you.
But do we believe this truth? Do we act like we believe this truth? It’s at this point I want to remind us of a few things about our individual relationships with Christ.
Foundations of Relationship
Most of you reading this consider yourselves Christians. If I asked, “Are you a Christian?” or “Do you have a relationship with Jesus Christ?”, I’m thinking most of you would say yes.
But there are a few things we need to remember about this relationship.
One, Jesus is a person, as is God the Father, as is God the Holy Spirit.
Two, we are friends of God. When we put our faith in Jesus, we are no longer at enmity with God. Because Jesus is a person, we can commune with Him in an actual friendship.
Three, Jesus is Lord. When you surrender your life to Jesus, you are pledging your allegiance to Him. You are saying, “Yes, Jesus, I am on your side, I am allied and aligned with you, and I will obey your instructions.”
With those three things in mind, we also remember that even though we are co-heirs with Christ, we are under His authority. We affirm that He is bigger than us, smarter than us, wiser than us, infinitely better than us in literally every way possible or conceivable.
But God is not so lofty as to not talk to us. He’s above us without being above us. That’s the mystery of the gospel! When we’re in right relationship with him, we acknowledge the vastness of His glory within the closeness of intimacy.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because we need to remember this crucial truth about our relationship with God. The truth? Our relationship with God is based on both Friendship and Lordship. For the relationship to work, just like any other relationship, it needs to be built on trust.
Do you trust Jesus? True, deep, vibrant faith is based on trust. If you believe in God but don’t trust in His wisdom, timing, and sovereignty, your faith is weak.
We can say we trust Jesus, but how we pray and how we live reveal the true depth of our trust.
If I’m honest with myself, I’ve found that I don’t always trust Jesus as much as I say I do. I’ve prayed and prayed for God to throw me into the pool, but when Jesus tells me to pick up my mat, I hesitate.
Why?
Jesus will always answer your prayer, but He will not always answer your prayer the way you want him to. I want the pool, I want the healing, but he gives me Himself—both his friendship and his Lordship.
Proverbs 3:5-6 (NKJV) says,
Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
And lean not on your own understanding;
In all your ways acknowledge Him,
And He shall direct your paths.
Also, Isaiah 55:9 (NKJV) says,
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
It’s easy to quote these verses. It’s easy to talk about leaning not on your own understanding and acknowledging him in all our ways and trusting him with all our hearts…it’s easy, until we actually face life and find ourselves in the position to actually do it.
Like I said earlier, the root of true, genuine faith is trust.
But how do we evaluate the genuineness of our trust, the fullness of our faith? How do we measure this problem, so we can take steps to mitigate the problem and grow in faith and effectiveness?
There is a simple tool you can use, a simple question you can ask. The question is this:
“Am I being childlike, or am I being childish?”
Now, I’m sure some of you are confused by this statement. It sounds like a contradiction; what’s the difference between childlike and childish?
If you’ve been going to church for a long time, you’ve heard how Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me.”
In Matthew 18:2-4 (HCSB), we read,
Then He called a child to Him and had him stand among them. “I assure you,” He said, “unless you are converted and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child—this one is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one child like this in My name welcomes Me.
So we have to become like a child. Or do we?
In 1 Corinthians 13:11 (NKJV), Apostle Paul says,
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Indeed, we are to be like children, but we are not to be childish. Still, this sounds kind of weird. Is it really that different, being childlike or childish? What are we supposed to do with this? Paul’s telling the Corinthians to grow up, and Jesus is telling his disciples that we have to become as children if we expect to see the Kingdom of God. Where’s the disconnect?
There is no disconnect. I’m going to say something to you that might be shocking. Unless you know where I’m going with this, I have a feeling this is going to rock your boat a little bit.
Here is goes: Jesus didn’t always talk positively about children. Children weren’t always his go-to compliment. Yes, I know the song, “Jesus loves the little children / all the children of the world”, I know, I know. But even though He used children to describe a positive characteristic all adults must strive to live with, Jesus also used children negatively to describe a certain attitude and action that needs to be avoided.
Listen closely to Jesus’s words in Luke 7:31-35 (HCSB):
“To what then should I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to each other:
We played the flute for you, but you didn’t dance; we sang a lament, but you didn’t weep!
For John the Baptist did not come eating bread or drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon!’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”
So we want to be like a child…but we don’t want to be those children. We don’t want to be like the kids in the marketplace, right? But what makes these children so bad? It’s not as much as they’re bad as that they’re immature. They’re selfish. They’re whiny.
When Jesus said to become like a child, He did not mean we need to be whiny. He’s saying we need to trust as a child trusts.
Instead of crying and complaining that we want to get out of the car seat, we need to listen to the voice of our Father singing over us, comforting us and taking us where we need to go.
We need to trust Him.
A childish Christian says, “we played the flue but you wouldn’t dance, We played the funeral song but you wouldn’t mourn,” but the problem doesn’t lie in mourning or dancing. The problem comes from the children telling the adults what to do when the adults are actually telling the children what to do, because the adult is in charge.
Am immature child throws a fit when he doesn’t get his way. An immature child whines and complains until mommy gets her what she wants. But a childlike Christian trusts in Daddy as a child trusts his daddy.
The difference between childish and childlike is trust.
Do you trust Jesus to bring the healing you need, or are you going to complain that he won’t help you to the pool?
Are you going to trust His word and let Him as a person sustain you, as you eat his flesh and drink his blood, even when you have no physical bread left over from last miracle?
The Application
The application of this message comes down to how we pray.
What do you say and do when you pray? I must confess, I’ve prayed some childish prayers. Prayers that sound more like complaints—which is exactly what God didn’t want when the children of Israel were wandering in the wilderness.
God gave them miracle bread in the desert, and they had the audacity to complain about it. “We want meat! We want meat!”
But God didn’t want to lead a group of complainers. He wanted to lead them into the promised land, and He did want them to be serious about keeping the law, but even deeper than that, God wanted real trusting relationship with them, just as he had with Moses. God wanted to make Israel a kingdom of priests where they could all commune with God on His holy mountain, but the children of Israel, filled with fear and hard hearts, refused God’s offer and wanted Moses to do the talking for them.
They refused to commune with God in real relationship, but then complained about how He lead them because they didn’t understand his ways. They wanted things done their own way, to the extent that they’d rather return to slavery in Egypt than trust God to bring them to the Promised Land in His own will’s timing and strategy.
They were children, wanting God to play the way game they wanted to play, by the rules they created. Like an immature child, they were selfish, spoiled, not wanting to obey.
All because they didn’t trust God as a child should trust a parent. But why didn’t they trust?
By complaining, they held God to their own standards. They refused obedience and communion, they refused relationship because they couldn’t move past their own offense. Instead of cultivating a real relationship where they can trust God as the wise and sovereign King and Father, they complained that God, the ruler of the universe, didn’t sing when they wanted Him to.
And if I’m being honest, I’ve treated God that way to.
So how should we pray? We know from the Word that we are to be persistent in prayer. At the same time, God is not a genie where He must grant every wish.
“But Jered, doesn’t the Bible say everything we ask in faith will be given to us?”
Yes, it does. In James 4:3 (HCSB), the Word also says, “You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your evil desires.”
We can ask anything in faith. But if the request is not consistent with the will of God, God doesn’t have to say yes.
“But Jered, I’ve prayed numerous times for things that ARE consistent with God’s will. Why does He delay?”
I don’t have an answer. I know many of my prayers have been delayed. But remember what we already talked about: His ways are higher than ours. He is wiser than all of us!
And though it’s not easy to admit it, the truth is this: how we respond to disappointment in prayer is crucial in the development of our relationship with God.
This is where respond as childish or childlike.
You can get mad at God, if you want to. You can yell, scream, throw a temper tantrum. The truth is, we’re entitled to nothing.
The childlike prayer is still persistent, but the childlike prayer is not whiny. The childlike prayer reveals trust instead of offense.
It’s okay to be disappointed with life. It happens to everybody. It’s normal to have your expectations not met, for life to fall short of what you want.
But in that disappointment, you can choose to say, “God, I TRUST you. I don’t understand what’s happening or why you seem to be delaying, but I trust you. I choose to trust your will. I choose to trust your sovereignty. I choose to trust in your love and your wisdom. I choose to trust that if something is part of your will, you can bring it to pass, but the timing is on your hands because you are the one with infinite knowledge and ultimate wisdom.”
Instead of living disgruntled, disappointed, and despondent, choose trust. Choose faith. And how do we choose faith and trust in the midst of disappointment?
Rest.
Rest in His love. Rest in His arms. Listen to the voice of the Father, delightfully singing over you. He will take you where you need to go.
Pray confidently, yes. Pray passionately, yes. But then, rest in the knowledge that God is good, and his word does not return void. Rest in the truth that His plans for you are greater than you can imagine.
Rest in God’s love, and let that trust lead you into a deeper relationship.
