A Child’s Kingdom

A Child’s Kingdom

I tell you the truth, anyone who doesn’t receive the Kingdom of God like a child will never enter it. Mark 10:15

PARENTS BROUGHT THEIR CHILDREN TO JESUS for him to touch and bless them. His disciples thought they were bothering him, but Jesus scolded the disciples for being the bother. Obviously, children should come to him, he insisted. They are most able to see Kingdom ways. They are the ones who get it.

Those who apply this passage to salvation and entering God’s Kingdom aren’t wrong. The innocent faith, humility, and acceptance of a child certainly characterizes our ability to receive the salvation God has promised. But there’s more involved in the Kingdom than our entrance into it. The Kingdom is a comprehensive lifestyle and experience. There’s no reason to read into this passage a salvation-only message. In fact, the fullness of the original language points us to a bigger picture: Anyone who doesn’t welcome and take hold of the Kingdom of God—in all its ways and wonders and promises—will never begin to experience it. Jesus goes beyond the salvation experience; he’s talking about a way of living and seeing.

That makes this childlike vision relevant not only to our acceptance of the gospel but in our ability to live it out daily. We often start out with simple faith that takes God at his word and runs with it. Somewhere along the way, we are conditioned out of that innocence through some unanswered prayer or teaching that emphasizes all the caveats and fine print on God’s promises, focusing on what they don’t mean rather than what they do. We realize, perhaps years later, that we have to work our way back toward simple, childlike faith again. It’s hard for adults conditioned in rationalist thinking to arrive at innocent belief. It’s a journey sometimes better accomplished by just choosing childlike faith rather than striving for it. We have to rebuke the rationalizations and explanations surrounding God’s promises and just embrace them. Trusting God implicitly is a choice. And it’s the only way to experience the joys and treasures of his Kingdom.

A child lives by faith, and his chief characteristic is freedom from care.