July 29, 2010
Greatest in the Kingdom
Lydia, my 4 year-old granddaughter is tentative about giving or getting wet-willies, the art of putting you index finger in your mouth and sneaking up on some unsuspecting soul and sticking your wet finger in their ear. She recently played a game changer saying, “I'd think I’d rather have a dry Willie.” My mental reaction was, ‘well, what fun is that?’, and yet Lydia giggled just as much trying to avoid a dry finger in her ear as she did the wet finger. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”. (Matt 18:3 NIV)
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Gail;
-----Children live in the place of learning and dependence. By the nature of childhood they resign to the influences of those they depend upon without reasoning their need to learn the way things are rather than their need to interject what they insist things should be. Their humility is simply a matter of fact. But that is not to say they are without stubbornness and self-interest. Jesus certainly was not making a statement about some inherent righteousness possessed by only children. Any reasonable parent knows the social ills present in a child. Rather, He was speaking about the humble state of surrendering these social ills of misbehavior to the better ways of good behavior as presented by trusted care givers.
-----It seems that when a child begins his adolescent approach to adulthood a quite different attitude takes shape. Even in an obvious state of insufficient knowledge, the person tends to acquire a sense of total understanding and daring self-sufficiency, both being hostile to continued learning and resignation. Yet the truth of the situation remains that one individual has neither the chance to experience and know every relevant thing, nor the moral fortitude to behave with impeccable perfection. If he carries this adolescent attitude into adulthood, his openness to relevant views not yet discovered will close, and he will become a pariah to others and to God alike. Like the gravity of a black hole that always draws and never gives back, the one who emerges from adolescence retaining selfish stubbornness distorts everything in his vicinity and ruins what actually comes into his contact.
-----That is not the nature of the kingdom of God. There, gravity of the individual situation has importance for sure, because responsibility for maintaining the wellness of the self-situation is not removed. But the gravity does not belong to the self. It belongs to God, Who spreads it to all His individual beings in such a manner that it not only draws needed benefit to one individual but also draws from that individual needed benefit for the others. The responsibility to maintain the wellness of the self is then expanded to include the responsibility to provide wellness for anything in its vicinity, and especially to what actually comes into its contact.
-----Man does not learn this of his own accord. Within the philosophies of many who have not known God, there have certainly been allusions to it. Man can understand the effects of mutual living by simply observing the outcomes of various behaviors. And doing so certainly proceeds from the childhood‘s trait of learning. But that trait is still out of place until it brings its dependence to the source of the gravity of its situation. For man is not alone and is not the source of his own gravity. God is. And He is not learned by observing the outcome of man’s behavior, but only by experiencing the outcome of His behavior. Only the Word of God has struck upon this. Therefore we will never enter the kingdom of God unless we go to Jesus as children.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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