“EXCEPT YE BECOME AS LITTLE CHILDREN” Listen to song in description after you finish the message

Understanding God's love for us is what fuels our obedience.

Join me in listening to the words of Jesus in Matthew 18:2. And Jesus called a little child unto him and set him in the midst of them. And he said, "Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whoso therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven."

This is an important statement because it's definitive. Jesus, in this statement here, Jesus tells us something that is a prerequisite to entering the kingdom of heaven. This is a deal breaker. Unless you're this way, it's not going to happen.

First of all, I want to talk just a little about the kingdom of heaven. And there's some other messages on this channel that are described that more in depth. But the kingdom of heaven is where we participate in the reign of King Jesus. It's a return to the way God made things to be. It was the theme of Jesus' preaching. It's what he said he came to bring is the kingdom.

And his teachings tell us how to behave, how to become part of that kingdom. And that is a kingdom that begins now. It's something that begins to happen in our lives now as we change our loyalty and we begin to follow Jesus' way of living rather than our own, rather than Satan's.

And we become partners with him in spreading that on the earth. So Jesus says that in order to become part of that kingdom, the prerequisite is we have to become like a little child. So the title of my message this morning is, "Except ye become as little children." As in any analogy, it's important that we stick to the point of the teaching.

Many times harm has been done as people take things out of an analogy that are not intended. And so we should always stick to clear teaching. And that's what I want to do this morning is look at some point-blank ways that the Bible says we are to become like little children. First of all, I have four of them listed here. There may be some more, but where the Bible clearly tells us we're not to become like little children. One is in 1 Corinthians 13:11. Paul says when he was a child, he spake as a child, he understood as a child, he thought as a child. But when he became a man, he put away childish things.

So there's a dimension there into which we are to allow our world and our thinking to be broadened, to think more deeply, to learn wisdom, and not to be childish in that sense. 1 Corinthians 14:20 says, "Brethren, be not children in understanding, howbeit in malice be children, but in understanding be men." Similar concept there. 1 Corinthians 3:1 talks about immaturity, having to be bottle-fed. "Brethren, I could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk and not with meat. For hitherto you were not able to bear it. Neither yet now are you able." So that's a way in which we're not to be children.

We're not supposed to be bottle-fed, just quickly being bothered and ill by anything that's difficult, but to be able to chew through things on our own. And Ephesians 4:14, after talking about how Jesus gave the church to help us to grow unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ unto a mature man, he says the point of that is so that we're not children being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. So there's ways in which we are not to become like a child.

I want to look at two ways in which we are to become like a little child and in which we are shown very clearly what our issues are, what our problem is, why we naturally are not able to live Jesus' way and we fill the earth with the curse that sin and selfishness brings.

The first one is directly from the text verse here in Matthew 18. Again, reading it, "And Jesus called a little child unto him and set him in the midst of them and said, 'Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.'" So the first one I want to look at is humbling ourselves.

Now Jesus says that, "Except ye be converted." And that is significant because that implies that we need a change. We need to be completely flipped over. So naturally, we're not in this state of being humble and childlike, and that's why we cannot participate in God's good reign.

So we need to be converted. We need a change, a complete changeover. And here he defines that changeover as a changeover of being humbled. We could talk about what humility is, but very simply put, it's simply lowering ourselves back to what we really are.

I want to read from Psalm 8 to understand a little bit of that. Really, humbling ourselves is simply a call to go back to where we were created. And while that is a lower position than God, it is not an inferior position. It's not a position of shame or subjugation or being demeaned by any means.

In Psalm 8:1, David says, "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, who has set thy glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him and the Son of Man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madeest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and ox and yay and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea and whatsoever passes through the paths of the sea. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth."

So here David very basically describes man's status as a created being. A few points I want to bring out here. First of all, he creates a context and looks at especially the heavens, the moon, and the stars. And David knew so little about it back then, as far as we know. The other night I was watching a video by Louis Giglio where he talks about the stars and the size of the stars in proportion to the earth. You could fit seven quadrillion earths inside Canis Majoris. And by the time we get out to one of the biggest stars that we know of, Canis Majoris, which means the big dog, our universe or our solar system is not even visible anymore.

And yet within that solar system, which is not even visible compared to the largest star, which is just one star among trillions and untold numbers in galaxies, our solar system doesn't even show up. And yet in that solar system, on one little planet, there are these little beings that each of us holds a representation before God, has just as much of an importance before God as all the rest of the beings, let alone the planet and the universe that we live in. So while we are small, we are created small, we are very important.

God has made us a little lower than the angels. So we are creatures that are down the list a little bit as far as who we are among the beings that have been created. But we are crowned with glory and honor. We have significance. We have importance with him. Part of that is as image bearers. We are given the responsibility to bear God's own image and to be like him.

It says that he made us to have dominion. So we are given a place of authority, and we're expected to reign with God, to be the managers of earth, and to grow the Garden of Eden, to fill the earth with the goodness and glory of God as we bear his image. So we are created to be a small thing, but a very important thing.

And our dominion and our power comes as we follow God, much like children. Children who follow their parents, who are obedient, are very important, very treasured, very protected, and are enjoyed very much. And that's the way we were created. And so really, Jesus' call to humble ourselves is a call to come back to where we were created, to humble ourselves and to reduce ourselves, not to try to be God or to be the parent and know everything and be able to determine good and evil like we tried to do at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but to leave that with God and to simply follow him. And when we do that, we have a tremendous place of security and authority.

It says here that, "Thou hast put all things under his feet." Hebrews 2 quotes this passage and deplores the fact that yet we see not all things put under man. And that's what happened as we fell, as we lost that place of security. God created us to not be vulnerable to anything, not to be vulnerable to our environment, not to be vulnerable to other humans, not to be vulnerable to the spirit realm. And it's as we stepped out from under that submissive dignity before God that we have become vulnerable to all of those.

So Jesus says we have to humble ourselves. We have to come back to who we were made to be. The songwriter says it very nicely, "To the gift to be simple, to the gift to be free, to the gift to come down to where we ought to be." And when we find ourselves in that place just right, we'll be in a valley of love and delight.

So we need to humble ourselves to become as a little child. We need to recognize that we need a father. We don't have it figured out. We cannot protect ourselves. We cannot provide for ourselves. We cannot order our lives. We don't have the wisdom that it takes. And we need someone to give us directions, to tell us. We need someone to be in partnership with and to share the enjoyment that being under that guidance gives us. I want to read a little from some of the prophets. Jeremiah captures this picture very well as he deplores the bondage that Israel was coming into because of their stiff-neckedness, their rebellion against God. And he says, "O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself.

It is not in man that walks to direct his steps." Jeremiah 10:23. Isaiah 50:10 says, "Who is there among you that feareth the Lord, that obeith the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness and hath no light? Let him trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon his God."

And then he breaks out in a satire, begging humanity to think about the foolishness and the destruction that they're bringing on themselves by trying to figure out their own way. And says, "Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks. Walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks that you have kindled. This ye shall have of my hand. You shall lie down in sorrow." And that's so much what it is. When we exalt ourselves and we think, "You know what? I don't need to listen to Dad. I can do this myself."

We're like that. We're like striking the flint and thinking we can light our midnight blackness with our sparks. And if we look realistically at our world, we see that very clearly, that as individuals and collectively as a human race, we are like that. We're trying to light our blackness with our own sparks, and we are experiencing a lot of sorrow. So we need to humble ourselves and become like a little child and realize we need a dad in order to be part of the kingdom of heaven.

The second one is from Ephesians 5:1, a point-blank reference to becoming children and what that means. Ephesians 5:1 says, "Be ye therefore followers of God as dear children and walk in love as Christ also hath loved us and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor." And then it goes on with many practical ways in which that lives itself out, what that means and choices that we need to make in order to walk in love as dear children.

It's interesting the way it says that. It says to walk in love, not simply to love God or to accept God's love, but to walk in love. So I want to talk just a little bit about what love is, what this means to walk in love.

My favorite definition of love is a mutual self-sacrificial commitment to the well-being of each other. So it's mutual. It's something that's back and forth. It's both ways. It's from both parties. And it's self-sacrificial. It's where I give up what I want because of what is good for somebody else.

It's also reciprocal. It's something where we love the other person and the other person loves us. In our broken world, love often has to be a one-way street where I love somebody else because it's unconditional. But to truly love, and as it says here, to walk in love, this is a mutual relationship of God loving us and us loving him back. And really, the whole thing isn't complete unless that's happening, unless love is going both ways.

Also, love does not always feel good. In our fallen world, when one party breaks the reciprocality of that love, often love is going to hurt, both on the part of the giver and on the part of the recipient.

An example of that that stands out to me is when somebody gets a snake bite. There was an old TV or radio program that we used to listen to called Stories with Aunt Bee. And in there, it told a story about a boy who kept a snake when he wasn't supposed to. And the snake grew up. It was a rattlesnake, grew up, and eventually it bit him. And his mother had to take a knife and cut across those fang marks and suck the blood out. Not a very pleasant thing for either party, but extremely necessary and a very important and a very vivid example of love and giving. So love is that way. Love is not some gushy thing that just makes everybody feel good, but love is a commitment that does hard things sometimes.

In this thing of love for God and love from God, it's that way in our lives. God's love doesn't always feel very loving to us as we struggle with learning to become children. And God's love has caused him a lot of pain.

First of all, thinking about God's love for us, because this is so important. Understanding God's love for us is what fuels our obedience. And it's good to put forth effort to obey. But until we really realize that God loves us and everything that he's done for us, everything that happens, every commandment he's given is a part of his love for us, we are really going to struggle with obedience. It's going to be a very difficult thing. And while I don't think the Bible ever tells us to just not obey simply because our motive isn't right, it always tells us to work on our motive. But it's going to be very difficult to obey. It's going to be a drudgery until we really believe that God loves us.

So I want to just briefly, this is extremely short, extremely limited, but I want to just stir our minds a little bit to think about how much God has loved us in ways that we see and experience God's love. First of all, is in his creation.

We already talked about that, how God created us. We're important. I like the term dignified diminutives. So we're small, we're little, we're diminutive, but we're dignified. We're very important. Screwtape and the famous screwtape letters by C.S. Lewis. That's one of the things he marveled at is he just didn't believe this could be true, that God would truly love, as he puts it, the human vermin.

But God made us important. He made us to be partners with him. So that's definitely an expression of love and fondness for us. His mercy on our rebellion. Many people want to paint God as some malevolent, vengeful spoil sport in the Old Testament. But really, in the Old Testament, if you want to see God's mercy, read the Old Testament. That's so much what the story is.

It's like Psalm 106 that recounts Israel's history, is his mercy endures forever. And so there's a lot of judgment and things like that in the Old Testament. But try reading it with some new eyes, some new glasses, and notice all the stuff God put up with, his mercy, his daily granting sustenance and enjoyment to us. In Acts 14:17, Paul at Lystra, in trying to get the heathens there to understand God and that he was reaching out to them, said, "Nevertheless, God left himself not without witness in that he did good and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons filling our hearts with food and gladness." So in the middle of a world that's so fallen, we still experience so many pleasant things, not just air to breathe and food to eat and sleep to stay alive, but there's so many things that are enjoyable in that.

We experience good weather, a beautiful day to be outdoors like right now. Food tastes good. We enjoy relationships. And while those things are all limited at times, there's still so much good, especially when we consider how much we have done to mess up God's world. So God gives us evidence of his love for us in granting us not just sustenance, not just what we need to stay alive, but enjoyment in those things.

His commandments. Psalm 119 talks over and over about, in so many different ways, about the goodness of God's commandments, what a blessing they are. Unless we become like a child, though, we're not going to see the goodness in God's commandments, just like a child when he's proud, rebellious, doesn't like dad's rules.

And it's when he humbles himself that he can experience the goodness of dad saying, "No, you know, don't go walk across the road. I want you to be home by 10 o'clock," or whatever it is. And so it is with us. When we can humble ourselves, God's commandments are a gift to us to keep us from our own evil and to show us the way to real life, the life of his kingdom where goodness reigns and we are blessed, like it says in Matthew 5, the first several verses there tell us the way to blessing.

So his commandments, his commandments are an evidence of his love for us. His redemption. 1 John 4:10 says, "Hear in his love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." So God choosing to reach out to us to send his Son to be the propitiation, to be that replacement, that hostage swap for us so that we can be freed from our sin and live God's way again.

It's a tremendous picture of his love for us, a tremendous evidence that shows us that he loves us and he has our good in mind, not just in mind, but all through his purposes has been a direct objective of his is to create our good, even when we have rejected that. So much should be said about that, but for the sake of time, we'll move on. And then his adoption, that he invites us back to being his children. 1 John 3:1 says, "Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God." So inviting us back again to be his children, to a place of fondness, to a place of inheritance, giving us his good world, his kingdom again as we choose to humble ourselves and let him be a dad to us.

He says, "Behold, just stop and look and think about and muse over the kind of love that it took to do that, to invite us back and do all the things necessary to bring us back to him." So we see God's love in those six points: his creation, the way he created us as dignified diminutives, his mercy on our rebellion, his granting sustenance with enjoyment to us, his commandments to guide us back to the right way, his redemption to set us free from our bondage to sin and Satan, and his adoption, bringing us into his family into a relationship of closeness and security and inheritance.

So the bottom line is God really likes us. The focal point of his design is our good and our exaltation.

So walk in love. So we've talked about God's part of this whole thing, this pool of love toward us and love toward God, of reciprocality, a circulation of love, of a self-sacrificial commitment to the well-being of each other that's mutual.

So how do we love God then? How do we walk in that love as dear children, as Ephesians 5:1-2 said? So the first one I'd like to talk about is by humbling ourselves, by accepting the way God created us instead of saying, "Eh, I want something better."

1 Peter 5:5 says, "Likewise, younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all of you be subject one to another and be clothed with humility. For God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble. Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time."

So when we reject the place God has given us and we decide we want something better and we're going to engineer for ourselves something better, we place ourselves in a position where God actually resists us, pushes us away. So we need to humble ourselves in order to be able to live in that circulation of love, God's love toward us and our love back to God. The other one is walking in obedience. 1 Peter 1:13 says, "Wherefore, gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance, but as he which hath called you is holy, so be holy in all manner of conversation, because it is written, 'Be holy, for I am holy.'" So here he refers to being obedient children and making the choice not to fashion ourselves according to our own worldly lusts like we used to, but to make the choice to be like our Father, to be holy in all of our lifestyle, our conversation, because he says, "Be holy, for I am holy."

Our dad is calling us to be like him.

John 5:3 says, "For this is love." So here's the definition: that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not grievous. Now notice that that's not two separate sentences there. It says that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not grievous. So those two things have to go together. And that is really important is we know we love God when we don't look at his commandments anymore as something to spoil our fun or something burdensome, but we understand that he loves us and his commandments are given to us as a good thing. That doesn't mean that we understand them all or that they all make sense to us by any means. No child understands why their parent gives them directions, gives limits to where they can go outside, gives them chores to do, why they say you can only have so many pieces of candy, or why you have to be home at a certain time at night.

Those things don't make sense to us as we're children, as we're young people growing up. But a happy child is one who submits and realizes that dad's been around and he knows what's good for me in a way that I don't, and I need to accept that. And so those commandments are not grievous when a child is walking in love with their parents. And in human relationships, the parents are not perfect. But in this case, our heavenly Father is perfect and everything he says is for our good. And we know that we love God when we keep his commandments, so we are obeying him, and his commandments are not a burden to us. John 14:15, Jesus says very simply here, he just says, "If you love me, keep my commandments."

So when we're walking in love and we understand that God loves us and we're willing to humble ourselves and become like a child, the result is going to be walking in obedience, not an obedience of trying to be better than his other children or anything like that, but simply walking in love and realizing our dad has given us directions to bless us and to lift us up and to exalt us in life, to lead us in a safe way so that we can be part of his kingdom.

I'd like to read a little poem that's also a song that illustrates this very well, this concept of being followers of God as dear children and humbling ourselves and walking in loving obedience and how we show our love by our obedience. The title is Which Loved Best and the author is unknown as far as I could tell. "I love you, mother," said little John, then forgetting his work, his cap went on. And off to the garden he went to the swing, forgetting the coal and the wood to bring. "I love you, mother," said Rosy Nell. "I love you more than tongue can tell." But then she fussed and pouted half the day till her mother rejoiced when she went to play. "I love you, mother," said little Anne. "Today I'll help you all I can.

How glad I am that school doesn't keep," and she rocked the babe till it fell asleep. Then stepping softly, she took the broom and swept the floor and dusted the room. Happy and busy all day was she, as helpful and busy as a child could be. "I love you, mother," again they said, three little children going to bed.

How do you think that mother knew which of them really loved her best?

Very good song and picture to help children understand what love is. And as parents, as older ones, we look at children and we say, "Yes, if you love your parent, you're going to obey them." For some reason, that's a little harder for us to understand when we think of God, is that if we love God, we will keep his commandments.

So as we think about this whole thing and we face the struggle of surrendering our own will, humbling ourselves, and choosing to accept God's love by loving him back in obedience, there's four steps that I've found helpful in my own life to help us to learn to walk in love, to respond to God's love, especially as we think about his commandments with a response of loving obedience. One is we have to make a decision. We need to decide. We need to make a choice and say, "This is what I'm going to choose is what's real, is that God loves me, whether I understand it or not, whether I understand this commandment or not. I'm going to do it and going to accept it as a gift of his love to me."

We need to declare that. The Bible talks different times about confessing things, and we do that with our whole life. But verbally, I think it's important to say that in prayer to God before the spirit realm, to say it before other people, to testify that we choose to believe that God loves us and that his commandments are a manifestation of his love for us.

To tell ourselves, especially in times of temptation, to just almost like a mantra, say that, "I'm going to choose. This is God's love for me. I'm going to obey this. This is God's love for me." And then to demonstrate that no belief is complete until it is acted out. And so faith without works is dead. And so we can say we believe God loves us, but until we make that choice and we say, "Dad, I'm going to obey you and please help me to do that," that his love, that circuit of love, God loving us and us loving God back becomes complete. And that's when God's love and his commandments becomes real to us. If we don't obey and we wait around to obey until God's love and his commandment becomes real to us, it's probably not going to happen.

We're not going to experience the love, the blessing that comes from obedience. And then discipline. Discipline is basically a continuation of those first three steps: deciding and declaring and demonstrating and repeating that over and over again in our lives, making that a discipline of choice and action.

So in conclusion, Jesus says, "I say unto you, except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." So as we want to enter the kingdom of heaven, we want to be part of Jesus' kingdom now and throughout eternity and whatever God is doing that's beyond what we've ever heard or thought of in the new heaven and the new earth, we need to humble ourselves and become like a little child and come back down to where we were made to be, realize we need a dad and realize that his commandments are a gift of his love to us and choose to walk in loving obedience.