Childlike, Not Childish: The Heart of Trusting Abandonment

 

Jesus never asked us to be childish.

He asked us to become childlike.

There is an ocean of difference between the two. Childishness is marked by tantrums, selfishness, impatience, and the refusal to grow. Childlikeness is marked by wonder, trust, dependence, and the freedom to run into loving arms without hesitation.

“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

Our Lord is not romanticizing immaturity. He is revealing the only posture in which a human soul can be saved: utter, joyful, confident dependence on the Father.

Picture a three year old walking hand-in-hand with his father through the aisles of a supermarket. Suddenly he sees a bright box of sweets on the shelf. His eyes widen, he tugs at his father’s sleeve. “Daddy, please! I want that one!” The father smiles, kneels down, and explains gently, “Not today, son, too much sugar before supper isn't good for you.” The child’s face crumples, tears well up and hee begins to cry; not out of rebellion, but out of instinctive certainty that only this man, his father, has the power to give him what he desires. He does not yet know how to earn money, how to drive to the store, how to negotiate with the cashier. All he knows is: Daddy can do it, he loves me and if he says no, there must be a reason, even if I can’t understand it right now.

That moment is a perfect icon of the spiritual life.

We, too, are three year olds in an immense supermarket called the universe. We see things we want; health, success, love, answers, relief, justice, consolation and we tug at the Father’s sleeve. Sometimes He instantly places the good thing into our hands. Sometimes He says, “Not yet.” Sometimes He says, “No, because I have something better.” And sometimes He is silent, asking us to keep walking while we hold His hand in the dark. The childlike soul does not interpret the “no” or the silence as proof of abandonment. It interprets them as proof of love.

Listen again to the words of the Lord: “What man among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:9–11).

Notice what Jesus does not say, he does not promise that the God will give us everything we ask for exactly when we ask for it. He promises that the Father will never mock our need, never hand us a stone when we are hungry for bread, never hand us a snake when we long for fish.

Yet sometimes, in our limited vision, the “stone” or “snake” is exactly what the refusal feels like. We asked for the job and someone else got it. We asked for healing and the illness lingers. We asked for reconciliation and the silence continues. In those moments we are tempted to think the Father has played a cruel trick. The childlike heart refuses that temptation,it remembers: My Father is good, He is not teasing me. He is forming me. If He withholds the thing I most desire then He is making room for a deeper gift I cannot yet name.

Long before the Canaanite woman or Bartimaeus, there was Hannah. Year after year she climbed the hill to Shiloh, her heart crushed by barrenness and by the cruel taunts of Peninnah, her rival. In the temple she poured out her soul before the Lord, weeping bitterly, lips moving without sound. Eli the priest thought she was drunk. “No, my lord,” she answered, “I am a woman troubled in spirit… I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.” She vowed: “If you will indeed look on the affliction of your servant and remember me… and give to your servant a son, then I will give him back to the Lord all the days of his life.” She did not pray once and walk away, she kept returning, kept weeping, kept begging childlike, shameless, persistent until the day God opened her womb and gave her Samuel. And true to her vow, she brought the child back to the house of the Lord, singing one of the most triumphant songs of Scripture: “My heart exults in the Lord… There is none holy like the Lord; there is none besides you.” (1 Samuel 1:1-15) Hannah teaches us that the Father is not annoyed by repeated, tear-soaked pleas; He is moved by them.

Jesus Himself told a parable to drive the same point home: a widow kept coming to an unjust judge, saying, “Give me justice against my adversary.” For a while the judge refused, but finally he said to himself, “Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.” Then Jesus asked, “Will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice speedily” (Luke 18:1-8). If even a corrupt judge yields to shameless persistence, how much more will our loving Father open the door when His children keep knocking with childlike boldness?

This is the faith Jesus later praised in the Canaanite woman. A Gentile mother, desperate because her daughter was demon-possessed, came shouting after Him: “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus at first answered her not a word. Then He said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” She knelt, pleading, “Lord, help me.” He replied, seemingly harsh, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Most of us would have walked away offended, she did not. “Yes, Lord,” she said, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Jesus stopped, marvelled, and declared, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed that very hour (Matthew 15:21-28). She refused to let silence, delay, or even an apparent rebuff stop her from clinging to the only One who could help. That is childlike persistence.

Blind Bartimaeus did the same, sitting by the Jericho road, he heard Jesus was passing by and began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The crowd sternly told him to be quiet; an adult telling a child to behave. Bartimaeus shouted all the louder. Jesus stopped, called him over, and asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” “Rabbi, I want to see.” “Go,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you.” Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road (Mark 10:46-52). Shameless, noisy, undignified faith exactly the kind a child shows when he knows only one person in the universe can meet his need.

And then there were the two men who went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, proud and self-sufficient, who thanked God he was “not like other men; robbers, evildoers, adulterers or even like this tax collector.” The other was a despised tax collector who stood far off, would not even lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast and cried, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” Jesus said, “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other” (Luke 18:9-14). The tax collector came empty-handed, utterly dependent, like a child who knows he has nothing to offer except his need. That is the heart the Father welcomes.

The psalms are filled with the same cry: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!” “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” “I stretch out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.” There is no pretense here, no adult sophistication, no careful negotiation. There is only the cry of a child who knows he will die without his Father.

Some people object: “If God already knows what I need, why must I ask?” The same question could be asked by the three-year-old in the supermarket: “Daddy already saw the sweets. Why do I have to ask?” Because love is relational, asking forms the heart of the one in need. Because the act of running to the Father with open hands keeps us from the terrible illusion that we are self-sufficient. Every “please” we utter is a declaration of the truth: Apart from You I can do nothing. Every tear we shed at an unanswered request is a confession: You alone are my hope. And every time we choose to thank Him even when the answer is “wait” or “no,” we grow a little more into the likeness of the Son who, in Gethsemane, prayed, “Abba, Father… not my will, but yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42).

On the night He was betrayed, after the Last Supper, Jesus led His disciples to a familiar olive grove called Gethsemane “oil press” a name that proved prophetic. There, under the ancient trees, He took Peter, James, and John deeper into the garden and began to be sorrowful and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” He told them. In Luke’s account His anguish was so intense that His sweat fell like drops of blood. This was no stoic hero, this was the Son of God, fully human, terrified before the cup of suffering He was about to drink; the wrath of God against sin, the weight of the world’s guilt, separation from the Father He had known in perfect communion from all eternity.

Falling to the ground, He prayed the most childlike prayer ever uttered by human lips: “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” “Abba” is the cry of a little child running to Daddy in the dark. First comes the honest plea 'Take this away!' Then comes the total surrender 'Yet not my will.' He prayed it three times, returning each time to find His friends asleep, utterly alone with the Father who alone could strengthen Him. An angel came, not to remove the cup, but to give Him grace to drink it.

Here is the pinnacle of childlike faith: raw vulnerability married to radical obedience. Jesus did not receive the escape He asked for, yet He rose from that garden resolved, calm, and victorious because He had placed Himself completely in His Father’s hands. When we face our own Gethsemanes like; illness, betrayal, loss, the long night of unanswered prayer, we are invited to pray exactly like this: to pour out our terror and desire without shame, then to bow and say, “Nevertheless, Your will, Father.” In that surrender we discover the same strengthening angel, the same river of peace that carries us forward.

This is the secret of Advent joy, and of all Christian joy: to live as beloved children who have a perfect Father. The world tells us joy comes from control, from having, from arranging life exactly as we planned it. Jesus tells us joy comes from surrender, from receiving, from running to the Father with every fear, every desire, every wound.

The childlike soul wakes up in the morning and says, “Father, I belong to You today.” It lays down to sleep whispering, “Father, into Your hands.” It does not need to understand everything, it only needs to be held.

And strangely, miraculously, this utter dependence becomes the source of unimaginable freedom. The child who knows he is carried does not waste energy pretending he can walk alone. He laughs, he sings and he dances in his Father’s arms.

That is the life Jesus died to give us.

So run to Him, cry if you must, tug at His sleeve, beg, bargain, weep, adore. Be shameless in your need, be stubborn in your trust like; Hannah who would not stop weeping at the temple door, like the persistent widow who wore out an unjust judge, like the Canaanite mother who would not be turned away, like Bartimaeus who shouted until the Lord stopped the whole procession, like the tax collector who beat his breast and simply begged for mercy.

For you are not an orphan striving to impress a distant God, you are a little child, breathless and wide-eyed, in the arms of a Father who has never once dropped you and never will. And in that embrace, you will discover the wild, startling, childlike joy that the world can neither give nor take away.

Two questions to carry into prayer today:

1. When was the last time I prayed with the shameless, tearful, stubborn persistence of a little child who knows only Daddy can help and refuses to let go until He answers?
2. Am I still clinging to the proud posture of the Pharisee, or have I learned to stand far off, beat my breast, and simply cry, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner”?