KINGDOM CHILDREN

Jesus said, ‘I tell you solemnly,’ or ‘truly,’ or in our language, ‘I tell you for sure, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom.’ The image of the child is used by Jesus to represent our transformed personalities, our new birth, our transfer to kingdom ideals, and our new understanding. The little child represents a freedom from all false and masked fronts that allow one to remain open, spontaneous, creative and abandoned to worship the one we love. There is no shame or holding back of emotions.

Children respond directly to the circumstance. There is no split between appearance and reality. This childlike attribute is rarely learned by an adult until later in life, if ever. Children are what they are without pretense and only learn performance by the tutoring and insistence of adults. The child is still in the innocence of their inner world and the inner world and the outer world are the same and not yet split into secrecy, mystery and hiddenness on the inner and performance and pandering on the outer. The singleness and union of our persons is found in the little child and is the example of what people in the kingdom are to establish as normal.

“And whoever receives one such little child in my name receives me. But whoever misleads one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for him to have a millstone hung about his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Jesus