Become Like Children

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” — Matthew 18:3

What Jesus Actually Said

He didn’t say become childlike in sentiment. He didn’t say recover a sense of wonder, though that may come. He said become like children. Present tense. A change. A becoming.

It is worth sitting with that before we rush past it.

What a Child Actually Is

Think about what a small child actually is, in the most concrete terms.

Without their parents, they have no food. No water. No shelter. No warmth at night. They cannot dress themselves, cannot feed themselves, cannot protect themselves from cold or danger. They do not yet know what is good for them or what will harm them. They have no wisdom of their own. No resources. No plan.

Left entirely alone, they do not merely struggle. They die.

This is not a metaphor to be softened. This is the plain reality of what a child is. Total dependence. Not partial dependence — total.

This Is Our Position Before God

What Jesus is asking us to recognize is that this is precisely our position before the Father.

He is the Creator of all that exists. He spoke the world into being, and He formed us from the dust of the earth and breathed life into us with His own breath. That breath was not a one-time event. He is breathing us into existence at every moment. We are that close to Him, and that dependent on Him.

We have no life except the life He gives. We have no love except what flows from Him. We have no wisdom except what He illumines in us. We cannot take a breath, form a thought, or make a single movement toward the good without Him sustaining us in that moment.

We love because He first loved us. — 1 John 4:19

Before we reached for Him, He had already reached for us. Before we could love anything at all, He placed that capacity in us by loving us first. Even our love for Him is His gift.

In Him we live and move and have our being. — Acts 17:28

Paul is not speaking loosely. He means it literally. Remove God’s sustaining action from any moment of your existence, and there is nothing left. Not a diminished version of you. Nothing.

Why We Forget This

We forget it because we feel capable. We wake up in the morning and our bodies work. We think, we plan, we accomplish things. It feels like our doing.

The child who has always had a warm home and food on the table may not fully grasp what it means that someone else provided it. The provision is so consistent, so faithful, that it recedes into the background. It is simply how things are.

This is our condition. God’s sustaining love is so faithful, so constant, that we mistake it for our own nature. We think we are self-sufficient because He never stops holding us in being.

The Poverty That Is Actually Wealth

To become like a child is to let that truth land — really land — not as doctrine we assent to, but as lived reality we inhabit.

I have nothing. I can do nothing. I am nothing apart from Him.

This sounds like loss. It is the opposite. The child who knows she is held by her father is freer than the child who believes she must manage everything herself. The weight falls away. The anxiety of self-sufficiency — which was always an illusion — dissolves.

This is what the Desert Fathers meant by poverty of spirit. Not a pious feeling. A clear-eyed recognition of what is actually true.

“Apart from me you can do nothing.” — John 15:5

He said it plainly. We spend our lives learning to believe it.