It has been about four months since I stood up here, and I think the wounds have finally healed. So, I am back up here again.
I want to continue along the same vein that I spoke about last time, and that was about being childlike. The last time I spoke, I talked about how our Heavenly Father has created an amazingly complex and beautiful physical universe. He has also created an amazingly beautiful and complex church. But He has made all these creations using very simple building blocks.
One of the key verses from last time was Mark 10:14-15:
But when Jesus saw this, He was indignant and said to them, “Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it at all.”
Well, His church is made up of very simple building blocks. That is us. In Scripture, we are told to come to His kingdom like a child and to be living stones in His house.
Being a child is pretty simple, and being a stone is even simpler. When we are childlike, we are not running around trying to architect and build the church; we are just being part of the church. His job is to architect and build the church. Our job is just to be the building blocks of that church.
When we are childlike, we can offer simple love, simple obedience, and simple faith. That is what He uses to build His church.
There was one clarification I made during that message that I want to make again: the difference between being childlike and being childish. It is all in the attitude of the behavior. If you are childlike, you are exhibiting the proper and desirable aspects of a child’s nature. If you are being childish, you are acting like my children. You indicate the improper, selfish, undesirable aspects of a child’s nature. The Lord wants us to be childlike, not childish.
After I spoke last time, at that Tuesday women’s meeting, one of the ladies—I do not know who it was—said, “I wish Jack would talk about what it means to be childlike.” Brenda told me about that comment, and it got me thinking: What exactly is being childlike like? What does it feel like to be childlike? What things in me are childlike, and what things in me are not childlike?
As I was thinking and meditating on this, Karen came to teach the first graders about 1 John. As we were preparing to teach on 1 John, I was reading through the book a couple of times, and the phrase little children kept jumping off the page at me. Several times—actually about twelve times—in the book of 1 John, the writer uses the term little children.
So I think it was the Lord raising a flag, saying, “Look at this book. This is something that you need to look at.” That is what I want to talk about today: being childlike from the perspective of 1 John.
I want to read several verses from 1 John, a couple of the places where little children is mentioned. You can just keep your finger in 1 John, because we will pop back to it every now and then during the message.
First John 2:1-2 says:
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.
And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;
and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins;
and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.
Then 1 John 2:12-13:
I am writing to you, little children, because your sins have been forgiven you for His name’s sake.
I am writing to you, fathers, because you know Him Who has been from the beginning.
I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one.
I have written to you, children, because you know the Father.
Then 1 John 2:28:
Now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming.
Then 1 John 3:18:
Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.
Then 1 John 4:4:
You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He Who is in you than he who is in the world.
And then, finally, the last verse in the book, 1 John 5:21:
Little children, guard yourselves from idols.
Biblical scholars really do not know when the book of 1 John was written. They are very confident that it was written by the Apostle John, or the disciple John, but they do not really know when he wrote it. They do believe that it was probably after he wrote his Gospel.
Also, biblical scholars do not agree on anything, but they do not agree on the problems in the church that this book was addressing. But it is fairly widely held that one of the major problems in the churches John was writing to was a heresy called Gnosticism.
Gnosticism has the Greek root word for knowing. These people thought they had the knowing. They believed in salvation through secret knowledge.
Now, I do not know—when I think of Gnostics, I get this mental picture in my head of these aliens from Star Trek: the ones with the tinfoil robes and the little skinny arms from never doing any work, but then they have this big, giant, throbbing head. You can see the little veins in their head throbbing, and they just walk around with their big throbbing heads all the time. Oh, that is beside the point.
But they were not space aliens. Gnostics had many problems. They did not believe that a holy God could create a sinful world. They believed that God was holy and all matter was sinful. So they came up with a scheme that the universe was created following thirty successive different emanations from the Lord, and finally it was far enough away that it could be a sinful world.
They also believed that, because God was holy, Christ could not come and live among us. What they saw as Christ was actually an illusion, some kind of projection from God—that Christ really did not live among us. It was just a hologram, to use another Star Trek phrase.
That led to all kinds of interesting problems. They believed that salvation came through acquisition of a revelation of knowledge that only they had, and that their spirit was saved but their physical body was unredeemably sinful and would never be saved.
This thing of having an unredeemable body led in two very different directions. There was one group, the unpopular Gnostics, who practiced a restraint that prevented them from doing anything enjoyable. Then there was the other group of Gnostics—probably the more popular group—who believed that since the body was unredeemably sinful, you might as well let the body do what it was going to do, because what does one more sin matter when that body is not going to be redeemed? So they just lived a life of wanton pleasure.
These Gnostics had their big old throbbing heads. They knew all the stuff, all the intricate knowledge about their system, but they were dead wrong. They would not have known Christ if He had come up and slapped them upside their big old throbbing heads.
It seems to me like when these heresies creep into the church—or crept into the church—they still enter in from time to time. But they seem to make following Christ more complex and more convoluted. Maybe that should be a red flag to us if somebody comes to us and is trying to explain something that makes following Christ more difficult and more complex. That should be an alert.
I wonder sometimes if we do not value knowledge too much. We often take pride in how much we know as compared to other believers, and then we let our big old throbbing heads get in the way of fellowshipping with people who may meet differently from us.
I think the more we know Christ—not the more we know of Christ, but the more we know Christ—the smaller our heads will become.
Sometimes I think we take a baby step toward Gnosticism ourselves. Because of this constant struggle between our spirit and our flesh, we tend to excuse the fact that we still sin by saying, “Oh, Christ sees us as righteous, even though we still sin.” If we are not careful, we may end up just excusing that sin because our spirit is holy and our flesh is sinful.
Another thing that is evident in 1 John is John’s love for the church. The real reason biblical scholars believe John used the phrase little children so much in this book was because he had been intimately involved in the lives of these churches, and he saw them as his children. He loved them like his children.
When John wrote this book, he was probably a very, very old man. He was probably like forty-five or something. He was probably in his eighties or nineties when he wrote this book. He had been involved in these churches for a long time, and he loved them. He loved them like his children.
Well, enough for an introduction. Let us look at some of the aspects of being childlike in 1 John.
The first aspect I want to talk about may seem very obvious, but it is knowing that you are a child and knowing Who your Father is. Let me quickly read again 1 John 2:12-13:
I am writing to you, little children, because your sins have been forgiven for His name’s sake.
I am writing to you, fathers, because you know Him Who has been from the beginning.
I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one.
I have written to you, children, because you know the Father.
It may seem strange, but the first key to being childlike is to know that you are a child, and to know that you are a child with a Father Who loves you very, very much. He loves us, His children, more than we can ever fathom.
It is like Herb said this morning: He gave His only begotten Son so that we might be His children. He gave His Son to cover our sins so that we could be adopted as His children.
Now, if we do not see ourselves as children, then what are we? Are we slaves? Well, slaves do not have an inheritance. Also, slaves have no grounds upon which they can approach their master. When a slave does something wrong, they are not disciplined; they are punished. A slave receives no payment for his labor, but yet we are laying up treasures in heaven.
Are we hired hands? Somebody is hired because of the capabilities that they bring. But we all know that in and of ourselves, we have nothing that the Father needs. A hired hand maintains his place in the family by the work that he does. The hired hand can be fired, but a child can never be fired. Once you are a child of God, you are always a child of God.
We are not just mere friends of His. If we assume to be His friend, then we are assuming some level of equality with Him. But outside of His adoption of us as sons, we have no standing to come into His presence.
We have been adopted as children of the Most High God. I think seeing ourselves as children will be very liberating. Sometimes it seems like we see ourselves as barely hanging on to God by our fingernails. But it is not that way.
When we fall and disobey, He does not abandon us. Did you abandon your children when they disobeyed? Nope. Neither will God.
In fact, because we are children, we can approach the Father. We can speak to the Father. We can have a relationship with the Father.
We are not only children with a Father; we are children with an involved Father. John 14:18 says:
I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
And Proverbs 13:24 says:
He who withholds his rod hates his son,
but he who loves him disciplines him diligently.
We can know that we are not orphans, that we are not abandoned, because the Lord disciplines us. That may seem counterintuitive, but if He loves us, He disciplines us. If He loves us, why does He not just give us everything we need and want right now? But that is really not the way things work. That is not how things work out for the best of the child.
It may sound really harsh, what I am about to say, but I think it is the truth: if I did not love my children, I would have abandoned them a long time ago. If I did not love them, why would I put up with all the times that they disobey and disappoint?
If I did not love them, it would be a lot easier just to walk away and leave them and let them fend for themselves. Because when they disobey, that seems like what they want to do. They just want to fend for themselves. But I love them, and I do not do that. I continue to work with them. I correct them, remind them, discipline them, and even every now and then inflict a little pain. I do this because I love them.
In a human way, I am trying to conform them into my image. It sounds like a very terrible thing to do, Tom. You are probably cringing: conforming my children to my image. But that is what we do when we are disciplining our children. We are trying to raise them to be responsible, thoughtful adults—or people who are enjoyable to be with for an extended period of time.
If I am doing this as a faulty human father with all my problems, then how much more is the Heavenly Father doing that for us?
If He did not love us, He would have wiped the earth clean a long, long time ago. Instead, He continues to remind us, correct us, discipline us, and occasionally inflict a little pain on us. He does this all to conform us to the image of His Son, so that one day we may be a people who are actually enjoyable to be with for an extended period of time—actually, for all eternity.
Another thing that knowing you are a child does for you is that it sets some boundaries around you. Let me illustrate this with a story from my life.
Many years ago—actually about twenty years ago—the day came for me to go off to college. My parents were driving me to college, driving on the highway. My mother turned around and looked at me with tears in her eyes, as mothers get on that day when they take their youngest child to school.
She said, “Jack, there is one thing. There is one thing I want you to know and want you to remember.” I thought, “She is going to tell me to change my underwear every day.” But she said, “No, there is one thing I want you to know and I want you to remember: whose child you are. Who purchased you with a price? Remember that you are a child of God and that He bought you.”
Well, I was stepping out into the world. I had a whole gamut of choices before me, just a slew of things I could get involved with. I could go out partying. I could get involved in drugs and the occult and psychobabble, whatever. I could get involved in that. But could I really? I was a child of God. I was not an unwanted child. I was not an orphan. God had purchased me with a price.
That purchase constrained me to try to please the Father. How disappointed would He have been if I were to go out and do the things that would displease Him, if I would have gone out and done the things that my flesh wanted to do?
But my Heavenly Father is wonderful beyond all measure, and He loves me beyond all measure. I want to be like Him because I am His child. I do not want to be like myself.
The position of the parents constrains a child to certain types of behavior. If we see a child behaving contrary to the position of their parents, we immediately classify that as rebellion. If you see a child of well-to-do, wealthy parents going off and living in the gutter, we know that that child is rebellious.
Children identify with their parents and have a natural tendency to want to follow in their footsteps. My children observe their parents and want to be like them.
With a childlike naivety, a child just lives and follows in the footsteps of their parents. They do not have a long-term strategy. They do not try to think, “How can I be like my parents?” They just live their life, imitate what they see, and become like their parents. They do not become overanxious with their progress for becoming parent-like.
On one hand, a child is pretty happy with where they are at. They seem to be satisfied with their position in life. Yet, on the other hand, they are still growing. They are still maturing.
When a child receives discipline from their parents, they do not go around kicking themselves for weeks and weeks because they have done something wrong and disobeyed. They just take the punishment or discipline, absorb the lesson, quickly pop back up, and continue on with life. They just live and listen and watch and grow. The next thing you know, they are like their parents.
I think being conformed to Christ works in very much the same way. I do not believe that we need to be concerned about our long-term strategy for becoming Christ-like. He will conform us to His image. We cannot do that in and of ourselves.
I do not think we need to be conscious or anxious about our progress, and we do not need to continually punish ourselves when we disobey. We just need to receive His discipline, get up, and go on.
We just need to watch, listen, obey, and live. Then the next thing you know, you have changed from the last time you looked, and you are more like Christ.
When we recognize that we are His children, we have a freedom to live the life that He has called us to, because we are secure in being His children. He will not abandon us. In fact, He will not even leave us the way we are. He will continue to work to conform us and shape us into His image.
He will conform us in a way that we cannot plan and do not expect. He will conform us in a way that follows His wonderfully wise and loving ways. We just need to watch, listen, obey, live, and grow.
Once we know that we are children, then we can adopt the childlike attitudes—or heart attitudes—that a child has. First John 2:28 says:
Now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away in shame at His coming.
Children are not independent, although they sometimes try to be independent. They need their parents to guide them, direct them, protect them, and teach them. Children know this.
This month, our kids are taking swimming lessons. Last week, I took all three of the kids to swimming lessons and left Brenda at home. She got to be at home for two hours alone without any children.
When I got home with all the kids, of course I was worn out from being at swim lessons for two hours. But Noah, our five-year-old, ran in the house and said, “Mommy, Mommy, I am so sad that you had to be alone for two hours.”
His worst nightmare inside of him was to be away from us, to be independent of his parents for two hours. So he thought that was our worst nightmare too: to be away from them for two hours. But in his childlike heart, he did not want to be away from his parents. He did not want to be independent of us.
I think we all know that the Lord wants us to be dependent upon Him, just like Christ was dependent upon the Father. That dependence on Him, I think, is manifested as abiding in Him.
There are several ways that a childlike attitude reflects this abiding with the Father. The first aspect of abiding is that children have this yearning to be with their father. It seems like a child’s life is centered on their father.
If I want to go outside and work in the yard, the kids want to go outside and be with me and work in the yard. If there is some plumbing, some sink that I need to fix, there always seems to be a child there with me.
I do not know if you all know this, but if you were to come watch me at work, at what I do for a living, it would be exceedingly boring—very, very boring. I just sit there, and I read and think and type some and make some phone calls. Basically, it is like watching paint dry.
I do not get to watch people doing open-heart surgery or anything like that. I just stay at a computer screen all day. But for some reason, my children want to come to work with me. They want to be with me at work, even though it is amazingly boring.
Do we have that same desire to be with the Heavenly Father? To be with Him no matter where He is at, no matter what He has called us to, no matter how weird or strange or boring it may seem to other people?
When I come home from work, our children are wildly excited to see me. They show no restraint whatsoever in showing their excitement. I have to be careful pulling into the driveway because there are kids running toward my truck.
I do not know why they are excited to see me. I am about as exciting at home as I am at work. But for some reason, they are excited to see me.
Now, do we get excited to come into the presence of the Father? I wonder sometimes if we are too reserved and too restrained when we come to worship Him. Why do we not show the excitement that His presence is due?
Another attitude that children seem to have about their father is that their fathers know everything and can do everything.
My children ask me the most bizarre questions: “How does radio work?” “Why does the sun not burn out?” They bring their broken toys to me and say, “Can you fix this?” No, I cannot fix these toys.
Unfortunately, I let them down. I do not know much, and I can do even less, but I do not think they have caught on to that yet. Hannah may be catching on. I think she is starting to figure out that I cannot do everything and do not know everything.
But fortunately, we have a Heavenly Father Who does know everything and can do anything. He created the universe. He created everything that we see around us. If He does not know it, it does not exist.
Do we really believe this? Do we really act upon this? Or do we just confine Him to dealing with the overtly spiritual areas of our life, and exclude Him from the more practical areas of our life?
Do you know that your Father knows more about doing your job than you do? Who better to seek about dealing with problems at work than your Father? He knows what you are doing. He knows how to do it.
Do you know that your Heavenly Father is the world’s most adept player at office politics? He has all the knowledge and wisdom to deal with these interpersonal problems at work. He knows how to deal with your coworkers. So we should seek Him in those areas.
Do you know that your Heavenly Father knows more about raising children than anybody else on earth, even more than Gary Ezzo? How often do we seek God about how to deal with our children?
My Heavenly Father knows everything there is to know about developing software, about managing software products. The times that I sought His counsel on how to deal with problems at work, He answered me and gave me an answer—not only for the problem at work, but He provided spiritual blessing because I sought Him.
Through the act of seeking Him on these small things—small work things—He provides us the faith and the gumption to seek Him on bigger things.
When we abide with the Father like this, when we see Him as and actually live with Him as the all-knowing Father and the Father Whom we enjoy being around, we will get to know the ways of the Father.
The things that the Father says and does will become ingrained in us, so that we can fulfill some exhortations in 1 John: not to let anyone lead us astray and to hold on to those things that we have heard from the beginning.
If we do not cling to the Father, we grow distant from Him. As that distance grows, His ways, the things that He does, and His likeness become fainter and fainter through the fog of other people’s ideas and other people’s beliefs. The next thing you know, we cannot tell what is of the Father, what is of man, and what is of the enemy.
When we abide with the Father, it is going to impact the way that we deal with the people around us and the world around us.
If we are clinging to the Father, we are going to begin to value things the way He values things. This new valuation will affect how we love each other and how we love others. First John 3:17-18 speaks pretty strongly about that:
But whoever has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?
Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.
If we value the Father to the level that He is due, there is going to be very, very little room left for valuing other things, especially our worldly belongings. It is pretty clear from this Scripture that our Heavenly Father values us much more than He values our possessions. But how many times do we force Him to work around our possessions to get to us?
If we have an appropriate attitude for what we have with the Father, we will automatically place our possessions in proper perspective. Then He can use our stuff to His advantage and to the advantage of the church.
We have also been talking a lot about warfare lately, and this abiding has to do with warfare also. I wanted to assure you that there is a way to be a childlike warrior. Being a warrior and being a child do not exclude one another. You can be both.
First John 4:4 says:
You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He Who is in you than he who is in the world.
A primary example of a childlike warrior was David fighting Goliath. David approached the problem of Goliath in a very childlike way. He saw Goliath, and he saw him defaming the name of the Lord. Therefore, the Lord would get rid of Goliath. That simple.
David did not need to sit down and analyze the situation and figure out whether he had enough strength or enough skill to take on Goliath. I think everybody knew, including David, that David could not take on Goliath by himself. But David believed that God would do it through him.
So David, like a child, went out trusting his Father, and he slew the giant. This ability to trust the Father and go out and kill Goliath came from David’s past abiding with the Father. David had trusted the Lord before to take on the lion and the bear. He had abided with the Lord in those times of danger.
So when Goliath came along, David had comfort and trust that his Father would be there with him too. So he was able to go out and take down the giant.
As we live as children of the King and walk in this world, we will come across things that pull our gaze away from the Heavenly Father. That last verse in 1 John speaks to that:
Little children, guard yourselves from idols.
The book kind of ends funny. It ends right there. The last verse of the book is like somebody lost the last page of the fax back when John faxed it out to the churches. It just ends.
Well, this is John’s final exhortation to these churches: “Children, guard yourselves from idols.” It seems kind of strange. What exactly is an idol?
An idol, I think, is anything or anyone to which we attribute providence or give glory—anything or anyone from which we think we get something, or to whom we give glory for doing something.
When we give glory or thanks to someone else or something else for doing something for us, we begin to lean on that thing or that person. We lean on them in place of leaning on the Lord.
As these things come along, and we start to depend on other things and other people, and we start attributing providence to them, the next thing you know, we are not leaning on the Lord at all. We end up in a state where we are completely independent from Him because we are not leaning on Him.
That complete independence is every adolescent’s dream: to be away from the father, away from the parents, and independent from them. But it is actually a nightmare to be independent of the Father.
As I was writing this, the thought came to me: maybe this is one of the issues with the second generation that we have been talking about so much for the past several years.
Maybe we have not remained childlike and remained as children, because children do not have children. Children do not have a second generation.
Maybe we have gotten all grown up and mature, and our physical children have become our spiritual children. Maybe our children have grown up leaning on us for spiritual guidance. Because of our spiritual knowledge, because of our big old throbbing heads, they have never actually leaned on the Lord.
We are good people and all, but we are not the Lord.
Maybe our children feel comfortable leaning on us because of our knowledge. If someone is leaning on me, they are not leaning on the Lord. If they are not leaning on the Lord, then they will never truly touch Him and experience Him.
Living the Christian life without direct contact with Christ is a very bleak and barren experience. So we need to make sure that nobody is leaning on us for spiritual guidance, that we are not being surrogate fathers.
I hope you are not offended by that. If you are, you can just take me out back and stone me later.
Finally, in conclusion, I just want to summarize and say that to be childlike, we need to know and believe that we are children of the Most High God.
We need to cling to our Heavenly Father like a child clings to their father and enjoys the presence and company of their father. We need to be excited to be in His presence.
When we cling to our Father like a child clings to their father, then we will share His priorities and share His agenda. We will be prepared for the coming battles that are facing us.
We must be diligent to maintain that childlike awe of our Father. We need to maintain that awe and the admiration that the Father deserves and desires.
Let us pray.
Father, I just thank You, Lord, for purchasing me, purchasing my life, Lord. Father, I pray that You would forgive me, Lord, for those times that I have not sought You as Father and have not clung to You as Father, but have clung to other things.
Father, I pray that if anything that I have said up here today has offended anyone or was out of place, that You would wipe it away as if it had never been spoken.
I pray this in Christ’s holy and precious name. Amen.