Exhortation

“Unless you are converted and become like little children, you cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” Jesus says. To enter His kingdom, we must be needy, eager, dependent, watching the world with wonder. Jesus fills His kingdom with children.

But the world and our own flesh makes it difficult to be childlike. Young people are too cool, too cool to take unfeigned delight in anything, too cool to need anything, too cool to ask for anything.

Older people are too jaded to be childish: We’ve seen a sunsets and snowflakes before. Ho hum. Or we are too dignified: You won’t catch us doing a David dance before the Lord.

GK Chesterton said that the living God has the exuberant, “eternal appetite of infancy,” and added, “We have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” We can also say: We have sinned and grown cool, we have sinned and grown jaded, we have sinned and grown dignified.

And the kingdom will pass us by unless we are born again into a second childhood.