Finding the Lost World of Wonder
Matthew 18:1-6 and Matthew 19:13-15
The past few months have been very interesting for me. As many of you know, Charity and I have been student teaching this past semester. It was the last hoorah before we were able to graduate. At the onset of the semester, we were given the first school and grade level we were to be placed at. As it turned out, Charity and I both were in 4th grade.
Now the middle school age groups are more my comfort zone, but I thought I could handle 4th grade and, thankfully, I did. It was a great experience, the students were great, and I felt very comfortable with the age group.
We spent 7 weeks with the 4th graders and then prepared to move on to our next placement. I didn’t know what grade I had until I walked on to the TN Tech campus at Cookeville and received the white sheet of paper that spelled out my fate for the next seven weeks. My eyes quickly scanned the paper until at last I found the grade level I was going to be placed with. To my utter shock, it was the age group I feared the most…1st grade.
Charity was rejoicing, this is what she loves, and I was making the decision to switch majors. But I went in with both feet forward. And I can confidently say that after spending 7 weeks with the little first graders, I can declare that I would still never want to teach first grade.
Throughout this time I was treated to new adventures that I had not witnessed before with such great quantity. The young 6 and 7 year olds would run up to me or raise their hands and say things like, “He has 2 pencils on his desk and he’s only suppose to have one. She won’t stop looking at me. He bumped into me. He took my place in line. He won’t play with me.” And the list goes on and on and on.
I became frustrated. After all, I was a student teacher. I had bright ideas. I was ready to teach these children and cause their minds to be set on fire with curiosity and interest in all sorts of things they had never dreamed about. And here I was, tying shoes, sharpening pencils, replacing glue sticks, and trying to solve the tragedies that came into their lives—even if only it was having 2 pencils on a desk instead of just one.
But the more I have been around children--this young group of 1st graders, the kids here at the Church, and other kids, the more I have tried to watch them. For quite sometime I have tried to figure out what exactly Jesus our Lord was talking about when He told His disciples that the Kingdom of Heaven didn’t belong to the ones who held the heaviest sword, conquered the most land, made the most money, or acted the most happy, but the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to children.
This was especially striking given the circumstances of the time in which Jesus’ Disciples lived. Children were not highly regarded. Children were often viewed as mischievous, uneducated, unintelligent, and inadequate. After all, Jesus had the highest ranking Rabbis, leaders of the Law, Sadducees, and Pharisees clamoring for His attention, insight, and solutions to history old problems.
Why would Jesus have time for children with this flurry of attention from the “elite” of society? Apparently, the Disciples thought Jesus didn’t have time. Obviously not learning their lesson from Matthew 18, they were rebuking the children as they came to Jesus.
Then the real kicker comes in: Not only does Jesus tell the Disciples to allow the children to come to Him, Jesus says the Kingdom of God belongs to these children.
Jesus had a way of taking the cultural norms and turning them on their heads. The Disciples were undoubtedly shocked at this turn of events. They were eagerly awaiting the day that Jesus would start a holy revolt and destroy the Romans and anyone else who dared to stand in Jesus’ way. After all of this, they were waiting for Jesus to stride into a massive temple or palace and be crowned as the King.
Of course, the Disciples naturally expected, since they were part of Jesus’ inner circle, they would have very powerful positions of authority in this new Kingdom to beat all kingdoms. The next logical question the Disciples had was, “boys, there are 12 of us and we can’t all be number one, so which one of us will be the greatest?”
The Disciples just didn’t yet get what the Kingdom of God was about, so Jesus gave them a living object lesson in the form of a child.
“Unless you turn from your sins and become like little children you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven.”
We have said these words throughout the centuries, but I believe we have missed the point. Jesus is not asking us here to be childish or immature or uneducated. There is a much deeper meaning that is infinitely wonderful yet difficult to grasp.
What is it about children that make us respond to them in such kind ways? What is it about little children that draws us to them and makes us want to pick them up and love them? What is it about little children that makes us want to watch them with intensity as they explore new things?
Is it not a sense of wonderment that so characterizes the life a little child?
You see, Jesus was not telling us to crawl in a bed and be rocked into spiritual sleep for the rest of our lives, He was reminding us that because of what Christ has done, we are a child of a loving Heavenly Father who desires to fill our hearts with the wonder that is so often lost as we grow older.
Paul tells us in Galatians 4:6 that, “Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”
That alone is hard enough to grasp. The Creator of all that we see loves us so much to call us His children and to be our Heavenly Father? That word, “Abba” is a deeply moving a personal word that so denotes the amazing intimacy that God desires to have with us, His children.
So how do we become a child of God, with a pure faith and a pure heart and have our wonder restored?
I believe there are 5 key senses that characterize the life of a little child. And I believe this is precisely what Jesus was getting at when He said we must become like little children.
5 Senses of Children (or a Child of God)
1. Sense of Wonder
a. We have mentioned this briefly and I believe it is the lynchpin of what makes life so special as a child and provides direction in terms of how we may restore the wonder as adults.
b. Let’s return to fairyland for a moment. G.K. Chesterton frequently talks about the world of fairytales and how all of the wonderment and joy flows from these classic stories. In fact, much of our moral principles come from the world of fairytales.
i. Beauty and the Beast: You have to love someone before they become lovable.
ii. Cinderella: the exultation of the humble.
iii. Sleeping Beauty: How we can be blessed with many things but still be cursed with the curse of death, but how death can even be softened to that of a sleep.
iv. And on and on it goes in the fairy world of fantasy.
c. Yet, the older we become, a couple of things immediately begin to jump into our minds as we read these fairytales.
i. There is always a condition: If you are not back by such and such a time, you will become a such a such. If you are not back by midnight, your chariot will turn into a pumpkin.
ii. The 2nd thing is this, after all of the conditions are given by the fairy god mother, the person never ever turns and says, “how come?”
iii. Chesterton says he strongly suspects that reason is because the fairy godmother will turn to the person and say, “if that’s the way you want it, then tell me how come there is a fairyland.”
iv. You see, there is a certain wonderment in mystery and God finds it fascinating to fill our hearts with this marvelous spectacle. Not all of us may understand why a firefly lights up at night, and yet there is wonder and fascination with that occurrence because we see the beauty and mystery of God’s design.
d. But something happens to our wonderment as we grow older and move away from the world of imagination.
e. Take 3 children at the age of 6, 3, and 1 and tell them a story:
i. First the 6 year old: Little Tommy got up from his chair and walked up to the large door. Little Tommy opened the door and all of a sudden a lion leaped in front of Tommy. (The 6 year old eyes go wide)
ii. Take the 3 year old: Little Tommy got up from his chair and walked up to the large door. Little Tommy opened the door. (The 3 year old eyes go wide)
iii. Finally take the 1 year old, who is probably more interested in cookies and mommy’s earrings than anything else: Little Tommy got up from his chair and walked up to the large door. (His eyes go wide)
iv. What’s the difference: For the 6 year old you needed a lion, for the 3 year old you needed the suspense of an open door, for the 1 year old it was a big deal just to walk up to the door.
v. You see, the older we become the more it takes to fill our hearts with wonder and only God is big enough to fill it.
f. We lose the wonder with age, but God can restore that lost wonder of fascination
g. How does this make us like a child?
i. Solomon said, “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
ii. God has placed within our hearts a desire and a passion that can only be satisfied by his presence.
iii. Though we grow older we don’t have to lose the wonder even though we are not a child age wise. We become children of God and His wonders cannot be exhausted.
2. Sense of Gratitude:
a. The following illustration is somewhat crass but I believe it is appropriate. I am indebted to Ravi Zacharias for this illustration.
i. Many years ago a large plane took off and was on its way to Canada. While the plane was thousands of feet in the air, there was all of a sudden a fire in one of the rooms. The pilot knew he would not have much time to react so he plummeted in an attempt to make an emergency landing. When he hit the runway the plane impacted so hard that the wheels broke and the plane began to break apart.
As they opened the doors, people were frantically being removed from the plane as it was turning into an uncontrollable blaze. Amid all of the chaos, the pilot stayed on the plane and rescued every person that he could. At last, he finally came off of the plane and he was on fire. As the flames on his body was put out, he quietly went away to a room by himself and avoided all media interviews as he tried to come to terms with what had happened.
ii. Here is the application:
1. If you are someone you loved had been on that plane and this pilot had rescued them, wouldn’t you want to go and thank him and praise him for what he had done. He had truly been the captain of the ship until the last moment. You would have a sense of gratitude, a sense of thankfulness. It would be natural.
iii. Take another plane that took off not long after this incident. It was traveling across the vast ocean, a massive airliner. At one point over the sea a problem emerges with one engine. One engine loses power, then another, then another, then the last engine goes. The pilot comes across on the intercom and says, “ladies and gentleman, we have lost all power, ditching is inevitable, ditching is inevitable.”
iv. All of a sudden, one of the engines strangely and mysteriously regains power and the pilot was able to limp it up and turn back toward land safely.
1. Whom do you thank then?
v. Children are naturally grateful (this does not mean they are always grateful) but they do have a sense of gratitude all their own that is not clouded at such a young age by the desire for power and fame.
1. Who do we give thanks to for the sun coming up every morning, for rain that causes our food to grow, for the blessings of life? If not God, then there is no one.
2. When we see young children thankful for the Christmas gifts on Christmas morning, who do we thank for allowing us to live another day?
vi. But we have an even more marvelous reason to be thankful, for through Christ, God has provided so great a salvation in which our whole self can be devoted in grateful worship toward Him.
1. “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise.” Psalm 100:4
a. The moment we began to thank God for His graciousness, the closer we become to understanding what Jesus was talking about when He told us to become like little children.
3. Sense of fulfillment:
a. There is a very important distinction to make: Attainment is not the same as fulfillment.
b. There are many people in the world today who have bought into the disillusionment that by making more money, being promoted in their job, having the most attractive wife or husband, and climbing a ladder by attaining more and more and more they will one day be completely fulfilled and satisfied.
c. Boris Becker, the famed tennis player, stunned the world after he won his second Wimbledon, after a reporter asked him how he felt he said he, “he struggled everyday with the decision about whether or not to commit suicide.”
i. Boris Becker, like so many others, had made it to the top and realized it was very lonely.
ii. The loneliest moment in life happens when we have just experienced what we thought would bring the ultimate and lets us down.
1. We have an entire generation of people that have believed the lie that one day their life will be made complete by attainment.
iii. St. Augustine said about God, “"You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are rest-less till they find their rest in you."
d. Last week, Charity and I were at a park with her family. Charity has a cousin who has a little girl who is now at the stage of “discovering” her world.
As they were walking on a path, she saw a little squirrel playing on the ground and became fascinated with it as she watched it frolic and run and do all the things that squirrels do. She watched it play, completely captivated by wonder of one of God’s little creatures. When she was finally pulled away from watching and as they walked away, she turned and said in her soft voice, “Bye!” as if she and the squirrel had been friends for years.
i. What’s the point? It’s a simple story, but if we began to look at everything in life through the eyes of an all loving Heavenly Father, of Whom the Bible says has eternal pleasures at His right hand (Psalm 16:11) then all of a sudden our lives begin to have a newfound sense of fulfillment.
ii. The bad days don’t seem quite so bad, the meager salary all of a sudden is a lot more sufficient, the old clunker of a car is now much more appreciated.
1. G.K. Chesterton said, “God is like the sun, you cannot look directly at it, but without it you cannot see anything else.”
e. How does this make us like a child?
i. Jesus made it abundantly clear to the Disciples that to be a child was to be uncontaminated by the desire for more and more power and material wealth, but to be fulfilled in all things in life
ii. Which brings us to…
4. Sense of Humility
a. So often we think that being humble just means not bragging about ourselves.
b. But it is far more than this, it is coming to the realization that God is greater than us and we must submit to Him and to His perfect will. But how are we to know His will? How do we know what it is that communicates to us so that we may submit to Him?
i. How many of us read the Bible every day?
ii. I remember sometime ago being at a Youth Rally called Crossroads. It was a meeting of several thousand college students.
iii. The preacher who was speaking to us was talking about worship and the differences in generations.
iv. He spoke about the current generation of 16-20 something’s and said that they had brought a great sense of worshipfulness back to the Church. In other words, we don’t have to be bored and dull at Church anymore, but that our hymns and our music can be fused with jubilee and the special meaning they were originally intended to have.
1. “There is a problem”, he said, as he held up his Bible, “though we worship with music and in many charismatic ways, we have forgotten that this is key to worship.”
2. We must humble ourselves to what God is saying in the Bible instead of trying to manufacture emotions for an hour every Sunday.
c. We must recognize that God is supreme and we must submit ourselves to Him, for we are smaller in every way than He is.
i. Yet we have made God almost like a “buddy” that we go out to have a cup of coffee with.
d. Consider what is known about our universe.
i. Our universe is currently known to be 156 billion light years wide. Each light year is approximately 6 trillion miles long.
ii. There are thought to be at least 125 billion galaxies in the universe.
iii. Our galaxy, the Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars and every other galaxy is thought to have at least that many. It is said there are more stars in the universe than the grains of sand on all of the oceans of all the beaches of the earth, each as large as or larger than our sun.
iv. I am reminded of the Bible verse, “and He created the stars also.”
e. Let’s remember who we are serving,
i. “Like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.” 1 Peter 2:2
5. Sense of Joy:
a. But, you may ask, how do we move from being a humdrum to being a child of God? The world is full of problems and it’s just not that easy. How is it that by humbling ourselves and coming a child to we begin to have the joy of following Christ?
b. I have a question that at first glance may sound almost ridiculous to you.
i. How would you scare Lazarus after Jesus raised him from the dead?
ii. There is actually an imaginative play written by Eugenie O’Neal.
iii. Tiberius comes to Lazarus and says, “Lazarus, I am going to kill you.” Lazarus begins to laugh and laugh until his laughter is uncontrollable. Lazarus is no doubled over laughing and then rises up with these words:
1. Laugh! Laugh with me! Death is dead! Fear is no more! There is only life! There is only laughter! (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400131h.html)
c. I remember watching a news report from a major network shortly after the VA Tech tragedy.
i. The anchor was questioning a young student who had been close to the tragedy and was asking her how she was ever going to make it.
1. As the girl thought about the answer, she finally looked up and said the only way to make it is…God.
ii. It is fascinating to me that so often the question of why did God allow this to happen comes from the outside, from people who are distant from the tragedy. While those who were closest to it draw ever nearer to God.
iii. Jesus said, “Because I live, you also will live.” John 14:9
iv. Jesus has not given a way to peacefully come to terms with death, He has done something much greater, He has provided the way to conquer death.
1. Therefore, regardless of what may happen in this life, we eagerly await the day, as dearly loved children, where we will enter into His eternal Kingdom.
You may say, “all this stuff is great, but it’s easier said than done. How in the world do we put this into practice?”
It is not always easy but when we turn from childhood, we don’t have to lose the wonder, but it can grow with our greater understanding as we began to see the extraordinary in that which was once ordinary.
The world of fairy tales may be fun and nice, but we eventually grow away from that.
But there is a great difference between the world of fantasy and the truth of our Lord.
We must turn from that which is merely fantastic to that which is fantastically true.
We always have the assurance that answers and fulfillment cannot be attained by our own bootstraps, but by the one who created us for a purpose, to be His dearly loved children, who desires to love us and use us for great and wonderful things.
God beckons us to recapture the wonder, to become like a little child: full of wonder, gratitude, fulfillment, humility, and joy.
Then and only then, we will not be concerned with being the greatest in the Kingdom, but we will look to Christ who made the way on the cross so that we may come to Him.
“Call to Me and I will answer you and tell you great and wondrous things you do not know.” Jeremiah 33:3
