The Faith of a Child

In Mark 10:15, Jesus famously declares that “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” The statement can also be found in Matthew 15:3 and Luke 18:17, though in Matthew it is worded slightly differently. (Matthew 15:3 reads, “unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”) If no one can enter the kingdom of heaven without having the faith of a child, then Christian disciples should clearly try to cultivate such faith. But what does it mean to have the faith of a child? And how does the faith of a child relate to faith generally? Is all faith childlike faith? In other words, is there any part of faith that is not childlike? Or is “childlike faith” just a synonym for “true Christian faith”, so that once we have clarified the notion of childlike faith we will have said everything that there is to say about true Christian faith? I am going to suggest that childlike faith – which is certainly not

childish faith – encapsulates all, or at least very nearly all, of true Christian faith. However, before I can suggest this, I need to say what it means to have childlike faith.

Let me begin with a story. A few months after I met Jill, her friend Paul asked me to start a Bible study with him. We decided to read Mark, and for the next few months we met for several hours every Wednesday to discuss a chapter or two. It was a great time. Paul is a wonderful person and a faithful disciple, and I learned a lot from him. Actually, I didn’t realize this until recently, and I doubt whether he ever thought about our Bible study in this way, but he was really my first Christian mentor. He and his family now live in California, and Jill and I miss them a great deal, but now I’m getting off topic. So, back to the story.

One night, Paul and I were talking about Mark 10, and the conversation eventually turned to Mark 10:15. We were both stumped. What exactly did Jesus mean by saying that no one will enter the kingdom of heaven unless he has the faith of a child? Paul has several children of his own, and we tried to think about them a bit. What is their faith like? Do they question their faith, or do they receive it uncritically? Would Jesus really say that true faith is uncritical and unquestioning? That didn’t seem likely, especially given passages like Matthew 14:22-33, Mark 9:24, and John 20:24-27. What did Jesus mean then? After a few cups of tea and a lot of discussion, we finally decided that the answer to the question was trust: to have the faith of a child is to trust the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s about trust in God. Of course, unless we can articulate what it means to have trust in God, we still won’t understand what it means to have the faith of a child. Sitting at Paul’s kitchen table, I thought that I understood what it meant to trust God, and I suppose that I was right, at least to some extent. But there was much about trusting in God that I did yet not understand. This brings me to another story.

By the end of my Bible study with Paul, I began to feel a sense of uneasiness about my faith. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it was definitely present, and it was negative. It was a gnawing feeling that told me that although my faith might seem strong in many ways, it was still quite weak. I sometimes wondered whether I had even begun the journey at all. The Bible study with Paul ended in 2009. Flash forward to Easter weekend of 2012. Jill and I had been in Raleigh for only a few short months. I felt that the Lord was calling me to a deeper faith, but the sense of uneasiness was as strong as ever. We celebrated Passover with a lovely family from Temple Beth Meyer on Friday, and then we headed to Maryland to spend Easter Sunday with some dear friends of ours from Chicago (they had moved to Maryland a few months before we departed for Raleigh.)

Our friends – their names are Adam and Jennifer – have always enjoyed children’s literature, and they now have one toddler and one baby, which means that they have a fairly extensive collection of children’s books. One night, we all sat in their front room reading children’s books to one another and to Adam and Jennifer’s toddler. The books were great. I sometimes enjoy action movies and comedies, but I am constantly disappointed by the level of profanity, violence, sexuality, and general crudeness in our popular culture. I crave a popular culture that is more wholesome and fulfilling, and reading children’s books with my friends was a welcome relief. Anyway, Jill and I had been talking a lot about having children, and when we returned home from visiting our friends, I decided to do a little research on Bible books for children. I did a quick search on Amazon, found an interesting title called Psalms for Young Children, and sent away for it. After a few days, the book arrived, and I started to read it.

The book consists of a few dozen psalms from the Bible, paraphrased for children and accompanied by illustrations. The paraphrases are faithful to the meaning of the original texts of the psalms, and the illustrations are quite simple. Thus, one might think that reading Psalms for Young Children would be no more illuminating than reading the original psalms in the Bible, and perhaps even less, for the paraphrases are decidedly aimed at children. Well, one might think that, but one would be wrong. To be honest – and I realize that this may sound incredible – reading Psalms for Young Children was one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. I have spent a lot of time reading the Bible over the past few years, and I have also read a lot of scholarship on the Bible, but it was Psalms for Young Children that taught me the true meaning of trust in God. I don’t want to say that the Bible itself cannot teach this, or even that commentaries and monographs on the Bible cannot teach this. That would be silly. But God used a children’s book to teach me the true meaning of trust in God.

It will be helpful to consider a few psalms from the book. Here is the book’s paraphrase of Psalm 1:

            When I listen to you, God,

            when I do what you ask me to,

            I am like a tree

            planted by a river,

            a tree full of fruit

            with leaves that are always green.

Here is the book’s paraphrase of Psalm 4:

            God, when I’m in my bed

            at night, I think about you.

            And then I’m not scared of

            anything. I can fall asleep

            quietly and in peace.

Finally, here is the book’s paraphrase of Psalm 13:

            Sometimes, when I’m very sad,

            I worry that you will

forget about me, God.

But then I remember that

you love me always.

So I will sing and be happy!

These paraphrases are faithful to the meaning of the original psalms, but they are clearly written from the perspective of a child; and, though they are simplified, they capture the essence of the psalms of which they are paraphrases. In particular, they capture the emotions of the psalmist, and they make those emotions vivid. Sometimes these are positive feelings of joy, happiness, praise, or gratitude; sometimes these are negative feelings of despair, sorrow, fear, or anxiety. But – and this is the important point – in every single one of the paraphrases, whether positive or negative, the psalmist clearly approaches God in trust. In the positive cases, the psalmist approaches God with full trust that his expressions of joy, happiness, praise, or gratitude will be accepted by God. In the negative cases, the psalmist approaches God will full trust that his expressions of despair, sorrow, fear, or anxiety will be heard by God, and that God will act on his behalf.

Of course, these elements are all present in the original texts of the psalms, but those elements never really penetrated my heart before. For some reason, I needed the childlike simplicity of the paraphrases – and perhaps also the illustrations – for the trust of the psalmist to reach me. Before reading Psalms for Young Children, I had some understanding of what it means to trust God, and I could have cited many passages from Scripture in which such trust is exemplified and extolled. But my understanding was purely mental – it was confined to my head. In reading Psalms for Young Children, I experienced that trust for the first time; or, rather, I experienced it in a powerful way which I had never experienced before. Again, I think that the childlike simplicity of the paraphrases, which are also expressed in first-person language, is extremely effective in communicating both the emotional state of the speaker and the trust in God that underlies that emotional state. And, as sometimes happens when reading literature, the language of the paraphrase helped me to feel the psalmist’s trust in God in my own heart – his trust became my trust, his prayer my prayer.

For the next two weeks, I read no Bible, and I read no scholarship on the Bible. Instead, I read through Psalms for Young Children every few days, concentrating on the text and praying the psalms as fervently as I could. As I did this, I grew in my understanding of what it means to trust God.

I thought about what it means to trust a friend. When I have a problem, I often turn to a friend for help. In doing so, I don’t run through a conscious decision process about which friend I should ask, or what words I should use to ask – I simply pick up the phone and call. Such behavior is perfectly ordinary, and it reflects our trust in our friends. When we turn to our friends in this way, we assume that we can reach them, and we also assume that they will want to help us. We take their existence, reachability, and willingness to help for granted, not in a bad sense, but in a good sense – we know that they are there for us, and that we can rely on them. We don’t have to ask ourselves whether they really exist, whether they really answer their cell phones, or whether they really want to help. It would be strange to ask such questions about our friends. They’re there for us; that’s what friendship’s about, at least in part.

As I thought about these things, I asked myself whether I trusted in God in the way that I trusted in my friends. I quickly realized that the answer was no. Although I frequently thought about God, and even prayed daily for other people, I seldom came to God with my troubles. I went to friends, not God. Why? Was it because I didn’t really believe that God was real? No, it was because I didn’t think that He really heard me, or that He was present with me, or even that He cared. I never doubted God’s reality or power – I doubted His love and His care. I doubted that He would even bother with me. The world is so broken, and things have gone so badly for me so many times. Why should I trust God this time? Wasn’t it better simply to assume that God wouldn’t come through? Wouldn’t I be stronger and less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the world if I didn’t count on God? And wasn’t it better not to ask for things for myself and simply try to muddle through on the basis of my faith?

I shouldn’t need to tell you that faith of this kind is not true faith. It is certainly not the faith of a mature Christian disciple, and it is definitely not the faith of a child. It is a weak, immature faith. If your faith is weak and immature in this way, don’t despair – God is calling you to a robust, mature faith. But let’s call a spade a spade. My faith was weak and immature. Furthermore – and this is the point I really want to drive home here – it was not childlike. It was adult in every bad sense of the word – cynical, skeptical, wounded, and weary. Childlike faith looks very different from this. Provided that a child comes from a healthy home, he will come to his parents with his fears and joys, his triumphs and desires. If a child is scared of a monster in his closest, he comes to his parents. If he is excited about a new cartoon, he tells his parents all about it. And yes, if he wants a toy, he asks his parents for it. The point is this – the child trusts his parents. In particular, he knows that his parents are real, that they will listen to him, and that they will respond to him in loving-kindness. The child understands his dependence on his parents; he would never try to go it alone in the world. The child cannot understand himself or the world apart from his parents; his parents are everything.

This is what childlike faith looks it. Childlike faith is fundamentally characterized by trust, and we trust in God when we know – not just intellectually, but in our bones – that God is real, that He hears us, that He is present with us, and that He responds to us in loving-kindness. To trust God is to treat Him as real as a child treats his parents. To trust God is to come to Him with our joys, triumphs, fears, anxieties, and wants. To trust God is to understand that we are dependent on God, and that we can’t go it alone in the world. To trust God is to regard Him as the center of our lives, to be unable to understand the world apart from Him. It is possible to understand such trust with one’s head, but it will not be true trust until it has penetrated the heart. To truly trust God – to have the faith of a child – is to experience the world in a distinct way, a way that is only available to those who believe. If there is anything more to mature Christian faith than having such trust in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then I don’t know what it is.

Jesus says that “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” I have just described what it means to have the faith of a child, and there are many passages from Scripture that support my analysis. (See, e.g., Psalms 63, 131; Matthew 6:11, 6:25-34, 7:7-11; Mark 9:14-29; Luke 11:9-13; Hebrews 11; 1 Peter 5:7.)  In my next few posts, I will provide some suggestions for how one might work at developing the faith of a child. These suggestions will all be taken from Scripture, or else from writers who themselves have borrowed from Scripture. When we consider the challenge of developing childlike faith, we may feel daunted, but we need to remember that Jesus has commanded us to do it, and that we do not labor alone – the Spirit indwells us and works on our behalf. Finally, we should remember that developing childlike faith, like Christian discipleship generally, is a lifelong task.