The Greatest in the Kingdom

On your way to you. See, won't you say Happy Mother's Day. If you're a mom, can I just, can you let me know that you're here? Like you would yell at your kid.

That's exactly right.

Everybody else is like you. Act like you. Hey, I know my mom yelled at me. Yeah, She's not here, She's in Europe right now so I can say what I want to say.

She's probably watching online.

Hey, Mom, Happy Mother's Day, Love you so much. Even the shoe you used to throw once in a while, you know It wasn't a chocolate, It was just a shoe, you know. Just, It's a full, full-on shoe. Sometimes it was accidentally a heel.

I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding. She didn't do that, But I'm a full-grown adult. Now, What are they going to do to her? You know She pulled a Martha Stewart And, In the name of Jesus, we start this sermon, We move on.

I just Happy Mother's Day.

I'm so grateful that you're here today. I, I'm sure everybody's having a lot of people are having brunch and we'll see a bunch of people come in second service as well. So, I am, I'm really excited to celebrate moms. We're so excited that we invited Modern Grind to come hang out with us today.

Yeah, if you, if you, if you want to go out there, even if you don't buy anything, at least you can thank them for being here.

They could have been anywhere today, but they showed up here today. They've been so kind to us And, one of the things that we did is we partnered with them to get you guys some, some lattes. You know what latte is? It's the Italian word for Anyone, know?

Y'all don't know what Latte means.

Milk She's Mother's Day is great, Anyways, And it's in a bottle. Y'all are laughing. I don't know if I'm being too inappropriate, but just in case, but you know what I'm talking about. Like, like, when you're born mothers, Okay, just I, I couldn't have asked for better guys.

It just all lined up perfectly because, just like latte bottles on Mother's Day, we're going to be giving out ribs on Father's Day.

Invite your friends. We partner with another organization. They're going to be bringing ribs and we're going to hand them out to everybody. I say everybody.

We'll start with dads and then we'll see how much money's in the budget for the rest of you people.

It's, it's interesting, right, Cuz you know, like, ribs are something we gave. I'm just I work, shopped this so much, and I'm not saying half the things I practiced this week. I just want you to know, cuz when I practiced them people were like I know you didn't just say that, But now we, we wanted to celebrate you guys, and typically we like give a flower with a stem on it, and the moms come to me afterwards and like why don't we get grills, Like the dads? And the truth is we'll spend a thousand dollars on a grill or whatever for dads to get them to show up.

We know you're showing up, moms, You're leading your family to church.

Amen, Man, I'm excited about the message today too. It's so, it's so cool cuz I planned the message long time ago and it always God's, God's just so good, He. He lines it up perfectly. We're going to be in Matthew, chapter 18 today.

If you don't know it, we're in our facts series f, a, c, t s facts that Jesus spoke.

He spoke a lot of positive things, but he also spoke some pretty intense things. I think a lot of times we skip over the intensity because we want to just feel the freely good, grace filled stuff. And there's a real moment in your faith when you stop skipping over the really intense stuff, because you recognize the intense stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff that causes you to make some real steps that you don't necessarily want to take. That's stuff is also grace-filled.

Like they do not judge lest you be judged, That's grace-filled.

The God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever may believe in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. That's grace-filled. But every one of these statements- true statements, but intense statements from Jesus, are equally grace-filled. There's one, one pastor I like to follow.

He said: "You know that you're stepping into an area that you need to grow when you don't like what you're hearing and when it makes you uncomfortable".

Comfortable if you. If you, if you're comfortable hearing the message and only encouraged, that means you're staying where you are. But when, when it gets a little uncomfortable, you hear the word of truth and allow it to implant on your soul and you start acting in suit with what God told you, that's the real meat. Everybody says they want depth, Depth.

You ever heard people talk about that?

No, Y'all with me today? Did y'all get brunch Too much bacon? People say they want depth. I think if there was a list of 10 reasons people leave the church.

I say the church in general, but even our church.

I'll say: "Oh, what's going on? You know what? I just want to be fed. I need more depth.

I'm sitting here like translating from the Greek New Testament.

Sometimes I'm like "What, what, what's depth to you" And I, I think depth really starts to like you. You start to get deep when you run into the uncomfortable stuff and don't resist it. And so Matthew, chapter 18, we'll be in verses 1 through 5, and I might tag in verses 6 and 7, cuz I think they're powerful, beneficial and equally intense. Actually, I would say equally.

I'm going to go through a harsh statement in the first five verses, but the next two verses are even harsher, But I don't know.

We'll see how I'm feeling on Mother's Day. Chapter 18, I'm in the New International Version, the NIV. If you're in a different one, you can follow along on the screen. But also check and make sure I didn't make this stuff up.

I think it's always helpful: Check, make sure your pastors don't make stuff up.

Pastors do make stuff up, Rita, You know that. Yeah, someone makes it up like 150 years ago, and then pastors preach that for the next 150 years and all of a sudden someone wakes up one day, does some real study and realizes: "Oh man, Matthew Henry wasn't right about that". It's such an interesting thing, but anyways, I'm not trying to get you to not trust your pastor at different churches. I tell people when they come here they ask me questions and I'm like: "I'm I'm just about as heretical as anybody else" Is what I tell them.

Anyways, I'm talking too much.

Chapter 18, we'll start in verse one: At that time. Now, this is after a situation in Peter's house, or well, at a house where Peter comes in and there's a little conversation and they start talking about children, and chapter 18 comes in and it says this: "At that time, the disciples came to Jesus and they asked: 'Who, then, is greatest in the kingdom of heaven'". It's a good question. Who's greatest Comes from the wrong place.

I know you guys who have heard this passage before know this is the disciples trying to decide how to rank the other people, and they want to make sure that they're number one versus number 12.

I think a lot of us are concerned about rank in society. That's why we look at what everybody else is doing to determine how we rank on the social ladder. And so this is the same thing in the ancient world. The disciples come and they say: "Who, then, is greatest in the kingdom of heaven"?

Verse two: he calls a little child to them or to him.

This is a little object illustration- And he placed the child among them and he said: "Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children- Greek word there paidea, It's relevant for later in this message- You will never ou me. Ou me is a. It's just two Greek words together. Ou means not, me means not, But when you put ou me together it's like never, It's like a double negative, and we don't use double negatives unless we're trying to really emphasize to somebody else that you ain't ever coming back to my house again, You ain't ever coming into my life again.

You know, ou me never.

He says: "You will never enter the kingdom of heaven unless you become like little children". Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. I want to address the first harsh statement before I go a little bit further, As I was praying about how I wanted to deliver this message on Mother's Day. It is pretty cool, cuz we're talking about becoming like children, and I don't have children, Regardless of what people may say, I cannot have children.

I don't even have to go get tested to find out.

You know what I'm saying? I, That's a mom's job. Can we say amen, just to make sure we're on the same page? It's a mom's job.

You had children.

I heard a pastor say one time that mothers come to the brink of death and I thought it was a crazy statement. But then I studied the last 2,000 years and realized "Oh dang". Yeah, they do come to the brink of death. Man, childbirth is a crazy thing.

The only way I can compare to that is a kidney stone And moms.

I had one. I was laying on the ground, crying like a little baby. Luckily my wife wasn't there that day, Or were you, Hannah? You were there.

So you came and saw me in the bathroom like curled up, like I was about to die in the fetal position- How embarrassing.

And she's- she's probably sitting there like We'd already had two kids at that time. She's like: "You should see". No, not see. She didn't say that.

I ain't trying to see that, But she said you should.

I don't know which is worse: You're talking to a dude, kidney stone's worse. Talking to a mom ain't nothing worse than bearing children. I thought it was just cool of the Lord to line this text up on Mother's Day And, as I was thinking about it, the Greek word that I mentioned that Matthew refers to in this passage, as he says: you must become like little children. Now, if you read the other gospels, the other gospels don't say this.

This is Matthew.

So, if you think about it, I used the word redaction criticism a couple weeks ago. Redaction criticism is the art of looking at Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and saying, okay, they all experienced this situation differently, so they come with a different perspective If they lined up. This is a little apologetic for all of you in the room who are struggling with Jesus. If Matthew, Mark Luke and John all lined up, compared notes and then put out their own gospels- which is what a lot of atheists would say that they did-, they would probably be more similar.

But what we find is that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John experienced Jesus differently, And so Mark and Luke have the same situation, where Jesus speaks about the children, But Matthew alone says: you must become like little children, And so that's a key when you're reading the Bible.

If only Matthew says it. What's he trying to say? And Matthew says you, there's something about children, Not only that Jesus loves, that he wants you to receive these children- Matthew says that in a moment- But there's something about a child that is so valuable, so Christ-like, naturally, that you need to become one Now. This is similar to the you must be born again statement in the book of John.

Jesus isn't saying here that you need to, like, go back into your mother's womb.

Jesus isn't saying you need to figure out how to shave a bunch of years off of your life, like that dude on Tik Tok who keeps acting like he looks 34 when he looks 50, you know, I don't know if you follow that guy. I don't follow him, but he keeps popping into my feet. And he's not saying you've got to physically be like a child. Obviously, you need to be who you are.

He's saying there are a few characteristics of children, that we need to.

We need to like, like, reinsert into our lives. As I was thinking about it, I started to look at the other demographics And I started to understand, through the negative of the other demographic, how it might be beneficial to become like a child, And the way I want to close this message is to give you some specific characteristics of children. Now the Greek word there is paideia, which means there's a very specific group of people. Paideia was a child aged 4 through 12.

Pretty much all the people we kick out of here and send in the back, you know Paideia.

That that's who Jesus is referring to. You need to be like a 4 to 11 or 12-year-old. Okay, so we're going to walk through this, But let's let's narrow this down and kind of extract some of the other demographics. So first he says: be like a child, not a baby, Not a baby.

Now, I don't know if you've met full-grown adults acting like babies.

Just hop on Facebook I. It baffles me, especially when, when there's people that I know on Facebook acting like babies, But that that's not what I'm talking about. Babies are so beautiful. Love babies, Except for.

Is Lucas back here?

Yeah, Like he was 10 lbs, 5 oz And I had to take a second. Like he was beautiful in the eyes of Christ, but when I looked at him I was like That's a big baby And nobody told me they have the cone-shaped head? Yeah, they didn't. They didn't tell me that I get It makes sense, but no one just told me and I'm like.

I looked at the doctor and I was like, Is he good?

And she's like, "No, it's normal" And I was like "Okay". God, I was really scared for a moment, Like we didn't take the DNA test, we didn't know what he was going to come out, as you know. And so when I saw a 10 lb, 5 oz baby come out and I was like- And she was totally chill about it, She's holding him and I'm like I hope he's okay, But a baby- the unique thing about a baby is a baby is 100% reliant, not by choice. It's reliant for food, Like if, if you're capable of nursing, then that baby relies on you for every aspect of sustenance.

And there's a beautiful aspect of becoming an infant.

Even in our spiritual walk, it's an amazing thing to become made new, to be born again. When many of you, if you have trusted in Jesus, you came into the faith you, you realize this is back to being an infant spiritually. There's so many things that I don't know and I need God to show me who he is. Maybe you went through a season of doubt in your life and you start to sense that I don't.

You don't know if it's the Lord, or or, or something else, but you sense something changing within your spirit.

We believe that that's God, maybe drawing you near to him. And when you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and you're saved, you become a spiritual baby, infant, And so God takes you and he's kind to you. He, he, he nourishes you, And I don't want to be overly poetic in a way that sounds weird, but there's truth to that. When I first became a believer, it was like my eyes were opened.

I went, I went from like the womb to the room.

You know what I'm saying. I just I was off the cuff. I felt good about that one, but no one, no one liked it. Okay.

I went from a dark space to.

My eyes were completely open. To use Plato's allegory of the cave, I went from the cave into the light And it was such an amazing thing for me. Immediately, so many things shifted And I don't even know how they shifted. God was just kind to me.

Every time I opened the Bible, I didn't even know what it was talking about, but I read it and I was like "Oh my gosh, that's Jesus talking to me".

That was my spiritual infancy and he was kind to me. There's a book called Dark Night of the Soul, written hundreds of years ago by St John of the Cross, And what he talks about is this spiritual infancy, where God takes you and he uses really like weird terms, like he takes you into his bosom and he nurses you. He uses all the you know these, these weird ascetics. Sometimes they just use terminology that feels icky to me as a man in the 21st century, But it's.

It's an interesting image because that was how I experienced it.

Many of you in here, if you are a believer, you've experienced something similar. If you became a believer, God was doing something in you without you having to do anything, Like he brought you here, He showed you who he was and he gave you everything you needed for a season- Now, that's not a forever season. This is why Jesus doesn't tell them to become like infants, Tells them to be like children, little children, Because infants they do it by by nature of who they are Like you. A baby don't don't choose whether they're going to be fed A baby, didn't choose whether something they need is going to happen.

Yeah, I know if they cry, but they just cry by nature because they need you to nurture them.

So, on the positive side, it is great that we get to step into that and God is kind enough to us to just show us himself when we know nothing and can't handle it ourselves. But at some point, just like Paul and the author of Hebrews would say, at some point you need to move from from milk to something greater. You got to learn to chew your own food. This is why Jesus says to be like a child, not necessarily an infant.

A child has a little bit of autonomy, And some of you might be thinking: "Not in my house, he doesn't".

I know, I'm trying to. I'm trying to hold some of my, my authoritah in my household and they, they look back at me and they try to argue with me. I'm like: Not, not, not today, . But they have a little bit of autonomy.

They can make choices.

You can make choices And in the midst of your autonomy, God wants you to choose him over everything else. So, not like a baby, You don't have a choice. You don't have a choice. Let me skip children for a second.

It also kind of means to me because it.

It caps out at 12 years old, that term- So not like a teenager I- I workshop this one quite a bit- It's like not like a middle schooler, Not like a teenager, And I think [clears throat]. Teenage years is: you want autonomy. You don't have it and you think you're smart, but you're also not that either Any teen. If you're a teenager, raise your hand.

You got autonomy to do it.

Do it. What's What's so? What's so? Hey, We love our teenagers, don't we?

We believe in the youth.

I just don't believe you have a prefrontal cortex fully developed yet. So not like a teenager I. I'm. I'm glad Jesus didn't tell us to be like middle schoolers.

Teenagers can be mean, can't they?

Teenagers can be rebellious even though they're acting stupid. I'm just being real. I was a teenager. I thought I knew something.

I didn't know a lot of stuff.

Teenage years is when I got into different levels of trouble Because I didn't want to listen to what my mom said or my dad said. And even when I read the Bible, it's like I need to listen to what God says. But let me try some stuff you know And I think, in your faith. There's a tendency if you act like a teenager, A lot of people are teenagers in their faith.

They know Jesus, But they've experienced Jesus at some level.

But they also they still want to tow the line a little bit. They want to see how far can I go and still be good in my walk with God. They want to test the boundaries. They start experiencing the love of Jesus.

They start to understand.

Kids don't understand the Bible at the level that a teenager understands the Bible if they're reading it, For God so loved the world that he gave his son that whosoever believes in him. Bible says: I have to believe in him and I won't perish. Also Galatians, for cuz I was in Sunday school, Galatians said: "Anyone who thinks you have to work for this stuff, they got problems". Paul says in Romans, chapter 8, : "There's therefore now no condemnation for those who are Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit has set us free from the law of sin and death".

And essentially what Paul's saying is: I can't do anything to inherit it, I can't do anything to lose it.

And when you start to experience that as a teenager, you're like: "Oh, that means I can test the waters out a little bit". And teenagers do that in your household. Spiritual teenagers do it. I think our country's filled with spiritual teenagers.

It's like "Let me have my cake and eat it too".

It's everybody's sweet 16 when it comes to their walk with God. I want to. I want to enjoy my life the way that that. You know, Chris Brown- not the Christian one- told me I could.

Yeah, I know, He, He bad.

That's why I turn his voice into AI music and I listen to the Scriptures. We want to. We want to do what we want to do and have Jesus too. A spiritual teenager goes out and does all the stuff, shows up at church And they're like: "Thank you, Jesus, for loving me".

And Jesus loves you so deeply.

He knows what you did all week, and it and it breaks his heart because he loves you so deeply, just like your parents would love you when you were a teenager, or you love your teenager. But picture your heart for your teenager when they're rebellious. Not be not because you're wrong, but because they don't understand yet what you're trying to tell them, And in a lot of ways, they're going to figure it out themselves, And so your ability to shift their posture is limited. With a teenager, What God wants is for us to be able to just trust him.

When we don't know what's coming, when we don't know the answers, Just trust him.

A teenager just doesn't, naturally trust. They look at what you used to do, what you used to deal with, and they're like "Well, I'm going to figure it out myself too". And I think these life stages are all helpful for us in their own way and you need to go through them. The way that we follow Jesus isn't like a rebellious teenager, It's like a child.

I was really struggling over the next few, trying to figure out how much I should break this apart, but I broke it apart three more ways.

Not even- And let me group young adults properly. I'm thinking college kids, I'm thinking non-college young adults about the same age, And I'm thinking maybe upwardly mobile young adults who have their careers, Those people from 18 to 30. Young adults, There's something I experienced when I went to college. It's I- None of my parents- had gone to college.

Really no one in my family had gone to college before.

So I was like: My brother and I were twins, so we were the first ones to go to college in our family, And when we went to college, we learned liberal arts And I read Plato and Aristotle and all those people that none of us want to read anymore. I read the books you're supposed to read. I took the math classes, took the science classes, and I had the professors that knew more than the people that I knew growing up, And so they would communicate certain things. That was natural for me, because I was curious and exploring to listen to what these people said and look at the things that I was taught by people who weren't as intellectual as if they were stupid.

I'm just being honest.

This may not be you. This was kind of me. This is a lot of our country. They hit 18, 19, 20, 21 and they say, "Why do you vote for this person?

I'm going to vote for this person now that I'm fully mature, at 21 years old", And they make these different jokes about how young people vote versus how older people engage.

And when you go to college or when you go to your first career, you experience the world for the first time not through your mom's or your dad's or your relatives' eyes, but through your own eyes, And so you not only open yourself up to new things, you also look at your faith and you start to question your faith. You say, "This, This is different than what they taught me, based on what I know now". And so we go from curious about the things in the world to skeptical about our faith in God. This is one of the reasons Jesus tells us to be like like children, Because there's nothing inherently wrong with asking questions.

I preached a whole message on Thomas for Easter.

Nothing wrong with asking questions. But when you approach the Bible and Jesus with this innate skepticism, that turns you into a deconstructionist where you got to break every single thing down because you think you in your life, with your limited amount of education, are going to be able to parse and extrapolate every unique truth from these passages in a way that's better and different than the people have for the last 2,000 years at 21. There's this. I'm not saying it's bad to question or ask or look, but when you move from curiosity to skepticism, it becomes really problematic in your walk with God.

This is why Jesus tells us to be like children, Cuz when you go to children and you say, "Hey, would you try this out".

Kids are great. I'd prefer a 12-year-old back at the sound booth than I would a 22-year-old. Not because I like 12-year-olds or 22-year-olds more, but because I know if I go to the 12-year-old and say, "Hey, can you press this button", What are they going to do? They're going to press the button.

If they don't, I'll find another 12-year-old or an 11-year-old Just kidding.

But a 22-year-old is like: "Why that button"? What's wrong with this button? I'm just kidding. [sighs].

Not a young adult- This is a fun one for you people in the room- Not a stable adult, Not an established adult, Not an adult who's reached the peak of success in their life- And I don't necessarily have an age range for that. It could be in your 20s, could be in your 30s, could be all the way up to your 50s or 60s. But there's something that happens when you become stable: You move from this place of excitement, curiosity, ambition, pursuit to protection, stability, security. And this is not just a, it's a broad brush to different generations.

I'm not saying you are that way, but if you are like, take this for truth, cuz Jesus was telling them to be like a specific demographic. And I think when we reach this place of 35, we become more like Moses in the Old Testament when he was interacting with the 12 spies. But God wants us to be a little bit more like the two spies, Joshua and Caleb, who, when they looked at the land of promise, they saw the land of promise, not the giants in the land, But the other 10, who were older, and we know that they were older because of the fact that they died off before Joshua. Yeah, We know that they were older, and they looked at the land through the lens of security, safety, comfort and what they had already accrued in the wilderness, And they said: "They're giants, We're as grasshoppers to them".

And you can see this in your life.

The moment you hit this place of security, the things that you used to think about start to go away. When I was younger, I thought God could do anything. Now that I get older, I look at my kids and my wife and my house and my car and all the things that I have now and I'm like "Ah, but, but I know God can do anything, but is this the time where I need to forsake some of these other things that I've accrued over time". In the next passage, guys, sorry, in the next chapter, chapter 19, .

This is when you see the rich, young ruler come up to Jesus And because he was a man of much wealth- it says rich, young man.

It was an established, stable adult. Because of his riches, he didn't follow Jesus and he walked away. Sad, This is. Many of us in our country We don't.

We don't receive it like children would receive it.

It's like: "Lord, you want me to go across across the ocean and be a missionary? Lord, you want me to go across my street and talk to my neighbor about Jesus? Lord, you want me to open up this ancient text and learn how to read it? Lord, you want me to serve in an area that I'm uncomfortable with.

I've been sitting at home by myself for a while.

You want me to become a, a greeter? You want me to talk to people at work about my faith? Lord, you want me to do all this stuff? God, I've developed a system And my system is working for me.

Don't change my system".

That's how we think. When we older, I felt myself thinking this way. As I've gotten older guys, I think about stability more than I do my spirituality, And I'm saying that as a pastor. I know how you think.

It's like if I say anything to you.

That would rock your stability. You're like "Whatever". Unless the spirit is doing something and he's breaking down and chipping away the wall that you've built up of protection in your life. Unless he is in that place with you, we tend to not receive the very things that God's trying to do because we're focused on the wrong things.

I think that's a very dangerous place to be.

Nothing wrong with stability, unless it takes us away from our connection with God. The final demographic I'll I'll talk about is not an old person, Not an old person Now. I'm talking about spirituality. Okay, Chill out if you feel aged in this room.

I'm not talking mess about older people, okay, And a lot of people in the room think I'm an older person at 38 years old.

But one thing that I've realized in my life- not just with people I've experienced as they've gotten older- it's not just safety, security, it's it's a mindset not of protection, but of resistance to change. As I get older, I'm more resistant to change. I've had to teach myself, train myself, to not be so resistant to changes, Like if you, you came in here for eight weeks in a row and you sat in the same spot and you got lucky enough to get the same spot for eight weeks. The older you get, the more you're going to look at that person who's standing in your spot on the ninth week and you're like, "I'll move", "I'll move".

But when I approach things like a, like a child, I'm not even thinking about status, I'm not thinking about that kind of stuff.

I'm approaching everything with with wonder, bewilderment, Like like the world is so cool, Not the sin of the world, but the world that God created. And as an older person I've become used to it. And not only do I seek stability, but I resist the new thing that God might be doing. I, I, .

I grew up in the South, as you know, you can tell.

I grew up in the South and I was in a, a Southern Baptist church, when I first became a Christian. It was a larger church and so there was a contemporary youth ministry and all that other stuff. But they had a traditional service And I heard inklings of it. I just stayed with the youth for the most part And I would sit in and they would sing hymns And there was a push to move into a little bit more contemporary worship And I would see older people and younger people who were used to things, but predominantly older people in this church who had been there for a long time.

They would be all up in arms about a shift in music style.

As I got older, I'd be around pastors who were at older churches than the one I was in, but they were way smaller and so they had a couple people in charge, who probably didn't need to be in charge, just to be honest with you, cuz they weren't pastoral, they were just rich guys who gave enough to be on the deacon board, and they would. They would freak out at a personnel meeting or at a business meeting when they were talking about changing the carpets. I'll never forget a story I heard when someone wanted to change the carpet from green to a more beige-y color and a fight broke out on the floor during the business meeting and one guy punched another guy in the face And they were over 70 years old. That's craziness.

I'm telling you the extent it can get even in the church when we're resistant to change.

But I heard an old guy. He was 84 at the time and he came and preached a fire message. His name was John Bassanio. It was in my chapel when I was in seminary.

He just starts ripping people.

A new one. You know, when you're old you can rip older people apart. I feel like I got to be respectful to my elders, but when I'm 84, ha, I'll be better off with with the other old people. And John Bisagno comes in at 84 years old and he starts ripping them apart.

He said: "YOU LIKE THE HYMNS, I like them too, But I also like the new stuff, And some of that new stuff's better than the old stuff.

So get over yourself. God's doing a new thing". And I just always remember that old guy coming in with the right posture because he learned how to become like a child. A child who's cool with change, A child who's willing to adjust, to roll with the punches.

Here a couple characteristics of a child.

A child is dependent, not self-sufficient, And they have the autonomy to choose that dependence. A child is humble, not concerned with social status. There's a scholar- his name's-, Jehoiakim Jeremias is his name, Just trying to. He's a scholar and he wrote a book on the world of the New Testament, specifically in Jeru- or in Israel at the time.

It's an amazing book.

You would be completely bored by it, but it's really cool, if you like, archaeology and things like that. And when he writes the book he talks about this social structure of status in the ancient world And he talks about children specifically when he's interpreting this passage and he says, that we look back on faith like a child as a good thing, Like it's romanticized in our world because we've heard the Scripture for 2,000 years. However, in the ancient world, a child wasn't someone that was romanticized. A child was someone who had zero social standing.

It's kind of like us when we're having a conversation with adults and our kid comes in and they start yapping next to us and we're like "Wait till I'm finished".

You know, this is kind of the status across the board for children in the ancient world. They weren't even in the, They weren't even in the structure. Children had zero status. They were nobody until they were older and started to receive a portion of their inheritance after their tutelage under a guardian.

Like it was not until they were pretty much young adults that they had any social standing.

The paidea the child from 4 to 12, they were invisible in the social structure. And so we look at kids as just a beautiful gift of God through the lens of 2,000 years of preaching this passage, but they looked at it. If our Peter, James, John or whoever asked the question about who's the greatest in the kingdom of God, I'd be like a child 4 to 12 years old. What the heck?

Why are you inverting this entire process?

We want to choose our social standing. We want you to put us first, second, third, We want to sit at your right and your left hand And Jesus is like hey, hey, hey, hey, kid, come here, Come here. He brings this child up And he's like: you see this? I know you didn't see him before.

I brought him up because you weren't paying any attention to him, cuz he's a child, Zero social status.

They didn't even notice him. They were trying to keep the kids from him in another passage. But Jesus brings him up and he says: you got to become like this. And they're like what A child To them.

It was disgusting.

But Jesus says: you got to. You got to humble yourself like a child. The phraseology he uses there is a perfect, like structural comparison to Philippians, chapter 2, where it says that Jesus emptied himself. He became like a bondservant, And so what he's saying is: you have got to humble yourself.

I know you're a full-grown adult.

I know you're a man, I know you're a mom, I know you're a dad, I know you're that family person, I know you've got a house and I know that you're more mature than you used to be. But what Jesus says, if he don't care about any of that, He don't care if you got a bigger house than the person down the street, He don't care how nice your car is, He don't care what your social standing is. You could be a CEO in a C-suite or you could be a homeless person on the street. He says: "I DON'T CARE.

YOU GOT to step down into zero social standing, like this child right here.

And if you think you're better than that, then you're missing the entire point. The greatest in the kingdom of God is one who has a characteristic where they are dependent by choice. They are humble rather than comparing. They are trusting, not skeptical.

They are forgiving, not grudge-holding".

It's like my, my son and daughter. How many times they scream at each other last night- Like 50. And then 30 seconds later, they're having fun together. They understand the 70 * 7 that I preached about a couple weeks ago.

They wouldn't be able to articulate it, but they understand it.

Forgiveness, just it just, just, it flows through them, Cuz, cuz they're children. It's like when I used to get in fights with kids in third, fourth and fifth grade cuz I was a bad kid. We'd do a couple push-ups and we bro hug and we're done, Not holding a grudge, available, not overburdened. We're so overburdened that we think that when God calls us, our excuses are valuable to him, But we're valuable to him, and when we're not with him we're losing out.

So when he calls, you become available, Like a child.

If I call a child, sometimes I got to yell at them a little bit, but when I call a child, they come. They know they need to. They know if they don't, the results are going to be catastrophic. We've got to understand that.

And a child is wonderful.

We say wonderful to describe something that's cool, but we're filled with wonder. As a child I used to think I could be an astronaut. I just named our church Orbit, though. Now you remember like you would read about Lewis and Clark as pioneers and you'd be like "That'd have been so cool".

And then we looked at the rocket ship and we were like "Nope", Not for me.

Then we got older and we forgot that God can move mountains. We forgot God can make the sun stand still. We forgot that God can make the day last longer. We forgot that he can cause, cause me to cross on dry ground.

We forgot that he will wall up the Red Sea.

We forgot he can wall up our paths. We forgot all of the miraculous things that he can do. Because we're not filled with wonder, We're filled with things that overburden us. We go back and do like a child, Filled with wonder.

And I didn't give you this list so that you could write down the list and then hold yourself accountable to that list.

I wrote down this list so that you would understand that there is an innate characteristic of someone who trusts Jesus like a child. It's one that says: "Whenever he calls, I answer", "Wherever he goes, I go". And Moses wasn't quite tracking when the slaves- or, sorry, when the spies- came back. But there was a moment late in the book of Exodus where he's interacting with God And God's going to stay back because of the sin of the Israelites.

And Moses recognizes something.

He goes back into the form of a child for a moment. He says: "I, I am not going anywhere without you". "Where you go, I go, And if you stay, we stay". That's the posture of Moses.

That was the posture of any of the prophets who followed God closely.

That was a posture of the adequate disciples who followed the dust of their rabbi's footsteps. This is our posture. We are called by God to follow so close, Not as a natural byproduct, like an infant Not resisting it because we're rebellious, like a teenager, Too curious in the wrong direction, like a young adult Stressed out about security, like a stable adult or resistant to change, like an older person, Not like a child Following him wherever he goes. And the harsher statement is not just that: you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless you become like a child in your trust toward God.

It goes a little bit further.

He goes further and says: "If anyone causes one of these other ones to stumble, those who believe in me". He's not talking about physical kids. He's talking about spiritual children. Padeia, Those who would believe in me to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

What does God care about?

He cares that we turn to become like children, humble ourselves, like Jesus did, to the point of death, even death on a cross and follow him, regardless of what that means. And then what we do is we turn around and we don't become a stumbling block for others, We become messengers, testifying of the grace of God because we followed him closely as a child would. It's like these kids who saw Moana for the first time, Or K-pop Demon Hunters for the first time, And they come up to the next kid and they're like "You got to check out this movie". Or even in church: Many of you in this room you showed up at church because your kid came with another kid who wasn't stressed out about inviting the other kids at school.

Even with the rejection, They forgave the frustration immediately, They forgave the mean statement, They got over it and they continued to invite.

And now you're here because of the faith of a child. This is how God's called us to operate: , One, when we are looking at him and not them. So if you're in this room, it's time to develop that faith of a child, Whether you've trusted in him and it's time to move forward in that direction, or whether you've never trusted, in him and it's time for you to be a child, even though you've got all these questions. It's time for you to say: "You know what?

I don't know the answers, but I'm going to trust you because I feel you, because you're regenerating me from the inside out, because something is happening that I cannot explain and because the other people who try to explain away the things in the world, they don't have a good definition, they don't have a good reason, they don't have a good why.

So I'm going to try with you. You may say something like "God, I commit to you today I'm going back to school, I'm going to spend time with you, I'm going to learn a new operating system And I'm trusting right now, even when I don't know that you're going to show me the way. God, be with me right now. .

I commit my life to you.