I completely admired that concept up until I can’t produce childlike faith anymore!

Child-like faith, you say?

You know, I think we have tried too doggoned hard to figure out what all these different kinds of faiths are (child-like, mustard-seed, abiding, etc) because we have had them dumped on us as if they represent something we need to strive for. But striving for such faith is exactly what was being questioned at the time.

Take child-like faith. We’re always trying to figure out how to get it, and yet at the time Jesus made the statement, the very idea was somewhat repulsive to those who heard it. You see, as the people were carrying little children to Jesus — most likely, infants — the disciples were simply put out by what they considered a waste of time. It wasn’t just Jesus’ time they were envious of but also their own because they had to wait for him.

Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it at all. Luke 18:17

This was not some requirement being thrown out to them but was a statement regarding the reality that only those who are brought or carried to Jesus would enter in. The same kind of thing was stated in many other ways during their time with him. Remember how Jesus told the people in John 6 that they could not come to him or believe in him unless they had been drawn? Remember how Jesus told Peter that it was only through the Spirit’s revelation that he could know him?

It’s also the same thing Paul told the Corinthians when he described the inability of the natural mind to understand God. He didn’t suggest that knowing things was bad, but simply that logic or man’s reasoning ability could not reach God’s wisdom. It is the logic of a mind that cannot come to God that is the problem and not the individual bits of information. A logic of darkness or blindness will use every bit of information to prove its already-formed conclusion, while a logic that sees and knows will find a witness in anything and everything!

There is no magic concept of child-like faith that we were ever expected to strive for — it was only framed that way to make a clear point to those who heard it. The logic of the men who spent all their time following Jesus was just as backward as anyone else, and God chose for them to learn the miraculous by having it continually clash against every single one of their fleshly-formed reasonings.

Jim