Day 102- What does it mean to have childlike faith?
📖Daily Reading
Psalms 116-118
🎥 Video
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📝 Reflection
Psalm 116: 6
The Lord protects those of childlike faith; I was facing death, and he saved me.
What does it mean to have childlike faith? Well first we have to look at what we think of when we think of the characteristics of children and childhood. We all were children at one time and we most likely have some children in our lives. When I think of children the following words come to my mind; open, curious, joyful, loving, imaginative, creative, fearless, dreaming, limitless, experimental, expressive, self centered, they want what they want, shameless, trusting, innocent, and I could go on, but you get the picture. We can learn a lot from children. The Bible often uses children as an example of how we should be, especially with regards to our faith. Many of us though do not heed this and take it seriously.
We are so busy taking ourselves, our life and our responsibilities seriously that many of suck the life right out of life. Sometimes and especially people of faith. We are taking our faith and life so seriously that we are repelling people from Jesus. I know this might no be a popular message. But I can tell you it is true, because I was one of those people who was repulsed for a long time because of a few bad examples. In Psalm 115 they also describe idols that ‘other’ people are worshipping. They are described as having mouths, but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear…. I think we adults can become like this. We become robotic and so serious and caught up in our responsibilities of our human existence that we are missing out of the full fruit of the spirt that is already given to us and that we have access to, and that we are supposed to demonstrate and be evidence of.
Children exhibit a few of these characteristics easily; especially joy, love and faithfulness. So when we talk about being childlike in our faith, we need to incorporate a sense of wonder, curiosity, play, imagination and joy back into our lives, if we find it missing. We need to be intentional about it as well, we can so easily get caught up in our day to day tasks and responsibilities, but if we take our faith seriously, we need to treat our assignment to be childlike as a responsibility and obligation.
I had the Lego movie come to mind as I was thinking of this. The father in the movie is portrayed in the child’s imagination as “Lord Business” and he was a mean tyrannical ruler who was ruining the land because he wanted to stop creativity and individual choice and glue everything together. In the ‘real life world’ of the child, the father started out with good intentions by wanting to ‘play’ with his son and build a lego town together. But as many adults do he got caught up in what he had built and wanted it to stay perfect, so he became rigid and lost his playfulness. Meanwhile his son still wanted to enjoy and play with the legos which meant creating new things, taking things apart and rebuilding etc.. as legos are intended to be used. This created a division in the relationship and sadness and feelings of rejection by the son from the father. Of course as the movie goes on the father ‘aka Lord Business’ wakes up to his mistakes, misplaced priorities and realizes what is truly important and regains his childlike attitude and then reconnects with his son.
I think often we become like Lord Business, and we start taking ourselves too seriously and we think it is all up to us and it needs to be ‘perfect’ and ‘glued down’ and ‘kept together’. When we live as if ‘it is all up to me’ and ‘it will fall apart if I don’t hold it together’, then it creates a similar disconnect between us and our creator. He feels sad and rejected, we are not demonstrating faith or trust in him, but rather in ourselves. He created us in his image, to be joyful, loving, creative, fearless, dreamers, curious, playful, …. This doesn’t mean that we ignore our responsibilities and go to the other extreme. We are to be mature adults, and be good stewards of what we have been given and that includes remaining childlike in our faith.
✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt
How can you incorporate some childlike faith into your life? Have you become like Lord Business in your life? Do you need to take yourself down a notch and let God be God?
📖Tomorrows Reading
Psalms 119-130
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