September 3, 2013

Mark 10:15 — Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.

“Now I wake and see the light: ‘Tis God who kept me through the night. To him I lift my voice and pray. That he would keep me through the day: If I should die before ‘tis done, O God, accept me through thy Son.” … You might not know this little prayer, but you surely know it’s nighttime counterpart, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Both these gems were printed in the New England Primer, and so were a part of the American consciousness for the best part of two hundred years until the Primer lost its place as a basic educational tool. The evening prayer is even older, with an earlier English version printed in London and a Latin version going back as far as 1190.
I love these prayers because they speak to God as I wish I did, as a little child.
What did Jesus mean when He said “as a little child”?
Children are, before anything else, dependent and willing to depend on their parents. They are not self-reliant, nor yet do they look to any other source to meet any of their needs.
Children are modest, and make no claims to greatness. Nor do they lay any great claim to many possessions. Their wants and needs, though often urgent and desperate, are few and small.
Though they have the germ of sin in them, children are inclined to be simple and obedient. We learn the habits of independence of mind and disobedience in behavior as we grow older. That little germ infects our every thought and action, but at the start it’s not like that.
I speak as a man, and say that any man who has held a little child — perhaps fallen a sleep with a child in his arms, knows that there is an extraordinary innocence and purity of mind. And at first that flower of innocence blossoms into something wonderful — a question asking machine, inquisitive and ready to believe — not contradicting, but accepting.
There is one last, most beautiful reason to follow the Master’s direction to become as a little child. Origen, the Alexandrian Christian who, in the early third century was one of the first great theologians said “For He Himself, when He was in the form of God, humbled Himself, and became a child.” When you think that God became a child to enter your world, don’t you want to become a child to enter His? “If I should die before ‘tis done, O God, accept me through thy Son.”