When was the last time somebody called you childish? It's not a compliment. The whole world treats childishness like a disease you're supposed to grow out of — grow up, get it together, act your age. We spend most of our adult lives trying to prove we're anything but.
And then Jesus says become like a child.
So maybe the question isn't whether you're being childish. Maybe it's whether you're being childish in the right way. Because there's childish, and there's childlike, and the difference between the two is the difference between missing the Kingdom and walking into it.
The question behind the question
It starts with the disciples asking Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:1). On the surface it sounds like a theology question. It isn't. It's personal — and if we're honest, it's a question all of us are quietly running underneath everything we do.
Because "who is the greatest" is really "where do I rank." Am I significant? Do I matter? When everybody in the room gets measured, where do I land? That's not a question twelve men asked one time two thousand years ago. That's the question your flesh asks every single day, in every room you walk into, and it asks it precisely because it doesn't have a settled answer. An identity that's actually secure doesn't need to keep measuring itself against everyone else. The measuring is the tell. We rank other people because we're desperate to know where we rank.
Jesus doesn't answer the question they asked. He answers the question they meant. And instead of telling them who's winning, He dismantles the whole game they're playing.
A child in the middle
Picture it. Twelve grown men, ambitious, driven, standing in a circle arguing about their own importance. And Jesus reaches down, takes a child, and stands that child right in the middle of them (Matthew 18:2).
We miss what that meant, because we love kids and put them at the center of everything. In the first century, a child had no status, no leverage, no position. A child couldn't advance your name or add to your reputation. A child was completely dependent on somebody else for everything — food, safety, belonging, all of it.
And that dependence is exactly why Jesus picked one. He didn't put the child in the middle in spite of the fact that the child had nothing to offer. He did it because of it.
What childlikeness actually is
This is where we usually get it wrong. We hear "become like a child" and we think Jesus is talking about wonder, or innocence, or believing without ever asking a hard question. That's not the center of it. Read what He actually says: "Whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:4). It's not mainly about wonder. It's about position.
A child doesn't walk into a room trying to establish dominance. A child isn't calculating leverage, working an angle, managing how they come across. A child just depends. Open hands, no performance, complete trust that someone bigger has them.
And that's the part that's harder than it sounds, because it isn't weakness. It's actually the deepest kind of strength there is. The greatest person in the Kingdom is the one who operates as if they have the least — and you can only do that when you already know you don't have to manufacture your own importance. The child can afford to have open hands because the child isn't the one holding everything together. Somebody else is. You will never be able to take the lowly position until your worth stops being something you have to defend and becomes something Christ already settled. This is why it always comes back to death with Jesus. Becoming small is a kind of dying — it's laying down the version of you that needs to be significant. And the old you does not go quietly.
The inversion
The hard truth is we've absorbed the world's definition of greatness without ever deciding to. Platform. Numbers. Influence. Followers. How impressive your story sounds when you tell it. We breathe that in every day, and we carry it right into our walk with God without noticing we've done it.
Then Jesus sets a child in the middle and says: that one. The lowly one. That's greatness. In the Kingdom the last will be first, the least will be the greatest, and the servant will be the leader. He didn't just adjust the world's definition of greatness. He turned it completely upside down.
So you want to be great in the Kingdom? Then stop trying to be great in the Kingdom. Stop positioning. Stop maneuvering. Stop comparing yourself to the person next to you. The striving itself is the thing keeping you out.
This is where the difference between childish and childlike actually matters, because they are not the same thing. Childish is irresponsible, immature, avoidant — it's a grown person refusing to carry what they're supposed to carry. That is not what Jesus is asking for. Childlike is dependent, open, humble, present, trusting. One is an escape from responsibility. The other is a surrender of self-importance. Do not confuse them.
The warning you're not supposed to skip
Don't stop reading where the encouraging part ends, because the passage doesn't. Right after Jesus invites us into childlikeness, He says something as severe as anything in Matthew: that whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble would be better off with a millstone hung around his neck, drowned in the depths of the sea (Matthew 18:6).
That is not an accident, and the placement is not random. It lands right on top of the invitation to become like a child on purpose. Childlikeness isn't only about your own personal humility. It's also about how fiercely the Kingdom protects the vulnerable. God takes seriously what happens to the small, the dependent, the ones who can't defend themselves. And it means nothing in your life — nothing — should be allowed to become the thing that trips up someone who's trying to find their way to Jesus. We're going to sit in that one harder next week, because it deserves more than a paragraph.
So when did you stop?
The disciples came in asking who's the greatest. Jesus answered a completely different question — what greatness actually looks like. And the answer was a child.
So here's the honest question to sit with: when did you stop being childlike? Not childish — nobody's asking you to be irresponsible or immature or checked-out. Childlike. Open hands. Dependent. Trusting. Present. Somewhere along the way most of us traded it for capable and impressive and in control, and we called that growing up.
You don't earn your way into this. You don't climb to the top of it. That's the whole point Jesus is making — there's no ladder, there's a posture. You become like a child, and you walk in. It really is that simple, and it really is that hard, because becoming small is something you'll have to choose again every single day for the rest of your life. The old you will keep trying to get up off the floor and reach for significance, and every day you'll have to lay it back down.
But that's the door.
Open your hands
Wherever you're reading this, try something. Open your hands. Literally. Not grasping, not performing, not holding onto anything — just open, and dependent, the way a child's are.
That posture is a prayer all by itself. So pray it. Ask God to loosen your grip on the pride, the self-reliance, the constant striving to prove you matter. Name whatever you've been gripping to keep yourself feeling important, and let it go. Open hands can't hold a place in line and they can't climb a ladder. But open is the only way anyone has ever received anything from God.
If you don't have a church family walking this out with you, we'd love to be that. We're at Kingdom House in Concord, and this is the whole thing we're after — becoming small enough to be great in the only Kingdom that lasts.
Written by
Pastor Cody
Lead Pastor
