Luke 18:17

Receive the kingdom of God as a little child

Receiving the kingdom of God as a little child

I. To begin with, let me deal with THE SECRET THOUGHT OF THE DISCIPLES, expressed by their actions though not spoken in words.

1. And, first, it is pretty clear that the disciples thought the children were too insignificant for the Lord’s time to be taken up by them.

2. Again, I suppose that these grown-up apostles thought that the children’s minds were too trifling. Despise not children for trifling when the whole world is given to folly.

3. “Ay,” say they, “but if we should let the children come to Christ, and if He should bless them, they will soon forget it. No matter how loving His look and how spiritual His words, they will go back to their play, and their weak memories will preserve no trace of it at all.” This objection we meet in the same manner as the others. Do not men forget?

4. Perhaps, too, they thought that children had not sufficient capacity.

5. To put the thought of the apostle into one or two words: they thought that the children must not come to Christ because they were not like themselves--they were not men and women. The child must not come to the Master because he is not like the man. How the blessed Saviour turns the tables and says, “Say, not, the child may not come till he is like a man, but know that you cannot come till you are like him. It is no difficulty in the child’s way that he is not like you; the difficulty is with you, that you are not like the child.” Instead of the child needing to wait until he grows up and becomes a man, it is the man who must grow down and become like a child.

II. Now we pass to our second head, namely, THE OPEN DECLARATION OF OUR LORD, wherein He sets forth His mind upon this matter,

1. Looking at it carefully, we observe, first, that He tells the disciples that the gospel sets up a kingdom. Was there ever a kingdom which had no children in it? How then could it grow?

2. Next, our Lord tells us that the way of entering the kingdom is by receiving. “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.” We do not enter into the kingdom of God by working out some deep problem and arriving at its solution; not by fetching something out of our selves, but by receiving a secret something into us. We come into the kingdom by the kingdom’s coming into us: it receives us by our receiving it. Now, if this entrance into the kingdom depended upon something to be fetched out of the human mind by study and deep thought, then very few children could over enter it; but it depends upon something to be received, and therefore children may enter,

3. The next thing in the text is that if we receive this kingdom, and so enter into it, we must receive it as children receive it.

III. THE GREAT ENCOURAGEMENT given by our Lord in the text. (C. H.Spurgeon.)