childlike or childish?

A wise friend posted a comment to my previous blog entry that I have been chewing on this past week. He reminded me, in the context of prayer, that children (and the childlike) are given special priority somehow before the Lord. This raised the following question for me: Is it really possible to learn about and grow in prayerfulness? If it is the simple and the childlike who are heard by the Lord, then wouldn’t any increase in knowledge or experience seem to work against us? I was troubled by this question until I remembered the importance of differentiating between the childlike and the childish.

Although the Lord clearly taught that His kingdom belongs to little children, He also chastised His disciples for their lack of understanding. For Him, childlikeness was an attitude of heart, not a state of mind. In Luke 22, when the disciples began to argue amongst themselves (much like little children I must say) over who was the greatest, Jesus rebuked them saying, “let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.” Similarly, in Mattew 18, Jesus said that, “whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” In both cases, there seems to be a conscious decision (on the part of one who might have reason to brag) to embrace an attitude of lowliness. And it is this willful decision, not ignorance or inexperience, that Jesus commends.

I was struck earlier this week by a passage from Ephesians 4, which includes these words: “. . . until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves . . .” The apostle Peter, in his firt letter, challenges his readers in a similar way: “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation – if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

So, while there is certainly a shrinking down of our pride in childlike self-abandon as we draw near to the Lord, there is also a growing up of our spirit through disciplines rooted in grace. The two most fundamental disciplines of grace seem to be prayer and feeding upon God’s Word.

That was a lengthy entry, the soul purpose of which was to make the point that there is a place for thoughtful interaction about the nature and practice of prayer. Unfortunately, our adult minds seem to work against us when it comes time to embrace a childlike attitude before the Lord in prayer. Thankfully, there are practices that can be learned, both from the Lord Himself and from His disciples throughout the centuries who have themselves discovered ways to overcome their childish distractedness and hyperactivity as they humbly seek the Lord for grace to pray.