what-did-jesus-mean-by-becoming-like-a-child

In the experience of this writer, most people—including committed Christians—do not truly understand what the Master was pointing toward when he spoke of becoming like a little child. The saying is usually received at the level of sentiment, morality, or behavior, as though Jesus were urging adults to adopt innocence, simplicity, or obedience as personal traits. Yet this reading consistently fails to transform the inner landscape of the reader, which should give us pause. When you read the words of Jesus Christ carefully, it becomes apparent that this instruction does not function as advice about how to behave, but as a destabilizing gesture aimed at how one is aware. Like many of the Master’s sayings, it resists being reduced to doctrine because it was never meant to live at the level of form alone.

These words were not intended to be taken literally in the modern sense, nor were they offered as a metaphor to be admired from a distance. They are pointers—precise, unsettling pointers—toward the experience of the Kingdom of Heaven within that Jesus invited his listeners to embody, not merely to understand. In his case, the invitation was spoken into the presence of those gathered around him; in my case, it is offered to you when you read. The misunderstanding arises because we have been trained to listen for instruction rather than initiation, for belief rather than Being. What is at stake here is not the recovery of a lost interpretation, but the recognition of a doorway that has been standing open all along, waiting to be entered from within.

The Master was not inviting you to return to living like a two-year-old, but to live from the mind-set of a two-year-old. There is an essential difference. A young child does not yet inhabit the world primarily through words, ideas, or internal narration. Life is not filtered through interpretation; it is met directly. This is what sets a small child apart from an older child or a young adult, and this distinction is the key to understanding what the Master was pointing toward. Heaven cannot be entered by thinking about it, nor by constructing refined concepts about its nature. Thought can describe, imagine, and debate, but it cannot cross the threshold.

Heaven is not a place one goes to after death; it is a state of awareness in which there is no felt separation from the living flow of the Divine within. What creates the sense of separation is identification with words, beliefs, and concepts—structures that gradually form the persona, the mask through which you learn to face the world. This identification becomes a veil, not imposed from outside, but quietly woven from within. It stands between the immediate experience to which the word Heaven points and the ordinary sense of living as a self moving through time and space. The Master’s invitation was not to improve the mask, but to see through it.

This seemingly strange invitation to “become as a little child,” so often misunderstood or softened into metaphor, is quietly supported by another statement of the Master that is just as frequently ignored—usually dismissed as unrealistic or impractical. He said, “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on… Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself” (Matthew 6:25, 34 KJV). Read plainly, without immediately rushing to explain it away, this instruction stands alongside the call to childlikeness as part of the same invitation. It is not a moral demand but a doorway into another way of inhabiting awareness.

As one practices the art of giving no thought, something unexpected begins to reveal itself. Awareness loosens from its compulsive habit of self-management and opens to the availability of Being thought through, in much the same way it happens naturally with a small child. Anyone who has spent time with young children knows that their creativity appears effortless and inexhaustible—an expression arising before self-conscious control has taken hold, long before it is slowly educated out of them. The invitation to give no thought is ignored largely because those who teach the Gospel have rarely lived from this surrendered way of living themselves. What is dismissed as impractical is, in truth, profoundly threatening to a mode of life built on control, explanation, and the constant narration of experience.

What these statements of the Master offer, when read without haste, are not commands to be obeyed nor ideals to be admired from a distance, but doorways. The difficulty is not that they are obscure, but that they are quietly ignored—set aside as poetic, exaggerated, or impossible—rather than approached as invitations into a different quality of living. When the Master speaks of childlikeness or of giving no thought, he is not describing a theory of spirituality, but pointing toward a way of inhabiting awareness that opens into what he elsewhere calls abundant life. These sayings were never meant to terminate in agreement or disagreement; they were meant to be entered.

The work of this website is to honor the words of Jesus Christ before all else by taking them seriously at the level from which they were spoken. This requires an understanding of his instructions that moves beyond literalism without discarding them, recognizing that they consistently point toward an inner experience of revelation rather than the accumulation of religious knowledge. When his words are received in this way, they cease to function as ideals that judge our failure and become living thresholds into a way of Being that can be known directly. What is revealed is not something added to you, but something uncovered—an awakening to what has always been present, waiting to be lived from within.

It is the hope and intention of this writer to illuminate the deeper meanings of the Master’s teachings beyond the long-standing error of taking them literally, without diminishing their power or dissolving their authority. These words were never meant to remain as text on a page, but as living invitations into an inner recognition that transforms how life is experienced from within.

If something in you recognizes what you’ve just read, you’re warmly invited to explore the Heaven Within series on its main series page.