You Cease To Be Childlike When You Cease To Be Receptive

Mat 19:14  But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

You ask me why? I think there are three reasons; there are three penalties that follow when the child-spirit dies, and the first is, that we cease to be receptive.

The joy of childhood is its receptivity. The greatest duty of it is to receive. 

The child knows nothing of a haunting past yet, and it is not yet anxious about the future. Its time is now, and now is God's time too, do not forget. 

But you and I have so overlaid this present with yesterday's sin and with tomorrow's project, that we have little heart for today's message.

We are not receptive as the little child is, and so we grow very commonplace and dull; there is plenty of dust about us, and no dew.

Let the dead past bury its dead!

Do not be living in a quenched yesterday. And take no anxious thought about tomorrow.

Consider the lilies; be a child again.

To feel the eternal in this passing moment, to catch the rustle of God's garment now, not to be burdened with a vain regret, not to be peering forward through the curtain; all that, with the open eye and feeling heart, is to be childlike.

And of such is the kingdom of heaven.

~George Morrison~