only children go to Heaven
saturday musings #10 - philippians 4 as a prescription to cure our adult-ish ways.
Happy 1st Saturday of 2025, my friends.
The first post of the year is here.
I pray that you and your’s have had blessed holidays and I pray for hope to be rooted in your hearts as another year’s road lies before us all. Who knows what God will do, how He will adventure with us! It is an exciting time as we look ahead to newness of it all.
Before I go ahead with any more, I want to note that not everybody has had a childhood in a healthy, happy, and safe nuclear family. While everyone has family ‘dysfunction’ to some level, because we are all ‘dysfunctional’ individuals due to sin, there are some who have grown up around parents or siblings that deeply wounded them in mental, spiritual, or physical places. Whether it be abuse, an absent or ‘barely there’ parent, death of a parent, a divorce, or some other deep wounding, I’m so sorry you had to endure that as a vulnerable child. Although you may think you cannot relate to what I will be talking about below, the wonderful news of it all is that no matter how lovely or fallen our earthly parent figures have been/are, God Almighty is the Father of every true Believer. He is the Dad that we all lack, to differing levels, here on earth. In every way, He is Redeeemer, Lover, Provider, and Protector of our inner being. So please know that He stands with you, He weeps with you, and most of all, He loves you perfectly and unconditionally.
Philippians 4:7 and 8 have been quoted again and again, both together and separately. From t-shirts, coffee mugs, and graphic prints for our walls, we’ve all ‘bought into’ these trendy verses. Visit your local Hobby Lobby and you will be guaranteed to find a notebook bearing these lines. There’s no doubt we’ve all seen them before, whether avid believers or new to the Christian journey.
Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. - Philippians 4:5-7
Gentleness.
Carefree.
Shameless requests.
Peace.
All attributes of what, I realized as I was studying, a child is composed of.
Another passage comes to my mind,
At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, and said, “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me. - Matthew 18:1-5
Hm. This is interesting. Seemingly, only children enter Paradise.
Philippians 4 has become, almost, obsolete, in my study of the Word, because I’m tired of it being coined as a cop out for thinking through decisions. So many times I’ve felt somebody utter, I just don’t feel the peace of God in this right now.
While I believe every Believer should put enormous stock in the mysteries of the Spirit and how Jesus moves in us each individually, and while I also think that our feelings should be acknowledged and in all cases, paid attention to, I don’t think using the ‘peace’ of God is an excuse for not seeking God’s Word. There are other cases in which I’ve heard this phrase expressed, but unfortunately, all of them in the wrong contexts.
“Gentleness,” I write in my journal, “the attitude of someone who has not allowed or yet tasted, the bitterness of malice and overt evil toward themselves…Who’s hands are gentle enough to hold baby birds and rabbits, but so passive we do not speak simple and obvious truths.”
The phrase, God’s peace, is used to dismiss out of hand, the calling of God that often makes us feel fearful. Actually, I think this to be more than on the rare occasion. Perhaps a time or two will come up when somebody isn’t interested in digging deeper than the surface and they’ll use God’s ‘peace’ as a guise. Usually though, I think that rather than facing a hard and yet revealing truth, we would rather just say that we don’t think God is leading us in a less than known direction. And grownups like the known.
Children on the other hand? Well, they don’t worry so much about the familiar. Youngsters are adventerous, if allowed to be. They explore, try new and very dangerous activities, with no thought of consequences or What will come next? I miss when I was a child when I would run out into the warm Summer rains with no deliberation because I didn’t want to dry off when I came back in. Laughing as I played in the gutters and kicked up fountains of water all over myself, into the air.
Maybe Paul’s words, which stem from Jesus’ own teachings, are a prescription for us to put away our adult-ish tendencies and retrieve from deep inside, our childlike heart. Because God is after our hearts like nothing else. He does not require of us good works, cleaned up lives, and religiosity to make us His.
It is possible to recover the lost life of our heart and with it the intimacy, beauty, and adventure of life with God. To do so we must leave what is familiar and comfortable—perhaps even parts of the religion in which we have come to trust—and take a journey. This journey first takes us on a search for the lost life of our heart, and for the voice that once called us in those secret places—those places and times when our heart was still alive. The pilgrimage of the heart leads us to remember together hat it was that first engaged us in deep ways as children: “Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it,” said Jesus (Mark 10:15).
A portion written by John Eldredge in his book, The Sacred Romance, touches on this very topic that Paul seems to be raising to the Philippian church. In many ways I think Christianity itself is a prescription for every grownup that has ever been a child before—which is to say, all of us.
Being a child again is something that I am relearning in my twenties, which is sort of ironic because I just ‘left’ childhood behind me not long ago. But I want to traverse the terrain I’ve abandoned, because I’m not sure that Jesus means for me to leave behind all of my childlike practices. I long to have my heart be light again, be detached from the heaviness of the world. In other words, to be carefree. Carefree is not careless, but instead it is a posture of realizing that cares are not meant to be lugged around but to be set down somewhere, or given to someone who must shoulder them, for awhile at least. Jesus is that Someone for each of us. He is the ‘grownup’ in our lives who we must turn to if we are to bring every anxiety unto Him.
When we were kids, we all have distinct memories of bringing our scraped knees, hurt feelings, and anger to our parents. We didn’t normally sit alone with these burdens. We knew we couldn’t deal with them on our own and besides, we needed comfort.
Not only does Paul call for carefree hearts, but he also desires for us to bring all of our requests before Him shamelessly, with nary an embarrassed glance. We’ve all been there when we are a little ashamed of our questions or pleas for help and we look at the ground and mumble them or we don’t ask them at all. In the teen phase of everyone’s lives, we often don’t ask for help because something in us thinks in order for us to be worthy of attention or applause, we must ‘tough’ it out. Jesus doesn’t seem to look on this fondly.
“And whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in My name, I will do it.” - John 14:13
This isn’t a free-for-all, ask what you want and you’ll get it. God’s not a vending machine or fairy godmother.
But we all seem to act as grownups, as if asking itself were some sort of letdown in God’s eyes or the eyes of our neighbors. Or, in numerous cases, we seem to think we let ourselves down. Instead, I think of it as letting ourselves off the hook. We have a Father who seeks our Greatest Good. Let your heart be free to request strangth, peace, love, and kindness from Him, and He will give it gladly.
All of this culminates in peace. Peace beyond our very human comprehension.
Children revel in the dappled rays of sunlight, dance to music unheard by adults, and sing to songs that they alone understand. In all of this, there is peace. The Message sums it up like this, “Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.” The peace that is beholden in a child comes from an utter reliance and excitement of Somebody who is advocating for, providing for, and loving them in a way that invites them into a life of excitement and adventure. Adventure naturally includes unknowns, scary creatures, and hidden treasures.
As a child, I often played the adventurer with my younger brother as my faithful sidekick. I drew maps from my imagination and sculpted the backyard into fearsome landscapes to traverse. I yearned for adventure and a crisis to overcome. Nowadays, I try my best to sign up for the “fun and successful” package rather than the “trials and tribulations” package.1 I sit back and just allow life to pass me by because its just too hard out there.
Surely it is challenging. But as a child, I was prepared for those challenges, knowing they would come, as I battled fire demons and evil goblins, knowing the peace that would come on the other side. Even as I fought real battles, like being left out of the ‘it’ group, being left behind by ‘trusted’ friends, or losing out when it came to competing for my ten year old crush’s attention, there was stability within myself. I could go home and, maybe not leave my worries behind me, but at least set them down for now, because home was safe and I was loved.
Peace beyond understanding. The culimination of a child’s heart.
Philippians 4 now has new meaning and insight for me, this week, and perhaps this was helpful in leading you closer toward the heart of Christ.
Weekly journal prompt
Create two columns in your notebook or phone. In the first, list all of the (negative) ways in which you have ‘grown up’ and lost the heart of a child. In the second, compare to the first list and write down opposing traits: those that a child’s heart would have toward a loving parent. Then invite Jesus into one of those adult-ish tendencies of your heart and ask Him to help you find your way back to a heart of dependence on Him.
My prayer for you, reader, is that 2025 would be a year God recaptures your whole being, sweeping you up into this grand adventure of His He desires for all of us, His created ones.
Go check out this hilarious YT short from @joechristianguy.