True disciples humble themselves like children
True disciples enter the kingdom of heaven, while false disciples do not make the cut. As the Son of God, Jesus knows with absolute clarity who will enter. He knows who his true disciples are, and he wants us to know.
Thus he tells us one more mark of a true disciple in Matthew 18:2–4:
“Calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus is not exaggerating here when he says you will never enter the kingdom of heaven without this mark. You really must turn and become like a child. And then he elaborates on the quality of a child he has in mind, and that quality is the willingness to humble oneself. “Whoever humbles himself like this child…”
Turn
Notice also that Jesus says there is something that happens in your soul that precedes becoming like a child. He says you must first “turn.” We must first turn because naturally if we are not children we are adults. And the kind of adulthood that Jesus is speaking of is not a positive maturity that is good but rather a negative sort of adultness that is bad, and what makes it bad is pride. As we get older, if we follow our sinful nature, we become more proud.
Pride runs so deep in the soul of the fallen human that it corrupts and controls everything about us. Pride is a major part of what caused Satan to fall from being a perfect creation of God to being evil. Our pride leads to rebellion against authority. It leads to self-centeredness. It leads to arrogance toward others. It leads to stubbornness, hardening of the heart, and disobedience to God. It leads to an independent spirit and self-righteousness. Pride leads to a spirit of unbelief toward God and his words.
And that is why we can never enter the kingdom of heaven without turning away from our proud unbelief and self-justifying thoughts, to humbly acknowledge our sinfulness and inability to save ourselves. We must become humble enough to acknowledge that we need a Savior, that we can never do enough good works to merit eternal life and acceptance from God. Apart from Christ Jesus, we can never be holy, never be perfect. We can never atone for our sins; we can never be free of our guilt unless we follow God’s way of forgiveness.
Proud people do not think they need Jesus. They think any religion will get them to heaven. They think they can be nice people and earn heaven. Whereas humble people recognize their own brokenness and need for God to save them.
The Pharisee and the tax collector
Jesus brought this crucial point home with an unforgettable parable:
“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 18:10–14 ESV)
Humble enough to believe Scripture
We need childlike humility because the “adult” mind does not accept God’s truth.
We must humble our proud mind. Believing in God and Jesus Christ his Son is not irrational or unscientific. Far to the contrary. Nevertheless no one through human reasoning alone can come to faith in Jesus. No one can prove Jesus rose from the dead. No one can prove Jesus even existed. There are mountains of compelling evidence and arguments, but they are not proof.
And God wants it this way. He deliberately planned for a way of salvation that did not depend on human wisdom. 1 Corinthians 1:21 says, “Since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.”
Young children humbly believe what their parents tell them. We must humbly believe what God tells us in his written Word.
The apostle Paul identifies the proud mindset that resists God and the gospel. He says that his evangelistic ministry required that he “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
Why did the Pharisees and the scribes reject Jesus even though they knew the Scriptures better than anyone in Israel? Because they were proud in heart and mind. They were in fact blinded by their pride. They believed they could be accepted by God by their keeping of the Old Testament laws. They believed they could be good enough to earn eternal life. They were proud of how externally religious they were, even though their hearts were filled with darkness.
Childlike to the end
We never outgrow the need for the humility of a child. We cannot humble ourselves, repent, and give our lives to Christ and then start depending on ourselves to save ourselves. While in this series of articles we have identified over a dozen marks of a true disciple, none of them is meritorious in the sight of God. These marks do not make us good enough to have God’s approval on Judgment Day. Till the day we die we always need the grace of God found through childlike faith in Jesus Christ.