I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.

The wise and learned are not able to see the things of God, but the child like can. The reason is that there are things that we know to be true and we dont even have to consult our intellects about them, because they are written on our hearts. This is very convicting to me, because I have spent a lot of my adult life trying to learn my faith, and as a result, I have come to that faith through my studies. But what God is asking for here is simple childlike faith. The kind of faith that believes without trying to understand. When I tell my todler not to touch the oven because it will hurt them, they trust and obey without question. But as they get older, they find that they have to touch it, so that they can know for themselves.

When we try to understand what Jesus is telling us today, I believe that His message is best understood by considering His teachings in the bible as a whole. The main message that the bible repeats over and over is that we must love God and love our neighbor as oursleves, and to trust Him in all things. God wants us to simply believe that and follow those axioms in our lives. The wise and learned get in trouble when they ask Jesus to define “what love is” or “who is my neighbor.” We convolute things because we want to distill everything down to its most basic parts, pull every little thing apart so that we can reduce the law to the one thing that we have to do to be saved. But God doesn’t care about any of that, He simply wants us to love everyone, and to trust him above everything.

We know this because God wrote this simple truth directly onto our hearts, and the knowledge of what is love, how to trust,  and who is our neighbor, is as natural to us as our own understanding of ourselves. But we often overlook these things that we “know” in favor of the things that our intellectual rationalizations fabricate. We need to seek the faith and trust of a child, and be content with what we know to be true without the assistance of our minds and intellects. And when we do we can rest in the protective embrace of His love. Because in the end all of the things of this world will pass away, and they will at the end be nothing. Only His love, and our relationship with Him will matter. So lets be like little children, cast off your intellectual rationalizations, and rest completely in His love, and trust Him in all things, because in the end nothing else matters.

Please lord today help me to gain the wisdom and understanding of simple childlike faith. To not over think things, and to trust completely in you. Amen.