Martha was talking about Psalm 91 and how it grows dearer to her every year. And she saw the core of it, the reason you can dwell “in the secret place of the Most High.” The reason neither the arrow nor the pestilence can touch you – the whole reason you’re immune – is because “he has set his love upon Me… therefore I will deliver him. I will set him on high” (Ps. 91:14). (Related Teaching I Am Owned)
The word used there is an unusual word for love. It means “cling, hold onto tightly, desperate dependence.” I don’t think it’s used anywhere else in the scriptures but there.
“Because he CLINGS to me… I will deliver him.”
But you won’t cling to Him, and hold onto Him, and set your love upon Him, unless you’re a child… unless you’re willing to be a needy, needy child. And the only Source of your need is Him.
It’s as natural as breathing to a little child –
if they’re undone – to come running.
And they WILL be attended to, and they will not let go until they’re done. They demand it at the top of their lungs! And that is the most utter, complete spontaneity. It’s not preconceived like we (adults) do. We judge it and twist it, and we become something different than what we are all the time. We won’t just BE.
Basically that’s what Jesus wants –
complete spontaneity and the honesty to be
where I am and go to Him with my need.
With a little child, you’re not dealing with an artifice or a construct. You’re dealing with a little heart that has a little belly that wants food. You’re dealing with a little person whose mind works in ways you cannot understand, who laughs at things that don’t make sense – aren’t even funny – but they find it hysterical.
That’s the purity. That’s spontaneity: a lack of planning and thinking it through. “How is somebody going to respond to this?” or “If this happens then I’ll need to do that.”
Life is simple for little children
because they are IN the moment.
A little child is in this moment only; there is no other reality. So all that Jesus calls us to, when you get down to it, is being in the simplicity of a child. (Related Podcast Holiness as a Child)
And then… not even considering that you’re dependent! Sometimes my dependence on Him is frightening to me, but it’s not to a little child. It’s natural. “I have nothing. I can do nothing. Ha ha, let’s go play!”
