Magnolia
United Methodist Church

This Week's Service (Oct 20, 2024):  "Childlike Humility"

Last week we talked about Childlike Maturity. When Jesus (in Mark 10:13-16) welcomes the children, he compares them directly to the Kingdom of God…  Jesus demonstrates that the nature of children is the purity that exists in eternity. Qualities of wonder, trust, curiosity, playfulness, imagination, honesty, vulnerability, innocence, faith, and open-mindedness are all part of eternity. We start off our lives with these qualities, but they get buried… we get hurt, we set up barriers, we “grow up”. And in last week’s service we looked at how the path to salvation on which we are walking is in many ways a path of relearning those childhood traits, or even better, of remembering them. 

This week’s reading from Mark proceeds right after last week’s reading, so we can’t ignore the "Be Like Children" context, as Jesus encounters the rich man. Today we’ll look at the story of the rich man longing for heaven through the lens of “Remembering Childlike Maturity”, and through this lens, rather than being a story about riches, we find a story about remembering dependency. Relearning the dependency we once had on those who provided for and cared for us as little children, we now learn in relation to God.  So this week we are remembering Childlike Dependency. 

(Past services archived here.)