Out of the Mouth of Babes, and the Part Nobody Quotes

The first time it happened to me I was standing in a doorway holding a dish towel.

My friend's daughter was four, and she was praying at the table the way four year olds do, which is to say she was reporting. She listed the day. She mentioned a dog she had seen. And then she said God's name, once, in the middle of it, the way a person says the name of somebody sitting at the table with them.

I have been in ministry a long time. I have prayed in front of rooms. And I stood there with a dish towel and had the specific, unwelcome thought that I have since heard from about forty other adults in almost identical words.

She means it more than I do.

Nobody says that out loud. It sounds either falsely humble or genuinely alarming, and it is neither. It is just a thing that happens to people who have prayed for twenty years and then hear a four year old do it in a way that has no seams in it at all.

What He quoted, and where He was standing

There is a scene in the temple that people remember as a nice moment about children, and it was not a nice moment at all.

Jesus has just turned over the tables. The building is in an uproar. Children are shouting something in the courts that the officials consider unacceptable, and the officials come to Him about it.

And said unto him, Hearest thou what these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise? (Matthew 21:16, King James Version)

He answers an objection with a quotation, which is what He usually does, and the quotation comes out of the eighth psalm.

Here is the part almost nobody follows up. Go and read what that psalm actually says in the place He is quoting from.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. (Psalm 8:2)

Strength. Not sweetness. The psalm says God has established something militarily useful in the mouths of very small children, and that its function is to silence an accuser.

You have been handed a verse about children that is actually a verse about what silences the voice accusing you, and Psalm 8 is where that stands rather than in anybody's sentimentality. The Spirit is the one who keeps a strong text from being read as a soft one.

Plainness is not a lower grade

So why does a child sound truer, and what is happening in an adult's mouth that is not happening in a child's?

It is not sincerity. Most praying adults are entirely sincere. That is not the difference.

The difference is that an adult runs a second process while they pray. There is the prayer, and then there is the monitoring of the prayer, and the monitoring is asking whether this sounds right, whether it is presumptuous, whether the wording is accurate, whether God has already heard this one four times this week.

A four year old runs one process. She says the thing. There is no second track.

You were not built to run both tracks and the second one was never required of you, and Matthew 18 says plainly that the way in is to become as a little child, and the Spirit of adoption is the one who lets a person speak without auditing themselves mid-sentence.

That verse about becoming as a little child usually gets read as a call to innocence. It is closer to a call to directness. A child does not manage the impression they are making on their father, because it has never occurred to them that the relationship depends on it.

You have a standing in that house that no four year old ever earned and neither did you, which is the force of Matthew 18 rather than a compliment about children, and it is His Spirit who keeps a person from quietly turning sonship back into an audition.

What the monitoring costs

I want to be fair to the second track, because it came from somewhere reasonable.

Most of us picked it up in a room where prayer was public. Somebody prayed out loud and somebody else was listening, and it is a very short walk from being heard by a room to editing for a room. Once that habit is in place it does not switch off when the door closes, so a person ends up editing in an empty kitchen for an audience that went home years ago.

The cost of it is specific. It slows a person down, so they pray less. It makes them avoid the plain sentence, so the praying gets vaguer. And it quietly moves the weight of the prayer off Him and onto the performance of it, which is exactly backwards.

You have a Father rather than an examiner, and that is not a nice thought, it is the reason the word Abba was put in your mouth at all, and Romans 8 says the Spirit of adoption is what prompts that cry in the first place.

Read that verse slowly if the second track has been running for years. It does not say we work our way up to calling Him Father. It says the Spirit is the one who starts the sentence.