My girls have been staying with my parents for just over a week now and are having a wonderful time. I went to visit them on Sunday. I drove straight to the church and caught up with a few old friends. I was walking across the front to greet a friend before the service and didn’t see the girls arrive. They raced from the back of the church and leapt onto me with such enthusiasm and excitement. It was the nicest, most loving greeting I could have had. They put all their boundless energy into hugging me.

During the worship, God spoke to me about how he longs for us to come to him like little children – no inhibitions, full of love and excitement about being with him. He doesn’t want us to spend time with him out of guilt, fear, insecurity or self-promotion but because we want to and we can’t contain our love for him. He wants us to run to him, leap into his arms, cling to his neck and smother him with kisses.

As God was talking to me, the pastor’s little daughter started cuddling and kissing him while he was worshiping and he gave her the most loving smile. God adores it when we express our love to him.

In Matthew 18, Jesus tells us that we need to become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven and those who humble themselves like a child, are the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

The bible repeatedly refers to us as being ‘children’ of God. Parenthood is the thing on earth we can experience that comes closest to God’s love for us. God uses the parent-child relationship to show us the depth of love he has for us and to illustrate the relationship he wants us to have with him.

Children say what they think. They do things because they want to. Any parent of a young child knows how hard it is to persuade a child to do something they don’t want to do – you only have to open the door of a child’s bedroom, or look at the vegetables that are left after dinner. Children honestly express what they feel, and they thrive on spending time alone with their parents. God wants us to tell it to him as it is, he wants us to spend time with him because we want to, to read the bible because we’re bursting to find out what his word says, to be so bursting full of joy and excitement we can’t wait to spend time with him… and unlike my girls waiting for me to visit, we don’t have to wait to spend time with God.

So let’s all behave like excited children!