ReflectionsTuesday airs each week on GospelBellsRadio.com, where Pastor Ayo Agunloye reflects on current themes from Your Potter’s House, the daily devotional he writes and publishes. This report is an edited summary of the broadcast, faithful to the teaching as delivered and prepared so that listeners and readers may revisit it, study it, and pass it on. Added Scripture references are provided to aid personal study.
In the second week of September’s Your Potter’s House series on the last-born attitude, Pastor Ayo Agunloye takes up the distinction the whole month turns on. Last week’s message, “The Heart That Leans,” commended a childlike dependence on God. This week draws the essential line beside it:
Childishness must be outgrown. Childlikeness must be preserved.
The two sound alike and are easily confused—but they are opposites. One is immaturity to be left behind; the other is a humble, trusting nearness to the Father that we must never lose.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode Below
A clarifying, practical message, closing with a rich exchange on excellence without competition and prayer that listens rather than performs. Worth an unhurried listen.
👑 A Father, Not Only a King
The pastor begins by re-laying the month’s foundation: the aim is to see God truly as Father—not merely as King, Judge, or even friend. A prince knows the king is sovereign over all, yet also knows a deeper access: he can run to him, embrace him, speak freely, because the King is also his father.
God has given us the spirit of adoption, by which we cry, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15). He is not the spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7).
So we need not come to God rehearsed, formal, and “dressed up,” as if before an important stranger. We come just as we are, hiding nothing. And this holds even in correction: a true father feels the pain of disciplining his child—he does it to help, never because he enjoys it. When David sinned and was offered three judgments, he chose to fall into God’s hands rather than his enemies’, “for His mercies are great” (2 Samuel 24:14)—because a father, even when angry, will not cast his child away.
🚪 First, Become a Child (Matthew 18:1–4)
When the disciples asked “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”, Jesus first redirected them: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter” (Matthew 18:1–4). Before greatness, the pastor notes, comes simply entering—and entering requires conversion, a complete change of state, not merely acting childlike.
The opposite is the drift of Eden and of every teenager: “I’m not a child anymore; I know what’s good for me.” Adam and Eve ate, their eyes opened, and they began deciding independently of God.
Earthly maturity means a child grows up and leaves father and mother. Spiritual maturity is the reverse—God never wants us to outgrow our dependence on Him.
A newborn is completely helpless; all it can do is cry—and that is exactly the posture God seeks. We do not even know what to pray for, which is why “the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered”(Romans 8:26). God does not answer by the eloquence of our prayer points; even a stammering child’s needs are understood and met by a loving father. It is about relationship, not performance.
🧎 Childlikeness Is Humility, Not Immaturity
The first distinction: childishness is immature; childlikeness is humble. The childlike person has genuinely grown, yet is intentionally lowly—”not just stupid,” but deliberately humble.
The pastor anchors this in Colossians 1:26–29, reading The Message: “to be mature is to be basic… Christ, no more, no less.” Maturity is being basic and lowly, as Jesus was “meek and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29).
The immature “package” themselves—fine phrases, borrowed accents, philosophy, psychology, impressive dress—adding to Christ to sound high. Maturity subtracts all of it: Christ, no more, no less.
Paul’s example seals it: “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). For the mature, everything—speech, dress, work—is simply about Christ. Pride, proving oneself, competing, comparing, craving recognition, and turning the gospel into a business of paid “impartations” all belong on the side of childishness.
🙋 Childishness Avoids Responsibility; Childlikeness Embraces Dependence
The second distinction is drawn from any household: the child whose name is “it’s not me.” When something goes wrong, the childish deny and defend; when corrected, they argue back and justify themselves.
The childlike person does the opposite—he takes responsibility and returns to the Father: “I’m sorry, I failed; give me grace to do better.” Corrected, he simply says, “Yes sir, I won’t do it again,” and learns.
Childishness avoids responsibility; childlikeness embraces dependence. The one must be outgrown; the other must be preserved.
This is also where a childlike heart casts all its burdens on the Father—like the child who hands over the school-fees letter, eats, and goes to play, no longer carrying what the parent has agreed to bear.
🕊️ Children Forgive Easily
A final, memorable picture. Two children fight over a coin they both spotted—until two mothers arrive and take up the quarrel on their behalf. While the mothers go on scolding and squaring off, the children have already made peace and gone off together to spend the coin on snacks.
Childlike people forgive easily; childish people take offence easily.
🏅 Excellence Without Competition
In the closing conversation, the presenter asks how one can pursue excellence in ministry without slipping into competitive comparison. The pastor is direct: comparing and competing is childish. Pursue excellence to please the Father, not to outdo anyone.
He grounds it in the talents: God expects a return proportional to what He gave—“to whom much is given, much is required”—not that the one-talent servant match the five-talent servant. The competition spirit, he warns, has driven many to “all sorts of things” just to be seen everywhere.
Be excellent—in exams, at work, in ministry—so that you represent Christ well. But compete with no one. The only verdict you are seeking is “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21).
🙏 Prayer: Attention, Not Composition
The presenter then asks how to balance structured, disciplined prayer with spontaneous, childlike crying out. Over-structuring, the pastor suggests, is often a sign we are outgrowing childlikeness—”we now have sense.” Much of it merely pads our prayer time so we can boast of hours spent, and it turns us into transmitters—“talking like a radio”—who never pause to hear the Father, even when He is trying to speak.
Prayer is not you dishing out instructions to God. Your Father already knows what you need (Matthew 6:8). He wants your attention—and then the Spirit prompts what to ask.
High-sounding, packaged “prayer points” raise the question: is this by the Spirit, or by composition? “Prayer is not compositional.” The fruit of prayer is not its sweetness or length but God’s answer. Keeping a list so as not to forget others’ requests is fine—but even then, depend on God to reveal the real need behind what was said.
God does not answer prayers by how eloquent or high-sounding they are.
🌟 Final Reflection
“Childlikeness, Not Childishness” hands the month its sharpest tool. It frees the believer from two errors at once: the immaturity that refuses to grow, and the false “maturity” that grows away from God into self-sufficiency and show. True maturity, the pastor insists, is not complexity but simplicity—Christ, no more, no less—held in a heart that stays humble, dependent, quick to forgive, and unashamed to cry to its Father.
Grow up out of childishness; never grow up out of childlikeness.
The episode closes in prayer:
“Father, thank you for calling us to childlikeness with You—not ordinary childlikeness, but to be like Your last-born, fond of You and always attached to You. Help us to drop every childish attitude and to grow in the maturity that is Christ Himself—no more, no less—that we may be, indeed, like children before You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
This is a message to grow into, not merely admire.
Listen again. Lay down the packaging. And come to the Father as a child—Christ, no more, no less.
