Matthew 18:2,3 – “Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, 3 and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.’”
Sin does a lot of things to people. One thing it does is it brings confusion in so many areas. It gets things “all messed up.” It breaks things, hurts things, wounds things, divides things and flat out destroys things. Have you ever had an extension cord or wires that were a tangled mess? It takes time and patience to unravel the chaos and bring order to the neglect of carefully maintaining a neatly coiled cord.
I heard my dad say to me more than once when I was a youngster, “You better straighten up.” I might have been misbehaving or doing something that was out of line. That’s all he had to say to me and I changed whatever I was doing very quickly.
It is interesting to note that the Greek word for “converted” in this verse means to “twist,” or “turn around.” It is the parent word for “perverse,” which is used in the previous chapter, Matthew 17:17. Jesus called the people listening to him a “faithless and perverse generation.” The Greek word for perverse means to distort, misinterpret or corrupt.
It’s as though Jesus is telling us in this passage that if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven you need to become “untwisted.” Some of us have such messed up lives that it takes the Holy Spirit to peel back the layers and untwist the mess we’ve made so He can save us, heal us and use us. Don’t let the tangled disorder in your life discourage you from calling on the Holy Spirit to help you. He is a Master of getting the twisted untwisted.