"A little child shall lead them....."

“For an answer Jesus called over a child, whom he stood in the middle of the room, and said, "I'm telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you're not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in. Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God's kingdom. What's more, when you receive the childlike on my account, it's the same as receiving me.”

When the disciples were discussing who should be thew greatest, Jesus took a little child in His arms and said, ‘Unless you become like that, you will never see the kingdom of heaven.’ He did not put up a little child as an ideal; if he had, he would have destroyed the whole principle of His teaching. If humility were put up as an ideal, it would serve only to increase pride. Humility is not an ideal, it is the unconscious result of the life being rightly related to God and centered in Him.
Our Lord is dealing with ambition, and had He put up a little child as a standard, it would simply have altered the manifestation of ambition. What is a little child? We all know what a child is until we are asked, and then we find we do not know. We can mention his extra-goodness, or his extra-badness, but none of this is the child himself. We know implicitly what a child is, and we know implicitly what Jesus Christ means, but as soon as we try to put it into words it is escapes.
A child works from an unconscious principle within, and if we are born again and are obeying the Holy Spirit, we shall consciously manifest humility all along the line. We shall easily be the servant of all men, not because it is our ideal, but because we cannot help it. Our eye is not consciously on our service, but on our Saviour. There is nothing more awful than conscious humility, it is the most Satanic type of pride.

Rich