Yesterday, I filled in as a substitute for a young teacher friend of mine, spending the entire day with sixth graders. When the bell rang for the first period, the room remained eerily empty. Just as I stood up to investigate, a small head poked around the doorframe: “Can we come in now?”
Apparently, students are expected to line up in the hall and wait for the teacher to admit them—a crucial detail buried in the extensive lesson plans I hadn’t quite finished reading. When I finally opened the door, the wave of students hit the room less like a class entry and more like a tsunami. I was catching the full junior high experience in one unexpected blast.
The first thing I noticed is that sixth grade seems to consist of three distinct species living in the same habitat. First, you have the “average” kids who share similar heights and features. Then, you have the tiny ones with faces that still belong in a fourth-grade classroom. Finally, you have the students who got a massive jumpstart on adulthood and tower over the rest.
The physical contrast was striking, but their minds were unified by the same impulsive energy. Beneath the surface, they all shared the same still-developing judgment. There was quite a bit of giggling, and most of them had the attention span of gnats on caffeine. In more than one class, I watched boys and girls wadding up paper and launching it across the room.
Once again, I thanked God that He allowed me to spend most of my career teaching 12th graders. While seniors certainly have their moments of mindless laughing and short attention spans, the chaos is usually dialed down. To be fair, however, the students’ behavior isn’t that different from tired teachers at an end-of-day faculty meeting. Fatigue and boredom have a way of reducing even professionals to restless fidgeting and whispered side conversations—though usually without the wadded paper.
It is easy to focus on physical development while forgetting that, inside, we can still act like kids. And the “kids” I’m describing aren’t just students. When I turned 60, I started viewing large swaths of the adult population as kids compared to me.
One of my all-time favorite movies, Grumpy Old Men, captures this perfectly. The rivalry between the characters played by Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon eventually boils over on a frozen lake. They end up fighting on the ice until Jack Lemmon’s 90-year-old father, played by Burgess Meredith, arrives. In a commanding voice, he yells at the two elderly men to break it up. Matthau freezes like a guilty ten-year-old. As the scene ends, the ancient father dismisses them with a single disgusted word: “Kids!”
To be clear, there is a kind of youthfulness I desperately want to keep. I want to stay young at heart so I can find pure joy in playing with my grandsons, rolling on the floor without worrying about my dignity. I want to have the energy to travel the world with my wife, exploring new places with the same wide-eyed excitement we had as newlyweds. There is a beauty in maintaining a childlike sense of wonder and energy.
But there is a vast difference between being childlike and being childish.
For Christians, staying a “kid” in our judgment isn’t just funny; it’s dangerous. Maturity isn’t about losing our joy; it is about gaining stability. The Apostle Paul urges believers in Ephesians 4 to grow into spiritual adulthood. When we do, we won’t live like little children—easily unsettled by every new teaching or vulnerable to those who twist the truth.
Is this really a problem today? Jesus thought so. In Matthew 7:15, He warns: “Beware of false prophets who come disguised as harmless sheep but are really vicious wolves.”
Think about how experts are trained to spot counterfeit money. They don’t spend hours studying every fake bill ever made because there are countless ways to create a forgery. Instead, they study the real thing. They know the texture, the ink, and the security features of the genuine article so well that when something is off, it stands out immediately.
In the same way, we don’t need to chase every false teaching to avoid being deceived. We simply need to know the truth—God’s Word—so well that the counterfeit becomes obvious.
. . . and that’s what I know today.