By David ReayWednesday 22 Jun 2022LifeWords DevotionalsDevotionsReading Time: 2 minutes
So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children.a]">[a] Now we call him, “Abba, Father.” For his Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children. And since we are his children, we are his heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering. (NLT)
Whenever we are asked to establish our identity, we usually have to produce some sort of documentation to indicate we are who we say we are. But we realise a birth certificate, passport, or licence doesn’t tell anyone who we really are, what sort of person we are.
It has been said that we are the products of those who love us or who failed to love us. Our present characters are formed, enriched, or distorted, by the imperfect nurture we have experienced in our earlier days. We are imperfect people because we have been raised in an imperfect world. My strengths reflect my father’s strengths, my weaknesses reflect his weaknesses. We bring this mixed raw material into our pattern of life today.
But the Christian faith, while recognising this reality, points us to another reality. All those who embrace Jesus as the way to God, are adopted into God’s family. We have a new identity, not determined by our childhood or by our peer group or by social media. Whatever our raw material may be, it is not the final story. True, our rough edges remain, our strengths are recognised. We are not yet perfected.
Yet our fundamental identity is that of a child of God. And day by day we need to cut through those other identities we may embrace or have bestowed on us. With the help of the Spirit of God we live not as crippled products of our past, but as beloved children of a loving God.
Blessings,
David