Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Whose You Are

 For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.  And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes.  There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.  And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God’s promise to Abraham belongs to you.  Galatians 3:26-29

Do you ever lose confidence in your faith?  As someone who finds himself humbled by the level of grace God has shown me,  I teeter between that place of blessed child of God and unworthy of the grace I have received.  If we are a mature Christian, we recognize we are both leaning more toward the former than the latter, but every so often, we fall more deeply into the latter category.  It is that which I find myself losing confidence if I stay there too long mentally.  You see, it is ok to remind ourselves that we have been given this amazing gift from God that we are undeserving of.  However if we stay too deeply in that area, it could move us from feeling unworthy of God’s grace to feeling simply unworthy, period.  What I have learned is that when I feel that way, I remember whose I am.  Sometimes, it is through a simple scripture, and other times, a pastor will remind me.  The importance is that when I lose confidence, I always go back to remembering whose I am; a child of the one true King.

It is always important to remember whose we are in addition to who we are.  We all come from different backgrounds and have different paths to God.  Some have followed God all their life, and others did not even know who God was and found them through someone who did.  If you were like me, you were much like the song Amazing Grace having known God, lost sight of Him, and then finding Him again.  No matter where you came from, realize that in our journey of faith, we all lose sight sometimes.  Some will lose it longer than others.  However, once we believe that Jesus is Lord of our lives, we are saved for all eternity.  I was reminded that we may at times feel unworthy of God’s grace.  The thing we must remember is that only Jesus is flawless.  Furthermore, we are not the only ones who knows are flaws.  He does!  It is not as a reminder of who we are.  It is to remind us of whose we are; a child of God who is made flawless through His love and grace.  We need not focus on our failings.  Rather, we must focus on the truth that through Christ, we are indeed valued.

We are always Christ’s children.  We cannot be pulled away by sin, and we are more valued to God than we can possibly imagine.  Paul said it best in Romans 8, saying:

 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8:37-38

So do not let the world tell you that you’re somehow less than worthy.  Be confident that you are indeed a valued and cherished child of God.  What doubt can you cast onto Christ today?  How can you move beyond unworthiness to confidence in God’s love for you?  My prayer is that we gain confidence in knowing that God knows who we are and we know whose we are.  Amen.

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