Children of the Father
For Meditation
Have you ever been told, or even said yourself, “stop acting like a child!”? When we say this we tend to mean that acting like a child or being a child is a bad thing. So often, being a child is seen as a negative, something we want to grow out of. Perhaps a better thing to say might be stop acting so childish, because in our scripture for this week John writes about how we are children, about how that’s a sign of God’s lavish and abundant love for us, and that because we are his children, we should act like it.
Our status as God’s children is one that we don’t earn, it’s given to us out of the goodness, grace and love of God that Father. We are God’s children because he’s chosen us, adopted us to be his own. This status is fixed, unchanging, and shapes who we become and how we live in this world. Being a child of God transforms us from who we were to who we’re meant to be. This transformation is to make us more like Jesus.
When you think of your relationship with God, do you think of him as your loving Father and yourself as his beloved child? How could growing in this understanding and experiencing God’s love change the way you live today, next week, and forward into the future?
1 John 2:28–3:3
28 And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.
29 If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him.
1 See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.