I’ve been sitting with something John writes, almost in passing. See what kind of love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are.

Not employees. Not apprentices working toward a title. Children, already, right now, before I’ve proven anything.

I spent years assuming I had to earn my way into that word. If I prayed enough, read enough Scripture, got good enough at this, maybe eventually I’d qualify. But that’s backwards. The word comes first. Everything else, learning to actually live like a son, follows from a place that was already given, not from a place I’m still trying to reach.

I think about my own kids here too. They didn’t do anything to become mine. They just are mine, from the first moment, and everything I want to teach them starts from that, not toward it.

That’s apparently how God works too, except he got there first. I don’t become his child by getting my life in order. I get my life in order, slowly and unevenly, because I already am his child and I’m finally starting to believe it.

Today’s Bible Study

There’s a companion verse I keep coming back to alongside this one, where Isaiah says it from another angle. You are our Father, we are the clay, and you are the potter, we are all the work of your hand.

That’s the same truth seen differently. Being named a child isn’t the end of the process, it’s the start of one. A potter doesn’t finish a shape before touching the clay, the touching is how the shape comes. So the word child doesn’t mean finished. It means I’m still on the wheel, still being formed, still his.

Recommended Reading

If this is something you want to sit with longer, I’d point you to Brennan Manning’s Abba’s Child. It’s a short book built entirely around this one idea, that we spend so much energy either performing for God’s approval or hiding in shame from his disappointment, when the whole time we were already his. It doesn’t argue with you so much as it keeps gently repeating the one true thing until it finally lands.