.
So all of that sounds great. Less pressure, more peace. Are we talking about “positivity and negativity”? No. We’re talking about living out of a posture where we recognize what we’ve already been given and releasing the desire to try to earn it on our own merit.
.
“So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. Listen! I, Paul, tell you this: If you are counting on circumcision to make you right with God, then Christ will be of no benefit to you. I’ll say it again. If you are trying to find favor with God by being circumcised, you must obey every regulation in the whole law of Moses. For if you are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been cut off from Christ! You have fallen away from God’s grace. But we who live by the Spirit eagerly wait to receive by faith the righteousness God has promised to us. For when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being circumcised or being uncircumcised. What is important is faith expressing itself in love.”
‭‭Galatians‬ ‭5‬:‭1‬-‭6‬ ‭NLT‬‬
.
This freedom found is Christ doesn’t make us slaves to the “law” anymore yet sometimes we live lives that are shackled to the things we think we should and shouldn’t do, as opposed to living by the spirit. So where does this undoing actually start. It starts in sonship and daughterhood. You will never live in freedom until you first can see God as Dad and not master first. As a dad there is nothing my kids can do to make me love them more or less. My girls are my girls and I love them so much. Do they drive me crazy at times? Sure, but love is never on the table as something to be gained or lost. My daughters have access to everything in my house, they don’t have to wonder if I’m going to love them more or less when they get a drink out of the refrigerator. If they bomb on a test or talk back to us, I’m not going to take their bed away from them until they “act right”. No my kids have freedom to live in my house. They’ve spent their lives with Erin and I, so they know what this life is about. They know the values we hold. Unfortunately though for us, we struggle to grasp this adoption into the family of God. God calls us his children. See 1 John 3:1-2.
.
“See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are! But the people who belong to this world don’t recognize that we are God’s children because they don’t know him. Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is.”
‭‭1 John‬ ‭3‬:‭1‬-‭2‬ ‭NLT‬‬
.
God has adopted us into his family through Christ. He has given us a new identity as sons and daughters, but we try to live like the old person we were, but that person is dead and gone, which is why there’s so much pressure and frustration because we’re trying to live like a dead man.
.
“Either way, Christ’s love controls us. Since we believe that Christ died for all, we also believe that we have all died to our old life. He died for everyone so that those who receive his new life will no longer live for themselves. Instead, they will live for Christ, who died and was raised for them. So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.”
‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭5‬:‭14‬-‭21‬ ‭NLT‬‬
.
Embracing our sonship and daughterhood with the Father is vital to understanding that “you can’t mess this up”. How do we embrace it then? And it can be challenging, especially at first, based off of the view of your earthly father, or maybe even a lack there of. The truth is it is trust and time spent. Do you trust that in spite of how good or bad your relationship with your earthly father or lack there of, that God can be a good dad? A great spot to start is with Gods character. His heart was always a family. It was always reconciliation. You can see it even in the midst of rebellion from the Israelites God still had a promise to reconcile.
.
“I will certainly bring my people back again from all the countries where I will scatter them in my fury. I will bring them back to this very city and let them live in peace and safety. They will be my people, and I will be their God. And I will give them one heart and one purpose: to worship me forever, for their own good and for the good of all their descendants. And I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good for them. I will put a desire in their hearts to worship me, and they will never leave me. I will find joy doing good for them and will faithfully and wholeheartedly replant them in this land.”
‭‭Jeremiah‬ ‭32‬:‭37‬-‭41‬ ‭NLT‬‬
.
The truth is that we have to grasp that Gods satisfaction with us is because of what Christ did, not what we can or can’t do. All the striving to keep God “happy” is our broken attempt to try to have some sort of control over something that’s out of our control. This sonship and daughterhood is the gift and goodness of God, transacted through Christ. At Christmas when I give my kids gifts, they don’t have to work for them, they just have to receive them, open them, and use them freely, because it’s a gift that was given to them, it’s theirs. You ARE a son or a daughter if you are in Christ. The question is will you receive it, and use the gift that’s been freely given, or keep trying to earn something that you already possess?
.