Christians use this phrase “I am a child of God.” What does that even mean?
It’s tricky. I mean we’re all children of somebody. I’m a child of my parents, you’re a child of your parents. And that relationship extends indefinitely into the past, so I’m not only a child of my parents, but of my grandparents, and of my great grandparents, my whole extended family, my particular ethnic group, and eventually, if you go back far enough, the whole human race.
To say, “I am a child of God,” puts all this one step further.
On the face of it, then, it sounds like we are all children of God. And in a sense I think that is true. If God has begotten us, then we’re all his children. We wouldn’t exist if God didn’t exist, and all of us can say that he is our father. All the religions of the world speak about God in this way, and to that extent they are all correct. But when Christians say they are children of God, they usually mean something a little different, that in addition to begetting us as children God has also adopted us into a living family.
The distinction is not too hard to grasp. You can beget a child without including him in your family, or you can beget a child and that child can run away from home. In either case, the family is broken, and that really gets to the heart of how Christians look at the whole of human life. The human family is a wonderful thing, but it is broken because we have run away from God, and now God has done something to bring us back in.
Now what has he done?
All people have a capacity to search for God, just as all people have a capacity to pray, but our search and our prayers are futile if God himself does not respond. Many of you have perhaps prayed for something you didn’t get. Or you prayed for something and got it but wondered whether maybe it was all just a coincidence. Here, however, we’re not talking about the prayers of just one person for this or that, but the prayers of all mankind: that God himself would come and meet with them. For Christians, that prayer has been answered in the person of Jesus Christ. That’s why they call themselves “Christians.” It’s a way of saying, “This is God’s answer to mankind’s prayer.”
When God comes to us in the form of Jesus, he not only enters into our world, he enters into the trials and sufferings that are a part of our world
It may seem like a strange answer, but it makes sense. To speak humanly, God realized that we did not have the ability to make it to him on our own, so he decided to come and meet us where we were at. When God comes to us in the form of Jesus, he not only enters into our world, he enters into the trials and sufferings that are a part of our world. And while at first we might think he does this in order to take our trials and sufferings away, instead what we find him doing is living through them with the trust and obedience that we as estranged children no longer have, but that he as a beloved son does. The point is not to show us up, but to put the father-son relationship to rights again, and then invite us to share in that relationship.
In sum, sin and death are still a part of the world. God hasn’t solved these things for us in the sense that we no longer have to go through them. But he has solved them in the sense that they are no longer the end of the line for us, and that changes the way we live. We no longer live as estranged children with no hope. On the contrary, we are sons and daughters of God. God lives with us and cares for us now, and he has an inheritance for us when we die, which means death really becomes more of a passing through than a dead end.
Can we really believe all that?
Well, not everybody can. I at least do. It is a truly glorious way of life. Not the sort of thing you could prove, but once you get the idea, it’s easy to see that there are good reasons for believing it, not merely because it heals us, but because it makes us into better people, and anything that has the power to do those things is not a lie, but, as the saying goes, “God’s honest Truth.”
It’s the old, old story. We should believe it and allow it to become our story, for in so doing we too become children of God.
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