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Daughter of God

             For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. (Romans 8:29)

His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. (II Peter 1:3)

There is a book written by Charles Sheldon called In His Steps. I don’t recall if I read it or just heard about it, but it’s the source of the “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) bracelet thing. The people of a town decided to ask themselves that question whenever they faced a decision. But if I ask what Jesus would do, then do it, it separates me either from the thing that I do or from myself. I don’t know quite how else to describe it. But, if I ask what I - as a daughter/son of God - would do, the answer is likely to be similar (or the same) but I’m included. Maybe that’s just my broken way of thinking.

This post is more of what I shared in my Sunday Soul Care post. It grew out of the idea that if God is my Father, then I am His daughter. If I am His daughter and have all I need to be His daughter then, among other things, I don’t need to prove it. That’s what Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness was all about… “If you are the Son of God…” That’s what the Pharisees and Sadducees were after, too.

The big problem is, we don’t see ourselves as children of God. We see ourselves as our gender, our color, our age, our nationality, our heritage, our ethnicity, our political party, our personality type, our job, our relationships, our successes, our failures, our hobbies… anything but child of God. And this is encouraged by the world around us. To consider ourselves a child of God is hubris. It would be if we claimed it, at least, but the only person I’m suggesting that we claim it to is ourselves.

For me, this tends to revolve around being “not good enough.” But as I said in the Sunday Soul Care comment, if I am a daughter of God, He has made me good enough. The goal is to catch “Not Good Enough” and replace it with “Daughter of God” before I waste the time and energy involved in beating myself up and then use that energy to do what a daughter of God would do. 

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