A Child of the Promise

This post is written by a sweet, sweet soul.  Kristen was an apartment-mate and dear friend to me my junior and senior years of college.  She is a french teacher, and has a love for the Scriptures that blessed me constantly.  I am grateful for our journey of friendship together and her consistent encouragement to me.  She's an angel. (: 

                                                  This is us, as college grads! Ha!

Enjoy:

Having been a Christian my whole life, so many Bible verses and stories are very familiar to me. But I love it when God causes these phrases that have become ordinary to suddenly pop out. It’s as if I’m seeing and understanding them in a completely different way that helps me to better understand Him and who I am in Him.

“Child of the Promise” is one of those phrases for me right now. I’ve been listening to Keith and Kristyn Getty’s CD just about nonstop for a few months, and my favorite song is “By Faith.” Part of the chorus says, “We will stand as children of the promise.” And every time I sing along with it I feel so empowered. It fills me up with such joy and confidence. Something about that line just gets to me.  Because as I’m singing I’m claiming that title. I’m standing as a child–His own child–of the promise. Someone God gave so much for to adopt into His family. Born of the promise of a faithful God. And this line is so great, because it’s not just a nice idea the Getty’s came up with. It’s something that God has told us about ourselves in Galatians 4.

I need lots of reminders of who I am in Christ. Since I belong to Christ, my identity is completely tied up in Him, but it’s all too easy to forget about His crazy amount of love for me, and to instead believe what the devil suggests about myself. I’ve never really owned that title–Child of the Promise–before, even though it’s a familiar phrase. I often find it difficult to truly accept the identity of being God’s beloved child. But with the wake-up call this song gave me, God is helping me to own who I really am in Him.

God’s care is so evident in these aha moments, when I feel the Holy Spirit truly speaking into my life in revealing a line or phrase of Scripture in a personal and powerful way. With this phrase, it’s kind of like God hit me over the head (in the nicest way possible!) with this truth about my identity. Because I wasn’t reading it or hearing someone else say it–I was saying it. And there’s something so powerful about saying out loud who you are in Christ.

What’s even better is that this is not the first time a familiar line of Scripture has stood out in a new way to draw me closer to God, and I know it won’t be the last. As Christians, this process of really grasping who we are in Christ is something that God is intimately involved in. He wants us to know how valuable we are to Him. He wants us to really understand that He gave Himself for us because He loves us. He wants us to embrace the new self we have put on, this new identity we have in Him so that we can have an abundant life on earth with God.

Even though a huge part of me just wishes that I could understand it all perfectly now, this process gives me important reminders. It reminds me of God’s very present and active care and work in my daily life. It fills me with joy as I see again the power of the Holy Spirit. And it wakes me up to the love of God. The love He has for His child who He loves and gave Himself for.