Life of the Beloved

May 4, 2016

Life of the Beloved

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”

Matthew 3:17 (NRSV)

What is the most difficult scripture passage for you to live out in your life? For me, it is a combination of two passages which are both comforting and challenging. Philippians 2:13 tells me that God is proactively at work within me, “giving (me) the desire and the power to do what pleases him.” This means that I am not naturally inclined and able to live the life in Christ, and thus God is at work transforming me. Changing my desires and then empowering me to choose God’s ways over my ways, is always a matter of letting go of the familiar and changing how I live and interact with others. Change is challenging and at times painful.

Romans 8:28-29 is encouraging because it tells me that God wastes nothing and uses everything in my life for His good purposes of transforming me to become like Jesus. This same chapter in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans tells me I am an heir of God, a joint-heir with Jesus. This passage tells me I can experience depths of intimacy with God and know God as my Abba. Just as Jesus heard the Father affirm him, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17 NRSV), I too can hear the Father affirm me as His beloved child with whom He is well pleased. While these passages are comforting, they are also very challenging, because they tell me that God will settle for nothing less than my complete transformation.

Abba wants me to journey through my life living out of the reality that I am His beloved, with whom He is delighted and upon whom His favor rests. Nothing less is acceptable to Him. It has been my experience in life that my awareness that I am His beloved is reinforced in the same measure that I experience rejection from others. It is a wonderful feeling to be affirmed by those we love. It is hurtful to experience rejection or abandonment from those we love. When this happens we can react passive-aggressively and withhold our love, we can hide or we can act out. Or, because God is at work within us, transforming us to become like Jesus, we can turn the other cheek, forgive and love unconditionally.

It has been my experience that the only way I can become fully grounded in my identity as the beloved of God is for all other ground to crumble. Corrie ten Boom put it this way, “You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have.” Abba wants us to trust in the sufficiency of His grace, the assurance that His love never fails and that He will not reject us. We learn we are His beloved when God stands firm and immovable for us while everything temporal around us fades away.

Sē’lah

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(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com. The BLOG is also available on Amazon Kindle, by subscription.

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

·        Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

·        The second edition of First Think – Then Pray is available on Amazon Kindle.

·        Meditations on The Story of My Life as told by Jesus Christ has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.