Who's Your Daddy?

Who are you?

You may turn to relationships to answer that question. You may be a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a child, depending on who you are relating to. Time passes and circumstances change; you may go from being a child to being an orphan, or go from being a spouse to being alone. Identity changes based on relationships can be painful and carry sorrow with the change.

You may look to personal interests to define yourself. You may be a cyclist, a hiker, a painter, a musician, a woodcarver, a stamp collector, a weaver, a hunter, a swimmer. Each of these activities exercise a set of abilities that improve with practice, allowing a pride and satisfaction in performance. But inevitably, with time, these talents fade and performance levels become a shadow of what they once were. Any titles or awards are a thing of the past, and someone else comes along to claim the trophies, or set a new record, or to buy the tools and product of the time you spent involved with an activity. There can be a sense of mourning with this loss of identity.

You may find that a career determines how you describe yourself to someone. You may work with your hands, or deal in finances. You may practice medicine or argue law. You may spend years being educated in your field to achieve a degree and title, or put in years of apprenticeship to achieve mastery of your profession. But in the end, you will find yourself no longer able or allowed to work at what you used to do so well, and there will be no more evidence of what you once did, and people will forget. There can be frustration and disappointment as this disappearing and disintegration take place in spite of your best efforts to rail against it.

Each and every one of us is someone who was created in the image of the living God, the Creator of the universe, and the King above all kings. Through accepting the redemption that God's Son, Jesus, made available to us through His obedience to God the Father on the cross of Calvary, we can become children of the Most High God, eternally at rest in the family of God, accepted by God our Father, and called brethren by His only-begotten Son, Jesus. God's love does not fade with time or change from circumstance. This is who I am.

Hebrew 2:11 So now Jesus and the ones he makes holy have the same Father. That is why Jesus is not ashamed to call them his brothers and sisters.

We are given talents and skills, gifts and callings, divided to us severally by God's Spirit to serve His people here on earth, to minister to His Body as we are brought together and learn to function together as one in maturity and holiness.

Ephesians 4:12-13 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do His work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.

By losing ourselves in the expressed love of God, and speaking from the fullness of God's heart, and serving others by meeting their needs, we bring more praise and honor to God, and we fade from view, taking on the image and resemblance of Christ, showing His nature, letting the light and life of God shine through us.

Ephesians 4:15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church

None of us has charge over very much, for we all have the one Head, which is Christ, but we each have an important part to play in helping the whole Body of Christ through our prayers, and our local part of His Body through our words and deeds.

Ephesians 4:16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.

We are ordained to be a nation of priests and kings unto God. It is a big job, a heavy responsibility to bring justice to those in need and to rule with fairness, meeting the needs of others, serving people out of love and compassion, not letting individual likes and dislikes, personal prejudices and preferences intrude. Being "professional" in an appointed position of authority, representing the highest power, speaking on behalf of the Lord of lords, bringing honor and praise to the One in Whose name you act, requires great dedication and great sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of yourself, laying down your life, dying to yourself, giving up your rights so that He can raise you up again in His Spirit bearing the nature of God rather than the nature of man. That is who I am.

1 Peter 2:9 ...for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God's very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.

Father God, great and glorious in Your plan and Your execution of it, we lose our selves in You that You may be given the honor and worship for the things that You do through us as we yield to Your will, as we obey You rather than our own desires, as we identify with You rather than with the world and the events that take place therein. Whatever we have in the world that we can take pride in or show benefit from, we count as loss for the sake of winning the prize You set before us. Reaching the goal will be worth any and every sacrifice we are called on to make, Lord, and we devote ourselves to seek You and be quick to hear and swift to obey when Your Spirit speaks.

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