hello friends!
the Lord has been MOVING in my life the past month or so and honestly shifting so much of my internal view of who He is. crazy stuff and I am so excited to start slowly sharing it with you all!
beloved: richly, freely, completely, fully, deeply, unconditionally, wholly loved by God to the point where nothing can make His love any less or any greater
I am slowly learning to live in the abundant life with fullness of joy that I am CALLED TO because I am a beloved daughter. The simple fact that His love for me is so complete and forever fixed that nothing I do will ever affect it. So why should I live in fear of making Him upset or disappointed? Why should I live a life of endless striving to “do more and be more” to gain some extra brownie-points of his love?
Living into my calling of BELOVED changes everything. It means that I am no longer known and loved for what I do, but I am known and loved for who I am. It means that I am certain of the fact that He called my name before I even knew His. It assures me of the fact that before I was ever known by this world that He knit me and crafted me INTENTIONALLY. I am loved because I am His and I am valued because of what He did for me through His Son on the cross.
I had to shift my thinking from forever identifying as a “sinner saved by grace” and stopping there. Because while it is absolutely essential to remember what God has done for me, He took me and changed my identity through the blood of Jesus from a SINNER to a DAUGHTER. My identity is now found in being a child of God and living every day as close to Him as I can get.
Grace leaves no room for comparison or defeat or shame or question or doubt or striving or guilt. It changes who we are down to our every move. It only leads us to a deeper longing to be with God every single moment that we have breath in our lungs and a heartbeat in our chest. It leads us to a desire to know His face and rest in Him.
He wants to be face to face with us. He wants us to be near Him. He wants us to look Him in the face and feel more safe and comfortable and valued than we ever will feel in this world. He wants to spend time with us reforming our desires and driving us further from sin because it hurts us and our souls, not because He is bound by it.
It is no longer about everything I can do for God, but it is all about everything He has already done for me. And man, when I finally got a hold of that, it changed the tune of my entire life, day in and day out.
It no longer mattered what my time with the Lord looked like and all the technicalities of the “Christian life”. What mattered is spending as much intentional time with God as I could and shifting from a checklist of “all the ways God can speak to me” to remembering that He is not bound by my expectations. Instead of opening the door to Him during my 30-minute quiet-time and 15 minutes of worship music on the way to school, I tore down the door (and honestly the entire wall) and let Him fully invade and saturate every part of my being and my life with His presence. I let my world be constantly DRENCHED in that full, deep, rich, complete, unconditional, free, whole love that He has never stopped and will never stop covering me in.
and THAT is how I have learned to live as a BELOVED DAUGHTER who spends her days clinging to His grace and looking at Him face to face. All He wants is to be with you and to let His love soak into every corner of your life. So open the door or break down the wall completely, and invite Him in and do life with Him. Invite Him into the routine and the mundane, and watch Him transform your heart into a heart that yearns and cries out for Him more than it ever has.
His love + mine,
bree
