Day 22

Family Resemblance

2 min read

Thought of the day

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There's a game you can play at any playground: match the kids to the parents. Watch a kid running around long enough, then start scanning the adults nearby for clues . . . same eyes . . . same walk . . . same way of throwing their head back when they laugh. Nobody's trying to look like their parents. They just do, because of whose they are.

Last week we saw that Jesus brings you into God's family. He doesn't leave you a foreigner. He makes you family (Ephesians 2:19). And Paul writes that every family, in heaven and on earth, gets its name from the Father (Ephesians 3:14-15). So here's the question worth sitting with today: if God really is your Father, do you look anything like Him?

Not physically, but by the way you love; by the way you forgive; by the way you handle conflict; by the way you respond when life doesn't go your way. Which version of you shows up when you're tired, stressed, or interrupted for the fifth time in an hour?

Most of us have a few things we've learned to explain away. "That's just who I am. I'm impatient. I've always had a short fuse. I'm not good at talking about feelings." Sometimes understanding yourself is genuinely helpful. But "that's just who I am" can quietly stop being an explanation and start being an excuse for staying exactly the same.

Here's what's important to remember before you look too hard at what needs to change: God isn't waiting for you to look like Jesus before He calls you family. Grace comes first. Growth follows because of it, not in order to earn it.

Today, ask honestly: does my family experience any resemblance to my Father? Not perfection. Just resemblance. That's what this whole week is about.

Prayer prompt

Ask God to show you where there isn't much family resemblance in your life right now. Thank Him that He's already made you His, before you had anything to prove. Ask Him to begin the kind of change that starts with grace, not guilt.

ScriptureNIV

Ephesians 3:14-15

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

1 John 3:1-2

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

Genesis 1:27

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Colossians 3:9-10

Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.