Children of God

John 1:12,13 (NASB95) ¹² But as many as received Him [Jesus], to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

I read an article yesterday on the decline of the American family. 

People just weren’t having any.

They weren’t getting married, and they weren’t having kids.

I found the article informative and interesting.

But what really got me were the comments that people made to the article.

Person after person told about how having kids changed their lives, gave their lives meaning and a joy they didn’t know before. 

Having kids is built into our very systems.  One of the strongest if not the strongest human desire is that for sex, and that act itself is responsible for the creation of new human beings.

Woman are told that they need a career to be happy and fulfilled, yet a career of something she does, while having children is something her body was designed to do.  It is built in her very body structure.

Throughout all of human history, people had little control over how many kids they were to have.  God did not make creating new life our decision.

We can speculate all we want about why that was, but our text here tells that we can become children of God.  Born of God.  We can become part of God’s family.

I have found that one of the hardest things for me to learn in life is feeling loved, not just by another human being, but as a child in a family.  No, I was not deprived of love as a kid, but it wasn’t engrained in me. 

It was only as I was much older, and especially after I had my granddaughter that it all really started to have the intended impact.

God gave us families to learn, to understand, and to appreciate His love for us.  We may know in our heads that we have been justified by faith and that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, but it was only when I could see myself as a child loved by his parents that I could feel God truly having my back, so to speak.