Beloved Before
Here's a little thought for today.
God calls Jesus "My beloved Son with whom I am well pleased," in Matthew 3:17. This is before Jesus has done any of His ministry, and years before the cross!
Jesus was the beloved son before he'd done anything.
In Matthew 4 Jesus goes into the wilderness. We don't know precisely what He is doing there except that He just received this divine blessing from the Father. And Jesus goes on to quote Deuteronomy three times in reply to the devil. In other words, Jesus' ministry preparation was to contemplate the nature of His relationship with God by meditating on the Word of God.
The devil comes to tempt Jesus there. Interestingly, each of the temptations is an attempt to get Jesus' sense of who He is shifted away from God's declaration and onto something like accomplishments, status, achievement, possessions, etc. In the context of "This is my beloved Son," it seems that the devil's goal is to get Jesus to act in ways disconnected from that identity.
Here is a picture of the Gospel.
God does not love you and is not pleased with you because you have accomplished great things for Him. He loves you before that. He is pleased with you simply because you have trusted in Jesus.
And, just like with Jesus, all our work for the Father flows from the declaration of the Father over us. We don't work for His love. We serve as loved.
And, just like with Jesus, satan's strategy is to separate us from God's love. He wants to shift our identity, our narrative, our sense of self, away from the unshakeable declaration of God's Word and onto unstable features of our lives such as our appearance, our achievements, our social status, and so forth. As soon as Satan gets us standing on sand, he sends the floods.
You are loved today. You don't have to be good to be loved. God loves you. You are His beloved too, because you are "in Christ."
We too, like Jesus, should take some time to consider what this means for us. And we should be on the lookout for temptations away from the simple Gospel-truth of God's grace. If you have to work for it, it's not the Gospel.
You were God's beloved before today. You'll be God's beloved tomorrow. Enjoy.
Photo by Lance Grandahl on Unsplash
