Children of God

"He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, 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."
John 1:11-13

We talked last time about how Jesus came to earth, and was not received well by the people of the earth. More specifically, He came to His own people, and His own people rejected Him. But Jesus didn't come to earth just for the Jews. He came to the earth for ALL the people of the earth. I believe that we covered the meaning of "all" last time. It means "all." You know, Jesus is a "hard pill to swallow." Human beings love to worship, were made to worship. Our society is no different than any of those in the past. We worship movie stars, and rock stars, and sports stars. We worship all kinds of things, except the one thing that we were created to worship: Jesus Christ. The song from the 1980's rings true: we are looking for love in all the wrong places. We try to be "good" people, when Jesus says that there is none that is good except God. We look to other people to fulfill the needs in our lives, when the only one who can really satisfy the longing and restlessness in our hearts is God.

And it tells us here, that as many as receive Him into their lives...and what that means is accept Him as Lord and Savior of their life, to turn their lives over to Him, to follow Him, to look to Him for direction in their lives instead of themselves, just making your own decisions, doing your own thing...as many as receive Him into their lives, to them He gives the right to become children of God. He isn't talking about becoming a physical child of God. He is talking about rebirth, being born again. There is a phenomena in the spiritual realm called being "born again," which Jesus explains to Nicodemus in John chapter 3, and we will go over when we get there. But a person has a physical birth, born as it says here, of the flesh and the will of man. But hopefully, one also has a spiritual birth, being born of the spirit. I could get really lengthy here in explaining this, and probably will next time...but suffice it to say, that we are born into this world physically, and need to be born spiritually to know God. Hence the term "born again." To those of us who are spiritually reborn, then God gives us the right to be one of His children, with all the rights and privileges that a child would have. One of your physical children has certain rights and privileges in your family, by virtue of the fact that they are one of your children, born into the family, so to speak. Even if you are adopted, you become part of that family that adopts you, and you have all the rights and privileges as part of the family. If you happened to have a hired servant such as a nanny or maid, they might have the familiarity of and to the family, but because they not part of the family, they don't have the rights and privileges of a family member, generally speaking. On the spiritual level, when we receive God into our hearts through His Son Jesus Christ, we become one of His children, because we are "born again," born into God's family. More on this later.

So, beloved, the choice is this: if you are born once, you will die twice. You will die physically, and you will face eternal death spiritually. But if you are born twice, born physically, and born of the spirit, then you will die only once, physically, because you will live eternally with God. Born once, die twice. Born twice, die once. More to follow. Shalom.