You were loved long before you were wounded. Before your parents, teachers, spouses, children, and friends loved or wounded you, you were loved by the Lover of your soul, Jesus.
That’s the truth.
Claim Him. Own Him.
There’s a soft, gentle voice that speaks in the silence and solitude of your heart, wanting to be heard. Jesus calls you His beloved.
This is your core truth.
He knows you’re under pressure to prove your worth, to do something relevant, something spectacular, to earn approval and attention. He understands. He knows how you’ve turned to people, things, and events to fill your life. He sees your spiritual longing, and He’s here now. His arms are out to you, and He’s eager to fold you into His joy. He’s here to give your life purpose and meaning, for you are chosen and treasured as His beloved one. Let Him show you the sweet path of lasting happiness.
Imagine the Lord speaking to you now. Imagine Him whispering in your ear:
I have called you by name from the very beginning.
You are Mine and I am yours.
You are My beloved; My favor rests on you.
I knitted you together in your mother’s womb.
I carved you in the palms of My hands,
and I hide you in the shadow of My embrace.
I look at you with infinite tenderness and care
more intimate than that of a mother for her child.
I have counted every hair on your head,
and I guide your steps. Wherever you go,
I go with you, and wherever you rest,
I keep watch. I will give you food that will satisfy
your hunger and drink that will quench
all your thirst. I will not hide My face from you.
Know Me as your own as I know you as My own.
You belong to Me. I am your father, your mother,
your brother, your sister, your lover, and your spouse.
We are one.1
As long as being the beloved of God remains in your mind simply as a beautiful thought or a sweet idea, it’ll stay in your mind as information only, like a note posted on Facebook. Your mind is not your spirit. God is Spirit, so when He speaks to you, it’s Spirit to spirit. Your mind can hold a thought, but your spirit holds life. What’s required from you to live as the beloved of God in your daily life is that you close the gap between your mind and your spirit. Think about what you’re absorbing into your spirit from the Spirit of God. The life of the Spirit of God in you has everything to do with the way you think, talk, and act in your daily life and what you think about and do from hour to hour.
I’ve given students the assignment to take out their calendars and day planners and write out what they plan to think about for the next two days. This is a shocking concept, and I’m usually met with confused expressions, like I must be kidding. Then I tell them that the thoughts they choose must be truths from God’s heart, not something like, “I’ll think about how cute Jim or Jana is” or “I’ll think about what I’ll eat for dinner.” I give them an example of my own: “This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.”
Hands go up. “What about other thoughts?” they want to know. “What if I think about how the Chargers are doing?” “What if I get angry about something?”
I explain that this exercise is about planning specific thoughts to have during the day; they won’t be our only thoughts. The average person thinks from fifty thousand to seventy thousand thoughts per day, which averages out to about thirty-five to forty-eight thoughts per minute. Most people haven’t begun to tap into this monumentally enormous reservoir of influence.
If you can plan specific thoughts to think for one day at a time, you’ll amaze yourself. I designed this exercise to help us learn to tether the wildness of our thought life and to bring focus and purpose into our lives as God’s beloved. As you may recall, two things cannot occupy the same area of space at the same time. So you can’t have negative and positive thoughts occupying your brain at the same time!
Four Aspects of the Beloved
Let’s look at four aspects of being the beloved of God.
Chosen
As a child of God, you are chosen. “You did not choose Me, but I chose you,” Jesus said (John 15:16). And He chose you for a definite purpose that the world can’t duplicate. “I chose you out of the world!” (John 15:19). “Many are called (invited and summoned) but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14 AMP). The word chosen is eklektos in the Greek, which means choice, select, the best of its class, excellent, preeminent, and applied to certain individual Christians. Your uniqueness has been noticed in heaven. God has observed you, and He has expressed a desire to come closer to you. God has seen you from every corner of eternity, long before you were born and became a part of history. When you choose Him back, He pours Himself into you for a relationship unparalleled on earth.
In the midst of painful reality, we have to dare to claim the truth that we are God’s chosen even when our world ignores or mistreats us. We no longer are caught in the indifferent net of a world that accepts or rejects according to its own agendas and control. It’s a lifelong work because the world persists in its efforts to pull us into the darkness of self-doubt, depression, low self-esteem—or worse, pride and empty vaunting.
Long before any human being saw you or touched you, God saw you. Long before you heard a human voice, God was speaking to you. Hold on to your chosenness. Hold on tight. Here are some guidelines to help you:
Blessed
In Latin, the word bless is benedicere, from which we get our word benediction. It literally means “speaking well” or saying good things about someone. But it’s more than that. Deuteronomy 28:8 says, “The LORD will command the blessing on you in your storehouses and in all to which you set your hand, and He will bless you in the land which the LORD your God is giving you” (emphasis added). When God blesses us with the force and power of His blessing, the other blessings of life follow. Proverbs 10:22 says, “The blessing of the LORD makes one rich, and He adds no sorrow with it.”
To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer. It’s more than a word of praise or appreciation; it’s more than pointing out someone’s talents or good deeds. It’s putting someone in the light of love. To give a blessing is to affirm, to say yes to God’s love for that person. God spoke His blessing on His people by saying, “Blessing I will bless you” (Gen. 22:17), and we tap into this towering, inclusive blessing to release it to others, obeying His Word, which says, “And you shall be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2). When you bless another person, you’re speaking spiritual prosperity to their spirit, soul, and body.
How can you bless another person if you don’t know how to be blessed? Go back to my suggestion earlier in this chapter and begin to plan your thoughts for the day. Choose your thoughts carefully. See and experience your blessedness in an unambiguous way. Be in touch with your own blessedness, and meditate on what it means to be blessed by God. Wear your blessings and the promises of God as an impenetrable shield.
“Out of brokenness beauty is born,” claims Mickey O’Neill McGrath, whose artistic expressions illustrate the joy and exuberance of faith in Christ.2
Julian of Norwich (1342–1420) wrote the oldest book in English by a woman, called Revelations of Divine Love, a timeless work that has remained century after century a powerful source of contemporary spirituality. In it, she tells of receiving a vision of a little thing, the size of a hazelnut in the palm of her hand. She wondered what it was and heard a voice in her heart say, “It is all that is made.” She wondered how such a small, seemingly insignificant thing could last, and the answer she received was, “It lasts and will last forever because God loves it, and in the same way everything exists through the love of God.”
She realized three truths with this simple vision: first, God made the small, seemingly insignificant things; second, He loved them; and third, He cared for and watched over them. “Truly He is the maker, the lover and the care-er,” she said and concluded the story with her personal surrender: “I can never have love, rest or true bliss until I am so bound to Him that there may be no created thing between my God and me.”3
Julian knew that her act of brokenness, or surrender, could be accomplished only through the mercy and grace of God. Brokenness can be faked with appearances of humility and self-induced suffering. She didn’t want that. She wanted to be real.
You and I, like Julian of Norwich, were created to surrender ourselves to God. We lovingly tell Him, “I surrender my life to You,” and He enters that sweet surrender with His unmerited favor, and like a lifeguard assisting a struggling swimmer to shore, He carries us through to the full reality of our purpose on earth, even if the whole world has turned against us.
In 2012, at the President’s Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, I met John Ramsey, a soft-spoken, unassuming man in his sixties, the father of a murdered six-year-old beauty queen, JonBenét Ramsey. The story of her murder in 1996 was, and still is, a media sensation. John and his wife, Patsy, were accused of murdering their little girl, and their life became an unthinkable nightmare. They lost everything they owned, and Patsy died of cancer before they were officially exonerated. I had the privilege of being the co-writer of his story for the book The Other Side of Suffering. I want to share with you a short piece from the book so you can hear what this gentle-hearted, kind man has to say of brokenness.
In the nightmare of the loss of our little girl and Patsy’s cancer I prayed for strength, for courage; I prayed God would spare the life of my wife. I can see now that what I’ve really been after is the Presence of God. Seeking His Presence is not about trying to get Him to do something. . . . I believe in every one of us there is a hunger for God. We may try to fill that hunger in many ways, but the only way it can be filled is by God Himself. Through Him, then, we go on to live our lives empowered by His Spirit. Through Him we reach our divine destiny. I have agonized over who killed JonBenét for fourteen years. I pray this monster will be found and brought to justice, but I am not twisted up in grief over the fact he’s still out there. If the Boulder police toss up their hands and do nothing more to solve the murder, if the investigators throw the case into the cold files to go down as one of America’s Most Notorious Unsolved Crimes, God is still on the throne.4
Possessed
The soul is happiest when possessed by God. That may seem like a simplistic statement, and so it is. The little seed, or nut, or whatever it was that Julian of Norwich saw in the palm of her hand is like you and me. We are small things, but in His hand we are infinite. We are eternally boundless in His love and care.
David said in Psalm 139:14, “I am marvelously made!” (Message), talking about the genius of God to create something as incredible as a human being. The New King James Version reads, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” David wasn’t flattering himself regarding his own physicality. “God so loved the world” (John 3:16) tells us God created all of us for Himself. He created us wonderfully for Himself. He didn’t just throw together the creation of universes, galaxies, and humanity without knowing and planning what was best for us. He had a plan for that small thing in the palm of Julian’s hand.
The truth is we’re not really all that unique in our human condition. We’re basically like every other human. What’s the difference between the one in the world who achieves their goals and the one who doesn’t? Nothing. It’s in God we become truly unique. Possessed by Him, we’re chosen, surrendered, unique treasures.
A Response to Being God’s Beloved
As God’s beloved, you possess His blessing. It’s time to be grateful and celebrate. You can’t celebrate when you’re complaining. Look for small things to celebrate. The way your fingers move across the page of this book, the feel of sunlight on your neck, the sound of your breath. Pay attention to the small things and be grateful for them (Zech. 4:10).
In the practical world, we send a card or flowers to say thanks. What do we give the Lord? Nothing opens the gates of lasting happiness like gratitude. When you purpose in your heart to be grateful, you’ll continually find more things to be grateful for. You’ll no longer need answered prayer to be grateful for something to work out well (though we rejoice and celebrate these blessings!). Your personhood now and forever is His, and you can exclaim with a great sigh of grateful delight, “It is well with my soul.” Studies conducted regarding the effects of gratitude on the overall well-being of a person are unanimously positive. They prove one thing: God created us to be grateful. A thankful heart is free to love life and be truly happy.
Gratitude has been shown to reduce health complaints too numerous to name, but I’ve had clients tell me their ulcers vanished, their headaches went away, their skin cleared up, and their bruxism (teeth grinding) ended. Gratitude must start and end your day.
Deep inside your grateful heart is the treasure you seek.
“For you are a holy people to the LORD your God, and the LORD has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (Deut. 14:2). “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:7).