Remember who you are. The phrase kept running through my head. Six months earlier I had started going to church again after more than a decade, but it had been at least two decades since I’d spent time alone with God. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in Jesus, not really, but I had mostly been living as if he wasn’t very important. But that phrase called me back to try again. So I opened my Bible, having an impulse to read in Ephesians. And I found these words:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will – to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. (Ephesians 1:3-6).
Remember who you are. After years of going my own way, this was the very first thing God wanted to say to me. That I’m not rejected. That I don’t have to earn my way back into God’s good graces (as if I could!). God has blessed me with every spiritual blessing. He chose me before the creation of the world – before I drifted away, before I ever rejected him, before I was even born – to be holy and blameless in his sight. Did he know, when he chose me, what I would do? Of course he did! He’s always known. And he still chose me. Me. To be holy and blameless in his sight. To be adopted as his son. I don’t have to do anything to be holy and blameless in the sight of God. All I need to do is remember who I am.
Remember who you are. I spent years drifting away, and sometimes running full speed. At the end of it I found that I didn’t have to walk back. All I had to do was turn around, and God was right there, where he’d been the whole time. Even when I abandoned God, he never abandoned me. And he calls me holy and blameless in his sight.
There’s more. There will always be more. But this is where it begins. Who am I? I am a son of God, chosen before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. No wonder the apostles turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6) – or rather, right side up – in the first century. They knew who they were.
God chose you, as he chose me, before the creation of the world, to be holy and blameless in his sight. To be adopted as his son, or as his daughter.
Remember who you are.