Already Beloved, Already Qualified

See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are!

1 John 3:1 NLT

I received an awesome testimony from twenty-five-year-old Nathan from New York, who grew up with no father figure in his life except a man whom his mother married and who beat him regularly from the time he was three. Nathan struggled with his identity, his addictions, and his anger. But his turning point came when he learned that his Daddy God loves him. He wrote:

I heard a sermon of yours about being God’s beloved. I had never heard someone speak about Jesus as someone who died for my sins because He loved me so much. I thought there was no way anyone would die for me if they knew what I’d done. But the love I felt as I listened was something I’d never experienced before.

I had to know more, so I bought your book Destined To Reign, and the Lord’s words through your book changed my life . . . I’ve dropped every bad habit—everything—in my past and have given myself to the Lord Jesus Christ. Every day seems new to me, and I see life in a different light now. I know that I have a Father in heaven who loves and accepts me. I know that He hears my prayers and won’t be slow to answer them.

In the same way, I pray you will have a revelation that you are right now loved by the Father and close to His heart. That your Daddy God always hears your prayers and is more than able and willing to lift you out of every dark pit and set you in His love and light.

Right now, I want you to do something: close your eyes and just say, “Daddy.”

That’s a prayer right there. In fact, that’s the deepest, most intimate prayer you can pray. Call upon your Daddy God because He loves you and cares for you. You never did anything to make Him fall in love with you. And beloved, there is nothing you can do, nothing you could have done, that will ever take away His love for you.

I want you to know today that as a child of God, you don’t need to qualify for His love in any way. You are already His beloved. You may feel that you are far away from Him, but your Father sees you. He has been watching and waiting for you to come home, ready to sprint toward you to embrace you. He wants to lavish His love and kisses on you, over and over again.

You don’t need to earn your Daddy’s love. ALL that He has is already yours. He’s not asking you to serve Him in order to earn His blessings. ALL that He has, He has already freely and unconditionally given to you.

He gave up His only Son to die an agonizing death on the cross for the chance that you might one day accept His love. So come. Come to the Father. Come with all your failings, with all your brokenness, with all your inadequacies.

Come as you are. As you realize that you are the object of His love, I pray that whatever is negative or destructive will be flushed out from your life and you will experience breakthrough after breakthrough like never before.

This devotional is taken from the book 100 Days of Right Believing—Daily Readings from The Power of Right Believing.