You are the beloved

Loving Freely is a resource developed by Dan Crain, Pastor, Consultant and Connector for REMERGE.

Loving Freely unpacks the need for us to examine ourselves in order to truly know how to love and serve others as the beloved children of God. The process is spelled out through the Loving Freely Process and able to be lived into with the Loving Freely Seven. 

It is a five hour training introducing those who help others to receive help themselves.

 

You are the Beloved

 

“You are my Son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased.” 

This declaration in Mark 1 by the God over His child is the essence and fuel to Jesus’ earthly ministry.

At this point in Jesus’ earthly ministry, he hasn’t done anything!

 

So many leaders in the ministry of reconciliation struggle with shame. We don’t think we’re good enough and constantly think of ourselves as a failure.

The summer of 2009 was all of this for me. I had just graduated from seminary, moved back to Orlando, was living with our gracious in-laws and Adrienne and I just got pregnant with our second child. I was working a part-time job to make ends meet and trying to find a job where I could live into the passion that God had placed inside of me. 

I met with over forty different churches and ministries trying to find a job that involved racial reconciliation or justice work from a gospel perspective. Nothing turned up. By the grace of I met Phil Hissom that had just started up Polis, went through Dignity Serves, was introduced to the concept of a dignified interdependent relationships with the vulnerable and the rest is history. 

I felt like a failure, like I didn’t matter and was anything but the beloved of God.

What was significant in that first year is that I began to facilitate a Bible study with friends that were living on the streets in Orlando with Compassion Corner. One of the first texts we dove into was the story of the two lost sons from Luke 15, commonly known as the story of the prodigal son. 

Little did I know but Christ was about to serve me through friends that were homeless to help me discover my belovedness in God. As we were walking together to help find jobs, bus passes, a warm cup of coffee or a way to get back home, my new friends were helping me to discover that I was the beloved and chosen of God. It was a dignified interdependent relationship in its most pure form. 

Christina Cleveland writes in, The Privilege of Hopelessness, “Perhaps it is those who are intimately connected to systemic injustice, rather than the privileged, who should sit atop the hope ladder. And perhaps it is time for us privileged folks to stand in solidarity below them, follow their lead, and join them in the pursuit of hope.”

As we spent the next three months on a Tuesday morning in downtown Orlando diving into the Luke 15 text, it became apparent of what God the Father was trying to teach me. At this point in my life I felt like a failure. I felt like I had let God down, my wife, children, family and friends. For the first time in my life I had thoughts of doing harm to myself because of the deep shame I carried in the interior parts of my life.

In many ways I was like the younger son in the story of the Luke 15 who had thrown everything way and was left to eat the pods that the pigs were eating. The younger son decides to return home to become a servant, not to become the son again. A lot of us miss this as to what the motivation was for the younger son to return. He returns to earn back his belovedness as his his father’s servant to work in the fields. 

Then something so beautiful happens when he returns home. His Father runs to the son, embraces him, restores him to his place of honor and throws him a party. The younger son does nothing to earn back his belovedness, because the reality is that he was always the beloved!

He was always the Father’s son.

Even in our most depressed and discouraging places in life, we can rest in knowing that we already have a position in Christ that our false selves are striving to inherit. Nothing we can do can make God more happy than He already is with us!

We don’t have to do anything to earn this belovedness other than receive something we already are in Christ! Receiving means believing in our original glory,  confessing our sins to Christ, and receive the grace and love of Christ. When I am operating out of my false self, my motive to help and serve others have often been driven by the need to become the beloved, not realizing that I am already the beloved. I have spent so much time in life and ministry trying to become something that I already am in Christ. 

Now that’s good news.

The younger son did nothing to become the beloved, because he was always the Father’s son. As someone called to the ministry of reconciliation, this is good news to me, because nothing that I do in the ministry of reconciliation is going to impress God. 

And because of the finished work of Christ on the cross, this belovedness is available to us who believe and confess to God the Father that we need his grace and forgiveness in our lives. 

Henri Nouwen says it like this in The Return of the Prodigal Son; “Jesus has made it clear to me that the same voice that he heard at the River Jordan and on Mount Tabor can also be heard by me. He has made it clear to me that just as he has his home with the Father, so do I. It is the place within me where God has chosen to dwell. It is the place where I am held safe in the embrace of an all-loving Father who calls me by name and says, “You are my beloved son, on you my favor rests.” It is the place where I can taste the joy and the peace that are not of this world.”

As we follow Jesus loving others through the gospel of Mark we see him living out of this belovedness, regardless of how he’s attacked, judged or maligned. It is from this place as being the Father’s beloved that he loves freely.

Howard Thurman describes this belovedness as being a child of God in his book, Jesus and the Disinherited, “The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego, and results in new courage, fearlessness and power. To the degree that a person knows this that he is a child of God, he is unconquerable from within and without.”

Our story begins in creation as the beloved children of God. There is nothing we can do in loving others that will take us away from our belovedness in Christ. Loving freely properly flows from the belovedness we have in Christ in creation.

 

When I am not living as the beloved child of God, my false self becomes a sponge to people and situations around me. I am constantly looking for the approval and affirmation of others. I am always trying to stay in control of relationships. I am looking to others for safety and security. And, I become a narcissist making life and ministry about me, rather than Jesus. 

 

But because of God’s work, we are the beloved of God in Christ. Nothing you do will take away this and no amount of loving and serving others will make you feel more affirmed. 

 

Being the beloved of God means we love others freely. We no longer need the affirmation of others when we serve as we hear the words from the Heavenly Father, “You are my child, whom I love, with you I am well pleased.” 

 

We have nothing to prove, because we are already the beloved of God!

 

So, stop what you’re doing.

Right now at this point, in Christ you are the beloved of God. He is well pleased and delights in you. Don’t believe the lie that if you don’t do anything, you are not valuable. Love others freely because you are freely loved by the good Father, Christ our brother and the Holy Spirit our comforter. 

 

Love Freely, beloved child of God.

 

Here are a few thoughts and principles that have helped me discover my belovedness in Christ; 

• Slow your life down to be with God and allow the Spirit to search you and know you and to discover why you are doing what you’re doing. What’s driving you? 
• Sit in key texts in the scriptures that point to who we are in Christ like; Ephesians 1, Psalms 139, John 15, or I John 3. 
• See a Christian counselor/therapist or trusted person that’s on the same journey as you. Dig into your past and discover the core lie you’re believing about yourself and begin to sit with Christ’s Spirit in silence in order to begin the journey of healing. 
• Pay attention to how Christ is showing up through the “other”. The other may be your spouse, close friend, someone you are called to serve or someone that is completely different than you racially, culturally and socio-economically. I am a firm believe that God’s Spirit is always speaking, it’s just a matter of how aware we are too recognize and discern the voice.