Do You Know Who You Are?

If you are a Christian, do you know who you are? Do you really believe it? I think we often act more like street child survivors and cosmic orphans than beloved children and heirs of God.

In J.I. Packer's classic book, Knowing God, he offers some great advice on how to practice believing our identity as God's children. It's found at the conclusion of his chapter entitled, "Sons of God." This just might be one to print off and keep in your Bible for awhile, so you can preach the truth to yourself and prayerfully ponder these questions until you believe in sonship deep down in your bones.

Here it is (italics original):

Do I, as a Christian, understand myself? Do I know my own real identity? My own real destiny? I am a child of God. God is my Father; heaven is my home; every day is one day nearer. My Savior is my brother; every Christian is my brother too. 

Say it over and over to yourself first thing in the morning, last thing at night, as you wait for the bus, any time when your mind is free, and ask that you may be enabled to live as one who knows it is all utterly and completely true. For this is the Christian’s secret of –a happy life?—yes, certainly, but we have something both higher and profounder to say. This is the Christian’s secret of a Christian life, and of a God-honoring life, and these are the aspects of the situation that really matter. May this secret become fully yours, and fully mine. 

To help us realize more adequately who and what, as children of God, we are and are called to be, here are some questions by which we do well to examine ourselves again and again. 

• Do I understand my adoption? Do I value it? Do I daily remind myself of my privilege as a child of God? 
• Have I sought full assurance of my adoption? Do I daily dwell on the love of God to me?
• Do I treat God as my Father in heaven, loving, honoring and obeying him, seeking and welcoming his fellowship, and trying in everything to please him, as a human parent would want his child to do? 
• Do I think of Jesus Christ, my Savior and my Lord, as my brother too, bearing to me not only a divine authority but also a divine-human sympathy? Do I think daily how close he is to me, how completely he understands me, and how much, as my kinsman-redeemer, he cares for me? 
• Have I learned to hate the things that displease my Father? Am I sensitive to the evil things to which he is sensitive? Do I make a point of avoiding them, lest I grieve him? 
• Do I look forward daily to that great family occasion when the children of God will finally gather in heaven before the throne of God, their Father, and of the Lamb, their brother and their Lord? Have I felt the thrill of this hope? 
• Do I love my Christian brothers and sisters with whom I live day by day, in a way that I shall not be ashamed of when in heaven I think back over it? 
• Am I proud of my Father, and of his family, to which by his grace I belong? 
• Does the family likeness appear in me? If not, why not?

1 John 3:1-3 (emphasis added):

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.