January 19 - LOVING OUR SPIRITUAL FAMILY MEMBERS
“God decided in advance to adopt us into His own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ. This is what He wanted to do, and it gave Him great pleasure.” (Ephesians 1:5)
Devotional Thought: Ephesians 1:5 is one of the most amazing verses in the Bible. It tells us that God wanted human beings, even flawed human beings, to be a part of His family. And it tells us that He created us to keep us with Him for all of eternity. The entire Bible is the story of God building a family and He wants us to be a part of it. We were made to last forever and His family is going to go on and on into eternity.
God has called us all to love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 12:28-30). But He’s also called us all to love other people (Mark 12:31), especially the people who are a part of our spiritual family. 1 Peter 2:17 tells us that we are to “Love our spiritual family.” The fact is our spiritual family is going to outlast our physical family. Our physical family is only going to last here on earth. In fact, a lot of families don’t even last that long. They’re separated by divorce and death and all kinds of things. But our spiritual family is actually more important than our physical family because we’re going to be spending forever with our spiritual family. And so God wants us to learn how to love our spiritual family. Why does He want us to do that? Three reasons.
First, God is a God of love and when we learn to love we become more like Him. And He wants us to become like Him (Romans 8:29-30, Ephesians 4:13). Second, all parents like for their kids to get along, and God wants His children to get along and learn to love each other. Some Children were writing letters to God, One child wrote, “Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. That’s the only thing that works for me and my brother.” Another child wrote, “Dear God, I bet it is very hard for You to love everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family and I can never do that.” Another child wrote, “Dear God, I can’t wait to get to Heaven because I know my big brother won’t be there.” Sometimes it’s hard to get along with physical family members. And sometimes it’s hard to get along with our spiritual family members. But the Lord wants us to learn how to do that. And that takes time practice and lots of fellowship together.
Third, loving and living with our spiritual family will be practiced for eternity. Because when we get to heaven we’re going to love God and we’re going to love the other people that are there. And God says, “I put you on earth to practice this. There’s a word for loving our spiritual family. It’s called “fellowship.” And this week we’re going to be learning how to love and fellowship with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Prayer Focus: Lord, help me learn the lessons I need to learn about loving and living with my spiritual family members - because that’s one thing that I’m going to be doing in the next life for all of eternity as well as in this life. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Follow-Up Activity: Identify seven members to your “spiritual family” that you need to be praying for and learning how to love in better ways in the coming days.
