DAILY DEVOTIONAL – February 5, 2021

“All Belonging”

Prayer:  Almighty God, Your love for us knows no bounds.  We see that as our Lord Jesus hung on a cross; Your only Son given so that we might be the sons and daughters of God.  By Your power and grace, guard our hearts and minds against the lies of the devil and establish us in the certainty of Your love.  In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Scripture: Psalm 100:3

Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Devotional – “All Belonging”

There isn’t much that a newborn baby knows or understands intellectually or cognitively, but that doesn’t mean a newborn baby knows nothing.  Without a doubt, from the moment a baby is born, he or she knows exactly who mom is.  As it turns out, it’s not only the baby who knows and can identify mom even before they are able to open their eyes.  A report released in the early 2000’s demonstrated with undeniable consistency that mothers can identify their newborn babies not only just by smell, but also by blind touch as well.  A series of studies conducted by Marsha Kaitz, a psychology professor at Hebrew University and reported in the Israeli Magazine-on-the-Web, demonstrated uncanny maternal recognition ability.

In the first study, 42 post-partum women who had spent at least 1 hour with their newborns were asked to select purely by smell a t-shirt worn by their infant.  Each woman was asked to sniff three bags, each of which contained a shirt worn by a newborn, only one of which was worn by their own.  100% of the women were able to choose correctly the shirt worn by their own offspring!

In a second study, 68 new mothers, with their eyes and noses covered, were asked to identify their own infants purely by touch.  69% were able to do so by simply touching their newborn’s hand.  When asked how they did so, most said they recognized either the texture or temperature of their infant’s skin.  40%, however, said they could not identify any particular sensory cue—the just “knew” it was their baby.

Underlying the Devil’s temptation in the Garden of Eden was the suggestion and lie that we do not belong to God, that we really belong to ourselves.  Satan told Eve, “You shall not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of the forbidden fruit, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  Satan knew that if he could get us to think we are our own, if he could get us to sin against God thinking that we ourselves are our own god, then in the shame of our sin, we would doubt God’s love for us and come to question whether we really are from Him and belong to Him.

The Devil promised the knowledge of good and evil.  After they bought the lie, Adam and Eve realized they had been deceived and that they only came to know of the difference between good and evil because they themselves committed evil against the Lord.  Now, they were ashamed, and they covered themselves in an attempt to cover their sin and even before God banished them from the Garden, they ran away from God.  God in His omniscience knew full well what had happened, but yet in His Fatherly love and mercy God came to them.  God knew right where they were.  God knows His own.

The devil and his angels love to harass us and capitalize on the suffering of sin he brought about through his lies.  He whispers in our ear, “See?!  Look what you did with all your sin.  How could God love you?  You’re not really His.”

The Good News of the Gospel my friends is that we don’t have company with the devil.  We have company with the Risen King of kings and Lord of lords, Jesus Christ, who has brought us into the family of God once again, adopting us as sons and daughters of the Most High God through His blood and by our faith in His death and resurrection.  As Jesus says in John 10, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.  My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

One of the most successful lies of the Devil today is the belief that we are saved because we know Jesus Christ, because we “give Him our life”, or because we “decide to make Him our Lord and Savior”.  We no more make Jesus our Savior than an infant makes a woman his or her mother.  Like a newborn infant, we only know who God is because He bore us and as David said is Psalm 139, “knitted” us together in our mother’s womb.  We do not make Jesus our Savior, He makes us His children.  Long before we were a prayer on the lips of our mother and father, long before our own mother and father were born, God decided to make us His own by sending His son to die in our place and rise again to make us a newborn creation in Christ; born of faith in the waters of baptism.

No doubt a mother’s intuition and knowledge of their child is an incredible thing to behold, but the comfort that a helpless newborn receives from that maternal knowledge is only a small testimony of the eternal comfort you and I have knowing that we know God and believe in Him and in His Son Jesus only because He first knew us.  As it says in 2 Timothy 1:9, “God saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.”

It is in the comfort and confidence that we are saved not by our knowledge of God but by His knowledge of us, that Paul says in Romans 8, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

God bless you my friends, and remember that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow.  Amen.