“See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are… Beloved, we are God’s children now.” St. John in his first epistle stresses our God-given identity. We don’t need to do anything to be a child of God — say a prayer or keep a commandment — God has already named us and claimed us. And we can’t do anything to lose our status as members of the divine family. We can’t change God’s mind about us. As my old scripture teacher used to say, the divine indicative precedes the divine imperative. We strive to lead a Godly life not in order to get something we don’t have but to reflect our true divinely constituted nature.
