Skip to main content

God is proud of you

Mark 1:11

“And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased”

A couple months ago, I had a friend say to me “God is proud of you” and I nearly broke down in tears. How could five words impact me so much? Never hearing or honestly believing it, my perspective changed on a lot of things. We all are our worst critic, and with that comes being very hard on ourselves. Living lives aiming to be perfect, yet sometimes we miss how detrimental that can be: associating our value in our pursuit.

I think at times we treat God as a form of teacher or boss: in the sense that if we provide something, whether it’s a high grade or a substantial amount of work, we are deserving of validation. In our lives, this may look like praying a certain number of times, maybe it’s fasting for a couple more hours, or even reading an extra chapter of the bible. Whatever it is, I think we are all guilty of thinking that if we do more, that somehow God’s love for us will be correlated to that.

That very same friend that said those five impactful words, also said to me “Often times our viewpoint of our parents is directly linked to our viewpoint of God”. Our parents are our first point of authority we ever see in our lives, and so our association with them, is sometimes associated with our eternal father. We grow up with the mindset that perhaps if I do more chores, maybe get certain grades, or even win that sports competition, then maybe our parents will say they are proud of us. But God doesn’t work like that, he was proud of you before you ever did anything.

Relating to the verse, a bit of context to what’s going on: this is when Jesus is baptised by John. Jesus hadn’t done any works up until this point: he hadn’t been beaten, he hadn’t been put on a cross, he hadn’t sacrificed his life for humanity. Before anything, God was proud of him, and I think there’s a beauty in that: something we can all adopt in our perception of God. Regardless of whatever you may have done, God is proud of you and loves you.

 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Being intentional with Joy

James 1: 2   “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds”   Have you ever not been in a good mood? Have you ever felt like things are just not going your way? If you answered yes to any of those questions, it shows that you are human. Problems occur and things happen that can make us upset, and that is an unfortunate reality we have to face in this world .   For me, one of my resolutions this year is to be more joyful. If I had to make a book about the year of 2024, the title of it would be “ A sequence of difficulties” . In my life, it seemed I was experiencing problem after problem and issue after issue. I couldn’t escape them. The bitter truth is that problems and issues are inevitable, but our attitude towards them isn’t .   At th at time, I was angry at God for allowing all those things to happen to me, but in retrospect I can be grateful to see the work God was doing inside of me, the resilience he was building, ...

Dealing with Fear

2 Timothy 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind”  Fear is a universal emotion we all feel.  It comes in different formats, affects different people differently and is an unavoidable aspect of life.  For me, as I’ve progressed in my relationship with God, fear has been the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with.  Whether it was certain dreams, visions or the enemy trying to play with my mind: they were all spiritual attacks.  You may not deal with spiritual attacks, and maybe your fear is embedded of people’s perception of you.  Maybe you have fear of rejection, or fear of failure, nevertheless we should all identify our fear, but let us not make it our identity.  Don’t hold your fear hostage, set it free by allowing Jesus to use his keys of comfort.  Looking at the verse, once we have given our lives to Jesus and have accepted him as our lord and saviour, w...

Equipping ourselves

Ephesians 6:13   “ Therefore, put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand”   Recently I had a conversation with one of my friends. Before our interaction, I didn’t set any expectation other than simply just seeing how they were doing. To my surprise, my friend asked me a question: and what was just a simple question, felt like an opportunity for me to express my faith. If I had not already had a foundation of God’s word, it would have been a missed opportunity. We are all presented with opportunities, some we may not be aware of, others we may not feel comftable in expressing, but all of them we need to be equipped for.    Our faith and belief are counter-cultural: it doesn’t agree with the views of today and goes against the perspectives and viewpoints of the society we live in.  As long as you claim to be a Christian, there will be people that dis...