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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.

 


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