I've often marveled at how God puts us together in families with people we would never have chosen for friends. After all, we tend to choose friends like ourselves in temperament, in belief, and in interest. When siblings don't fall into those categories, however, our relations with them become more like exercises in patience and forgiveness rather than true friendship. We sometimes love them because we have to. We will, after all, be related to them forever.
God has a family, too. When He adopted us as His children, He gave us brothers and sisters according to His choosing, not ours. Some of them we like, and others we may not, but we are related to them all forever. We are joined with each other through the Lord we all love, for better or worse.
He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with His pleasure and will to the praise of His glorious grace which He has freely given us in the one He loves.--Ephesians 1:4-6
We are all adopted children in God's family, equal before Him by virtue of our faith. The blood that joins us, the shed blood of Christ, is at least as strong a tie as shared DNA. We cannot reject one another when we have differences, but must take advantage of every opportunity to face our rough spots with honesty and overcome them.
I don't always understand my fellow siblings in God's family, but by God's grace, I love them. They, like my physically related sister and brothers, teach me to deal with dissension and criticism as well as how to enjoy agreement and affection, but they do it under the eternally binding influence of faith. I may not have to spend hereafter with everyone in my physical family, but am blessed, or stuck, with God's family forever. Thank you, Father, for the challenge of family business.
Thought for today: How do you think God's family differs from a physical family?
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