God’s Dear Children - All The LORD is near Daily Devotionals for 2025

Therefore be imitators of God as dear children.
Ephesians 5:1

God's Dear Children
What a wonderful place the Lord sets us in here, and sets us in the consciousness of it too, showing us how we get to it, with its effects and fruits. But that consciousness is hindered by everything that is in contrast to God: worldliness, carelessness, or negligence. Still, it is where God has really set us, and we are to be "imitators of God as dear children." To think that such a word should come out of His mouth to us, calling us "dear children." We are familiar with the thought of being sons of God, children of God by faith in Christ Jesus; but when we think of the nearness and intimacy of this, and His revealing Himself to us, and acting as such, it is wonderful. It is not what He has done to deliver us from condemnation; but when the sin is all gone, to be remembered no more, He sets us in this relationship of "dear children," and in the consciousness of it.

If He says to me, "Dear child!" what a thought I have of Him, and of the wonderful condition I am in: the expression draws out the consciousness of the love in that condition. He may have done all kinds of things for me, but the very word conveys to me where I am. If we come to think of it, and measure it, we have to think of Christ (Jn. 17:26). He dwells in us to be the power and enjoyment of it, and He attracts down from the Father's heart what the Father feels for Him and for us, and this is shed abroad in our hearts.

It is not a mere doctrine, but the address of God to us. When He says "dear," what says it? It is His heart, what He feels about us, poor creatures as we are; but He says it because He feels it. He is expressing Himself and reaching us, and that is what is so thoroughly blessed.

J. N. Darby