“Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.

And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me,

when as yet there were none of them.”

Psalm 139:16

Since the beginning of creation, the motive of the devil is to make you think less of yourself than what the Word of God says about you. In the Garden of Eden, the serpent came to Eve and said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1) The devil always comes to you questioning the authenticity of God’s Word in your life. When you are sick, he will come to your thoughts and say, “Has God indeed said, ‘You will be healed by His stripes? Look, you still can feel your pain, and the doctor’s report is very bad.” In the wilderness, the devil came at Jesus and said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” (Matthew 4:3) As the devil try to make Jesus question who He is – the Son of the living God – he will want you to question who you are in Christ.  And noticed that the devil left out the most important word, “beloved,” out of the Son of God. If you remember that immediately after John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, the heavens were opened to Him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon Him. And God’s voice came from heaven, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (John 3:17) Why would the devil leave out the word “beloved”? It is because the word “beloved” represents the closeness of Jesus’s relationship with the Father. Since God is love and the devil is the embodiment of fear, he cringes at the sound of the word “beloved” because he is afraid of love, and that is the reason he left it out when he spoke of the deity of Jesus in the wilderness.

Today, the devil will continue to make you question the love of God in your life. He will do his best to make you believe that God is not pleased with you and that He is angry with you every time you have messed up. My dear friend, you do not have to be fearful in coming to God’s presence when you have failed or sinned. He always looks at you as His beloved child in whom He is well pleased. “How can I be pleasing to God when I have failed so badly?” you might say to yourself. The truth is not about how bad you have failed or have sinned against God, but it is everything about how perfect and complete the sacrifice of Jesus is for your sins. The devil wants you to think less about yourself when you fail.

God wants you to think more about what He thinks about you through the finished work of Jesus at the cross. Through the cross of Jesus you are forever His beloved child who is accepted in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:6). Through the cross of Jesus you are forever the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:21) . Through the cross of Jesus you are more than conquerors through Him who love you (Romans 8:37). Through the cross of Jesus, He has already taken away your past, present and future sins in the body of His Son, Jesus Christ. The next time the devil tempts you to refocus yourself on “YOU” and your failures, God wants you to focus on “CHRIST” and His love for you at the cross of Calvary. There, you will see how precious the Father’s thoughts toward you are and how great the sum of them is for your future!

Scripture Reading: Romans 9:25-26

This Devotional is from:

“Live The New You – 365 Days Devotional in Living the Real You”