Well pleased. Sonship. Belovedness. Accepted unconditionally by the father. At this point, Jesus had not done anything in ministry to please the father. Let this reality sink in. Jesus was declared the beloved by the Heavenly Father and at this point, he has done nothing.

The loving Heavenly Father takes all of the takes all of the pain, all of the struggles, all of the fears, all of the doubts, and redeems it all.

The reality is this. The Heavenly Father is deeply pleased and impressed with his children. We don’t have to do anything to get his attention, because his attention is already fixed on us with pure delight in his eyes. He looks down at us like Jack looked at Katie and says, “I love you so much and I fully delight in what I’ve created!”

This is the invitation for the church in this time, to enter into the pain and suffering of their brothers and sisters in Christ. Christ has taken on human flesh and entered into our pain, so we can now enter into the pain and suffering of others, particularly those in the family of God. When you really enter into cross-cultural, racial, and class relationships with an open mind and heart, the oppression of others opens your eyes to a whole new world.

Receiving is hard, very hard. In American culture, we are typically defined by what we do, accomplish and achieve. Receiving is the antithesis of this. Receiving means that I need to ask for help to get something done and most Americans don’t like to ask for help.  As Americans, we work for everything we get, right? We’ve been shaped by the lie of meritocracy, that if you just work hard enough for something, you’ll get it. There’s nothing wrong with hard work, but the motive has to be checked all the time.

When we allow Christ to a deep work in the interior parts of our lives, we no longer need to be in control when we love and serve others. As Paul says in Galatians 5, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Christ has set us free in the deep interior part of our lives so that we can now love freely. When we see a problem, we don’t need to jump in and fix it and feel the sense of being a hero. We can be patient, build relationships based on humility, listen to people, and then develop a plan of action together as the Holy Spirit guides the process.

It’s not the promise of scripture that makes everything okay. Actually the opposite. Everything is not okay. I almost died. The hope is that God promises that he is never going to leave us, either in this world or the next. Because of the incarnate Jesus, he enters into our suffering. He enters into the tears, the worry, the doubt, the reality of almost dying and somehow he’s mysteriously there as a presence of comfort.

Green pastures are not so much about circumstances working out, but about recognizing the goodness of God while you are in the valley. It’s about learning to be fully present in the moment that God has you in and embracing all that God wants you to have in that moment.

God wants to reconcile all things back to himself. He longs for us to know his unconditional love. He longs for His bride to be made whole across color, class, culture, family units, and any other relational unit that’s divided. He longs for us to enjoy the fruit of our labor in long and healthy lives. And, he longs for us to face the division in our own lives in order to live into the fullness of what he desires.

But, what we fail to miss in this text and argument (and what Paul deals with a lot in his letters), is what the false or old self does to different people groups, it categorizes and makes distinctions in order to control, manipulate and have power over.