You Are Gods Beloved!

“After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, ¹⁷ and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.’” (Mat. 3:13-17).

Imagine hearing this voice. You hear God’s voice saying how much He loved His son. I would have been awe stuck. Imagine someone fainting and falling in the water after hearing this.

Right after this baptism Jesus went to into the wilderness and fasted for forty days. Then the Devil tempted him with three temptations. In each temptation Satan said, “If You are the Son of God” then listed things for Jesus to do. He left out one word out of the sentence, “beloved.” Here God had just explained who Jesus was and yet the enemy left that one word out. Why? Because temptations are less effective when you know you are God’s beloved.

You may say, “But Caleb that was Jesus, we all know He was God’s beloved.” The truth is, as believers, we are all God’s beloved. We become this not because of anything that we do, it is because we are in Christ. We are accepted not because of our works. The book of Ephesians tells us, “he (God) hath made us accepted in the beloved (Eph. 1:6) (KJV). We are in Christ. We are accepted, “in the beloved.” Do you know what David’s name means? The Hebrew word for David means, “beloved one[1].” It takes someone who knows they are God’s beloved to slay a giant. My friend when you know you are God’s beloved temptations will lose their power and you will overcome in life.

[1] Thomas, Robert L. New American Standard Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible: Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries. Nashville, TN: A.J. Holman, 1981. Print.