February 17

BOY, YOU’RE GETTING MORE LIKE HIM EACH AND EVERY DAY

Father, thank You for bringing me to this place and this time today. I ask You to speak to me right now, and to let Your Word breathe life into my heart. Please use these next few moments to bring me to more of a fullness of You and to learn more of Your Glory and how to leave the footprints of Jesus everywhere I go today. In Jesus Name I pray. Amen!

Read Matthew 5:8-9

In case I have not mentioned it before, I am a big fan of country music. Always have been and probably always will be; most days as I write I am listening to country music either through my iTunes program or via an internet radio station which I prefer. The title of today’s reading is a line from the George Strait song So Much Like My Dad, because as I have thought more and more about these verses I have continually come back to the phrase “for they will be called sons of God.” So I want to explore this concept of being a son or daughter today, and look at how we are sons of God.

The easiest way to be a son or daughter of someone is to be the biological offspring of them. A second way is to be raised by someone and exhibit characteristics of them. Now in the perfect setting both of these tasks are completed by the same people but more and more this is not the case. Shaquille O’Neal during his thankfully brief and incredibly dreadful rap career had a song entitled Biological Didn’t Bother. I feel that I must confess that I actually own a cassette tape with this song on it. In this song Shaq says the man that raised him is his real dad, because his biological father was absent. His adoptive father taught him how to be a man and it is his traits that Shaq tries to emulate.

Now I am pretty much certain that God is not the father of any of us in the first sense. We all have biological fathers, some great, some not so great, but since none of us are Jesus, then none of us can claim God as our actual biological father. However, and this is the good news, we all have open and equal access to being His son in the other sense. That is obtained by accepting Christ as our personal Lord and Savior and asking for forgiveness of sins. This brings us into the family. Signing adoption papers also brings an individual into a new family, but they become recognized as being part of the family when they start to take on family traits. Verse 9 in today’s passage gives us a hint of how to take on the traits of God’s family so we can be readily known as His.

It is the peacemakers that will be called the sons of God. Today you can leave His footprints by being an agent of peace among those around you. I encourage you to do this.

Leave His footprints as you walk today!