A mixed message is where two
or more ideas which contradict each other are both deemed to be valid. If I tell you my team won the game, even
though the other team scored more points, that is a mixed message. Some mixed messages have greater impact than
others. If I tell you there are about 80,000
spiders on the acre on which your house sits, it could be a relatively
interesting bit of trivia. If I tell you
not to worry about those 80,000 arachnoids who can eat 10% of their body weight
daily, and that means if you weigh around 175lbs, all the spiders could only
eat about half of your arm while you sleep tonight…that might be a
mildly-concerning mixed message.
One of the deadliest mixed messages is to
hear: We’re all God’s children. There is some truth in the statement. God created humans, and in that sense, we are
all His offspring in the biological meaning. However, the confusion of spiritual and
biological convergence can have eternal significance far-beyond whether spiders
will be chewing on you tonight.
When the Pharisees were looking for a way to
convict Jesus of some offense to get rid of him, they claimed their biological
heritage as descendants of Abraham as evidence that they were children of
God. Jesus disagreed and said so,
plainly, that they were children of hell:
Jesus told them, “If God were your Father, you would
love me, because I have come to you from God. I am not here on my own, but he sent me. Why can’t you understand
what I am saying? It’s because you can’t
even hear me! For
you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil
things he does. He was a murderer from
the beginning. He has always hated the
truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his
character; for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:42-44
Jesus also told the Pharisees they would not enter
God’s presence, despite their biological pedigree, unless they repented of sins
and trusted in Him:
Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth,
and the life. No one can come to the Father except through
me. John 14:6
Apostle Paul picked up on this and restated it so
that we would have no mixed message about what it means to be a child
of God:
But you are not controlled by your sinful nature. You are
controlled by the Spirit if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And
remember that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ living in them do not
belong to him at all.) Romans 8:9
So the antidote for the mixed spiritual message
sent by the statement “we’re all children of God” is to
rephrase: You’re a child of God
if Christ lives in you.
For You Today
There are about 2,000 devotional
posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions
library. To dig deeper on
today’s topic, explore some of these:
Inclusive and Diverse - and Dying
Images: Title Pixabay.com Images without citation are either personal
property of the author, or in public domain.
Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
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