Forever Home in the Eternal Family of God

Daily Encouragement for the Family of God by Kenton Cheek

29 July 2025

Reading From Romans 1

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie,and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. … Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.”—Romans 1:25-26a, 28

In His infinite wisdom, Almighty God created finite human beings with free moral agency. A human being has the ability to choose right or wrong and we will be held accountable for those choices by our Maker. We have the freedom and power to choose either to go our own way following our own desires, or to surrender our wills to God allowing Him to transform our hearts and minds with His love and grace so that our desires align with His.

Leaning on our own understanding and indulging our natural lusts in ungodly ways leads to spiritual poverty, death and destruction. To believe that any way other than God’s way laid out in the Holy Scriptures will bring us fulfillment and satisfaction is futile. It will not.

God’s way requires that we come to a realization that our own way is not and will not work and that we need Him to intervene. To acknowledge His lordship supersedes our own leads us to surrender our wills to His in submission to His guidance in loving and grateful obedience. As we choose to believe in Him, turn away from our sin and to Him for forgiveness, confessing to Him our sins and acknowledging Jesus as God, we go from spiritual death to new life, from darkness to light. We are born again by grace through faith and this is only made possible through receiving the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

This new birth experience allows God to fill us with His Holy Spirit and begin the process of conforming us back into the image of Jesus, who is God the Son. You see, when Adam and Eve were created, they were made perfectly in the spiritual image of God, but that image was corrupted by sin. So while their descendants, including us, are born, our reflection of God’s qualities is broken, our spiritual and physical DNA marred by generations of wrong choices and our own disobedience.

Salvation is an event (the new birth), a process (spiritual growth and sanctification), and the goal (perfect unity with God and glorification with Him). As we come to Him at the point of our conversion and we begin to learn more about Him and His ways from His Word the Bible and choose to put those ways into practice in our everyday lives, He gradually changes us to be more and more like Him until we reach perfect unity in the faith with one another as His children and enjoy uninhibited harmony with His divine nature.

This grand and glorious, messy and marvelous sanctifying work will reach its crescendo at the resurrection and the marriage supper of the Lamb. The process is messy because of our own mistakes. It is marvelous because of His grace and mercy and how He sovereignly weaves our stories together into a beautiful tapestry for His glory and our good.

“Lord Jesus, thank You for Your loving kindness. As we choose in faith to respond to the prompting of Your Holy Spirit, you meet us right where we are, rescue us from the miry clay, set our feet upon the Rock, wash us clean of our sins, anoint us with the oil of Your Spirit, and put a new song in our hearts. Thank You God for allowing us a choice. I pray that more would choose You. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.”

“Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”—Joshua 24:14-15