“Christians often find it difficult to believe that God’s unfailing love is real. This is where the knowledge and increasing assurance that we are children of God is a refuge and shield against the attacks of Satan. Just as part of his plan of action in his temptation of Jesus included the issue of whether he was really the Son of God (compare Matt. 4:3, 6), so a parallel issue arises with us. Satan will cast up to us the sins of both the past and the present; he will allure us with temptations to sin to which we may fall in the future, and then lead us to question the reality of our relationship to God. Can we be God’s children after all, when such thoughts lurk in our minds, and such deeds lie in our past?
“What is the answer to this kind of temptation? It is, at least in part, the recollection that we are not children of God by worth and merit, but by free, gracious adoption. God has chosen us. Our status is not a matter of our worthiness, but of his love.”
(Sinclair Ferguson, Children of the Living God, 30).
