This is part 3 in a series of posts explaining the meaning behind my blog Finding the Beloved. Finding the Beloved isn’t just about finding God, but it’s about finding ourselves.

In my previous post, Finding True Love, I shared about how we all long to experience unconditional love, and how that love is most fully and completely experienced through a relationship with God our Creator. Finding the Beloved is about discovering this intimate relationship with God, which is an ongoing process as we relate with Him and get to know Him each day.

Yet, there is another Beloved that we need to find. And that Beloved is you. Finding the Beloved in this way is about finding your identity as one who is deeply loved by God. That’s what this post is about today.  Before I go on, I want to lay a very important foundation. 

The Starting Point

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 14:6

There are many different ideas about who God is. I write from the perspective of the Bible. According to the Bible, the Beloved is personified in Jesus Christ. Colossians 1:15 says that He is “the image of the invisible God”, and Hebrews 1:3 says that Jesus is the exact imprint of God’s nature in a human body. God became a man to show us what He is really like. 

This man is Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Jesus came to not only reveal to us what God is really like, but He came to give up His own life to reunite us with our Father and Creator. It is through Jesus’ death and resurrection that we receive forgiveness and reconciliation with God and can experience a love relationship with Him.

What I believe is that Jesus is the gateway to experiencing the love of God and being transformed by this love. Without going through this gate, we cannot truly experience the transformation and the liberation that comes with being known and loved by God.

Through Jesus we are set free from everything that blocks us from experiencing a relationship with God: the wrong that we’ve done, guilt, shame, unworthiness, condemnation, you name it! Through Jesus we have access to a close and intimate relationship with the Father like Jesus had when He lived on earth.  

The Process of Becoming

In the Bible the word translated “beloved” is the Greek word “agapetos”.  Agapetos refers to those who have been reunited with their heavenly Father through faith in Jesus and it is used more than 70 times in the Bible. The word means dearly loved, esteemed, favorite, worthy of love. The first time this word appears in the New Testament is when the Father declares over Jesus, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17) Jesus was called Beloved before He ever began His ministry. This means that His identity as the Beloved of the Father was rooted not in anything He did, but in who He was to the Father.

In the same way, we become the Beloved of the Father immediately when we are born again through our faith in Christ (John 1:12-13). We become the Beloved before we do anything to serve God. However, growing into our identity as the Beloved of God is a process. This is because it takes time to internalize God’s love for us to the point where we experience transformation in how we think, feel and behave. This transformation takes place as we walk with God each day, experiencing His love, obeying His voice. This is the process of becoming the Beloved. The Bible likens this process to a bride preparing for her wedding day to her groom.

Jesus Loves Us to Wholeness

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.  In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.  After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—  for we are members of his body. 

Ephesians 5:25-30 

In my previous post, I shared about how marriage is used in the Bible as a picture of the kind of relationship that we can have with God.  Christ is referred to as the Bridegroom Who will come again for His Bride.  When we first come to Christ, we are completely forgiven, made new inside of our hearts and completely cleansed from our past.  The Bible refers to this as being “saved”.  The Greek word for saved is sozo, which encompasses healing, rescue, deliverance, restoration, and being made whole. This presents salvation as something that doesn’t just happens all at once, but as an ongoing process as the effects of salvation are worked out in all the different areas of our lives. 

In the above passage, Christ is pictured as a husband who nourishes and cares for His bride, washing us with His words, making us new, removing our stains and clothing us in beautiful garments. To me this represents how we are gradually transformed as we engage in an intimate relationship with Jesus. He changes how we think about ourselves, how we speak and act, and how we relate with others. This process of healing, restoration and being made whole is deeply connected to growing in our identity as God’s Beloved.   

Transformation Requires Our Participation

When we come to Jesus, He is the One that cleanses us, changes us and transforms us through the power of His Holy Spirit. However, we need to partner with God as He is seeking to bring about His transformation in our lives. 

How do we partner with God? There are two very simple ways. The first is that we need to learn how to HEAR GOD’S VOICE. This takes time and practice. God is speaking to us all of the time. He speaks to us through His Word in the Bible, but He also speaks to us in many different ways.

Very often, we don’t recognize that God is speaking to us.  This is either because we are so busy and don’t make space for stillness in our lives, or because we have things that are blocking us from hearing Him. Those are topics I will discuss in future posts. The most important point for now is that both things are only resolved through practicing a lifestyle of connection and intimacy with Jesus.   

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”

Luke 9:23-24

The second way that we can partner with God to become the Beloved is that we need to learn to OBEY GOD’S VOICE. This may seem obvious, but it is very common that we hear and sense things from the Lord, but we do not act on what He is saying to us.  Often, we resist because God’s direction doesn’t always make logical sense to us. He will often lead us to do things that are uncomfortable or painful to our natural human feelings and desires. Most of us resist pain and discomfort. I know I do. Unfortunately, this is not the way that we grow spiritually.

Jesus’ teachings are full of difficult, uncomfortable things like forgiving and blessing our enemies, showing kindness and gentleness to those who mistreat us, giving generously to people who can’t ever pay us back, etc. Jesus had to die on the cross before He was resurrected. He said that if we want to follow Him, we will also have to die to ourselves. But it’s more than worth it!  This is how we find true life. As we obey God the Holy Spirit is able to work changes in our minds and hearts and behavior that would be otherwise impossible.  This is the process of becoming the Beloved.

Put it into Practice

Reflect on your relationship with God. What has He been speaking to you about lately? How have you been responding or not responding to His voice in your life? Why or why not? How is this impacting your life, whether postively or negatively?

If you would like to hear God’s voice and respond to Him better, I have created an exercise that you can take into your prayer time. It is called Encountering the Beloved and I think you will find it powerful. Dowload it here. Give it a try and I would love it if you would comment below on your experience.

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Did you enjoy this post? I think you will also enjoy the post: How to Wait on the Lord.

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