Children as Gifts

I personally love getting gifts. It is probably my primary way of receiving love from people. After I got passed the guilt of feeling shallow about this, I began to embrace this aspect of myself as the great asset it is in the Kingdom. Being able to receive God's gifts in our lives is essential to being a child of God in His Kingdom. The first gifts we need to know how to receive are His love and the free gift of righteousness in Christ Jesus. This is the gift of righteousness imparted to us by God because of the cross - Jesus lived the perfect righteous life we couldn't ever live and then died the death we deserved to die to take the penalty of our sins and then give to us the gift of His righteousness! Wow! What a gift! I am now righteous by faith and not by what I do because of what He did! I can come before my Heavenly Father cleansed and pure and righteous because I have received this gift from Him by faith! I also can freely now receive His love nd the fullness of His salvation! Gifts He wants to give me so freely!

Then from there, the list of gifts He wants to give me are endless, provided I am willing to receive them!

Romans 8:32 "He who did not spare His own son but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things."

So about 2 1/2 years ago now the Lord began to challenge me with the issue of having children, with things like how many we would have, when they would come, how we would take care of them and provide for them, etc. There is a whole long story to it that I would love to write out later, but for now I will sum it up by saying that the crux of the issue came down to Him asking me "Can you trust me? WILL you trust me in this area of your life?". I was struck with the reality that as much as I thought I was trusting Him with so many areas of my life, I was learning there always seemed to be other areas He would later reveal to me that I needed to surrender and walk by faith in. And at that point, here was my next area.

One of the bigger things I learned through this process of coming to surrender and trust this area of our lives to Jesus was the issue of the gifts. I realized that if I truly believe children are a gift from the Lord, and I love getting good gifts from my Father, why would I want to limit the number of gifts He gave me if I believed Him to be all-wise and all-knowing and very capable of choosing the best number of children for us and the best timing of thier arrival in our lives. He began to show me that he has many gifts he wants to give to his people that we so often are not wanting and willing to receive, not the least of which is our children.