We are born with no rights except the right to choose whether to believe and trust the God who created us. An attitude of entitlement causes us to lower our guard and our work ethic. Being entitled means that one does not need to work to keep what one has. So, thinking oneself entitled to what must be earned leaves one with nothing.
As our Creator and Redeemer, God loves us, sees great value and potential in us, and gladly crawled through crucifixion to ensure that we could retain a pathway to live out that potential. But, that is all it is: potential. Jesus gave us no guarantees on the results in our lives, only that we would keep a choice in the matter of our own futures.
We can’t even change our past. We can only affect our future.
Simply accepting God’s gift adopts us back into the estrange family of our natural birth. God made us, we fell, and He welcomes us back if we simply return. We are always welcome as sons and daughters to live in and enjoy His estate. But, what we do with it remains up to us.
This makes God’s unconditional love perfect. We are always welcome in His own house, just as children believe that their parents’ home also belongs to them—because it truly does. Just the same, everything children own belongs to their parents. They are family, loved, and have a place to belong. But, we also have complete control over results. If one can work, practice, learn, and earn more, then one has more rightly and fairly, not because of any favoritism.
We find both inner strength and confidence in our hearts when we know how secure we are in God’s unconditional love, along with knowing that we are entitled to no particular results whatsoever where our work is concerned—except that our results are earned fairly. What a gift!—that we have nothing we didn’t rightly earn except the unconditional love of our adoptive biological Creator Father in Heaven!
Even our bad results are our own faults, while unavoidable hardship strengthens us. This, too, is liberating—to know God isn’t just some meanie.