Daily Manna · Day 38 · February 7
Family Name
“And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.”
Picture a man standing in a doorway, on the wrong side of the threshold, talking to someone inside the room.
We are good at wanting the room. We quote this verse, where the Lord Almighty promises to be a Father to us, and we mean it; many of us have cried over it at some point. When we fail, the voice we hear is often our own father's, and that voice has never once said, "Sit down, you are mine, we will sort this out together." So the promise hits hard. We hold on to it as a comfort, and we stop there.
What we do less often is read the sentence it belongs to. Paul builds this passage out of pieces of the Old Testament, and the line just before our verse is a command: "Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you." Then comes our verse, joined to it by one small word: "And will be a Father unto you." That little word "and" holds the whole thing together. Being God's son or daughter is a gift we could never earn, yet it is also a place we have to step into. Stepping in means leaving something behind on the other side of the doorway.
Most of us know what ours is: the account still open, the number we still answer, the habit our whole week is arranged around. We have not stepped away from any of it, and then we wonder why the Father sounds far away.
So look again at the man in the doorway, still talking and still not stepping through. The threshold is not a test of whether he is loved. It is only a threshold, a few inches high. The room is warm, and the Father inside has already said, "I will receive you." Nobody is going to carry him over it. He only has to step, and the welcome is already waiting for him.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 38 is Aaron Held His Peace (Leviticus 10:3).