Child's inheritance is not an Employee's salary

When I was younger we hold young adults’ evenings at a certain church. We had a team, and I ended up being the one who took on the most responsibility because of my hands-on and service-oriented nature. I also gave speeches in which I shared about how God supernaturally changes us as His followers to become more like Jesus. I also talked a lot about God’s healing power to make both our mind and body healthy. People changed got healthier inside out, and several miraculous healings took place among us.

In our group, there was an older guy who found his place by serving as a bass player in the worship band. He was a nice and quiet man who never really expected or asked for anything for himself. After spending some time with us, he asked if he could speak with me after one of our services. He wanted me to pray for him. I gladly agreed! When I asked about his prayer request, his request pierced my heart and greatly challenged me.

He said that he had been struggling with unemployment for a long time and asked me to pray for him to find work, but I was struggling with the same issue. I suffered from unemployment and a certain kind of poverty. I had great faith and trust in God's transforming and healing power for people's internal matters, but when it came to external prayer answers, that was an area of my spiritual life that had not yet been fully surrendered under the Lordship of Jesus—because if it had been, it would already have looked like the reality of Jesus.

Our bassist’s prayer request put me in a difficult spot. Could I truly invest myself in that prayer? In other words, could I really believe in the issue we were praying for, or would I pray just to look good and make him happy? To me, such a prayer would be religious and performance, which would be waste of my time, above all, a waste of his time.

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.”
Matthew 6:5 (NIV)

“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.”
Matthew 6:7 (NIV)

“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”
Hebrews 11:6 (NIV)

I went through a brief inner struggle before finally praying for him. However, it still bothered me because I realized that I was missing something significant. Little did I know that this situation was God’s purpose to start growing something new in me.

The Father began to teach me one of the core principles of the Gospel: how everything He gives us is based on the principle of inheritance.

Just as we will never earn our salvation, we will also never earn any answer to prayer.
But of course! How else could it be? When discussing this, it may be obvious to many of us. We certainly know the right answers at the intellectual level, but when it comes to practice, we begin to see where we really stand on the heart level.

Conversation with the Father

One day, completely unexpectedly, the Father began a conversation with me:

“It’s been difficult for Me to bless you because whenever I try to bless you, you try to ‘repent’ of it”

I didn’t understand why I—or anyone—would repent of something good that we had received?

Over the course of my journey, I’ve learned that the Father reveals truths about us by asking the right kinds of questions. That’s exactly what He did again with me:

“Imagine a situation where I really gave you one million dollars. How would you choose to use this money?”

I started thinking about the question as in a real situation. I realized that in real scenario, I would probably give a significant portion of that sum away. Either to a church or to charity. Alternatively, I might begin making certain good investments with the money.
Either way, I would end up using the money in a way that would justify keeping it, to satisfy my own conscience, rather than viewing it as a completely free gift.

It’s not that giving money wouldn’t be noble or that making an investment wouldn’t be a good idea. Rather the Father was revealing and leading me to understand my true motives. At that time, I really struggled to receive something good, in form of gifts or compliments.
If I received something for free that exceeded my sense of self-worth, I felt the need to “balance the books” by doing something super good in return. Something that I felt would be worthy of the gift, so that I could feel justified in keeping it.
Even though I hadn’t originally aimed to take the gift by stealing it, it could still feel as though holding onto it was like possessing something stolen.

I had never thought of things in this way. The Father was perfectly right in my case!

Next, He began speaking to me about identity. While I hadn’t viewed my salvation as something I earned, He revealed that I had adopted the identity of a hired worker when it came to blessings and prayer answers, rather than seeing myself as a child of God.

In our conversation, God revealed something significant that I would probably remember forever:

“It is illegal to give a child’s inheritance as payment to a servant for work done.”

As we are born again, we become children of God and receive all the rights that a child of God has. However, throughout our entire spiritual life, we will grow into spiritual maturity, which involves shedding the false identities and worldly concepts that have been taught to us, such as being slaves, orphans, or hired workers.

Sadly, some believers and movements even teach these things, sticking to identities that make us seem like hired employees of God. There’s a back-and-forth between either total passivity or performance-centered spiritual lives.

There’s much more to say about these identities, but here I’ll briefly focus on the differences between the hired worker’s and the child of God’s identity.

The significant difference between these two identities are:

1.
A worker is paid a salary as a payment for the work they have done and based on the amount of work they’ve put in.

2
A child receives an inheritance based on their maturity, which determines their ability to bear the inheritance given to them.

As I was having these discussions with the Father, I decided to ask Him what difference it would make how I understood my own identity. He is Almighty God, so couldn’t He still answer my prayer requests regardless of how I viewed myself? His response made more sense than I expected:

“If you retain the identity of a hired worker while I give you your inheritance, you would end up believing that it happened because of your own earned deeds rather than by My grace. Additionally, you would also testify this to everyone else. I would end up reinforcing the wrong kind of identity in you.”

Checkmate! To receive the blessings God promises in the light of the Gospel message, it’s absolutely essential to consciously accept our role and position as children of God.

This revelation completely transformed my prayer life!

I began to dive deeper into understanding how inheritance, heirship, and the principles of inheritance work, rather than just letting them remain as flowery terms in the Bible to make things sound more beautiful.
I also started practicing thinking about, and thus exercise, topics and life situations like a child of God would. I learned to accept—meaning believe—that all of God’s promises are privileges intended also for me. Not because of my own excellence, but because of the accomplishment of Jesus Christ on the cross:

“Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ...”
Romans. 8:17 (NIV)

By spending time in specific Bible passages and in God’s presence, I began to practice seeing myself more through the eyes of the Father. When He looks at me, He sees His Son Jesus in me and His righteousness, loving me with the same love as if I were His only one, even though I know I am part of a larger family.

This began to manifest in my prayer life, and in a relatively short time, in my prayer answers as well. I started receiving many blessings that were necessary for my life and also personally significant, joy-filled blessings. Blessings whose absence I had secretly wondered about for years.
I had never swallowed “theology” about how God’s will was supposedly for us to live in lack of life’s basic needs because I had never found support for such idea in the reality of the New Covenant.

Today I can share several testimonies of how faithful and good the Father has been even in the external matters, concrete prayer answers and blessings. My attitude has also totally changed. These days I’m excited about what good He will do next, and I’m ready to expect, believe, and pray for the next breakthrough in any area where I still don’t see Jesus’ reign in full measure!

“Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.”
Hebrews. 2:8 (KJV)

All glory to Jesus Christ, amen!

Let’s cast off our old identities, which don’t even serve ourselves, let alone the Almighty God. Instead, let’s put on the new identity the Father offers us as His children, and be amazed at all the good He will lead us into as He frees His inheritance to us as His heirs!

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.”
Matthew. 25:34 (NIV)

Follow freedom!!