The Right to Be Called

She can say Christian. She says it in the ordinary way, at work, without any of the flinching she used to do, and it took her about two years to get there and she is not embarrassed about it anymore.

She can say believer. She can say follower of Jesus, though she thinks it sounds slightly like a brochure. She can say I go to church.

She cannot say daughter.

She has tried. Twice in a house group, when it went round and people were saying what they were to God, she had it lined up and it did not come out, and she said something about being grateful instead and it was fine and nobody noticed.

Once, alone in the car, she said it out loud on purpose, to see, and it came out and then she sat there feeling as though she had said something untrue in an empty vehicle, which is a strange thing to be able to feel about a word.

Aoife is thirty-six and she has been a Christian for nine years, and the difference between those two vocabularies is the whole of what this is about.

Christian is a category. It says what she signed up to, and categories are safe, because a category does not claim anything about how anybody feels about you.

Daughter is a relationship, and a relationship has two ends, and she can only speak for one of them.

If you can own the label and not the relation, hear the question. Why does that word stick?

The verse gives it as a right

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.John 1:12

The word rendered power there is not the word for strength. It is the word for authority, or entitlement, or the right to do something. Some translations put it exactly that way: he gave them the right to become children of God.

That matters enormously for a woman who cannot say a word.

Because a right is issued. It is not a feeling you generate and it is not a claim you make on your own account. Somebody with the standing to do so grants it, and once it is granted, using it is not presumption, it is just use.

Aoife has been treating daughter as a claim she is making about the state of a relationship, and worrying, honestly and carefully, that she is not entitled to make it.

The verse says the entitlement was given, and names who gave it.

You have been given the right to be called His child, and it is already issued, and using a right that has been granted is not a claim, it is use. I am not encouraging a woman to feel differently. It is written in John 1:12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word about entitlement and puts it in front of somebody who has been carefully not overstepping for nine years.

Which end of the relationship she has been checking

And now the specific thing, because Aoife's difficulty is precise and deserves a precise answer.

She said it herself, without realizing it was the whole diagnosis: a relationship has two ends and she can only speak for one of them.

She is confident about her end. She is in it. She has been faithful in an ordinary unremarkable way for nine years and she does not doubt that she means it.

What she cannot verify is His end, and daughter is a word about His end, and so she has been unable to say it without feeling she is asserting something she has not been told.

Except she has been told. That is what the verse is. It is not a description of how she is doing; it is a statement from the other end of the relationship about what He has given. The whole content of John 1:12 is His side of it, in writing, issued.

You have His end of it in writing, and it is already stated by Him, and the word daughter is not your assertion, it is His. Scripture says behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God (1 John 3:1), and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies the other end of a relationship a person cannot verify from inside.

Why the mouth matters here

And there is a practical reason not to leave this at understanding, and it is worth being clear about.

Aoife understands the theology already. She could have written most of the paragraph above herself; she has been a Christian for nine years and she reads.

The problem is not comprehension, it is that the word has never made it out of her mouth in a settled way, and there is a real difference between a thing a person believes and a thing a person can say out loud without their throat doing something.

That is not a failure of faith. It is what happens to a word that has never been used. It gets stiff, the way an unused joint does, and the only thing that loosens it is use.

You are able to say it and it is already true whether it comes out easily or not, and the stiffness in the word is not a report on the fact. It is written that He gave them the right to become the children of God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who loosens a word in a person's mouth by having them use it.