What Does It Mean to Be a Child of God? — MacDonald on Sonship
⏱ 14 min read
There is a sentence the Christian woman has been hearing since childhood — you are a child of God — and it tends to sit, by middle adulthood, in a strange middle place. She knows it is true. She has not, somehow, lived inside it. The phrase belongs to the Sunday-school felt board and the worship-song lyric, and it has not been carried, intact, into the actual weight of the marriage, the parenting, the work, the years she has spent quietly wondering whether the daughter-of-God identity she was given at seven still applies to the woman who shows up at the bathroom mirror at forty-three. The doctrine is intact. The felt sense has gone thin.
This is the gap George MacDonald spent his life writing into. The nineteenth-century Scottish minister whose Unspoken Sermons — three small volumes of plain Aberdeenshire English about the Fatherhood of God — formed C. S. Lewis (Lewis later said MacDonald baptised his imagination) was not a systematic theologian. He was a pastor who had buried four of his own children and spent the rest of his life convinced that the question what does it mean to be a child of God could only be answered by a soul who had let the Father be the kind of Father MacDonald believed Him to be: not the distant magistrate of the catechisms, but the actual, near, particular Father whose love for the daughter is older than her name. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries a similar slow form into daily companionship, if you would like a place to take this practice after the article. For now — read slowly. The question deserves a slower reading than the felt-board version.
MacDonald’s answer to what does it mean to be a child of God is not a list of privileges. It is a relocation of the centre of gravity. He believes the daughter-of-God identity is not primarily about what you receive from the Father but about whom you belong to, and the belonging-to is the substance of the identity. The privileges follow from the belonging. The belonging is the thing.
The first passage: be thou my home
“Be thou the well by which I lie and rest; Be thou my tree of life, my garden ground; Be thou my home, my fire, my chamber blest, My book of wisdom, loved of all the best; Oh, be my friend, each day still newer found, As the eternal days and nights go round!”
— George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is MacDonald in verse — Diary of an Old Soul is a year of seven-line stanzas, one for each morning — and the language is doing something the doctrine alone cannot do. Notice the verbs. Be thou. That is the whole prayer. The Christian woman who has been asking what does it mean to be a child of God has often been looking for the answer in a list of attributes — I am loved, I am chosen, I am redeemed — and the list, while true, has not given her the felt relation. MacDonald’s prayer is the opposite of a list. It is a request that the Father be something for the soul. Be thou the well. Be thou the tree. Be thou my home, my fire, my chamber. Each image is a small place where a daughter actually lives. The well is where she drinks. The tree is where she rests. The home is where she returns at the end of the day. The fire is where she warms herself. The chamber is where she sleeps. (For the woman who is at the beginning of this and does not have a page to write the first sentence on, how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin is the gentle starting point.)
What does it mean to be a child of God? MacDonald, in seven lines of plain devotional verse, is answering: it means having a Father who is your home. Not a list of things He has done for you. The being-home of Him in your actual daily life. The well you draw from. The tree you lean against. The room you sleep in. The fire you stretch your hands toward at the end of a hard day.
The modern Christian woman has often been taught the doctrine of sonship without the practice of homing. She has been told the legal status — adopted, made a daughter, given the Spirit of adoption that cries Abba — and the legal status has been true and necessary. MacDonald is saying it is not the whole of the identity. The legal status is the floor. The home is the room you actually live in. And the room is a place you enter slowly, by asking Him daily to be the things the prayer names. Be thou my home. The asking is the practice. The being-home of Him is His response.
Oh, be my friend, each day still newer found. That last line is the working theology of the passage. Each day still newer found. The relationship between a daughter and her Father is not a one-time legal arrangement; it is a daily new finding. Yesterday’s experience of Him is not enough for today. Today’s experience of Him will not be sufficient for tomorrow. The being-a-child-of-God is a daily small re-discovery, and the new finding is what makes it alive rather than static. The catechism answer is static. MacDonald’s answer is daily new.
The second passage: the joy that holiness is
“This is, even here in the wilderness, ‘the Highway of Holiness: the ransomed of the Lord shall come with singing; the redeemed shall walk there; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness.’ Do all God’s children understand this? that holiness is just another name, the true name, that God gives for happiness; that it is indeed unutterable blessedness to know that God does make us holy, that our holiness is in Christ, that Christ’s Holy Spirit is within us. There is nothing so attractive as joy: have believers understood it that this is the joy of the Lord — to be holy? Or is not the idea of strain, and sacrifice, and sighing, of difficulty and distance so prominent, that the thought of being holy has hardly ever made the heart glad?”
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons
This is the passage that will, if you let it, gently re-arrange your sense of what it means to be a child of God. Read it once, then read it again, slowly.
MacDonald is asking a question most Christian women have never been asked. Do all God’s children understand this? that holiness is just another name, the true name, that God gives for happiness? The question is rhetorical in form but pastoral in intent. He has been observing, for forty years of preaching, that the believers in his congregation associate holiness with strain, and sacrifice, and sighing, of difficulty and distance. The phrase is exact. It names what the modern Christian woman often associates with holiness as well: the strain of being good enough, the sacrifice of the small pleasures, the sighing of the long uphill walk, the felt distance of the God she has been told is near.
MacDonald is overturning the association. Holiness is just another name, the true name, that God gives for happiness. The child of God is not, in MacDonald’s account, a daughter living under a regime of strain. She is a daughter being made happy — in the deep, settled, biblical sense of happy that has nothing to do with the surface mood and everything to do with the steady undercurrent of being held in love. The verses MacDonald is quoting — the ransomed of the Lord shall come with singing; the redeemed shall walk there; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads — describe the actual condition of the daughter who has begun to walk the Highway of Holiness. She is not straining. She is singing. The joy is upon her head, like a crown, not chased after in vain.
Have believers understood it that this is the joy of the Lord — to be holy? That is the question to keep near the page. The modern Christian woman has often been working hard for a holiness she felt distant from, and the working-for has been exhausting because the holiness was framed as a destination across a long sad road. MacDonald is gently reversing the geography. The holiness is not a destination. It is the daily small joy of being a child of a Father who is making the daughter into Himself, slowly, over years, and the joy is the inside of the process, not the prize at the end of it. The being-made-holy is the gladness. The strain has been an unnecessary addition.
This is the line that, for many readers, has done the slow work that no list of doctrinal attributes ever could. There is nothing so attractive as joy. MacDonald is saying that the daughter of God whose holiness is becoming her happiness is the most attractive thing in the room — not in the worldly sense, but in the deep biblical sense of drawing others toward the Father by the visible gladness of being His. The Christian women who have shaped you most, if you stop and think about it, were not the ones who looked most strained. They were the ones in whom holiness and happiness had become the same thing. (For the woman who has been told her need for rest is itself a failure of devotion, what the Bible says about self-care walks the scriptural grounds underneath MacDonald’s reversal.)
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow joy-formation. A short passage each day, room for the small re-finding of the Father — each day still newer found — and no demand to perform the daughter-identity you are slowly settling into.
A somatic for the daughter-of-God identity
Pause here. MacDonald’s vocabulary has a body to it, and the body is where the felt sense of sonship usually arrives before the mind catches up.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat to the floor — the small reminder that you have a body, that the body is where the identity lives. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders lower by a small amount. Now, on the next breath, do not think the words but rather receive them, slowly, in the quiet of the chest: I am His daughter. I am held. He is my home. Each phrase on its own exhale. Not performed. Not believed-against-the-evidence. Received, slowly, as the simple report of what is already true and what your body has been holding itself stiff against feeling.
Do this three times. Then let the awareness rest, for a moment, on the recognition that the daughter-of-God identity is not earned by the rehearsal. It is being slowly received, in the body, of what was true before you began. The waist relaxes a little. The jaw lowers. The breath goes deeper. That is the body learning what the mind has already known. (For a slow daily companion to this kind of body-and-soul reading, how to bible journal for beginners is the gentle introduction, and for the younger reader figuring her way in, a journal book for the young woman figuring out her faith is the matched starting page.)
The third passage: the Father’s love means it
“But how shall I bless Thee for the lesson of this day, that there is not a loss or sorrow, not a pain or care, not a temptation or trial, but Thy love also means it, and makes it, to be a help in working out the holiness of Thy people. Through each Thou drawest to Thyself, that they may taste how, in accepting Thy Will of Love, there is blessing and deliverance. Thou knowest how often I have looked upon the circumstances and the difficulties of this life as hindrances. Oh, let them all, in the light of Thy holy purpose to make us partakers of Thy Holiness, in the light of Thy Will and Thy Love, from this hour be helps. Let, above all, the path of Thy Blessed Son, proving how suffering is the discipline of a Father’s love, and surrender the secret of holiness, and sacrifice the entrance to the Holiest of all, be so revealed that in the power of His Spirit and His grace that path may become mine.”
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons
This is the passage that goes furthest. It is also the passage that, more than any other in the Unspoken Sermons, will do quiet work on the woman who reads it slowly across a hard season. Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
MacDonald is making a claim the modern reader will find almost too tender to hold. There is not a loss or sorrow, not a pain or care, not a temptation or trial, but Thy love also means it, and makes it, to be a help. The claim is not that loss is good in itself. The claim is that the Father — the actual living Father whose daughter you are — does not let any sorrow in your life occur outside His love. The sorrow, while it is happening, is also being meant by His love to be the means by which you are drawn nearer to Him. The pain is not the contradiction of His love. It is, in MacDonald’s account, the discipline of His love — the slow, particular, painful means by which the daughter is being shaped into the kind of woman who can bear the weight of being a daughter of God.
This is the part that most needs the slow reading. The Christian woman has often been told that her hard seasons are also the work of God, and the telling has often felt like a doctrinal flourish offered too quickly at the wrong moment by the well-meaning person who has not actually walked through what she is walking through. MacDonald is not offering a doctrinal flourish. He has buried four of his own children. He is writing from inside the actual experience of long sorrow, and his claim is not that the sorrow stopped being sorrow but that he came to recognise, slowly, that the Father’s love had been at work in every part of it — not despite the sorrow but through it, drawing him into a nearness to the Father he could not have reached by any other road.
Thou knowest how often I have looked upon the circumstances and the difficulties of this life as hindrances. That phrase is the modern Christian woman’s daily prayer rephrased in nineteenth-century English. You have been treating the difficult things as obstacles to your spiritual life — as if your real relationship with God were the thing that would happen if the difficulties would only quiet down. MacDonald is saying, with the authority of one who has buried his own children, that the difficulties are not hindrances. They are helps. They are the means. The being-a-child-of-God is happening inside the difficulties, not waiting for the difficulties to be over.
Suffering is the discipline of a Father’s love. Surrender is the secret of holiness. Sacrifice is the entrance to the Holiest of all. Three short sentences that compress a lifetime of pastoral observation. The being-a-child-of-God is not the absence of suffering. It is the slow, daily, sometimes painful learning that the Father whose daughter you are is the one whose love is shaping you through everything — including the parts of your life you would have asked Him to spare you from. The wall art version of child of God does not include this part. The actual identity does. MacDonald is the writer who teaches you, gently, to hold both.
What this identity will feel like over a year
MacDonald is explicit that the daughter-of-God identity he is naming is entered slowly. The first month feels like learning a new vocabulary. The third month, the vocabulary begins to feel less foreign. By the end of the first year, the woman who has been daily asking be thou my home, be thou my friend, be thou the well by which I lie and rest has moved her centre of gravity. The list-of-attributes version of being a child of God has been quietly replaced by the being-at-home-with-Him version. The strain has lowered. The holiness has begun to be experienced not as distance but as the gentle near work of a Father who is making a daughter — slowly, patiently, with love that means every part of her life — into the woman she was always meant to be.
The hard days will still come. They will land in a soul whose Father is the home, the well, the fire, the chamber, the friend each day still newer found. The waves will still come. The daughter will be held differently. (For the sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series, see who am I in Christ — Murray on abiding identity and what is my identity in Christ — Owen on the indwelling Christ.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day, a short passage and room for the small re-finding MacDonald names — the daily new discovery of a Father who is your home, your fire, your friend each day still newer found.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries MacDonald’s slow vocabulary — be thou my home, the highway of holiness, the Father whose love means every part — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question what does it mean to be a child of God is, at last, ready to stop being doctrinally answered and start being daily lived.
