Heir by Position, Pauper by Practice #1

Monday, January 5, 2026

“Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Galatians 4:7 KJV).

Saints, we in Christ are spiritual winners and heirs by position, but we can choose to be spiritual losers and paupers by practice!

Once, a preacher was staying in a faraway city when he spotted a pitiful little article in the local newspaper. Police were attempting to locate a missing person, an educated man who was to inherit half of his father’s multimillion-dollar estate. Authorities had looked in the alleys, bars, cheap hotels, and homeless shelters to no avail. No one could find him to give him what was rightfully his. The preacher returned home and, at church, used this story as an illustration in one of his sermons. Afterwards, a woman came up to him and stated, “You know, I am from that city. They eventually found that man—dead in an entranceway on a cold autumn night.” Indeed, beloved, as difficult as it is to fathom, that rich heir perished in loneliness, homelessness, and pennilessness!

Such dreadful events really took place several decades ago. There is a spiritual parallel, one that has been happening among God’s people every day for nearly 20 (!) centuries (!). Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ seldom think and act according to the identity and wealth they have in Him. This travesty is due to the rampant Bible ignorance that natural-man thinking and denominationalism have generated and sustained. Unless we start using God’s Word God’s way, and believe it in our heart, we have neither a hope nor a prayer in the world of ever understanding and enjoying our Christian identity.

Go back to the aforementioned true story of the homeless heir of his wealthy father’s estate. Though that son lived (and even died!) in poverty and squalor, that did not take away from the fact he was a multimillionaire by birth! He decided not to take advantage of those rights and privileges he legally had, but his wealth by nature was independent of that poor decision in practice. So it is with victorious Christian living or acceptable Christian service….