A comment by a friend struck me as significant: “I’m watching so many political pundits on cable TV that I think this part of the news industry is beginning to own me!” Maybe any of us could have echoed that kind of comment at some point in our lives. Maybe we’ve felt owned by a sport. Or our job. Or what about being owned by negative states of thought, such as fear, frustration, or anger? In fact, we may not exactly want to be “owned” at all, but all of us desire to feel that we belong—in our family, our church, our country. And yet sometimes even our relation to the things we want to belong to can feel disrupted in a way that is very unsettling. Is there a way to feel a deeper unity that is practical as well as permanently satisfying?

The Bible assures us that we belong to a God that is Love (see I John 4:16). The right kind of oneness is so “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17) that even earthquake-type events can’t shake it. Christ Jesus was the ultimate example of what it means to truly understand that we belong to God. He understood himself to be the very Son of God. And it was this conviction that enabled him to change individual lives and even an entire society—in fact, to alter the very course of human history.

If we have a clear sense of what this true spiritual belonging means, we’ll find a lot more blessing in what it can mean to us humanly. And what isn’t helpful—for instance, addictions, dark thoughts, fantasizing—will lose its grip on us. So here’s a brief description of one way to view this larger question of what it means to belong to God.