“Children of God,” Topics and Questions (2025)
Overview
Children of God
God is our loving Heavenly Father. We are literally His spirit daughters and sons. The Apostle Paul taught: “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.” Just as many of us look like our earthly parents, we are created in God’s image: He has a body of flesh and bone like us, and we were made to look like Him.
Because we are all God’s children, every person who was ever born on earth is our spirit brother or sister. And because we are the spirit children of God, we each have inherited the potential to develop His divine qualities. Through the grace of Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice that enables us to overcome our weaknesses, sins, and death, we can become like our Heavenly Father and receive a fulness of joy.
We each had our own identity in heaven. We know, for example, that we were sons and daughters of heavenly parents—that we have an eternal identity as males and females. We were also blessed with different talents and abilities, and we were called to do specific things on earth.
We cannot remember our premortal life, but we lived there with our heavenly parents before we came to earth. Our Father in Heaven knows who we are and what we did before we came here. As part of His plan of salvation for us, He sent us to earth at this time so we could receive a physical body, learn from our own experience to choose good, and grow spiritually.
As we live up to our divine potential as children of God—as we do our best to follow Him and obey the laws and ordinances of the gospel—we will be richly blessed and can also bless the lives of others through our individual talents and personalities. We will also be eternally blessed in the next life when we return to live with Him and with our families again.