Adoption

Today we're dealing with the next part in our story of the redemption story, and that is the doctrine of adoption, or the doctrine of God cherishing. We had a look over the last few weeks of God calling us from the beginning of the well, not of time, before time, from the before the foundation of the world. In fact, Ephesians 1 says that He has drawn some to Himself. We've seen that in regeneration. We are born again in the process where God makes us alive to Himself.

He renews our hearts. We have seen in week three that God converts our hearts through repentance and faith in Him. We have then seen that when that happens, we are justified in His eyes, that through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, placing our faith in Him, we are made right with God. Our penalty has been taken upon Jesus Christ, and we have a right standing with God. And today, we see the, I guess, the next process, the next part of what happens.

And for me, this is the most beautiful part in our story of redemption, the story of God adopting us into His family. It has actually been one of the greatest influences on my Christian walk, in my Christian journey, understanding what it means for God, this holy, powerful creator of the universe, to love me like a dad loves his son. For some of us here, however, and I only realised this sort of more recently, for some of us, this is actually a really hard teaching, understanding that we have a heavenly father who loves us. I read a story of a man, or actually heard a story of a man who became a Christian and found this one of the hardest teachings to accept. And the reason this was is because he had a dad, an earthly dad, who used to beat him severely, abused him.

And what complicated the situation worse was that this father proclaimed to be a Christian. He said his dad was rough as guts, would get drunk and beat him, and would have a tattoo of the cross on the arm that was beating him. And so you can imagine the confusion of, on the one hand, hearing this dad professing to be a Christian who knew the father love of God and yet was the worst dad imaginable, and then coming to hear a pastor teach that God loves you like a father loves a son. You can imagine that this would have been so difficult to understand, and so for some of us here, we might actually wrestle a little bit with this. But I wanna tell you this morning that God's love is not like any father's love, even an earthly father's love.

It is the most pure love that we can understand. And so this morning, we're going to just explore a little bit of what the Bible has to say about this metaphor, this image of God's love being like a father's love. If we start right back in the beginning, we look at the story of Genesis, and we saw that God lovingly created the first humans, Adam and Eve. And He created them in His image. And so from the very beginning, we have this image or this idea that God created us to be in a parent child relationship of some sort.

Adam bore a relationship to God, the Bible says. Yet when Adam and Eve sinned, they broke this fellowship, they broke this relationship with God, and they were removed from God's presence, lest they would be destroyed by the holiness of God. And so in essence, what we see, what happened in the fall of Adam and Eve is that they were orphaned, that they were alienated from their God who had created them. And from them and through them, the whole human race followed that course. We were orphaned, and we were alienated from God.

And yet, the Bible says it's much worse than just being orphaned. Our plight became such that we were seeking to create this relationship again somehow, and we looked to every possible solution in order to build a God child relationship, a father son relationship, a father daughter relationship, that we turned to every other thing, which is called idolatry, and we try to find our worth in that. We sold ourselves to slavery, to sin, Romans 6:20 says. Our hearts were darkened towards God, and we wanted a king for our soul. And ever since, the Bible says, the human race has not intimately known God as a father in the purest sense.

And yet, even though the relationship was broken at that fall, we also see very quickly how God goes about trying to restore this relationship. And we see it primarily as an adoptive love. You see, much, many, many years later, but only a few chapters later in Genesis, Genesis 12, God comes to a man called Abraham and says to Abraham, I want to take you, and I want to bless you and make a nation out of you, and I want to be your God. I want to be your father, and I want Israel to be like a son to me, He says. And so we see that God has a plan of rebuilding this relationship very, very early.

And so that is the story of how this adoption process happened. Much later again, God made that adoption possible ultimately when He sent His son Jesus to the earth to restore that relationship. And we're going to unfold that, how that happened more, I guess, more succinctly in Galatians, chapter 3, verse 26 today. So if we're gonna read from that, Galatians 3:26 to 4:7. This is sort of the summary in the New Testament of how that looks, how that works.

Galatians 3:26. This is Paul the apostle writing to the church in Galatia. Paul says, you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.

If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. What I am saying is that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. He is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. But when the time had fully come, God sent His son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law that we might receive the full rights of sons.

Because you are sons, God sent the spirit of His son into our hearts, the spirit who calls out, Abba, father. So you are no longer a slave but a son. And since you are a son, God has made you also an heir. Now there's a lot happening in this passage, so hopefully I can explain it here. But we see already in that the reference back to Abraham, to God's first promise that I will be like a father to your descendants, Abraham.

Now we often hear people say that all the people on the earth are God's people. All people on earth are God's people or are children of God. However, the idea that all are children of God is actually not found in the Bible anywhere, that all people are God's children. Now there is a sense, like I said before, that since we carry the image of God because we were created in His image, we are the offspring of God, but there is a special bond that is created through faith in Jesus Christ. And the Bible in the New Testament refers to the word adoption several times, and the Greek literally means to place as a son.

To place as a son. Now we see that here. Verse 26 in Galatians 3 says, you are all sons through faith in Christ Jesus. You have all become sons through faith in Christ Jesus. Now, it sort of kicks, I don't know about you, but it does for me.

I'm a Gen Y, twenty first century kid. It kicks back to me that why doesn't he use the word daughters here? Why just sons? You know, that's not politically very correct. It sounds gender insensitive, and they argue some people argue, wouldn't it be better that Paul had said we become supporters of God?

That would be more politically correct today, but it actually misses the point of what Paul is trying to say here. Some time ago, a woman whose story I read explained this in a new light that really helped me. She said she comes from a non Western background, a traditional I think it was Middle Eastern background. And she explained that in her family, which was also a very traditional family, her family had made provisions for the son to inherit the estate and the honour. In essence, the family said that he's the son and you're the girl, and that's just the way it was.

Now, she became a Christian eventually, and she said that she was studying this passage on adoption in Paul's writing, and she suddenly realised that the apostle was making a revolutionary claim. Paul lived in a traditional culture just like she did. He was living in a place where daughters were considered, in many ways, second class citizens. When Paul said out of his own traditional culture that we are all sons in Christ, however, he was saying that there is no second class citizen anymore. When you give your life to Christ and you become a Christian, you receive all the benefits that a son would enjoy in that traditional culture, which means the honour, which means the blessings, which means the inheritance.

Now as a white male, I never felt this exclusion before. And as a result, I didn't see the sweetness of this passage in this way before. I didn't recognise all the beauty of God's revolutionary promise that raises us to the highest honour by adopting us as firstborn sons. That's the first thing that we have to remember. That sonship means we receive God's honour and glory.

According to Paul, sonship is a gift of grace. It is not natural. It's an adoptive sonship. We are made sons through the work of the unique son, Jesus Christ, because He came. We just read in verse 5, to redeem those under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons.

So the gift of sonship to God becomes ours, not through being born, not through the fact that we have an image somehow related to God, but that we are reborn. Remember, we read about that a few weeks ago. John 1:12 and 13 says this, but to all who did receive Jesus Christ, all who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, born not of natural descent, nor of a human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. It is something new. It is something different.

Do you see why this is so important, however, for us? What we see in verse 6 is a declarative statement. You are sons. You are sons, Paul says. In the ancient world, if we were looking to adoption, most cases would be that a wealthy childless couple, who weren't able to have children of their own would actually go to one of the slaves that they may have owned and would have adopted one of the young slaves as a son or a daughter into their family.

And in this process, in this great stroke of fortune, this slave ceased to be a slave but became an heir with full rights and responsibilities of being a son or a daughter. Slaves, Paul is saying here, slaves are bound to work for their master, and we were once mastered by sin. We were once mastered by Satan. Slaves are bound to work for that master, but sons, firstborn sons, are free to love their father. And so Paul makes clear that our stories before our conversion to Christ is that we were slaves, but now that we have a father.

Gerald Bray, the author of God is Love, writes this. Now the image of adoption here is particularly well chosen because it illustrates in a way nothing else can the relationship of us to God in Christ. He says, as an adopted child is not the natural offspring of his adopted parents, neither is his or her presence in the household an accident. It is very deliberately chosen. He says his parents, their parents have deliberately chosen them and made them a member of their family. And this child has been brought into the family by an act of will that is sealed, that is testified to in love and self sacrifice.

It is a choice. When I lived in New Zealand for a while, we had great friends, the Steencamps, Steencamp family, and they're a South African family, and they had five kids, but two of the boys were our age. And so, yeah, we would, you know, go and do fantastic things together, naughty things sometimes, but usually good things. One time we were camping out the back. We had a forest that sort of edged onto our property, and we decided to go and stay there in a tent one night.

And, as you do when you're that age, we started telling each other ghost stories or scary stories, you know, to try and see which one was the scariest. And, we, you know, we went around and we told these stories, and then at one point, our friend Albert, and Albert was a character, He decided to tell this very scary story that explained that we would tonight, in our sleep, one of us would be adopted by aliens. And we were thinking, adopted by aliens? Like, what does that mean? And then we realised that he actually meant abducted by aliens.

And so, like, once we figured that out, the whole scary atmosphere was ruined because we just broke out into this roaring laughter. Because what he intended to be really scary, being taken away against your will, abducted by aliens, turned into this lovely beautiful picture of loving alien parents coming to take you to be theirs. Because to be abducted is scary. It goes against your will. It is something that creates a prisoner out of you.

But to be adopted is to be loved. It is to be cherished. It is to be accepted. And many pastors and theologians will tell you that the doctrine of adoption is the highest privilege we have as Christians. It is the centre point of our faith.

It is our greatest joy and our greatest comfort in life as Christians now. Because as Christians, we believe that one day, we will be transformed, and we will be renewed, and we will come to God in we will be transformed into the likeness of His son, Jesus Christ. But that's in the future when God's kingdom is fully established. Right now, our greatest joy, our greatest comfort is knowing that we have been adopted, however, into this family. The minute you become a Christian, the Bible says you have intimacy of relationship.

And we see in verse 6 just how intimate this relationship is. Verse 6 in Galatians 4 says that through repentance and faith in Christ, our spirit is being filled with the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, and it joins us with God in a familial way, a way that is like family. The spirit, Paul says in our heart, cries out, Abba, father. And this is the greatest and most amazing truth that we enter into an unconditional relationship with God whereby we have an incredible, shocking, astounding intimacy with this God. Our adoption means that we are loved like Christ is loved by God.

We are loved like God the father loves Jesus. We are honoured like He is honoured no matter what. Your circumstances cannot hinder, in other words, the promise. In fact, your bad circumstances will only help you understand and even claim the beauty of that promise. The more you live out who you have become in Christ, the more you become like Him in reality.

And Paul is not promising here a better life circumstance, but Paul is promising a far better life. He is promising you a life of deep, deep understanding and acceptance. He's promising you a joyful soul. He's promising you a life of humility when a world of pride is seeking to devour itself. God is promising you a life of nobility.

Consider it this way. Last week, we spoke about justification, and justification and adoption go hand in hand. This is why you have to have eight weeks on this to explain because it's all so interrelated. But on the one hand, we have justification where God erased our sins and removed all the legal impediments between us and Him. Our penalty was dealt with in Christ.

In a courtroom setting, a person, however, may be acquitted by a judge of all charges against him, but this acquittal does not lead to that person becoming a member of the judge's family. But Christianity does not only serve a God who is just, but a God who is a father and loves. So when God justifies us and He forgives us our sin, He goes one step further and He also says that we are His child. And He sends His spirit into our hearts as a testament to this fact, to prove to us that we are His. In ancient cultures, again, in Paul's culture, with this transaction of adoption, I'm sure it was a lot more a lot less complicated than our adoption system now.

But as part of an adoption process, they had to have a witness of this transaction taking place. They had to have someone that says, yes, this has happened. This is legal. This is binding. Right?

Paul uses the Holy Spirit as this witness. Paul uses the Holy Spirit as this witness. The spirit of God confirms and authenticates, and that gives us a deep seated persuasion and identity as sons and daughters of the living God. In verse 6, the word that it uses of the Holy Spirit crying out, Abba, father, to cry out is a loud, guttural, earnest cry. And based on the construction of the sentence here in Greek, it seems that the spirit is the one who cries out on behalf of us or better yet through us to the father.

It is the indwelling spirit of God that teaches the believer to come to God as Abba. Now you may have also heard this before in a sermon or something like that, how Abba theologians believe is an Aramaic expression that was derived originally from the first syllables uttered by a baby. And in Zulu, we have baba for dad. In English or Afrikaans, we have papa. Mama is the first first words, first construction that a baby can make.

And so that's sort of the adopted word for mum or dad. Abba is a personal, very personal intimate use of the word dad. It is a term of familial intimacy, endearment used by children towards their fathers. Moreover, Abba is the term that Jesus used for God the father. The unique son of God used it to address His heavenly father, God the father.

And there is something, friends, shockingly intimate about this. It means that we can approach this astounding God, this magnificent, majestic God, the maker of heaven and earth, as a little child running towards daddy to grab him by his leg. While we have been acquitted by God for our sin through Christ, we now do not serve simply a distant, powerful God or judge. There is free access to a loving father through Jesus Christ. And our adoption is testified to in our moment of prayer.

The father is always accessible to the child and is never too preoccupied to listen to what they have to say. Because of the personal nature of this relationship, prayer, our prayer life, our relationship with God, how we think about God, how we come to God, is spontaneous. It can be spontaneous. It can be free. It can be heartfelt.

It can be honest. We know how that looks, don't we? Most of the time, if you've had children or you've seen children with mums and dads, most of the time, a little baby, a little Elijah doesn't have to go and prepare his speech to come to Wilson and say, you know, I want to play with my toys or I saw something scary, or whatever. They don't have to think in their minds what they have to say. It is open.

It is liberal. It is from the heart. It is spontaneous. Far too much we stand back at a distance, and we are formal. But the little child rushes in and grabs a hold of the father and says, this is what I'm going through.

This is how much I love you. This is how much I care for you. The child has a right that no one else has. It is intuitive. It is instinctive.

And friends, I wanna say that this morning, this truth is the most profound truth in Christianity. There is no other philosophy. There is no other spirituality. There is no other world religion that sees God, the creator of heaven and earth, the reason for our existence in the light of a father with a child. This is what makes Christianity for me so distinctive.

It means that we are free to take our problems and our desires to Him without fear of being ignored or rejected. We also know that we have a father who loves us and therefore acts in our best interest. We do not have a God who serves out there, working things for His own purposes and His own glory, devoid of His children, can be fickle at times, can hurt at times so that He may be satisfied. No. This is a God, like Romans 8:28 says, that works all things for the good of His children, those who love Him.

So we see a total experience that embraces every aspect of our lives, filling us up with a knowledge of peace, knowing that we are loved, and that we can rest in His presence knowing that we are safe in these everlasting arms of His that hold us. So adoption is a work of God's grace by which He receives as His very own children who have put their faith in Christ and through His work. And there's no greater joy. There is no more liberating a thought than knowing that no matter what we have done, we may, through the empowering of His spirit, come to Him and say, Abba, father. And God will see us as His kids, and God will love us.

Even the best fathers in the world cannot compare to the perfection, to the provision, to the care and the comfort that God provides for us as we know Him. And I really hope that that man who struggled with understanding what God's heavenly father love looks like was able to see that his bad relationship was his dad, but God is his father. Let's pray. Heavenly father, we pray that this truth that we often can so easily look over or use in clichés, even addressing you as father in our prayers. But this truth of your fatherhood, that this intimacy of being able to address you as Abba, may seep into every aspect of our lives.

And that even in those moments of prayer where we doubt or whether we don't understand or we fear that we may not speak to you in a certain way or we may not come to you with certain needs, father, that's in those things, your spirit may confirm in us again that we are your children, that you love us more than we can imagine or understand. Father, for some of us who do wrestle with this, I pray that we may understand this for ourselves and understand you and your love more fully. For some of us, Lord, who are challenged as fathers, may we use this as an example of what it means to be a good father. May we become great dads because of this, knowing that we are loved by an even greater dad. Father, for reconciliation perhaps that needs to take place between us and our fathers, I also pray for strength in that, knowing, Lord, that there is grace, that there is redemption even for our fathers.

I pray, Lord, that as we come to grips with this, as we understand ourselves as firstborn sons with an inheritance that can neither spoil nor fade kept in heaven for us. I pray, Lord, that this may become our great joy and peace. Thank you, Lord, that we do not have to fear you. Thank you, Lord, that we do not have to hide from you. Thank you, Lord, that we do not have to even rationalise our shortcomings before you.

Father, seal this in our hearts. By your spirit, we pray. In Jesus' name. Amen.