“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.”  Galatians 4:6

Let’s take time together to discover what it means to be God’s sons.  Let’s be free from slavery, and free from the life of the orphan.

Who Are the Children of God?

In order to set the stage for our discussion we must first understand, “Who are the children of God?” Well, in one sense we might easily say everyone is a child of God because we can see their very life has come from God. The intellectuals in Athens held to this point when Paul addressed them in Acts 17, and he used this idea to reinforce their understanding that God was our creator (as they said “we are His offspring”) and was not something made of our hands or a religious invention. We can ascribe the word “children” to be synonymous with “created by” in this sense, but we should not stop there. If we do stop there, then we can come to a quick conclusion: “If God did create us, and we are like his children, then what else is there to be concerned about? After all God could not abandoned His own, nor is there any need to consider religion, judgement, or the after-life.” We can see how easily this sentiment could grow strength, especially in our modern intellectual climate where metaphysical truths and absolute ideas about God or eternity are laughed off as archaic, bankrupt inventions.

What if we simply push a little further and define “child” as something more than just a biological emanation. What if child is more than just a biological match to chromosome chain? What if children of God implies something passionate, something beautifully relational. After all, what we all love about the word children is in the joy of finding our own features, our own heart, and our own loves in the faces of our little ones. This, we think, is a deeper way to understand what it means to carry the DNA of God. What we really mean by DNA is the code of life–the architecture of being–the identity of the parents being found in the life of the child. The way a parent’s true DNA is imparted to a child is not in the act of sex, it is in the act of ongoing parenting. Parenting requires a life journey of sharing, caring, challenging, receiving, and all the beautiful little moments in between where parent and child live together. Now, if we see it this way…who are God’s children?

We think it is clear that when we say, “These are my children” as we look at our own kids, it is our way of expressing a deep connection that implies a continuing lineage, a sharing of deep, personal values, and a certain pride that the children are in agreement. This is they way the word is most commonly used in the Scripture, and in real life today. “You are my children” implies that I claim you as your parent, and you act like you belong to me. It is a two way affirmation. “My little children” as John would say implies both a deep affection and an affirmation that “you act like my children–you reflect by you love and life that you belong to me.” Yes, it may be a bit of a generalization, but it still reinforces the most obvious point and that is that our God is the God of relationship, not the God of creative machinery.

To better underline this use of parent/child language we find examples in the Bible where being created by God is not enough to secure the affectionate identity as His child. Look in Deuteronomy 32:5 as the writer tragically states , “They have acted corruptly toward Him; to their shame they are no longer his children, but a warped and crooked generation.” They did not reflect His DNA so they were not really His children. In the Old Testament we find that not all peoples of the earth were called God’s children because He was placing his lineage, will, and identity into the sons of Abraham, uniquely. He did not call the Babylonians or the Egyptions His children in this sense, because they were not walking together in a parent/child relationship. Jesus makes it clear, however, that even this bloodline claim was not enough to claim the title “child of God” if they did not reflect His parenting. He puts this to the Pharisees in John 8 when they argued: “Abraham is our father,” they answered.” “If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do the things Abraham did. As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the things your own father does.” “We are not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only Father we have is God himself.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire.”

So, if we are not all God’s children in this more meaningful way, then how are we to, first, become God’s children, and, second, how do we view those around us in the world through this perspective. Can we see some not included in this definition without diminishing their value as people created and loved by God? Some have chosen, we believe, poor answers to these two questions, and we hope to clear the air and establish some better direction in the rest of this article.

Homeless Orphans

Unbelievers might be understood as homeless orphans. An orphan is a child who is separated from his parents. An orphan is still a child and really does have parents, but in the reality of life he is not in relationship with his parents. In our spiritual journey we might be able to say that all people are God’s children, but we might not be able to say in the reality of life they are in relationship with Him as a parent, and, so, they live as orphans. Since an orphan is a child without a connection to its parents then our first question is, “What reconnects a person to their heavenly Father?”

Remember, we believe that the Father planned, equipped, and designed each and every person for an eternal purpose before they were born. He did all of this planning and equipping out of His great love for them. Jeremiah 29:11 says “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” And Psalm 139 exemplifies his plans for us that were formed well before we were when it says “My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” So God loves all of us, and has a great plan to be with us, but we must face the fact that we have been disconnected from the Father and have found ourselves alone, out on the street, looking for a reconnection with the Divine. We see this about Us–the human race–in every culture and every religion throughout history. We state this broad and easy to see fact about humanity to set the stage for verses like:

John 3:16   “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Romans 3:22-23 “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…”

1 John 2:2 “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world”

Peter 3:18 “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”

We can see in these simple verses that God loves everyone the same, and Christ died for absolutely everyone, but we also see that there is a two way relationship being established. It follows in perfect harmony with our understanding of a parent/child relationship where both child and parent have to submit to and love one another. And, now to make the Good News of Jesus perfectly clear: when we can’t find a way to reach out and reconnect with God on our own God reaches out to us and through Jesus makes a beautiful way. A way to be adopted! That’s right, God our Father wants to adopt us into His Family and call us His own and enjoy the delight of hearing us say, “God, You are my Dad!” John 1:12 gives us a clear picture of our transformational requirement: “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” This transformation is not automatic by natural birth. There is a spiritual new birth required. People who have not received Jesus Christ as their way back to God and who haven’t believed in His name are homeless orphans. Orphans wander. We need a Father. We need a family. God’s plan of salvation is all about this adoption into a Family! Ephesians 1:5 says “he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.” And the unique beauty of the Gospel is that Jesus does it all when we think of our restoration of ourselves with God: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near through the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13), but we simply have to “receive” and “believe” (John 1:12) which is a beautiful relational picture of what God really desires–intimate relationship. According to Scripture this is only accomplished through Christ alone.

Orphans in the Orphanage

OK, so when we receive the love of Christ is we are adopted in the family of God and we become related to other family members as brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, uncles, etc. However, and unfortunately, most of us enter a form of religion where we gather together in buildings and organizations that we call church. By the way, Jesus never called a building or an organization a church, and neither did any of the apostles and prophets. I wonder why we do that?

An orphanage is a place where children can be brought off the street to live together and be nurtured by a team of people who are functioning in some way as surrogate parents–but mostly as managers of a crowd. Now in an orphanage we normally find people who don’t know who there parents are and so they must live this way in order to find some nurture and some care. We can see that the world is full of institutions, social forms and fraternities, religious systems, and political identities that serve as orphanages. These orphanages are places where the fatherless can find some sense of belonging. This is, tragically, where many of the children of God get trapped as we try and carry our old ways in the new ways of family. A voice comes to us and says, “Yes, God has adopted you just as the Spirit testifies in you, but your only hope for family is really to just live and learn inside of this institution…this is the orphanage where you must grow and find make your own family…there is nothing more.” This is where we make this note: We call organizations and fellowships “churches” because we are, at first, most comfortable identifying them as our family, rather than the actual people of God we are connecting to.

The orphanage is way better than homelessness, but it is nowhere near a real family.

The tradition of church-institutional is often to teach us to get accustomed to the orphanage life and learn to call it “family.” Though our hearts are crying out for true family where we know God as Father and one another as sister, uncle, father, son, etc., many of us find our relational surroundings to be filled with teachers, fellow journeymen, meetings, projects, managers, directors…all of which build in us a tragic way of viewing this world of management and crowd control as our Christian family. Isn’t it a tragic idea to think of those who have spiritual family still choosing to live in an orphanage? Yet, we see it all the time, and many of us are living it right now. Paul echoed this tragedy when he said to the Corinthian believers in 1 Corinthians 4:15, “Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers…“ Do you feel this way about your journey with God now? If so, let us love on you dear friends: you can be free from this impersonal touch, this institutional life, and you can come into a full realization of the joy of family! Family in God and with one another! We will encourage you more so please read on…

The Good News of the Orphanage?

Our new DNA needs family. I said new DNA, because “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” 2 Corinthians 5:17. You see, when we receive Christ He brings us the life of God and transforms us from the inside out. Now, we simply must mature in a loving family.

In the natural realm we all need real family. A Harvard Medical study was performed on babies in an overcrowded Romanian orphanage. Researchers found that babies who went hours without touch had high levels of cortisol (a hormone activated by high stress levels), lower immune systems and an overall decline in their health. Each baby was meant to be loved, touched and cared for physically…as well as emotionally. When they failed to receive this kind of touch in the natural they suffered from what the researchers came to term the “fail to thrive” syndrome.

The babies could survive, but they could not thrive.

If we remain convinced by the devil that we just need to deal with the fact that the institution is all there is, then we will learn to survive, but we will not thrive.

So why then do we continue to focus on preaching the Good News of the Orphanage which is going to meetings, joining churches, and assimilating into organizational crowd control? Don’t we know that we are only ushering the people we love into a world where they will have to struggle to find the Gospel of Family inside of the life of the orphanage. Why would we continue to do that? Is it because this is all we know, and so it is all we know to share? Maybe if we have been raised in an orphanage, then it is simply the best we could do. My friends, there is not judgement coming from my heart. We are all in this together.

Remember, an orphanage is better than the street, but it is not as good as family.

The Gospel of Community

Now, I would like to take this moment to delineate between the Gospel of the Family and the Gospel of Community. The latter seems to be the hottest buzzword in western Christianity. It is used in a wholly good-hearted way to try and bring people together. However, it is not the Good News we really need.

The word community is only found in scripture when referring to Israel. There are two Hebrew words. Both words share the meaning of assembly, or community, with the distinction that one is used when referring to Israel assembled for religious ceremony, and the second is used usually in giving direction to a unique collection of people like in Gen. 28:3, “ May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and increase your numbers until you become a community of peoples.” It is used one time in the New Testament, but only in reference to the Jews as a unique people group living in a place. This is important to note because in scripture Israel is always seen as a family first, and when they gathered together in a place they could be called a community. We all know that this is really what community is: families and peoples gathered into a place who learn to work and live together. Did you notice where the word family was in that simple definition?

Family comes first. We used to think that all of those “begat” scriptures were a waste of good paper and ink until we realized that the Father is all about family! These genealogies, and family connections, and these father and son narratives make up the backbone of His plan. He does not try to get us all to live together, or to agree on everthing, or to assign us to the same public work project. He simply adopts us and then…we are family. We have one Father. We all become related together in an instant. When we pursue this Family life, then community grows as a beautiful and natural by-product. It is not the other way around, and we should be very careful in our attempts to try it backwards…it leads to some very unhealthy consequences.

Here is the problem for believers who grow up in a spiritual orphanage, and then someone starts preaching the Gospel of Community: community becomes nothing more than an upgraded life in the spiritual orphanage and still they learn little of family intimacy. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, and family don’t let family memebers stay in orphanages. We must claim one another! We must fight for family, and allow the beauty of community to grow as a byproduct. We must believe that we really can connect to God as our Father and then to one another as real family relationships. We must receive this kind of love. Have you begun to claim your spiritual family as part of your inheritance? Can you name your fathers, and sisters, and daughters in your spiritual family? Well, now is the time.

What is a Spiritual Slave?

Wow, we are so excited to share these encouragements with you, and we know that many are hoping that we will get super practical on how to escape orphanage life and move toward family…and that is exactly where we are headed…but….

We need to talk about slavery. It is important, because we have to overcome our immaturity in order to grow in Family.

We learn early on in journey whether at home, in school, or at work that we have to work to belong. We learned this honest–as the country folk would say–that is, we got this idea from the real and overwhelming influences of our life in this world. Slavery is a principle of the broken world, and it has spiritual power. It was birthed in us when we first broke our relationship with God. We plummeted, as it were, into a hole of self doubt and lostness that spoke “work, work, work” to our inmost parts. Now we find that it is common to human nature to work to belong, work to have relationships, work to be loved, work to be righteous, work, work, work.

Jesus said “everyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin.” Bam. This is how it gets us. It is not so much that sinfulness controls our every action, but more an issue with the fact that once we broke away from God we fell into a lifelong struggle of trying to work our way back to OK-ness…but we never can. We have all become slaves to this struggle, no exception, and this is where we enter the great tiredness. Religion just makes us feel more weary as it adds more things to do in order to be loved, and no matter how tiring and ridiculous it is something in our brokenness affirms that we must continue in our work, work, work! Aha! See why so many people equate religion with suffering and dreariness? If you never hear the Good News of Sonship, then why be a Christian!? You can get more work done if you become a Muslim for sure, but it is a close competition (tongue in cheek.)

Listen very carefully now. Jesus draws the sharpest of contrasts when He makes us a promise: “a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.” A son belongs forever. Can you feel the rest coming? Can you see how poor religion becomes when Jesus steps in and offers sonship?

Let’s look at the process of moving from slave to son.

From Slavery to Sonship

Paul illustrates this idea that all little children are like slaves because in their immaturity they have to be told what to do by teachers and guides. “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.” Paul’s speaking of things in the natural as well as the spiritual. If a child inherits his father’s estate it is put into a trust until he is old enough to manage it himself. That time is determined by the child’s father who understands finance as well as the maturity of the child and his/her ability to handle the weight of the inheritance. This is seen in the spirit realm as well. Like in 1 Corinthians 3 where Paul addresses the church of Corinth, “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly — mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it.” Here Paul, as a fathering leader of the church, allowed for the fact that immature believers act live slaves when they are too young to understand that God really loves them as sons. We submit to you that all of Christian maturity is just learning to receive this word, believe this word, and act like ourselves…to act like His sons!

He continues: “Indeed, you are still not ready. “So also we, 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 adoption as sons.” Whoohoo! Did you see it coming? He is speaking to our nature…our beginnings. We were held in slavery to the basic principles of the world, and this means captured in the struggle of working for our love and right-ness (righteousness.) Christ was sent to us to actually buy us out of our slavery. He provides an escape from the “basic principles of the world” and the escape is a miraculous adoption. We no longer have to strive, we can immediately become part of the family. Now, we just have to believe it, and act like it. This is an amazing passage where we can see all of humanity as the children of God, but there is a critical transformation that takes place in us when we become the sons of God through adoption. It also says, clearly, that before we receive Christ we are definitely slaves, but even after we receive Him we may still act like it for a while…until we mature.

Continuing in Galatians; “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.” So good. We must be transformed from children who live like slaves, to sons how understand their adoption and inheritance in God. Paul new that immature believers could easily fall back into the old way of living like slaves…but we don’t have to. he says In Galations 3, “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God — or rather are known by God — how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable principles? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? You are observing special days and months and seasons and years!” What were these weak and miserable principles? These are ways that slaves can trade in knowledge, or trade in strength, or any other value system that might give them a sense of position in the spiritual social scene. These calendar events were part of this slave value-trading as these believers tried to gain personal rightness by special rituals and calendar commitments. I know a lot of believers who do this every Sunday morning. These are temporary things we trusted in instead of trusting in Christ, which is to say, we were not confident that Christ had brought us back into the family of God via adoption…and so we continued working for love just like slaves!

Here is our finale on how to make the transition from slave to son. It is not Bible study or worship events. It is not seminary or discipline. Receive and believe in Christ alone for your sonship, and eagerly receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

How to Fall Back Into Slavery

There are two sure ways to remain in slavery.

First, we fall into slavery when we choose to give power to the “laws” that we place ourselves under. Consider these; the laws of religion, the laws of christianity, and the laws of acceptable behavior. Webster’s defines religion as a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices; a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith. So it’s easy to identify religions like Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist etc. But consider the observance of other laws that have created a religion of sorts…like those who worship the earth and observe the laws of environmentalism or those who worship their philosophy and the laws of acceptable behavior. Those who are a part of the any religion observe a list of laws…the do’s and don’ts of the belief system. Just like any other religion, keeping these laws creates a sense of OK-ness and the measuring tools to cast judgment at those who don’t observe the laws. These laws tell us there is definitely a grid that we must adhere to to be in good standing at the heart level. The grid may contain social benchmarks like college degree, etiquette, popularity, conformity or non-conformity, physical attributes, fashion, style, and political affiliation. We judge one another by this acceptable behavior grid which are, more often than not, are tied to our religious beliefs as well. This is the way of slaves, working for righteousness, and it will make us miserable. We must constantly believe and receive Christ alone as our rightness, our reconnection with the Father, and our safe resting place in sonship.

Secondly, we fall into slavery when we refuse to receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. If we can’t receive the power of the Holy Spirit, then we can’t receive the power to act like sons. If we can’t receive the counsel of the Holy Spirit, then we can’t understand our new nature and how to be ourselves. If we can’t be close friends with the Holy Spirit, then we refuse intimacy with the only member of the Trinity whose purpose is to be near us, teach us all things important, and help us in this world. In summary, if we refuse intimacy and friendship with the Holy Spirit we are destined to fall into the trap of slavery from sheer ignorance of our own sonship, and the powerlessness to act in accordance with our new, true nature as sons.

Slaves Can’t Help It

If we are trapped in spiritual slavery, and we are not free in our sonship, it will affect the way we love those who don’t know Jesus. It works itself out in two distinct approaches. These two approaches reflect: 1) the slave-believer who fixates on the “saved” and “unsaved” as the only legitimate categories of human beings in the world, and 2) the slave-believer who defends a more universalist approach to God as a way to let everyone be the children of God by natural birth without deeper transformational requirements. The Great Commission sends us into the world to make disciples who join a family. Watch what slave-believers will do…

In the first slavery approach to the Great Commission is born in the fear of offending our own conscience (which continues to condemn us when we are slaves.) The slave-believer focuses constantly on what is right and wrong according to knowledge and performance, because he is not at rest in his relationship with God. He gorges on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and refuses to enjoy the Tree of Life. If we fixate on what is right and wrong we will, by necessity, have to require everyone to immediately conform to all known laws of right behavior in order to really be saved. This slave-believer will spend a great deal of time making statements, writing blog posts, and joining traditions that diminish the value of those who do not follow Jesus or even practice Christian traditions the way they do. They must diminish other believers who don’t teach the exact things they do. Folks, it is sad, but many have made their radio, TV, and local fellowship careers trafficking in the trade of slave values to other slave-believers who are trapped along with them. In the arena of loving unbelievers this is particularly pronounced. Take for instance my friend, Monica, who ministers to single mothers in the inner city. She does amazing work, loving these women and their children with Christ’s love and giving them hope in their circumstance. She hosts Bible studies for them, coordinates projects between them and her local fellowship so that these women can make relationships outside of their environment, and works with them in many practical ways to rescue them from drug use, domestic violence and unhealthy lifestyles. She’s led many to Christ and His beautiful Family along the way and has seen some of them even begin to lead the Bibles studies themselves. She told me of how some [slave-believers] from her city challenged her that she “loved too much” and needed to share “more truth” with those women. We know what they really meant. They needed to fix these women up with more teaching and better doctrine so they would look more like them, talk more like them, and not act so unsaved. This was prompted, of course, after they heard that some of these women use some profanity during their Bible studies. The seeds slave-believers sow are division, fear, judgement, and self-righteousness. The fruit that will grow is a long way from the peace and joy that comes from resting in Christ.

The second slavery approach to the Great Commission is born in a fear of being rejected by the conscience of the world. Slave-believers who are not free to be sons are also not free to really believe that God is always good. It is hard to enjoy the absolute sovereign goodness of God as a slave. Slave-believers will find themselves being crushed under the weight of public opinion these days which, tragically, is twisted against the goodness of God and the truth of the Gospel. What happens is the slave-believer must constantly apologize for God, work to change the world’s opinion of Christianity constantly, because without doing so they feel ugly in the eyes of the world. Slaves always struggle with comparison and judgement no matter who is doing the comparing. It is a tough spot, because slave-believers may genuinely love people and want to help them, but when they are judged for receiving and believing in Christ alone for their connection to God it puts a conflicting pressure on them. The slave-believer, without a mature sonship and the power of the Holy Spirit will often buckle under this pressure and choose to use the tools of slavery to fight back. Take for instance our friend Tommy who grew up in a city where Christians were mocked, rejected, and ridiculed professionally by the anti-Christian university culture. Tommy has spent most of his life into adulthood trying to ward off this constant barrage of diminishment, but some of his tools are slave tools. Tools of comparison and tools of performance. The comparison tool comes out when he preaches, “I am not like those other traditional Christians…they don’t really know God at all because they believe in hell and they don’t recycle.” (I am not kidding, nor am I making fun.) The slavery performance tool is applied when he can no longer enjoy himself as a member of a beautiful family, but must be the leader and promoter of social activism to defeat capitalism and social injustice in order to prove God’s goodness. Now, don’t be offended at me. I did not say raging against injustice wasn’t the will of God for all of us…what I said was that the slave-believer must do these things in order to feel OK…he is under the authority of this slavery mindset. Yes, a son rages against injustice differently than the slave, and one thing he does not need to do is apologize for Dad. Sons know their Heavenly Father is always good, not exceptions, no rational required. The insight that comes from 1 Cor 2:14 “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” belongs to the sons, not the slaves.

Practical Steps To Sonship

Adoption is the centerpiece of the Kingdom.

Our agreements with the basic principles of the world must end. Our need to meet benchmarks to satisfy our souls need to work, work, work must end. We will never accomplish our way into sonship, or achieve our way to daughterhood. We can not satisfy a contract, of fulfill a law to gain any ground with our Father. Once we’ve received Christ as the healer of our sin, then there is nothing that can separate us from the Father. Romans 8 is a beautiful chapter on this subject and Romans 8:39 says nothing “in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” He gave us His Son to die on a cross so that we could be near Him again. Nearness is Good News. Our job is to believe and receive the truth–Jesus Himself. We will never come into who we were meant to be as long as we continue to accommodate the lies of the enemy in this regard. Jesus knew this would be the hardest part of “working out our salvation” (Phil 2:12) when he said “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matt 11:12). We must violently war against the bondage of the old ways, the miserable forces, and the lies of our enemy and claim the adoption of our Father.

Have you left the safety of sonship to return to the elemental things that have soothed your soul in the past…the measurements that have given you the feeling of being “OK”, the basic principles that tell you that you must work to win the love of your Father? I want to challenge you…sonship is yours. Receive the spirit of adoption through Christ, be reconciled to the Father, and be reconciled to your spiritual family.

Some Ways We Know We Are Sons

• Have we received Jesus and believed in Him as our rescue and our God? The language of the Bible is the language of love. We need to have our hearts transformed by His love! This is what we call salvation: the process of being brought back into His loving arms as a son. Have you received this rescue? Jesus transforms us when we put our lives into His care. The Bible calls this step toward Jesus as “receiving” and “believing” in Him. These are not cliches when we see ourselves standing before the loving Christ with nail scars in His hands and feet as He reaches out to hold us. It means that in that moment we open our hearts and hands and say, “Only in You, Lord Jesus, can I be restored to sonship with Daddy God.” John 1:12-13 “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”
• Do we claim God as our Father and know we are His? John says, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” The Father must claim us, and we must claim Him! We know Him as our Father, not just as God impersonal, and we are carrying out His will. We cry out “Abba, Father” and know we are recipients of an inheritance which belongs to us as sons. Many people go to churches, practice religion, and adhere to a moral code, but not many say to God, “You are my Father and I am your son.” How can we be children of God if we can’t call Him our Father? Try it.
• Do we carry out his value system? 1 John 3:10 expresses this clearly when John says, “This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.” The way we live and think proves whether or not we are God’s children. Many will address Jesus as “Lord” as we enter the next life, according to the parable in Matthew 25, but because they did not carry out the heart of the Father in the earth they are not allowed to enter into His presence. In the natural this is plain to see as well. Our sons literally have my DNA, and they are in one sense our children because of this basic biology, but that is not the same as when one of us sees Zane do something we love and we instinctively proclaim, “That’s my boy!” Father, look on us as your sons and say to us by the Holy Spirit, “You are my beloved sons in whom I am very well pleased!”
• Is our identity wrapped up in the family of God? In Romans 8 it says, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs…” This is the promise of family lineage and family identity. Paul goes on to affirm that it is the Holy Spirit in us that convinces us, internally, we “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” To be filled with the Holy Spirit is a confirmation of being a child of God because it wells up in us to say, “Abba, Father!” and we know we are His…and we love His children…we love His family. 1 John 5 raises the bar and say, “This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands.” Let’s identify and embrace the people of God as our family.

Some Ways to Practice our Sonship!

1. Read Romans 8, the whole chapter, aloud. After each statement say aloud that you agree with it with all your heart. Do it over and over and find rest in the truth.
2. Spend one whole day as you hike, walk, work, or drive doing as Brother Lawrence taught us in the little book “Practicing the Presence of God”: with every exhale of your natural breath, whisper, “God is good.”
3. Repeat #2 the next day, but this time exhale, “Dad is good.” Take as many days as you need.
4. Say aloud, “I am my Father’s favorite son.” Keep saying it, and wrestling with it until the Holy Spirit shows you that it is true.
5. Let’s do spiritual warfare together by taking “captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” especially those thoughts that speak slavery to us. Identify these slave tools and destroy them. When judgmental thoughts or fear into into our minds we say aloud, “I am a favored son, I am not a slave!”
6. Stop raging against institutions and Christian organizations that have not been good to you. What did you expect from an orphanage? Seek your spiritual family by name. Holy Spirit, reveal to us our parents, our siblings, and our kids in the family of Jesus…help us to lay hold of them and claim them as our own.
7. Receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Ask Christ to pour out the Holy Spirit on you. Do whatever it takes, because it is worth it to be friends with the only member of the Trinity specifically sent to walk with us here on the earth. He is the fountain of our sonship, He is the firstfruits of our adoption…so, there is more fruit to come!
8. Yes, once again, we have gotten into a rocketship of teaching and unloaded a ton on you, our dear readers. Please forgive us if we flew over some things too fast. Please forgive us if some points we did not make as clearly as we could. Please hold on to our simple encouragement: we were saved to be sons and each of us can, together as family, overcome the immaturity of slavery, and the unsatisfying life of the orphanage. May God guide each one of us very carefully.

Ben and Robin Pasley

Download the PDF:slaves_orphans_sons

Tags: community, family, orphanage, orphans, slave, slaves, sons, sonship

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