No Longer an Orphan
In his book, Adopted for Life, Russel Moore shares several deeply moving experiences involving his adoption of two children from a Russian orphanage. Concerning one of those experiences, he writes:
Teaching about the believers’ adoption into the family of God, the apostle Paul writes in Galatians 4:3: “In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.” In context, Paul was speaking of the prior spiritually orphan state of the Galatians before coming to saving faith in Christ. They were enslaved to the law and to sin. They had religion—they had legal guardians and rules, but they didn’t have a real relationship with God the Father.
Because of false teachers, the Galatians began to wrongly believe that to be right with God, one had to keep the law of Moses, like circumcision, and other religious ordinances. As a result, like the two Russian orphans, they were looking back to their former religious practices to find security, when all that they needed was provided in their new identity in the Son of God.
To remind them of their new identity, Paul writes: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.” (Galatians 4:4-7)
As Christians, to live fully in the freedom, inheritance, and security that we have in Christ, we must know who we are and whose we are because of the redemption that Jesus secured at the cross. And nothing speaks more to our identity in Christ than the biblical doctrine of Sonship.
What’s more, one of the great privileges of being heirs with Christ as adopted children of God the Father is our access to Him in prayer. When you know God as your loving Father, when you know that you are the son or daughter of the King of kings who has all wisdom, power, and authority, who has set His love upon you, who wants you, who delights in being your Father, you will pray without ceasing—you will praise God in the good times and cry out "Abba Father" in the hard times.
Recounting another moving experience concerning the adoption of his two Russian children, Russel Moore shares:
Similarly, when we are born again—when we are adopted into family of God through faith in Christ, the Spirit of Christ takes up residence in us to reassure us that we are not orphans anymore, that we are not alone in the dark anymore. Remember, concerning our divine adoption Paul explained: “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'”
Beloved, as adopted children of God the Father, we have immediate access to God, we have the full attention of our Heavenly Father when we cry out to Him in prayer. "Abba," as you may know, is a personal and deeply intimate way that first century Jews referred to their own fathers.
When teaching His disciples to pray, Jesus gave them a pattern for prayer and encouraged them to pray persistently. But He did so not because repeating a rote prayer would get God’s attention. We pray as Jesus taught us to pray not to overcome God’s reluctance to answer, but to lay hold of His willingness to answer. And His willingness to answer, Jesus said, is rooted in the Fatherhood of God. In the climax of His teaching on prayer in Luke 11:13, Jesus says, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
As adopted children of God, Jesus, our elder brother, who shed His blood so that we can have access to His Father as our own Father, assures us that His ears are open to the "Abba" cries of His children. And He is ready to give them more than just scraps to fight over, but the greatest gift of all, Himself, His presence, His power, and His provision to meet our needs. Beloved, what should motivate us to pray is not first our needs, but that we have a Father in heaven who cares for us and knows our needs better than we do.
If you’ve received Jesus as Savior and Lord, you’ve been adopted into the family of God. And because you are an adopted son and daughter of God, as Paul explained in Galatians 4, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying Abba! Father! You are no longer a slave, but a son. The reason Paul wrote that you are a "son" and didn’t also add "daughter," is because in his culture, sons, not daughters had the right to their father’s inheritance. But in God’s upside-down Kingdom, the daughters are heirs along with sons, along with the Son of God. We are heirs together with Christ.
“Why would we covet what seems important to Wall Street or Hollywood or Madison Avenue when we have waiting for us [as children of the most high] mountain ranges and waterfalls and distant galaxies to rule with Christ as the resurrected sons of the new creation?” -Russel Moore
We will struggle in our Christian lives when we lose sight of our identity in Christ, of our inheritance in the Son of God, of who we are and whose we are in Christ. We will look back to the scraps of the orphanage rather than resting in the security of our Father’s adopting love.
If that’s you, don’t fixate on your struggle, but focus on your new identity as a child of the King. The more you know His love, the more you will gladly give your full allegiance to Him, the more you will see your access to God the Father as your greatest asset, and securely live only for His approval to the glory of His name.
In your service,
Pastor Marco
“When Maria and I first walked into the orphanage, where we were led to the boys the Russian courts had picked out for us to adopt, we almost vomited in reaction to the stench and squalor of the place. The boys were in cribs, in the dark, lying in their own waste.
Leaving them at the end of each day was painful, but leaving them the final day, before going home to wait for the paperwork to go through, was the hardest thing either of us had ever done. Walking out of the room to prepare for the plane ride home, Maria and I could hear Maxim calling out for us and falling down in his crib, convulsing in tears. Maria shook with tears of her own. I turned around to walk back into their room, just for a minute. I placed my hand on both of their heads and said, knowing they couldn’t understand a word of English, 'I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.' I don’t think I consciously intended to cite Jesus’s words to his disciples in John 14:18; it just seemed like the only thing worth saying at the time.
When Maria and I at long last received the call that the legal process was over, and we returned to Russia to pick up our sons, we found that their transition from orphanage to family was more difficult than we had supposed. We dressed the boys in outfits our parents had bought for them. We nodded our thanks to the orphanage personnel and walked out into the sunlight, to the terror of the two boys.
They’d never seen the sun, and they’d never felt the wind. They had never heard the sound of a car door slamming or felt like they were being carried along a road at 100 miles an hour. I noticed that they were shaking and reaching back to the orphanage in the distance…I whispered to Sergei, now Timothy, ‘That place is a pit! If only you knew what’s waiting for you—a home with a mommy and a daddy who love you, grandparents and great-grandparents and cousins and playmates and McDonald’s Happy Meals!’ But all they knew was the orphanage. It was squalid, but they had no other reference point. It was home.
We knew the boys had acclimated to our home, that they trusted us, when they stopped hiding food in their high chairs. They knew there would be another meal coming, and they wouldn’t have to fight for the scraps. This was the new normal. They are now thoroughly Americanized, perhaps too much so, able to recognize the sound of a microwave ding from forty yards away. I still remember, though, those little hands reaching for the orphanage. And I see myself there.”
Teaching about the believers’ adoption into the family of God, the apostle Paul writes in Galatians 4:3: “In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.” In context, Paul was speaking of the prior spiritually orphan state of the Galatians before coming to saving faith in Christ. They were enslaved to the law and to sin. They had religion—they had legal guardians and rules, but they didn’t have a real relationship with God the Father.
Because of false teachers, the Galatians began to wrongly believe that to be right with God, one had to keep the law of Moses, like circumcision, and other religious ordinances. As a result, like the two Russian orphans, they were looking back to their former religious practices to find security, when all that they needed was provided in their new identity in the Son of God.
To remind them of their new identity, Paul writes: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.” (Galatians 4:4-7)
As Christians, to live fully in the freedom, inheritance, and security that we have in Christ, we must know who we are and whose we are because of the redemption that Jesus secured at the cross. And nothing speaks more to our identity in Christ than the biblical doctrine of Sonship.
What’s more, one of the great privileges of being heirs with Christ as adopted children of God the Father is our access to Him in prayer. When you know God as your loving Father, when you know that you are the son or daughter of the King of kings who has all wisdom, power, and authority, who has set His love upon you, who wants you, who delights in being your Father, you will pray without ceasing—you will praise God in the good times and cry out "Abba Father" in the hard times.
Recounting another moving experience concerning the adoption of his two Russian children, Russel Moore shares:
“Of all the disturbing aspects of the orphanage in which we found our boys, one stands out above all the others in its horror: it was quiet. The place was filled with an eerie silence, quieter than the Library of Congress, despite the fact that there were cribs full of babies in every room. If you listened intently enough, you could hear the sound of gentle rocking—as babies rocked themselves back and forth in their beds. They didn’t cry because no one responded to their cries. So they stopped. That’s dehumanizing in its horror.
The first moment I knew the boys received us, in some strange and preliminary way, was the moment we walked out of the room for the last time on that first trip. When little Maxim, now Benjamin, fell back in his crib and cried—the first time I ever heard him do it—it was because, for whatever reason, he seemed to think he’d be heard and, for whatever reason, he no longer liked the prospect of being alone in the dark.”
Similarly, when we are born again—when we are adopted into family of God through faith in Christ, the Spirit of Christ takes up residence in us to reassure us that we are not orphans anymore, that we are not alone in the dark anymore. Remember, concerning our divine adoption Paul explained: “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'”
Beloved, as adopted children of God the Father, we have immediate access to God, we have the full attention of our Heavenly Father when we cry out to Him in prayer. "Abba," as you may know, is a personal and deeply intimate way that first century Jews referred to their own fathers.
When teaching His disciples to pray, Jesus gave them a pattern for prayer and encouraged them to pray persistently. But He did so not because repeating a rote prayer would get God’s attention. We pray as Jesus taught us to pray not to overcome God’s reluctance to answer, but to lay hold of His willingness to answer. And His willingness to answer, Jesus said, is rooted in the Fatherhood of God. In the climax of His teaching on prayer in Luke 11:13, Jesus says, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
As adopted children of God, Jesus, our elder brother, who shed His blood so that we can have access to His Father as our own Father, assures us that His ears are open to the "Abba" cries of His children. And He is ready to give them more than just scraps to fight over, but the greatest gift of all, Himself, His presence, His power, and His provision to meet our needs. Beloved, what should motivate us to pray is not first our needs, but that we have a Father in heaven who cares for us and knows our needs better than we do.
If you’ve received Jesus as Savior and Lord, you’ve been adopted into the family of God. And because you are an adopted son and daughter of God, as Paul explained in Galatians 4, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying Abba! Father! You are no longer a slave, but a son. The reason Paul wrote that you are a "son" and didn’t also add "daughter," is because in his culture, sons, not daughters had the right to their father’s inheritance. But in God’s upside-down Kingdom, the daughters are heirs along with sons, along with the Son of God. We are heirs together with Christ.
“Why would we covet what seems important to Wall Street or Hollywood or Madison Avenue when we have waiting for us [as children of the most high] mountain ranges and waterfalls and distant galaxies to rule with Christ as the resurrected sons of the new creation?” -Russel Moore
We will struggle in our Christian lives when we lose sight of our identity in Christ, of our inheritance in the Son of God, of who we are and whose we are in Christ. We will look back to the scraps of the orphanage rather than resting in the security of our Father’s adopting love.
If that’s you, don’t fixate on your struggle, but focus on your new identity as a child of the King. The more you know His love, the more you will gladly give your full allegiance to Him, the more you will see your access to God the Father as your greatest asset, and securely live only for His approval to the glory of His name.
In your service,
Pastor Marco