by Rev. Thomas V. Aadland
Romans 8:15-17 (KJV): For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.
The Church is a place of miracles, that’s for sure. In every congregation where the gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed in its truth and purity, miracles happen. As the Holy Spirit pleases, faith is granted within the hearts of those who hear. That’s a miracle! Through the washing of water and the Word, those who had inherited the doom laid upon all dying sinners are reborn as children of God, loved and forgiven for Jesus’ sake, and made heirs of eternal life. That’s a miracle! At His table His family “partakes one holy food” with bread and wine, the true body and blood of the crucified and risen Christ. That’s a miracle, too!
During every season of Epiphany we hear told some of the miracles our Lord did in His earthly ministry. What did our Lord do? He
- changed the water for ritual cleansing into wine for a wedding celebration at Cana,
- calmed the stormy waters of Galilee with but a word,
- fed the hungry multitudes with but a boy’s lunch out in the wilderness,
- spat upon the earthy clay and made of it a holy salve to restore sight to one born blind,
- healed the helpless paralytic at home in Capernaum, and
- raised the widow’s dead son to life in Nain.
I know the record shows that the onlookers were astounded, but, the truth is, these were really heaven’s “little miracles.” Dear ones, the reason our Lord permits us to hear of these things today is so that we might not in any way doubt that He is willing and able to come to us here and now and do the truly astounding thing for us. Still today, He does the miraculous. The really great miracle, the Miracle of miracles, is that He takes us as we are and makes us His own. The apostle John was carried away with the sheer wonder of it when he wrote: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God; and so we are!” (I John 3:1, RSV).
This day in the church year has become commonly set aside and commemorated as Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. As we celebrate the marvel that we are created in the image of God, may we also be enraptured with the sheer delight that in Christ we are truly made God’s very own. Our theme will be: IN CHRIST GOD SAYS TO US, “WELCOME, MY CHILD!”
The apostle Paul knew the sheer wonder of this. In his great epistle to them he writes to give Christians in Rome a good reason to hold their heads high as they press on in faith: “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15).
That’s an astounding thing. We Christians must never lose hold of its wonder. For it remains true that, in fact, we who are now children of God were born as wayward children indeed. We were born dead in our trespasses (Colossians 2:13), “by nature the children of wrath,” as Paul puts it in another place (Ephesians 2:1-5).
This is nothing theoretical. Every self-centered thought, every heartless word, every loveless deed reveals sin for what it is—rebellion against God. By nature we are as those trying to usurp God’s place in order to decide for ourselves what will help or hinder us. Yet this very act of rebelling against the Godhood of God leads not to liberation but to the worse sort of bondage—that to sin and death and the power of the devil.
Nothing could be more natural than a family. And yet nothing, it seems, is more fragile. Today, one in every two marriages ends in divorce. But divorce is usually only the final step in the long unraveling of a damaged relationship. Sin tears away at the moral fabric of our relationships, ultimately breaking bonds of love and respect.
The selfishness, which roots naturally in the human heart, puts a person in a state of servitude, and the worse kind of bondage is bondage to self. This is how we are outside of Christ. The further result of this is a constant and slavish fear.
The spirit of the unregenerate sinner is craven and cowardly. To the extent to which he or she thinks of God at all, the unconverted worldling thinks of God as the One who would put a limit to his freedom, the One who would only punish his misdeeds, the One who must ultimately destroy his very life.
That is the blindness of human reason, born of sin. It seems so logical to think that if we have stood against God, then God must stand forever against us. It is this spirit which Paul names “the spirit of bondage and fear.”
But for the Christian this is not so. We who are Christians have been delivered from fear of condemnation. In Christ Jesus there is no condemnation (Romans 8:1). We have been given a new spirit, the spirit of love and joy and peace in the Holy Spirit. IN CHRIST GOD SAYS TO US, “WELCOME, MY CHILD!”
Outside of Christ we are spiritually homeless. The themes of loneliness and homelessness fill so many of the pages of the wise and discerning literature of our day. One reads it in the novels of James Joyce and Franz Kafka, and in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats.
But in Christ we are, indeed, welcomed home, home with God and home with one another. IN CHRIST GOD SAYS TO US, “WELCOME, MY CHILD!”
Now, that seems too good to be true. Has God gone blind? Does He simply not see what has become of His good creation, ruined by sin? Does He do nothing about where I have gone wrong? Does He just sort of wink His eye at sin, overlook it, and pretend to be oblivious to it all, a sort of Grand Tolerator?
Not at all. God takes our sin seriously, because He takes us seriously. But God did something with that sin that was so beyond all expectation. He took our sin Himself, made our sin His own, and died with it on the Cross that we might be free of it forever. The Father sent His Son to bear the guilt of our sin in our place. He did that so that we might be welcomed back into His family. The Cross is where God provides a creative solution to our guilt and waywardness, the means by which He brings us close to His own divine and fatherly heart, close to the One who is holy, without destroying us. Rather than unmaking us, He remakes us new. He chose not to destroy but to save, not to abort us but to adopt us.
God adopted us in Christ. We were not children of God by nature. We were rebellious sinners. But we are made children of God by grace. It is indeed by a kind of adoption that we are made God’s very own.
IN CHRIST GOD SAYS TO US, “WELCOME, MY CHILD!” What could have prompted God to do that? It must have been a love that is wider, longer, higher, and deeper than anything in this entire universe (Ephesians 3:18) – a love as wide as humanity, as long as eternity, as high as the heavens and as deep as any human need. It is the love of God in Jesus Christ. Before the foundation of the world, as Paul once wrote to Christians in Ephesus, God decided that we should be His own sons and daughters through Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:3-6). Such is the splendor of this love lavished upon us in Christ. We do not deserve this love. That is why it is called “grace.”
This welcome comes beyond the natural order of things. It is a gracious word wholly other than the accusation given by the Law. Through the Gospel we hear that Jesus was put to death for our transgressions and was raised for our justification. When we believe this, we are made God’s own through faith. And GOD SAYS TO US, “WELCOME, MY CHILD!”
Then, in any distress, when we feel as helpless as a little child, we are prompted to cry out to our heavenly Father. Our text puts this in a striking way: “ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” The Aramaic word “Abba” is the term of endearment used by such a little child: “Daddy!”
This is the blessed liberty that belongs to us as children of God, adopted by His grace, that we may run up to Him in joy or in distress and find welcoming arms ready to carry us up into His loving embrace. There we find help and comfort and the joy of knowing we are His.
So “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.” Such is the continual reassurance that we children both need and are given, just as our children need it and must receive it from us each day anew, the reassurance that we belong.
And then, just as we have been given this, “the Spirit of adoption,” so we live in it. As children of God have been loved and forgiven and welcomed, so they will reflect their Father’s character and themselves in turn become loving and forgiving and welcoming. The Christian’s spirit is this spirit of adoption. IN CHRIST GOD SAYS TO US, “WELCOME, MY CHILD!” And so we must welcome others.
Later in his epistle, the apostle Paul writes: “Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Romans 15:7, RSV). This is how fellow Christians are to relate to one another in the household of faith, as fellow redeemed of the Lord, as fellow adopted brothers and sisters, children of God.
Of all people, the children of God should be the most open to the creation with its many wonders and open to other people with their many needs. In some cases, we will be led by the Spirit to open our very homes to welcome those needing shelter.
In the early centuries of the Christian church, during the harsh persecutions of the pagan Roman Empire, Christians displayed in a very practical way what the spirit of adoption means. As they had been welcomed by God into the family of His adopted so they cared for others on the margins of existence.
In those days and in that pagan culture, abortion and infanticide were accepted practice. A man who would not recognize his own paternity—not only in his offspring from a servant-mistress but even over a child he had fathered of his own wife—would customarily discard the child outside the walls of the city on a heap of other refuse. During the night, Christians would secretly rescue these children, despite the irritation and ire they would thereby arouse in those who had rejected them. They sheltered and gave safe haven to these little ones. Why? Because theirs was a different spirit than that of paganism. They could not sit idly by in a culture of death and indifference. As God their heavenly Father had adopted them, so they in turn practiced not abortion but adoption.
The earliest manual of Christian instruction from those days (other than the New Testament itself) reflects the calloused indifference and hardheartedness of the surrounding culture in which those brothers and sisters in Christ lived and labored. It reads: “ … do not kill a fetus by abortion, or commit infanticide” (The Didache or Teaching, II, 2).
We must seriously ask ourselves whether our culture is significantly different in these matters than pagan Roman culture. As a Roman male citizen was permitted to deny and destroy the personhood of the unborn and the helpless infant, so our highest civic authorities permit private constructions of reality that lead to the same results.
Since 1992, privatism has become the official American civil religion. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Supreme Court Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life.” This is precisely what the ancient Serpent promised to Eve.
We must ask, “If I am free to define as I will the mystery of human life, am I not free to disregard those who fall outside the lines of my own definition”? There are so many people today who are regarded and treated as non-persons. There are many at the margins of existence, unseen, unheard, homeless and helpless, or unborn and vulnerable.
A nonsensical children’s rhyme puts it this way:
The other day
Upon the stair
I saw a man
Who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today:
I wish that man
Would go away.
We cannot know exactly how many—somewhere between one and two million, though I cannot fathom the number—little children’s lives are snuffed out in America each year before they take their first breath. And though they seem invisible to a great many calloused minds in this nation, their little souls will not go away. They must haunt us.
Can we help turn things around? Yes, we can. We must. As our forbears in the faith, we too must show the spirit of adoption. As God has welcomed us, we must welcome others and encourage adoption.
One week I received two postcards, one from the Atlantic coast, the other from the Pacific. Both asked for the same thing: that I would recommend them as prospective parents and help them find a child to adopt.
God has given us people such as this. Sadly, because so many are aborted before adoption is presented as a real alternative, a child is lacking for these eager adoptive parents. If more can be made aware of the precious and sacred gift life is as created in God’s image, if more can be encouraged to enable adoption, that can change.
Some years ago a blatantly pro-abortion agency defended its work with the slogan: “Every child a wanted child.” Apparently, there are those who believe that the sum total of loving care within families increases if only those not wanted are aborted. The bitter result of this philosophy is not so encouraging.
In Christ, every child, born or unborn—no matter the circumstance of its conception or birth, no matter the will of its father or mother—is a wanted child, “even as he chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). IN CHRIST GOD SAYS TO US, “WELCOME, MY CHILD!”
In God’s own Son we have received adoption. We in turn may be led to seek out children not biologically our own and by love and legal adoption to make and to welcome them as our own. We may help others who have been led to make this pro-life choice. A young single woman was so led by her Lord and helped to cross the oceans in order to rescue one such child from almost certain death. She went to China to find her little girl and recently returned there to rescue and adopt a little boy. Now sister and brother are welcomed into a caring home.
The Spirit of adoption is at work in the hearts of God’s people. May we, who in Christ have heard God say to us: “Welcome, My child!” also welcome others by that same Spirit. Amen.