Sermon- Adopted by Abba Father

Sermon – April 17, 2005


Intro
In a few weeks the Bol’s will be heading to Zimbabwe with Dani and me. Each of us will have assignments at the orphanage. Dani will work on the medical team, Denise with the teen girls on sewing, Lindsey with the children, Steve will install telecommunications equipment, and I will be researching a novel. It is a true story about a little girl named Alexandra. She was abused from age four. She grew up with no one to look out for her; the mother took advantage and made money on her. She was adopted into the orphanage at about seven. When Alex first arrived, she could not grasp the love and compassion she received. For a long time she remained hard, closed, and bitter. Alex eventually responded to persistent love and accepted Christ as Savior before dying of AIDS at about nine years of age.

Spiritual Orphans
Many of us have much in common with Alexandra. The World was a cold, hard place with no one watching out for us. Others hurt us. We learned to trust no one and spent our energy guarding our own hearts. Then we came to Jesus. We were adopted into His family. But, like Alex, we still carry around hardness and mistrust. It takes a long while to let go of worry, and self-centeredness and fully trust the Lord. This is called a spiritual orphan mentality. I have a chart that demonstrates this attitude.

You can read this on your own later. For now let’s look at the key characteristic of a Christian suffering from spiritual orphan mentality. Paul identified it in:

Gal 3:1-3
3:1 You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. 2 I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? 3 Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?

Spiritual orphans do not fully trust Christ’s completed work on the cross. They are always busy attempting to establish their own goodness. They want to follow rules so they can say they have met the mark on their own. They want others to think highly of them so they are good enough for God. They tend to worry, gossip, and brag to leverage themselves higher, all the while, feeling inadequate inside. Not trusting Christ drives the orphan traits.

Sanctified By Christ
The Galatian church had accepted Christ for salvation but they were trying to accomplish sanctification by their own efforts. Sanctification is simply the process of becoming Christ-like in this life. The truth is, we are not only saved by Christ, we are also sanctified by Him. It is His Spirit living and working in us that changes us. Listen to this verse for the source of sanctification:

Rom 15:16
…so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

This may sound mysterious and complex, but really it is very simple. Example: We are convicted by love to help the poor. That is the Spirit of Jesus working in us. It is Jesus who pays for our sin; it is Jesus who works in our hearts to sanctify us—straightforward and simple. The problem comes when we block His work because we haven’t learned to trust Him—the spiritual orphan mentality.

Words of Comfort
There is still a touch of spiritual orphan in each of us. So let me speak the words our orphans need to hear. These are the same truths that changed Alexandra. Listen:

You are loved by God. If you are in Christ, you are accepted by the Father. He forgave your sin; past present and future. Listen:

Ps 103:11-12
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

You are forgiven. Now you can do nothing wrong in His sight. You have come home, no one can harm you. There is no reason to fear, no reason to doubt. You are safe. You are protected by Christ’s blood. Nothing can reach you. Hear the promise of God:

Rom 8:35-39
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:

"For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So orphan, you are henceforth adopted. Listen again:

Gal 4:6-7
6 Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father." 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

You are an eternal heir. So Relax and stop hoarding, defending, and running. Have fun learning to eat, speak, and act like an adopted child of the King. The first change is to learn to act out of love instead of fear and guilt. You are not guilty. Jesus erases all the past and makes everything new. Move forward in love.

Free to Admit
Our spiritual adoption frees us to confront our orphan ways. How does it free us? Because all our sins are forgiven, we are free from any need to hide or defend broken ways. We can now afford to be honest about our sin.

As an example, if you confront a four-year-old with shaving the kitty and he says, “I’ll tell you only if you promise not to get mad”, as soon as you laugh and promise him, he feels free to recognize he did a bad thing. You and I are freed by Christ from any punishment for sin. It can no longer hurt us to be honest and admit weakness and enter into the joy of letting Him change us.

When I pastored in Concord I fell in with an interdenominational group of pastors. We met over several years and prayed once a week and loved each other. We supported one another and held combined events. When I moved away, they gave me this shirt. The best lesson I learned from them was to pastor out of weakness. I recall one day when they all agreed that a major reason they stayed in the pastorate was it kept them accountable from drinking and carousing. These guys were honest enough with their weaknesses to confront them and let Christ heal. God works through weakness because it demonstrates His power over our own.

A boy came to his Indian chief and said, “Chief, I feel like there are two dogs living inside me. One is good and one is bad and they always fight.” The chief asked him which one usually wins and the boy said, “The one I regularly feed”.

Pastors are just like you. We have a bad dog inside us. We must feed our good dog to stay focused on Jesus. We need church on Sundays and the Bible everyday or we go sideways. I am so grateful I have been adopted and I’m free to admit I’m no better then others.

One of the things that first attracted me about Harvest CC is that no one puts on pretense. I don’t have to clean myself up for Sundays to look good to you. I’m a big fat, horrible sinner and you are too. My business card says, James d Christian-pastor, missionary, freelance writer, forgiven scumball. That is what I am. Until we admit sin is more than smoking, cussing, crewing, or going with girls who do, that it is also thinking jealous thoughts, or dreaming of retribution, or imagining ourselves famous—until we admit the level of our sinfulness, we have no hope of sanctification. Praise God as adoptees we are free to examine our hearts.

How do we examine our hearts? Here are some ideas:

Ask God to reveal where you are acting like an orphan.
Get your spouse or Bible study group to write down the one thing about you they would change. It will require a bit of coaxing. Promise you won’t defend.
Ask the Lord to show you from scripture.
Be challenged by the B-attitudes from Mat 5, the description of love in 1 Cor 13, or the fruits of the Spirit in Gal 5.

Whatever the method, remind yourself you are doing this out of love and gratitude not guilt and shame. You are the adopted child of Abba. Be warned, in love Jesus will eventually sanctify the whole being. He wants us to have the joy of celebrating our earthly reforms for eternity. Listen to the words of CS Lewis:

When I was a child, I often had a toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother, she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go to my mother--at least not till the pain became very bad. And the reason I did not go was this: I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist the next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want. I wanted immediate relief from my pain; but I could not get it without having my teeth set permanently right. And I knew those dentists; I knew they would start fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache. Our Lord is like the dentists. Dozens of people go to him to be cured of some particular sin. Well, he will cure it all right, but he will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if you once call him in, he will give you the full treatment.

It is a joy to let Jesus sanctify layer after layer of the old self.

Conclusion
To close, I’d like to read part of a story called, “My Heart, Christ’s Home.” It captures so well this concept of being adopted into Christ’s family and working from the position of an accepted son or daughter toward sanctification. Follow the link below to read "My Heart, Christ's Home."