Freedom Through Adoption [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. It is a move from living by the law to living by grace. It is a move from one covenant to another.

It is a whole new identity. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series called Unleashed, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program today, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. You can find out more about it and even receive a copy of your very own for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer at PastorAlan.org. Find out more about it and make your request or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Again, our website, PastorAlan.org. More on this later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. The slave started a whole new life as a son and an heir in a new family. And what's important to know is that clearly the Roman law stated that it was possible under certain circumstances for a Roman father to disown his biological child. But it is clearly indicated in the law that once you adopt a son that was seated in your choice, you cannot under Roman law disown that adopted child. And this means so much to me because what it means, beloved, you were chosen.

Not in some wooden sense of fate and predestination, but in the sense of in the Father's heart He wanted you. It means that you have a completely new legal status, that everything has changed in your life. It means a legal transaction has taken place in the heavenlies and all your debts have been canceled. There is no debtor who can bring an accusation against you, beloved. When you're in Christ, there is such a thorough cancellation and extinguishing of all of the debt of sin that it is for this very reason that the accuser, the tempter, the one who's called Satan, who comes to accuse the beloved of Christ, that all of the roars of that lion must fall impotently to the ground. Not because of any of your own merit, but because you simply have a new legal standing.

You are gods. It means you can never be disowned and turned into a slave again. And it means that because you're an heir of the Father that you can know that God has an abundance that He shares with you. That's what being an heir is all about.

It's about sharing. God's one but three, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. He came to earth as a perfect man, Jesus, who was not God's adopted Son. He was the pre-existent Son. He was the firstborn of all creation. He was, the Bible says, the firstborn of many sons. This is the image of the New Testament.

God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, pre-existent Son, who came and lived a sinless life and, on your behalf, went to the cross. And there, in some mystery that I will spend all eternity trying to understand, God the Father turned away from God the Son, and it was as if the Son were treated as if He were disowned, so that anyone who trusts in Him would become an heir and Adrogatus, who could never be disowned. And so what the Holy Spirit does is He longs to come into the heart of every believer and convince you that all of this has taken place, so that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit, so you're born anew by the power, the same resurrection power, mystically, mysteriously, that raised Jesus from the dead, a life-giving power that Paul says in Ephesians 2 is the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, and the same power from the dead is at work in your heart. And it's the first and most beautiful and exquisite thing the Holy Spirit does is He begins to whisper to you and sometimes shout to you, Behold, you're a child of God.

The old is gone and the new has come. And He lives with you and He resides with you to bear witness to such. Because the Roman Adrogation, the adoption process in Rome was public. They had witnesses because if there should ever be a question about whether this slave had indeed been adopted as a son, there were witnesses that they would call upon who said, We were there. We witnessed it. We saw the paperwork. We saw it take place.

This is not a slave. This is a son. And the Holy Spirit is your witness. He was there. He was there as the grace of God was enacted upon your life. He was there seeing you be justified by the blood of Jesus.

He was there seeing you being adopted by the Father. And He lives with you forever bearing witness to the goodness of God to tell you who you are. And that same Spirit, Paul says, is residing within us so that when we pray, we are now not praying like slaves to a master. We are not praying as if we are begging. We are praying like little bitty children who call out to Abba, Father.

We address God in the same way that Jesus addressed God. It means that the church has become a new family. It means that all the orphans in spirit become heirs together of the grace of God. It means that former slaves who are adopted live with joy and gratitude and appreciation because though we are different, we are the same.

And in Christ, there's no Jew nor Greek, no slave, no free, no male or female, because our status has changed and we have become brothers and sisters with one another and with Christ Himself. It means that our hope is built on what is already and on what is yet to come. It means that you have the real experience of the actual affections of God the Father. And it means that you have a place of intimacy in the heart of God that the writer of Hebrew says grants you the boldness to come to the throne of grace in your time of need.

As Tim Keller has said, the only one who can wake up a king in the middle of the night and ask for a cup of water is the son or the daughter. But there's also something in the future that we still are to inherit and we know that it's coming and it changes the way we think. In other words, beloved, living as a Christian is living as a child of God.

And though these images have limits and are constrained by our imagination, to grow up in Christ and ever increasing maturity in the Lord in fact, growing into increasing conformity to the image of Christ Himself, who was the Son of God, is to ever increasingly know the depths of what it means to have God as your Father. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series.

greater perspective. In Pastor Alan Wright's eight message CD album, Out of the Ruins, you'll discover how God can rebuild your life gloriously out of yesterday's disappointments. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright.

J.I. Packer in his classic Knowing God written many years ago has summed this up so beautifully. It is worth reading Knowing God, just so you'll come to page 182, and read these words. You sum up the whole of New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the fatherhood of the Holy Creator. If you want to show how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child. God is his father. This is not the thought prompts and controls his or her worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life.

It means that he or she does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught and everything that makes the New Testament new and better than the old, everything that is distinctively Christian, as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the fatherhood of God. Listen to what Packer says, Father is the Christian name for God. It's not to say that God is merely defined by this one image of his fatherly affection and covenantal love for us, but it is to say that all of who God is is only understood in terms of such relationship. The parent and child trust relationship is the best image we've got. It's who God is. And knowing God means knowing him in such a relationship that you increasingly know yourself to truly be his heir. And that's the hard part.

That's really what growing up is all about in Christ. And some years ago it was a zany movie version of Alice in Wonderland starring Johnny Depp playing the Mad Hatter. It was magical and bizarre, as you could imagine, and the retelling of Alice in Wonderland.

The movie depicts an opening scene. Alice is at a surprise engagement party where a man she doesn't love is about to propose to her in front of hundreds of people. And in the midst of this, she is distracted by the sight of our little rabbit hopping around and follows the rabbit who goes to a hole where she falls down into a magical underworld, a world in which she has evidently been before but has forgotten who she is. And she's become too ordinary on the face of the earth, but now she's back in this magical wonderland. And she comes early in the movie to meet Absalom, the wise caterpillar, who says to her, you're hardly Alice. But she goes on many adventures, including even becoming filled with the bravery to ultimately face the evil Jabberwocky.

And later she appears back before the wise caterpillar, Absalom. And she said something like, you said I wasn't Alice. He said, no. I said, you were hardly Alice. He said, but now you're almost Alice. I think that's who I am. I'm almost Alan.

I'm not there yet. But the more that I come to know the love of the Father, the more I know who I am. The Holy Spirit wants to bear witness to your spirit of who you really are, because as such you will grow.

If I could sum it up in a little chart, if I had to, I'd put it like this. Spirit of fear and spirit of adoption is what Paul's talking about. You didn't receive a spirit of fear. Your spirit of adoption. And the spirit of fear is in the realm of what he calls the flesh, but the spirit of adoption in the realm he calls the spirit. The spirit of fear is about the heart of an orphan, but the spirit realm, the spirit of adoption is about the heart of an heir. And the fear in the orphan causes sin, but the faith in the heir causes victory over temptation. For the one it is a hopeless mentality, but for the heir it is a hopeful mentality. I'm in a family. I am loved.

I have a future. So the orphan heart is a life of worry, but the one who is truly deeply adopted is a life of peace. It is in the end the difference in spiritual bondage and spiritual freedom. So the move from slavery to adoption is a move from living by the flesh to living by the Spirit, which is to say it is a move from living by the law to living by grace. It is a move from one covenant to another. It is a whole new identity. May we learn it. May we learn it. A lot of the confusion is answered by this image because I spend all these years trying to figure out the answer to Bennett's question, or at least his statement, that a lot of the things of a son belonging to a father, having to do what you're told, maybe getting disciplined if you don't. What's the difference in that and being a slave?

I'll give you another image. Fast forward a number of years later. I can't remember what year it was, Bennett. We went to the father-son thing out of Dudley Hall's ranch in Texas, Tesoro Escondido. It's a hidden treasure.

It's a beautiful ranch with giant bluffs over the Brazos River and all kinds of outdoorsman activities. And we went to a father-son retreat, which is an opportunity to essentially have a rite of passage wherein we welcome the young man into adulthood. We're not very good at this in our culture, especially, I think, for our sons, but our sons and our daughters. We don't really know what it is. I mean, if you were in a Jewish culture, you could have a bar mitzvah or a ba mitzvah.

We don't have many rituals. How do you know you're a man? Because you turn 18 or 21, and you can, what?

Now you're 21, so you can go to a dirty movie and drink alcohol. Does that make you a man? So this is designed to welcome you into manhood and to go and let a father and son have this time together. And we studied God's Word together, and we studied, you know, but it was all going to lead up to this time of kind of going through a rite of passage, is welcome to the community of men. And so we had all these activities throughout the weekend, and they're all the activities that I'm terrible at.

Maybe if they played some golf and tennis, I could have held my own or something, but this was outdoorsman stuff, and I just was no good at any of it. So we went rappelling on a steep cliff. I mean, a steep cliff. And so Bennett put on the gear and stuff, and he rappelled, and he did it like a champ, like he'd done it before.

He kind of rappelled back, went down the wall and everything, like, yeah, it was great, you know. So I'm watching the other dads, and it's like, this is not going to go well. And I put that stuff on. I mean, it's not easy. And I'm leaned back on that, and they're like, lean back further. I'm like, no, lean back further, you know, and I couldn't do it.

And I just turned upside down and kind of skinned my knee against the wall, and they just sort of, the humiliating fashion just sort of let me down. And so then the next activity, we were going to do some skeet shooting. I'm terrible. I just didn't grow up hunting. I can't, I don't shoot a gun.

We want to go shoot some skeet. And I missed the first 12 out of 13. I remember that in my mind. And while I was missing them, you know, and they're over there too. No, here's the way, no, don't close that eye.

Get them both open. Now you need to lead it a little bit, you know what I'm like. And while I'm missing everything, I hear him going, good one, Bennett. Oh, you got another one, Bennett.

Good job, Bennett. You know, so I'm getting emasculated on the father-son thing. And then the next event, we go down to the Brazos River. It's 100 degrees in Texas. And we go down to the Brazos to play tackle football in waist deep water. I mean, what could be more manly than that, you know? And so we go down there and we're playing tackle football. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to, you know, I can do this.

And I'm out there and it's like, you get about three 16 year olds hanging on your shoulders and you're trying to move the ball. And man, like, I thought this would be the worst place to have a heart attack. We are down in a canyon. It's a canyon here.

They'd have to bring a helicopter down here. And then a couple of times I thought I was going to drown. So I did it for like five minutes. And then I just waited over to where the old dads are just kind of lingering over there, chatting in the side. And I watched them play football the whole weekend, you know, it was like this where I'm just increasingly like, what kind of dad am I, you know, even in this thing. And until we come to Saturday night and we gathered on the sandy beach down by the Brazos and lit torches.

At first it started with this trust walk where the dad leads a blindfolded son. And I just resisted telling him, I don't see very well at night anymore Bennett. But we just went off and we gathered all the dads on one side of this gauntlet of torches and all the sons on the other side. And it finally came my turn. And I just stood up.

And though I couldn't shoot a skeet or repel a cliff or tackle anybody in the football game, I could do this. Matthew Bennett Wright, come join the community of men. And he runs into my arms. Because in the end, being a father, it's not just about being a provider or a disciplinarian or a guide or a teacher. It's about a heart, isn't it? The difference between a slave and a son or daughter is the child, the heir, has the heart of the father. And that changes everything and sets you free.

And that's the gospel. Allen Wright, in today's teaching, Freedom Through a Father, in today's teaching, Freedom Through a Lady in Christ. Adoption, it's part of our series unleashed and I encourage you to stick around Alan's back in the studio here in just a moment Sharing a parting good news thought for the day. This is what the Lord says I will restore the fortunes of Jacob's tents and have compassion on his dwellings The city will be rebuilt on her ruins and the palace will stand in its proper place Those timeless words from Jeremiah 30 reveal the heart of God he loves to restore in ancient times cities would often be rebuilt on top of the ruins of the former city the new city would Stand higher with safer walls and a greater perspective in Pastor Alan writes eight message CD album out of the ruins You'll discover how God can rebuild your life gloriously out of yesterday's disappointments When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today will send you Pastor Alan's Messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Call us at 877 544 4860 that's 877 544 4860 or come to our website pastor Alan org unlock the power of blessing your life discover God's Grace-filled vision for your life by signing up for Alan Wright's free daily Blessing if you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement get Alan Wright's daily blessing It's free and just a click away at pastor Alan org Back in the studio with Alan Wright and for me personally. I think there have been two things that as I've gotten older I've really gravitated towards and understanding What Jesus has done for us one is the advocate in the courtroom? Illustration and the other is the the principle of adoption and this is one that if somebody's listening right now This is the good news thought for the day. This is it right here You when you trust in Christ you are adopted by God as your father Yeah, you have God as your father the image is spiritually we are orphans but when you become a Christian you have God as your father and God is perfect in his love for you and he is unlimited in the grace that he has for you and so The world might say be free pursue all the choices don't ever narrow your choice, but what the gospel says is no Here's the good news Trust in Jesus and become a child of God and as a child of God adopted by him You can never be unadopted. You're his and he loves you forever Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries