Your Highest Privilege

Take your Bibles and turn to Ephesians 1. We're going to continue in our study. Last week, some you guys, after I preached on election, you decided to come back. And so that's good news to me. I thought it might be me in the sound booth this morning.

But we are going to talk about the second spiritual benefit that is mentioned. This text after introducing in chapter 1, verses 1 through 3 of Ephesians, the spiritual blessings that come. from the Father through the Son by means of the Spirit. In this Trinitarian gift that's given in a series of gifts that go and extend beyond what's listed here, but we get a listing nonetheless from verse 4 through 14. And we're going to look at the second one.

The first one was God, irrespective. Of anything you and I had ever done, reached down in his grace and initiated saving. you and saving me. and that His grace has been so kind to us to bring us to Himself. And we didn't come because we were smarter or better or more bright than anyone else, but God, having loved, extended Himself to us.

We get to the second gift.

Now I'm going to do something different this morning. If you were if you're willing to do it if you were adopted or you have adopted a child, just stand up real fast. If there's anybody in here, I don't know if there is or not, okay? Look. Oh look, okay.

Fantastic. All right, great. You can have a seat. There's something about this morning's message. That you who stood will lay hold of in ways existentially.

that others will strive to. We'll try to get there. But it just becomes kind of difficult. Right. Last weekend, uh we had a little celebration for our Pastor of Student Ministries, Aaron and his wife Krista, and their adoption official last week of uh Remy.

And we just celebrated the beauty of all that that meant and all that that means moving forward. But You know as well as I do that in those environments when Eric pulls in.

Now back when he was what, a sophomore or freshman, pulls in now a junior in high school in DJ. Yeah. The trajectory of a life, the trajectory of Remy begins to shift and change in ways that that little guy in that case. will not even be able to understand fully. Right?

Not be able to understand his whole life will be different.

Some of you who have adopted, God used you to literally transform the life of someone. And as you reared them in that home, I promise you, they were not always thankful for that. They were a kid. And they kicked against the goats. They kicked against the pricks.

They warred against it at various times. But God used you in an extraordinary way. If you were the recipient, You know what it meant for you. to have what what would have been in your life Had you not been brought into a context of love and mercy and grace. The highest privilege of the Christian life is that you are a daughter or you are a son.

Yeah. That you've been brought in. We're just going to think about that. I want you to look in Ephesians 1:4, and we'll start in verse 4, but we're going to look at 5 and 6 this morning. Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

And then you'll notice, and this is an interpretive question: does in love go with verse 4 or verse 5?

Now you'll notice the translation, if you have an ESV, has put the period. after him, and has lumped in love with verse five.

So I'm choosing to do that, and there's arguments in the text to be made either way, and commentaries go either way.

So but the truth of the matter is whether you want to talk about election or adoption, they're both saturated in love. Because of this text and other texts in Scripture. But I think we should read it this way: with verse 5: In love, he predestined us. For what? For adoption to himself.

As sons. And here that's a placeholder for daughters too. Through Jesus Christ. According to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in. The beloved.

I want to begin by actually reading something to you. And this comes from J.I. Packer. There are not a lot of books that have been written in my lifetime that will be read 200 years from now. I can think of three books right off the top of my head that I go, they'll be read 200 years from now.

The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard will be read 200 years from now. The Cross of Christ by John Stott will be read 200 years from now. And this book, Knowing God, by J.I. Packer. If you haven't read those three books, just say a quick prayer of repentance, get to Amazon, and rectify your situation.

All right. Listen to J.I. Packer. This is beautiful. He's actually quoting something he wrote earlier.

When he says this, he's quoting an article he wrote years ago before he wrote this. He says, 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.

In the same way you sum up the whole of New Testament religion. If you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's Holy Father. Think about that. You want to know what it is to live as a New Testament Christian? It is an orientation to God as Father.

It's a fundamental reorientation even from the Typical orientation of the language of the Old Testament. That's why it was so radical when Jesus said, Our Father who art in heaven. We see that and we go, that's just how you pray. That's because we stand on his shoulders ideologically. We pray that because of the New Testament legacy of what Christ did for you and I to give us something we didn't have and that people did not experience.

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out, Packer says, how much he makes of the thought of being God's child and having God as his father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he doesn't understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new and better than the old, and everything that's distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish. Is summed up in the knowledge of the fatherhood of God. And I love the final sentence.

Father. is the Christian name for God. He's just your dad. He is Your transcendent, unrivaled, self-existent gift bestowing. Father.

And it's your highest privilege to be his child.

Now, if you grew up with a dad that was a loser, or you grew up with a dad that was wonderful. If you grew up with a dad that was wonderful, you felt pretty good about people being aware of who your dad was. In fact, you may have ridden on his laurels to some different things in your life, if the truth be known. Mm-hmm. Because he paved the way.

For you in some different ways. A father does those kinds of things.

So, what I want to do is think about four aspects of this high privilege from verse five. And verse 6. And we're not going to go in a... Kind of go in a logical order, maybe more than an exegetical order from the text. But here's the first one: it's a gift.

It's a gift. In love he predestined us. Right in love, he predestined us for adoption to himself. He did not have to do that. Even in saving you, by the way, he could have given you the little pass to get to glory.

So it saved your skin. Let you go and experience eternal bliss. Without a gift of adoption. Without Being related in intimacy, without experiencing a familial identity, without being brought into a family, without experiencing the benefits that come with daughtership or with sonship. But instead, he gives you this gift of adoption.

I want to just highlight three things out of this real quick. First, you see it in love, Hebrew destiny. The gift stems from his love. Quote Packer again, the New Testament gives us two yardsticks for measuring God's love. The first is the cross.

That's what we celebrated in the Eucharist or communion. The second is the gift of sonship. He gives us an identity.

So you celebrate, we remember, and you sit. And as you sit there, as one who reflected upon this gift this morning, you sit with a familial identity tied off to the resource of a father as a gift. To you. Right after Packer highlights that quote, he rightly in his book points to 1 John chapter 3. Listen, 1 John 3:1.

What does that verse begin with? See. What kind of love? The Father has given us that we should be called children of God, and so we are. John says, look at it.

Sit with it for a minute. Just behold it. Just think about and meditate for a moment in the busyness of your life on the fact that. who you are in the present with all that you tend to identify yourself with, that your core identity is you sit as one who is the object of the adopting love. Of God.

Your father. And John says, see that. Sit with it. What kind of love? Has the Father given?

Look at your text. In love, He predestined us, verse 5, for adoption Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the, and I don't like that the ESV renders it this way. The purpose, see that? It's the same word used down in verse 9, making known to us the mystery of his will according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ. That's a better use of the word purpose, but the word is the word eudokia.

Eudokia. In the word means... U is a prefix. I mentioned it the other day, a couple messages ago, when the word eulogia was in the text. We get eulogy from that.

U is a Greek prefix for good. Right? Good. Eulogia, good speech to speak well of another. Here, Eudokia.

His pleasure, his good. Pleasure. His good. Purpose. It would be best probably to have this translated, given this text, given the sonship metaphor and the familial identity, according to the good pleasure of his will.

It's the same word that's used in Philippians 2:13, for it is God who works in you to will and to do according to his what? Good. Pleasure. Good pleasure. If you're a parent, I hope this is the case for you.

Sometimes parenting, you know, obviously you just need a break from the nut jobs sometimes. I mean, I get that. But But Aren't there times when you go, man, I just want to hang? I just want to be with Like my youngest daughter, we she's the only one left at the house now, right? The other two are out.

So, my youngest daughter and I, it's one of my favorite things to do in life. is to go for we got this one A mile and a quarter walk, I do some nights with her. And we go out and we walk and we talk. And it's just her and I. And I mean There are days I just look forward to that.

Just getting out for what? Just to be with. Just to walk, just to engage. It is Good. Pleasure.

For me. To get with that. 15-year-old chick and walk around the hostile confines of daybreak.

Okay. I hey, I know what it is to Be in the hood as well. I mean, we're planting churches daybreak. All right? Come on.

My wit's about me. Good pleasure. It's his good pleasure. It's also a gift. A gift.

Famous verses. But to all Who did receive him? Who believed in his name? He gave. It's a gift.

He gave what? The right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor the will of man. But of God he gave you birth and said come to me He gives you the gift of the cross and says, We're not settling there. We're not stopping there. You're not just getting a ticket to get into glory.

I'm bringing you to myself. And in this journey, arduous as it is through the hardship of life, you get a resource that you call not in the abstract God. Not merely in the sovereign submission, Lord. Both good things. But you get to call father.

In the intimacy of all that that felt relationship constitutes. Look at your text. In love, Hebrew destined us for adoption to himself. As sons. Through Jesus Christ, very similar to what we saw in regard to being chosen.

We saw that being chosen was you were chosen in him. Here? It's through Jesus Christ. Even when you get to the end, He's blessed us in. The beloved, what's the ground of your redemption?

The ground of your redemption is. Christ.

So What is it? It's this movement that we had here this morning. It's you come, you experience, you remember, you worship symbolically his death. Burial resurrection on your behalf. You go back, and now, having celebrated that, you sit and you're reminded, I'm redeemed, I'm washed in the blood of the Lamb.

And what is it that I sit at? I sit. as one adopted, but you sit as one because of what took place here. This is the gateway to the gift. This is the ground of the gift.

This is the currency with which the gift was purchased. for you. And you're given that. There's other texts here that speak about this. Galatians 4.

4 and 5, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem. That's what we celebrated. Those who were under the law, why?

So that we might receive.

So that might might receive. Adoption. As Sons Thomas Merton, Trappist monk. who spent most of his life in a monastery in Kentucky. Was talking one day with a fellow monk, and here's what he said: If I make anything out of the fact that I am Thomas Merton.

I'm dead. And if you make anything out of the fact that you are in charge of the pig barn, he said to his fellow monk. You're dead. What was Merton's solution? Here's what he said.

Quit keeping score altogether. Just think about that for a minute. Self-identity gets wrapped up. in your annual review. Maybe it gets wrapped up in your daily review from your spouse.

Maybe it's Been wrapped up in the review that you experience through trauma from your parents.

Okay. Maybe it's that you know more than anybody your own failures, and you wake up every day and you look in the mirror and you're reminded of them all again. Hmm. Quit keeping score altogether and surrender yourself with all your sinfulness. Don't live in an illusion.

Don't look at the mirror and go, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough to hug on at people like me. Don't steward smallly your Christian life. No, no, it's it's real that you're a sinner there. Surrender yourself with all your sinfulness to God, but here it is, who sees neither the score nor the scorekeeper, but only his child redeemed by Christ. Hit on look and see the score.

I do. He unlook and see the score keeper. All too often I'm the scorekeeper. And if I'm not, the devil tries to make me the scorekeeper. And he says, don't do that.

That's a good word. Remember, you have received an adoption as a son through the redemption of Christ, and so now God looking at you through the lens of Christ sees you grounded, rooted in that redemption, and so you receive full and free adoption. Adoption, that's the ground.

Now, where I want to make a little hay this morning is in the next point. The gain of adoption. What's it mean for you? What's it mean for you? What do you get?

as a result of this. And I think the best way for us to think about it is its connectedness to the Spirit because the text of Scripture kind of shows and points us to the Spirit who is not the one of the member of the Trinity adopting us. That's the Father. But the Spirit is the one who's bearing witness inside of the spiritual realities of the gifts that have been bestowed. The Spirit's the one that says to us in terms of these gifts, they're yours and it's okay.

They're yours and you can celebrate. They're yours and you can relax. They're yours, and you can bask in the Father's love. They're yours and you can source yourself in Him.

So, I want to think in terms of the comforting witness of the Holy Spirit to three. Different realities. About this issue of adoption. The first one is very obvious, but before we get there, I need to show you two kind of generic texts. We've kind of seen at least text from the Galatians.

We'll go back to that to a later verses. But first, just think with me in Romans 8 for a moment. If you want to think about adoption, there are three probably of the biggest texts is the one we're looking at this morning. Ephesians 1, Romans 8, and Galatians 4. They're not the only ones.

Hebrews 12, we may get there, I don't know. That's an important one. But Romans 8, 14 through 17, For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God, for you did not receive the Spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you've received the Spirit of adoption as sons. By whom we cry, Abba father. Abba, uh Aramaic for for dad or daddy, it's an affectionate term.

The Spirit Himself bears witness with our Spirit that we are children. of God. Right. I love that word abba, by the way. Yeah, and everybody runs their family differently like this, but my girls will tell you that I love it when they call me Daddy.

I do. In fact, growing up in our house, they will ask me, they always would do this to sort of get my goat. Can you imagine Hurlbutt children doing that? But they would say to me, Hey, Dad, can we? and they'd ask a question and I wouldn't answer them.

I said, Dad, can we, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, can we? And I would say, who are you talking to? I have no idea who that creature is. And then they say, Daddy, and I would go, Oh yeah, what what did you need? I just had to ask.

All right. Is it affection? Intimacy, right?

Something about that, the spirit of adoption of sons, the spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we're children of God. And because your sons got our sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts. What does that spirit cry? Abba, Father.

So, you're no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

So, here's the first thing: it's just God's fatherhood, and you've got to understand His fatherhood for a minute. We got to think about what that means that God is in fact in that kind of role.

So, what I want to do is give you, I'm going to give you a couple of quotes here. The first is from Brennan Manning. In his book Abba's Child, and I just want you to see something he says that I find. It's so compelling. My dignity as Abba's child is my most coherent sense of self.

When I seek to fashion a self-image from the adulation of others, and the inner voice whispers, you've arrived. You're a player in the kingdom enterprise, man. You're getting it done for Jesus and his kingdom, you spiritual beast. There's no truth in that self-concept. When I sink into despondency and the inner voice whispers, You're no good.

A fraud, a hypocrite, a dilettante. There's no truth in any image shaped from that message. As Gerald May has noted, it's important to recognize these self-commentaries for the mind tricks they are. They have nothing to do with our real dignity. How we view ourselves at any given moment may have very little to do with who we really are.

Have you thought about that? What you think you can't think something. And make it true. You understand that? You might think you're a piece of garbage.

That doesn't make it true. You might believe you're the bee's knees. That doesn't make it true. The arbiter of truth speaks reality. All things.

find their mowering in the character nature and proclamation of your father. And he is the one who speaks over you. You are not the one who dictates yourself in regard to your arrogance or your self-abasement. Either one. Both are narcissistic pride.

One, I'm all that, one, oh, I'm so horrible, and you sit at the center of both. Instead, your father has bestowed a gift.

Now, when I say the word father, Mm-hmm. I'm going to tell you right now, there are some of you who go, Brian, that isn't a great word for me. If you knew my father. If you knew the one who would like me to call him Daddy, He was an Ab. Yeah.

Fool. He was an abusive man. who hurt and wounded me.

So, to get to a place where I can experience the glories. of God as Father feels like I'm walking into a foreign land. To that, I'd like you to think about something from George MacDonald. It's a l rather lengthy quote, but I think it's worth it. Macdonald was an old Scottish pastor and poet and writer.

And MacDonald said, Alas, there may be those among my readers for whom the word father brings no cheer, now dawn, in whose heart this word rouses no tremble or even a vanished emotion. It's hardly likely to be their fault. Therefore, I say to a son or daughter who has no pleasure in the name Father, you must rather interpret the word by all that you've missed in life. Every time some person might have been to you a refuge from the wind. I love it.

So beautiful. A refuge from the wind, a hiding place from the storm, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. That was a time when a father might have been a father indeed. Happy yet are you if you found such a refuge in a man. or woman.

Thus far have you known? A shadow? of the perfect one. You've seen the back of the only man, the perfect son of the perfect father. All that human tenderness can give or desire in the nearness or readiness of love must also be infinitely more true of the perfect Father, for He is the One who made all Fatherhood.

He's the father of all the fathers of the earth, especially of those who have truly shown a father heart. I love that.

Some of you got to do some projection.

Some of you got to say, I've heard of... Father. What did I miss? Think of all the perfection you may have missed. Place that.

Unmitigated. Undefiled. unpolluted in a bucket. And that Is your Father, the one who gives you the gift of his Fatherhood. That gift comes in interesting places and ways and shapes.

You know, Hebrews 12, I'm not going to turn there, but I'll just read it for you. Don't need you to turn there. Hebrews 12:5 says, And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? You forget about that? My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him, for the Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives.

Through verse 7. The Lord is kind as a father, and he's kind to discipline you. And he goes on and says, Aren't you glad? I mean, in hindsight, if a father disciplined you properly and well, not abusively. But if he disciplined you well, Can you look back and say, wow.

That was good. I'm thankful that I had some ropes along the highway, some chains along the way. I'm thankful that I had to learn what it meant for me to live within the consequences of my behavior, but to live in it still loved. Still valued, still treasured. God does that with you and I.

I sin and you sin and we do not leave the lap of his love. And yet he might turn you over on that lap. and might paddle your bottom. And just let you know. that we can't continue that way, both for your good and for my glory.

That's the way our Father works. That's the way He functions and operates. The second is our freedom, and you saw it in those texts. The Romans 8 texts, you were a slave. That's what you were, but the Spirit has...

Brought you something. Ephesians 2:3, we saw it last week. We'll say you're by nature children of wrath. You were once a son of disobedience, right? But now things have shifted.

You were that, but now you've been set free and adopted, and now you have... Freedom. Jesus, speaking to people in his day that thought, thought that they had a relationship with God, but had not tasted of the goodness of God in John chapter 8 said to them, you have a father. He said, you're doing the works your father did, they said to him. We were not born of sexual immorality.

We have one father, even God. Jesus said to them: If God were your father, you'd love me. For I came from God, and I'm here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say?

And then he says this: It's because you cannot bear to hear my word, you are of your Father. The Devil And your will is to do your father's desires. You and I were like that. We were sons of disobedience. Yeah.

But God having loved us. redeemed us, brought us from a place of destitution. to receive Freedom. To traffic. as his Child.

That's Abbas. child, as it were. In love he predestined us, verse 5, for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace. with which He's blessed us in the Beloved. We'll come back to that last phrase, but just as a harbinger, remember, He adopted you and one of the gains that you get is a future ultimately with Him.

Romans 8 witnesses to this. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly. I love that.

Think about it. I'm in life. I'm dealing with hardship. I've got tension, I've got depression, I've got anxiety, I've got regret, I've got all kinds of pressure and challenge, and I feel it, my body's breaking down. He says, and you groan inwardly, you go, oh.

This life is hard. And you go, but there's got to be more. You wait eagerly. Wait eagerly. The same text in Romans 8 will describe that the creation waits eagerly, but the word when it describes the creation waiting eagerly is like somebody standing on their tiptoes, craning their neck, going up.

I I gotta see what's out there. And you go, God, there's got to be more than this. There's got to be more than this. Right, right, right. We wait eagerly for what?

for adoption as sons.

So I've already received it. Yes, you have, and yes, you will. Yes, you have. And yes, you will. What's that mean?

That means that you're adopted as a son. You're adopted as a daughter, and then one day daddy's giving you the whole kitten caboodle. And he's just gonna dispense it. Aren't you? He's going to bring into the fullness of his kingdom.

The redemption of our bodies is how the verse describes it. One day you won't groan inwardly. And you won't wait eagerly because the future will become the present. The glories of the future will be brought back. into the here and into the now and into the goodness.

that God Which leads us right to the final point. He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ according to the good pleasure of his will. And let's just give a little. Give a little maybe better rendition than the ESV gives us here to the praise of his glorious grace. Let's say it this way.

There's really a series of what are called genitives. in the Bible, to the praise of the glory. of his grace. What is it that's getting praise? What is the goal of adoption?

The praise of his glorious grace? Oh It's actually in the grammar the praise of the glory of his grace. And why would that matter at all? Here's why. Because the word for glory.

has a rich Connection in Greek back to the Hebrew, kavod is the Hebrew word that's used. Not all the time, but the majority of the time when the word glory is used. And that word came from the idea of weight or substance or heaviness. In the sense of glory in the New Testament, is often a way of speaking this, something like the radiated effulgence, the magnificence, the beauty, and the majesty of the substance of God's essential being. Who God is by nature as God.

His glory is put on display because he brought you into his family. The goal. Of me. The goal of you Being a child of God is that the glory of God's character would be put on even greater display through that demonstration of his grace, that one facet would come back and point to his character and that the world would look and go, you mean that nut job is a part of the family of God? And they go, if he can save him.

If he can bring him into the family, he can bring anybody. I'm not the poster child. For salvation. Because I'm beautiful.

Well I'm not the poster child. For salvation. Because I brought a bunch to the table. I'm not the poster chop for salvation because the kingdom needs me. on the poster child for salvation.

Because I got nothing. Nothing. But God Having loved. predestined us for adoption as his sons and daughters, to the purpose Of his good his good pl Yeah, sure. It just Just walk with us, enjoy us.

His good pleasure. In this familial dynamic, so that the world could look and go, Now that's a beautiful God. That's a glorious God. Don't get it twisted. He's always center stage.

Always. Two verses. How great are your works, O Lord? Your thoughts are very. I don't even get that.

Why? I don't know. didn't have to. Again, he could have saved me without adopting me, but he didn't. Great are the works of the Lord.

And then I love this: studied by all who delight in them. That's why we're looking at this. Why are you spending the whole morning thinking about adoption? Why did we spend last week thinking about election? Why are we going to turn and think about redemption?

Why are we going to turn and think about the inheritance you receive in salvation? Why are we going to turn and think about the sealing and beautiful gift of the Holy Spirit in your life? Because we delight in the fact that God would perseverate out of his holy character that doesn't need us and yet perseverate upon us. And we just go, man, we got to learn about that. We gotta sit with that.

We got to glory in that.

So you pray this week, and when you say. Father, and I'm encouraging you. There's not some people will say, You, every time you talk to the Lord, you got to say, Father, in the name of Jesus, by the power of the Spirit. No, you don't. People prayed to Jesus.

Have mercy on me, Lord Jesus. Stephen prayed to Jesus when he's going to be martyred.

So, no, no, we're not legalistic in our prayer, but I want to tell you something. The normative way, the normative way for you to pray is to come to your heart. Father. Call him that. And when you do.

Think about it. Pause. Process it. Think about why you. Why you?

And the only answer you'll have is that he loved you. That's it. It's the cul-de-sac. of your relationship with God, is the sweetness Of him As your father. Lord, we love you.

We just take a moment just to say, Father. Thank you. Father. We praise you. Father, we love you.

Father, you're good to us. Father, you bestow gifts. Father, you are so gracious and kind. Father, you extend those gifts way beyond what we deserve. Father, you're consistent in your love for us.

Father, you're epic in your holiness. Father, you're so gracious in forgiveness, Father. We love you. And we worship you. In Jesus' name, amen.