Well, Liz Jackson, she flew over 4,000 miles overseas. Now she's standing in an orphanage with about 100 children. She's a teacher from Southern New Jersey, so she's familiar with the kind of noise that that experience should entail, all these children and infants in one room. But not one of them made a sound. In this room, it was called learned silence. One article put it like this, "The cries of children in orphanages like this are so rarely answered, so they learn early to stop crying out loud." They're eerily quiet. She'd traveled there to adopt her son, Landon, and after months of process and paperwork, she's finally allowed to visit, finally allowed to pick him up for the first time. He's 18 months old, and usually at that age, toddlers have learned to wrap their legs around the adult holding them, but here's what she says. She picks him up, and, "He was limp. He just didn't know how to be held. His eyes were empty," she says.

When they brought him home, for months, she says, "He would just shake himself violently to fall asleep. He didn't want to be touched." Another adoptive father describes a similar experience with him and his wife. He called it, "The loudest silence I've ever heard." So the workers there were caring for the children, but they were overwhelmed. There was a ratio about one to 30, and he went into the room one time to retrieve their son, and it was a room full of cribs, about 20 cribs, he says, children anywhere from a few months to a year or so old. And they stood there, and the room was just perfectly still. Looked to see if the children are sleeping, but there were some sitting up, some on their backs, and he knew that they were hungry. They didn't have enough food to feed them properly, but they weren't making cries. The child's instinctual move is to cry out, to cry out that they have a need.

But if over and over and over, the needs are not met, if no one comes, they soon learn that this crying is pointless. And here's what the father says, "An entire room of children who had simply shut down." He says, "Crying is the sound of life. The child is saying, 'I believe that someone will meet my needs. Someone will come. Someone loves me.' It's a beautiful sound." He says, "The first time our son cried, we knew something had changed in him. He realized we would respond to his cries." It is a terrible tragedy not to belong to anyone.

We all long to be wanted, yes, in the world, perhaps most of all in a family, and it is heartbreaking to hear of the challenges that go on around the world and what some children endure. Praise God that some are able to be brought into a loving home. However, even in such cases as these, it's not the end of the struggle. It's not the end of the battle for belonging. Because crying out takes trust. It takes faith. There's a kind of vulnerability that is hard and painful, and we can learn to stop crying when that trust is broken. And for some, even when the adoption is finalized and a forever family secured, the struggle to trust, to accept, to live from that true belonging, it persists throughout their lives. To struggle to live from true belonging, to cry out in times of need because you trust your cries will be heard and heeded. The Galatians knew that there was an in crowd.

They were on the outs. The Judaizers had their lunch tables, and the Galatian Gentiles were not invited. But what was worse than that these Judaizers conveyed, not just that the Galatians weren't welcome at the table. What was worse was the message behind that exclusion was that their state as Gentiles prevented them from truly belonging to Abraham's family, and thus they didn't truly belong to God. The Galatians had been challenged to question their place of acceptance and belonging before God, being intimidated and destabilized as young Christians here in a profound way. Many of you are familiar with that feeling of an in crowd with confidence, intimidation, pressuring you, and making incisive statements declaring something that causes you to doubt whether you really belong, that maybe you're missing a key factor. There's a kind of social and theological pressure upon them, luring them to jump through some kind of man-made law keeping hoops in attempt to earn acceptance before God. So here they're enticed back to this errant and impossible path of trying to behave in order to belong. Trying to behave in order to belong. Paul has been down that road.

He said, "It goes nowhere. It goes nowhere." So as he's proclaimed the gospel, and they've joined them on the highway of grace, and he hears that they're drifting over into the slow lane, considering an exit, he practically yells through the pages of this letter, just writing them, saying, "Stop! Get back in the fast lane. We're on the highway of grace. Don't get off there. You cannot belong by behaving. You cannot. No one can." Belonging is a gift of gospel grace.

You receive it by faith. You belong not by behaving to earn God's favor, but by believing you've been given it for free. To be sure, those who belong learn to behave out of love, but their behavior is not the basis of their acceptance. It is the effect. You belong not by behaving to earn God's favor, but by believing you've been given it already by grace. That's a hard truth to hold onto. Peter says that we have to stand firm in it because all the world and our own flesh and doubts and the demonic realm are against it. It's a message too good to be true, and yet it is. That's why it's called good news. But we have to stand firm in it and hold onto this grace by faith, believing and living from that acceptance.

This is what the Galatians had received, but they were starting to drift from. That we can cry out to God and talk to Him in faith, and yet it became a struggle. Do we really belong to really have what we need, acceptance before God? And God has preserved this message from Paul in the scriptures because He knew it would be a struggle, as it was for the Galatians, for many ages to come, including us. A struggle to live from true belonging. Do you ever face that struggle? Do you ever wonder if you really belong? Or maybe you're missing something. Like maybe you're on your own. Like maybe others have done what's needed to enjoy access to God in a way that you don't have.

Paul's answer for the Galatians, which remains God's standing word to us, is to push us towards the doctrine of spiritual adoption. He brings this idea of spiritual adoption, and why is that? Why does Paul address this struggle with belonging by teaching adoption? I think it's the best way he knows how to show us how much better and more profound a belonging that we can have by grace through faith in Christ is than any kind that we would try to conjure up ourselves. This kind of belonging is so much better, so much more secure. He's exposed law-keeping and self-righteousness for what it is. It's a terrible slave holder. And he's painting now a picture of how wonderful the grace of true gospel belonging is. Grudem says adoption is this, "An act of God whereby He makes us members of His family."^[1] An act of God whereby He makes us members of His family.

Adoption is a distinct action when it comes to redemption. It's not the same as regeneration, which we've heard about. It's being made alive and enabled to relate to God, regeneration. It's not the same as justification, which we've talked about means being declared righteous. We can receive regeneration and justification and yet not have the privilege of being brought in as members of God's family. See, this is unique. Regeneration has to do with living, experiencing spiritual life within. Justification has to do with cleansing, that we enjoy right standing before the law. Adoption establishes belonging, our personal relationship with God as Father. You see, angels can be alive.

They exist, and they're not guilty. They can stand before God and even have the term sons of God applied to them in the sense of God as creator and in a unique standing, but they are not children of God with the privileges of being family with God. This is what the writer of Hebrews explains that we have in Christ. Adoption is special. In regeneration, God gives us new spiritual life and justification, right legal standing, but in adoption, He makes us members of His family. It changes the way God relates to us and we relate to Him and one another. We relate to God our Father as our Father. He is, yes, our creator, yes, our master, yes, our teacher, provider, protector, but the privilege is that He is our Father. J. I.

Packer says adoption is the highest privilege the gospel offers, higher even than justification.^[2] He says justification is primary, that's our main spiritual need, and fundamental, meaning everything else rests upon it, but adoption is higher. Not just a subset of justification. They're distinct. Justification has to deal with the law and God as judge. Adoption has to deal with the idea of terms of love with God as Father. To be right before God the judge is a great thing. To be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater. I think you're starting to see why Packer is pushing us towards the beauty of adoption, and why Paul drives the Galatians towards this wonder in this moment where they're questioning their belonging. J.

I. Packer would say it like this, "Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption." It cannot be better than our grasp of adoption. Why would he say that? As we consider this truth, I'll put it like this. I think it's because spiritual adoption doesn't just mean you belong to God. It means God gives Himself to you. It doesn't just mean you belong to God. It means God has given Himself to you. And if you grasp that truth, there's no way you're getting off this highway.

How do you overcome your struggle with belonging? Look, there's nothing more secure than God's gift of Himself. You want to break free from the pressures and the external intimidation and all the challenges and the fear of man and what the world is bringing upon you. And did I do enough? Have I made enough people happy? Do I really belong? Have I jumped through all the hoops? You want to shake all that off. Understand what you have in adoption. Look to not only your belonging to God, but His giving of Himself to you.

You need to understand this wonder, and to do that, I think we need to anchor ourselves in this truth and then to deepen our maturity and understanding of belonging. And so that's what we're looking at here in Galatians 4. We'll try to cover three anchors to help you when the pressures of the fear of man, whether it be legalism or rules or self-righteousness, all kinds of standards and comparisons, the world and all that pressure that comes against you and to say, "Do I really belong?" You want to fight against that, and you want to make progress in this struggle, you need to anchor these truths in. And the first anchor is this, to learn to trust God's wise pace. Trust God's wise pace. To understand that stages are real, and God doesn't do everything all at once. He doesn't do everything all at once. There can be multiple things true, even though experience can be quite complex of those truths. God has a pace that He works through, and we need to learn to trust His pace and His wisdom.

In the complexity and the challenges of the redemptive history and the Bible and all of this theology and Old Testament stories and Jews and Gentiles and all of the complexity and those challenges, the Galatians were a bit vulnerable. And Paul is having to explain from multiple angles the truths that are there, but they're vulnerable to false teaching who come in with oversimplifications and other kinds of arguments and appeals. And so Paul is working his way through this gospel truth and defending it, and he's giving several different kinds of illustrations and metaphors and analogies here. Here, he's got a few that come, and it's hard to follow just because he's giving as many as he can to keep explaining these truths, and he gives an illustration of progression that we can consider in verses one through two to just remind us that God has a certain kind of pace, and we need to trust His wise pace. You look there in verses one through two, the idea, the illustration here of, is of an heir. And he says, "Let me put it to you like this. I mean that the heir, as long as he's a child," so he's not fully grown yet, he's still a minor, "he's no different from a slave in the sense that even though he's the owner of everything," verse two, "he's under guardians and managers until the date set by his father." He's giving this illustration of stages. That there's an heir, and yes, he's the owner of everything in one sense, but as he's still a child and a minor and doesn't have legal authority to make decisions about those possessions, he is under the stewardship, the care of a guardian and a manager until a specific date his father sets. I think Paul is drawing from the Roman background of how things worked legally.

I think there's probably a lot of reference points that various cultures have, but I think he's drawing from the Roman background of what would happen as a child had to reach a certain level of maturity to actually receive the inheritance. Picture for those that have seen it, the Disney movie, "Lion King," there's a young prince, and he's walking around, named Simba, and he's like, "I own all this stuff." Well, really, he's going to own it all. And he's living there and walking around the kingdom of the Pride Lands, and yet he's under the stewardship of another. It's going to be his, but not yet. It's already his in one sense, but not quite yet. It's an analogy that we can understand. It's how things work. And even though it's kind of a complicated reality, it is true. This is how life works, and Paul is drawing an illustration here of how life works legally and in our own experience to help the Galatians understand what is going on spiritually.

And I think there's some challenging realities, yet they are inescapable realities that we have to learn to appreciate, and we do that by trusting God's pace. The first is just complexity. Life is complex. There's a layered nature to life that's hard to appreciate, but if we trust God's pace, we can come to appreciate that and come to appreciate that well-designed complexity does not mean disordered chaos. See, young Simba, or like a young child, they might look for simplification, say, "Is it mine or not?" Say, well, yes, it is, but there's a kind of complexity to this. There's legal complexities, there's practical complexities, your maturity. There's a lot of dynamics going on. And that's a part of God's design. It's actually beautiful that there's a layered nature of this, and you need to appreciate it and not just say, "Well, there's a level of complexity. Doesn't make any sense to me."

No. We can learn to appreciate the layered nature through which God works. There's tensions with the way the world works, but also the way salvation works. And sometimes, if we're not willing to work hard, we're going to miss how it actually works. You see, Paul, he's saying, "I mean this." He's giving an illustration, "Let me put it to you this way," and he's giving another illustration. And you say, "Well, couldn't he just say, 'That's the gospel,' and then be done with it?" No, he's going to continue to explain it and give more, use more figures of speech, and use various arguments to help us understand what's actually happening. And there's a lot of thought required to understand theologically what has occurred, just like there would be a lot of thought to understand legally. And Paul uses a simple illustration to just help us understand God's universe is complex in some ways, and there's beauty in that.

And that complexity is sometimes hard because there's a tension because of how dissonant things can seem. And you see Paul, he's emphasizing that. He says, "Look, this is the heir, but even though he's the heir, as long as he's a child, he's no different from a slave." Now that feels irreconcilable that a child is no different from a slave. But in this sense, as a minor in his legal capacity, he has no more power than a slave to make a decision about the estate. He doesn't have that ability, and that feels dissonant, but it's appropriate for that stage. God's got a design, and there's a layer here that's happening, and it's helpful when Paul uses this to make a complex illustration. It's helpful because it helps us understand this is how things actually work. And in this sense, this is how things have worked even in their own experience of salvation. Now Paul's using this illustration, he's going to keep explaining it, but we see there not only complexity involved, but also authority.

Authority. Life has, in God's pace, it has complexity, but authority. There's layered nature to life, but there's also tiered structures. There's authorities in place, and these structures are not a design flaw but a feature. God has put authorities in place for a reason. And there are worldly philosophies that are anti-authoritarian and think that no, authority is a bad thing, man-made. No, God has designed and ordained for these things, and Paul references two simple ways in which we relate to authority. There's those under authority, like the child here, and then there's those in authority who he references as guardians or managers, and yet they are, in a sense, under authority as well by the father. So there's those who are in authority, those who are under authority, and yet all of us are, in some capacity, under authority. These relationships are ones that we recognize are a part of life.

And Paul is explaining this illustration, but it's good to recognize in God's pacing that this is a part of His design and plan. So yes, there's complexity to life. Yes, there's authorities in life that we can learn to accept in God's pace as He moves us along, but there's also a sequence. There's a sequence, and there's timing. There are progressive procedures that God ordains to take place, and we can appreciate those, that there are seasons that have their place, and they are best neither rushed nor delayed. We dare not wish away the season we're in or wish ourselves back to a season that we used to be in. There is a date set by the father, and it's appropriate while the child is a minor to just grow under these guardians and to allow the guardian, which is a term for someone who'd oversee the raising of this child, and then the manager who would oversee the care of the estate. It's appropriate for them to have stewardship according to the wisdom of the father until the date set. In Roman background, there usually was a moment of maturity, a legal point where they would cross from being a minor to being a man and have legal access. But I think Paul's referencing a general, maybe even a special situation whereby the father would designate a particular day where that would occur, a day where the procedures were taken care of, and this date is an actual date and an intentional date.

It's not an accident. It's intentional. This is the illustration that Paul is giving to show there's certain things that, parts of life where there's a stage where we feel like a truth isn't ours. Like maybe we don't belong or things don't belong to us the way we would hope, like an inheritance. And I think thinking back towards the inheritance belonging to Abraham, there's a time where we think, "Well, that couldn't be true." But it's for a season, and it feels that way, but it's only for a time. And while that's complicated and there's authorities involved and sequences and procedures, that that doesn't mean it's complicated and it must not be special and supernatural. No, that's the way that God's world works. And you shouldn't think different theologically. Paul's addressing, look, there's a kind of trust we have to learn, and a trust in God's pace and His wisdom.

He's worked through ages and stages throughout the scriptures. You can see the wise and steady pace He's followed from the creation of man to our redemption, and then one day that ultimate return of Christ. Everything's on schedule, but God doesn't do everything all at once. And there is a kind of complexity to the way that God works. We have varying relationship to various authorities. There's timings and schedules, and there's a beauty in God's design. Even you see in the coming of Christ as He came, He came as an infant, and He slowly grew under His parents' authority. You see Him baptized, you see Him do ministry, but you see Him challenged and being called to disregard various authorities from His opponents seeking to trap Him. And He was faithful. He wasn't taken before the time.

He was steadfast, following God, persecuted and attacked, but not harmed until the very moment when He would offer Himself according to God's timing as a sacrificial payment for our sins. He accomplished this, and He rose according to God's timing on the third day. He appeared in sequence to various individuals according to God's plan and timing and His wisdom and His pace, and then they were told to wait and pray, and the Spirit was given at the right time. And then proceeded according to His promise to Jerusalem and Judea, Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth according to God's plan. Each stage had its own wonders. God didn't do everything all at once, including now. He's working through the complexities and authorities and sequences of life, even our own. And it's appropriate to recognize where we are in our relationship with redemptive history and our relationship with God and in our own testimony, and to embrace where we're at and trust God's wisdom and His pace, and not allow comparisons or oversimplifications from others, especially false teachers challenging us to doubt God and to look to them to guide us. There is a trust, and life is complicated enough. There's enough authorities and timings that we just have to trust God, and Paul's analogy here helps us realize that that's important.

It's important to trust God's pace. But I think their sense of belonging is being threatened, and they're being pressured to look for something more secure than trusting God. We have something that will actually guarantee you belonging and inheritance, a man-made way, instead of trusting God, and the pressure towards a return to the law here was nothing less than a demonic assault on their grasp of the one true gospel. And if we're going to trust God's pace, it's led us to the point where we have heard the good news of Jesus Christ and believed in Him, and here is where we need to continue to return and then grasp the surety, the certainty of God's grace. We need to anchor it into our hearts over and over and over to really understand, grasp what it is that we've been given in the grace of God. He's going to correlate the provision that God gives according to this illustration to our experience. And in this sense, yes, there's stages of life, but what Paul wants to say in terms of redemptive history and then in your experience with the gospel, the wait is over. The wait is over. The stage we're in, we recognize redemption has come. When you have these people telling you fancy things from the law and looking back, they're looking from a certain perspective, but you need to realize where you stand and the perspective we have.

We look and we see Christ has come. Grace has a name, and you know Him and He knows you. Jesus Christ. You need to grasp what that means. That will help you remember how secure you are in your belonging in the family. Trying to behave to belong is like going backwards. There was a trend for a little while where children who had grown would go back and recreate childhood photos. So there'd be a three-year-old and a five-year-old in the photo. They're sitting in a little kiddie pool, and then they'd go back as adults and wear swimsuits and sit in that kiddie pool again and recreate the photo. And you look at those and you go, "Oh, that's creepy."

It's just a little off. You're not supposed to go backwards. It's funny in one sense, but it's also very clear that stage is behind us. We're moving forward. There's something beautiful that has occurred, and we don't need to go back. We should be averse to going back, where we recognize what's happened and where God's brought us. The wait is over. Redemption has come. Did you forget what Jesus has accomplished? The veil is torn.

This is such a powerful transformation. We dare not go back. You think about the challenge of moving finally from foster care into a forever family and then wondering, maybe if I go back, I might feel belonging more. And Paul says, "No way. You're in God's forever family. Don't go back." You need to understand actually what has been terminated to bring you into this family. God's grace has accomplished such a profound termination of the things that you need to leave behind, and there's a few terminations that are helpful to recognize, the first being our custody. There was a kind of custody that was over us, a kind of temporary guardianship, a season of governing that is over, that custody, and grasping God's grace means realizing that that's at an end. We're out of that stage.

Paul says in verse three, "In the same way we also," connecting to this illustration, "when we were children, we were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world." There's a sense in which that was us. "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons." He's describing the wonder of what we have received. Now, there's a couple things that Paul does that make it a little difficult to follow, and one is that he changes pronouns a little bit. He changes pronouns to include himself, and you're saying, is he talking about himself and the Jews or the Gentiles too, altogether, Christians? And then he even says you singular. So trying to understand, but Paul is being quite inclusive here, and I think what he's doing is he shifts from speaking specifically about these Judaizers to now addressing the Galatians and welcoming them in and understanding our shared problem before God, and he's connecting several illustrations and building his argument towards this idea of adoption, and he gets a little bit more cosmic in a broader sense. But he's describing there's a sense in which we had a custody. We had someone governing, and he's used some harsh descriptions of a teacher who was over us or a master.

Here, he talks about guardians and managers, but he uses this word enslaved. We were enslaved. It's a harsh term, but you see what he says, "We also," he's including himself. I think he's describing Jews and Gentiles, that this is the pre-Christian conditionThat before Christ had come, and before those who had placed our faith in him, here we were under a kind of custody. We were enslaved in one sense. And he says our condition then, when we were still children, we were enslaved, and he says, "To the elements or the elementary principles of the world." The elementary principles of the world. Now this term, there's so much written on it, because there's a couple of different ways that you could understand Paul to be using this term. The basic idea is a term that comes from things set in a row, kind of like rudiments or like ABCs, kind of like something set in a row, or the simple or the basics. So there's one sense in which maybe this is the rudiments or the elementary principles of religion.

There's other ideas that maybe this is the elements of the world, like earth, wind, fire kind of thing. There's other ideas that maybe this was sort of the way that people worship at the time, especially different planets and stars and how the calendar system works. There's ideas that maybe this is just purely the law that he's describing. I think if you go to Colossians 2, you can see part of what Paul says. He uses a similar term there and explains it. And I think probably the best way to understand it is basic human approaches to be right with God, so-called standards of righteousness and pleasing God, but without divine help, especially without the divine help of the Trinitarian God. And so these human approaches, these earthly approaches to go to God rather than recognizing God come to us, I would say they are energized and overseen by the God of this world and demonically infused. So yes, when you're talking about human approaches to try to please God or to be right with God and to reach God without divine help, without His divine plan, that they are demonically inspired. And what is shocking here is, as Paul describes this enslaved elementary principles, I think he's referencing, if you go down there in verse eight, he talks to the Galatians, "You were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods." So yes, he's recognizing there's something demonic about what the Galatians had done in their Gentile religion.

But here in verse three, he's saying, "We were children enslaved." I think Paul is looping together the Jewish approach through twisting the law, and self-righteousness is the same in that demonic approach as the Gentile approach through all of their idolatry. It's the same kind of enslavement. It will never get us to God, has no power to get us to God when he twists the law like that, when we're trying to do our human man-made ways. This is the way of the world. The elementary principle of the world is the way he says it, and it's a kind of slavery, and that it is impossible, and we're intended by God to recognize we cannot save ourselves. That is impossible. We need a savior. Paul says, look, that custody, that whole way of trying to get to God, all the religions, all of that, that's the way of the world, terminated. Terminated.

That's what it was. You were enslaved. He says, "We were enslaved," but that's over. And now Paul says, not only that, but there's a kind of ambiguity of not knowing, well, how is it over? What's going to happen? What's God's plan? How are all the Old Testament things going to work their way out? He's like, that ambiguity, it's over. It's over because grace now has a name, and grasping God's grace means realizing He has ended all those long-awaited promises of His arrival there in the first coming, that He has come on time. He's come in person.

He's come from on high and for good. Jesus is the fulfillment of those promises. He says, "When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under law." What for? To redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. Now, this plan we learn from Ephesians 1 was set in motion before we were even born. He predestined this plan. Why? In love. God had a love, and He moved to accomplish our adoption, and He did it through this redemption.

We don't have a mystery, an ambiguity here. God has made it clear and plain to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We see here that this was a pivotal move by God. We needed it. Anytime you see but God moving in human history, all of those moments, praise God, He intervenes. But God intervenes in this way, pivotal, we needed it for our good, and He's purposeful. He does it at the fullness of time. Fullness of time, I think, yes, by providential design, such that the culture of the time, that the government had established a kind of security. There was roads and language and all kinds of ways for the gospel to move, and it was in fulfillment of the provision that was needed. Yes, providential design, but I also think by prophetic declaration.

When you look at the Book of Daniel, I think there had been declared times and prophecies that needed specific dates to be fulfilled, and I think that time had come, and it was fulfilled in Jesus. Can't be fulfilled by anyone else. Paul says that time, according to God's plan in history, providentially designed, prophetically declared, that happened and God sent forth His own Son. He came in person, God as a man. He didn't send Jesus, His Son, from Galilee into ministry. He sent forth His Son. This is the preexistent eternal God from heaven to Earth. God as a man. This is a divine cosmic plan. It's profound from on high, and it's so personal.

This is what God has accomplished. We don't have to be ambiguous about it. That's terminated. We know who he is. Not only that, but there's contingencies that he's terminated. Contingencies meaning those kinds of conditions like, well, maybe it wasn't enough. Maybe there's things that still need to happen. Maybe I need to do some things. There are contingencies on me. No.

Terminated. He has accomplished this. Grasping God's grace means realizing he has paid for and ended the procedural requirements for redemption in full. He's taken care of it. You see the requirements there, and he lists, he says, "He sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law." So he sent Jesus to redeem, and that picture is from the marketplace where slaves would be bought out of slavery and brought into freedom, and they've been purchased out, and that's what Jesus has done for us. He's brought us out of slavery to our own condition and our human attempts to try to please God, that the demons are oppressing upon our souls. And here he says you've been bought out of that, liberated, set free by Jesus, and the contingencies are covered. They've been terminated. The sufficiency is enough.

This is God's own Son. He's got more than enough to cover all of our needs, but the legitimacy also covered. It was valid. He was born of a woman. So he is also human. Yes, divine, fully divine, but also fully, truly human, and so he can actually die in our place, and he was born of a woman, not of Adam, so he's a second Adam. He's not tainted with sin nature, and yet he also is human, and he was born of a woman, I think in fulfillment of Genesis 3 when the seed would come of the woman. So he is the fulfillment. Yes, there's the sufficiency of him as deity. There's the legitimacy of him as humanity, but also there's a prophecy that he was born of the woman, and this was ordained by God.

And also by necessity, this is effectual. He was under the law. He accomplished all of the duties required. He did what was needed to be a righteous sacrifice in our place, fulfilling the law as was necessary. And then you see the clarity that is here. It was purposeful. He died for those who were under the law, those bound. That contingency has been covered, terminated. It's taken care of. That's what Jesus has done.

So there's no more need for, I'll say, hesitancy. And that means that grasping God's grace is realizing he's secured a permanent place of belonging in his forever family. Whatever hesitancy you have, say, "Well, okay. Well, he's paid all those things. Do I really belong?" That kind of hesitancy says it's terminated. Look, he did this all so that we might receive adoption as sons. He did it for a reason so we'd receive adoption as sons. You see the scope. Paul says, "So that we," not you, like, well, we're a good part of the family, and you get the lesser of the adoption.

No, we together. Paul uses the term brother, sister. He says we have this adoption. He includes himself. And this adoption, he says it comes as a gift. We might receive it. We haven't earned our way. We haven't behaved our way by the law. God's given us this in love, and it manifests as adoption. You know, this idea of adoption, there's some assumptions about it.

The simple assumption is that God understands the need for it. The fact that there's a need. Look, God planned this idea of adoption before there were any families to break apart, but he knew what would happen, and he designed for this to happen for his glory and for our good. But the fact that it's needed, there is pain in that. He knows that families are supposed to operate, and there's something beautiful, but he knows that they don't always do that. He knows that families get broken. You don't have to turn far in the Book of Genesis to see how broken families can become. God gets that. The whole scriptures and all of human history and our own lives testify to the brokenness of families. There are children without parents, children in broken homes.

There's couples without children. There's families with adopted children, families who discover their biological father wasn't who they thought late in life. There's families whose children never meet their biological parents. There's children who meet siblings and have siblings late in life. There's parents who never meet their biological children. There's children who don't know their family of origin and wish they could. There's children who don't know their family of origin, and they're content not to. There's couples considering foster care and adoption, family members supporting others. All of this is going on in our church family. I think there's an assumption.

God understands all of those dynamics, and yet he's not afraid to put adoption on the table and say, "I want you to think about this." Because this is an important truth he's put here for us to understand our relationship to him. When it comes to adoption, there's the idea of being put from one status, one position, into the status of son, of sonship, and I think the background of Roman law is a part of what is informing Paul here, but I think he's drawing a general analogy when it comes to adoption. We talked about how beautiful it is and the privileges that come. If you want to read about it, read in Romans 8. I wish we had time to unpack more of that. You can see the wonder of what Paul explains is how precious this gift of adoption is. He wants us to know who we were before this took place, when it was planned, before time began, who it comes from. You see in John chapter one, verse 12, that it's through Christ that we're given the right to become children of God, and it happened through what He accomplished. You can see Jesus praying in John 17 for the oneness that He experienced with the Father, that we'd be welcomed into that Trinitarian love.

And you see after Jesus dies for our sin and comes, and He raises, and He's speaking to them, He addresses them, "And we're going to go," and He appeals to his Father and to your Father, the shared Father that we have. It doesn't erase the unique deity of Jesus, but there's so many implications about adoption that changes how God hears us now as Father. When we read the Psalms, appealing to God as Father, when we're taught by Jesus to speak to Him as our Father, when we hear He has compassion for us, that those are true of us. It changes how we live, how we experience God and trust Him as our Father, and we don't worry about our needs because He's taking care of us. And even as we experience the discipline of a father, it's not the wrath of a judge. It's loving discipline for our good. We imitate and honor God. Even in our suffering, we trust Him. We love the family of God and our brothers and sisters. It helps us to forgive because if God's brought them in, He brought me in.

It changes our relationship with each other. There's so many things, and then it shapes our understanding of our inheritance and what's to come. There's so many precious passages that describe what it means to be children of God and what we will become in the age to come. Sons, this is what God has accomplished. If you grasp God's sure grace, it will change the way you deal with the struggle with belonging. Say, "No, I look at what God has done. Redemption has come. The wait is over. I've been brought into the family. I don't need to go back. I'm secure."

When you think about adoption, to be sure, it is costly, not just financially. It is costly because when you adopt, you are entering into someone's suffering, into their loss, loss that they did not choose, and you are absorbing some of that chaos, sharing that burden with them, and you do so as a choice, as an act of love and grace. That's what you do. Think about adoption, though, the challenges when it comes to this, and when you're starting to fill the paperwork out for foster care adoption, they give you different papers. And one of them, depending on the agency, it says, "What kind of children are you willing to allow us to call you for, to be in your home?" And you have to look, and there's boxes to check. These boxes say, "Are you able to take children with multiple siblings? Are you able to take children with these kinds of special needs? Are you able to take children with this background or these challenges, with some drugs?" And you read, "Are you able to take children with AIDS?"

And you have to decide as a couple, prayerfully, what boxes can we check for the good of God or the glory of God for the good of our family. What can we prayerfully, considerately check? And I think it's right to consider and to seek wisdom. But you imagine God in His adoption plan, and He's sitting there, and here you are with your condition, whatever it is. Your condition's one of those boxes. Maybe a sin that you committed, maybe a background situation that you've got, a feeling that you have, awkwardness, whatever it is, and you think, "This is my box." Thinking, "Maybe God didn't check that one. Maybe I don't qualify. Maybe my box isn't checked." And when you grasp God's grace and you look at what He's accomplished and what Paul is saying to the Galatians, saying, "We as Jews, me as Paul," he's like, "If my box got checked, your box is checked. They're all checked. God welcomes you into the family."

This, we need to anchor in to claim our new place, the gift that God's given, the implications of this position, that in Christ, we share in the privileges as heirs. He's checked the boxes. He's died for us. We're adopted in. Paul says, "Don't be afraid. Don't struggle that you belong, the challenge that you have. No, this is the adoption that God's accomplished." And the way that it's talked about in adoption circles is permanency, a forever family. Forever family. You look at the legal wording there on the adoption, and when they're talking to you, and you sit there, and the judge is addressing you and asking you, you affirm this under oath, and they say, "It's final and irrevocable."

You say, "Whew. Irrevocable." And here's what the decree of adoption is, even in our own courts, that it will be that the child of the petitioners here, for the purposes of inheritance and all other legal incidents and consequences, shall be the same as if she or he had been born to the petitioners. New name, new birth certificate. Final. This is forever family, and it's a struggle to claim and live out our identity in Christ as a forever family with God, but we must. Anchor it in. You look at the blessings that Christ has secured in our adoption. First, our identity, that when we claim our new place in Christ, we find there's a new kind of belonging to enjoy, that God loves us without fail. He says, verse six, "You are sons."

You are sons. This is your identity as sons. You belong to God. You have His love, and in fact, because of this identity, there's also a newfound intimacy. You claim your place in Christ, and you come to find that there's a new kind of compassion to access, a compassion that God hears you without fail. In intimacy with God, he says, "You can live with certainty that your heart cry always has your Father's ear. God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba, Father!' " God has placed his own spirit within us. The source here is the Trinitarian God himself. He has sent the spirit of his Son.

And the place there is your very core, into your heart, the center of your being and decisions, and the person who it involves is the Spirit. This is the Holy Spirit who, yes, you have an inferential assurance that I can make a conclusion drawn from the text and what God said that I'm adopted, but we have an immediate assurance, actually, the blessing of God's own spirit testifying within our hearts. And the way it's expressed is through a new heart cry. That idea of a cry is the earnest and appealing, a loud prayer or cry, and the cry that he references there is, "Abba, Father." That is the cry of Jesus, God the Son, appealing to God the Father as he was there looking at the daunting cross ahead, expecting the wrath and appealing to his Heavenly Father there in his moment of greatest need. That is the cry of a child in need. "Abba, Father." And he references that cry is in your heart, the most vulnerable kind of grief you could utter. This idea of Abba, you might have heard that maybe it's the same as daddy. I think the idea of daddy, there's some similarities in our culture.

Daddy, typically, we use it more with infants and kind of in a childish way. So it's rare for adults to speak in such a way. They would use Abba even as an adult son to a father. It is endearing, it is intimate. Maybe not quite the same, but I think we kind of catch the meaning if we understand that this is what we cry out in our moments of need. It was some years ago, I think it's okay if I share. Some years ago, one of Pastor Rich's son was driving out, and as he was leaving here on Hines Lane, there ended up being another car collision. Car was just smashed, totaled, rushed to the hospital. And in this urgency, I'm able to go and enter in the room, and here's the son, he's been kind of strapped to the board, and there he is, and it's this desperate moment where Pastor Rich is coming in, and here's the son. And you know what he's crying out?

"Daddy, Daddy." Weren't sure how he was going to do. Weren't sure what was going on, but that was the cry. It wasn't a cry of trite familiarity. It was a cry of desperation. What do you imagine Jesus was crying out with Abba Father in that moment as he's sweating blood? "Abba! Abba!" You can almost hear, it's guttural. There's a sense where it's not even a word, and that's where Paul talks in Romans that this cry and the Spirit cries with groanings too deep for words.

The prayers that you offer to God when all you do is make sound. It's just, "Ah." God hears it. It's his Spirit in your heart. He says, "I'm listening." That's what we have in adoption, the heart and the ear of our Heavenly Father. We have this new identity, we have this new intimacy and a new inheritance. Now as sons, we're heirs. Heirs through God. It's given as a gift of grace.

This is what we've received. It's a new place that we dare not struggle to belong because we drive these anchors, these stakes deep into our hearts to say, "Yes, we have been adopted." And we sing these songs to each other, and we get to see even adoptions happen in our church family. And even in fact, the courthouse knows our church. Foster care agencies, they call us. When we go to the courthouse for various adoptions, they say, "Oh, Bethany's back here again." That's a good reason to be known in the courthouse. We're there on a great day. If you're considering adoption, you're thinking about how you can help support others, come and talk to us. We have ministries that help support that.

If you're struggling with the challenges that arise, all kinds, from the challenges of parenting and broken families, we'd love to come along and support you and pray for you. You have a Heavenly Father who knows and cares, and siblings all around you. We're part of this family. If you struggle with that sense of belonging, we're here to remind each other of these truths. We do it every week, singing, praying, loving. This is what God has given, and he's not just left us here alone. He will return one day. In our families, we celebrate adoption day. God made me a Beekley day, and the Lord's granted us three. All those days, special days, we're in the courthouse.

It's amazing thing at that point, you're there, and you realize that the ones most affected by this moment and the decisions, they don't even have a voice in the matter, and they don't always understand what's going on. But the reason why it's happening is so that they can have a voice. See, my daughter, she says to the judge when it's over, "I like your costume." And we go out to celebrate. We say, "How do you want to celebrate?" She says, "Let's get donuts." Donuts it is. There's a lot of legal technical jargon. The time doesn't mean very much. A lot of theological terms that we work through.

One day it will mean some things, but in the end, it's just belonging to your forever family. "I like your costume. Let's get some donuts." Every time my kids cry, they have my ears because they have my heart. Been in the ER, been in prompt care with each of them. Not perfect as a father, but they truly do have my ear because it's a reminder to me to not stop crying out to my Heavenly Father because I know I have his ear. And if you are in Christ by faith, so do you. We can share our hearts with him because he has given us his, not only for us, but to us. Lord, thank you that you're for us. Thank you that we can come to you as our Heavenly Father.

Thank you that you have compassion on us. You know our frame. You know all of our sin. You know all of our sufferings. You bore them in your body. Lord, there's different boxes in our lives that we're tempted to worry if they're checked. We wonder if you'll really accept us because of this physical challenge, this weakness, of this sin in our background, this kind of awkwardness, these kind of mental loops that we have, and we don't feel secure, and have we thought the right thing or done the right thing? And Lord, our belonging is actually out of our hands, and we thank you that it's in your secure, loving hands. You've accomplished it. Lord, help us to declare and anchor these truths into our hearts, even as we sing this morning.

In the name of your Son, Jesus, we say amen. Please stand.

Referenced in this sermon

1. Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine by Wayne Grudem (1994). View ↩
2. Knowing God by J. I. Packer (1973). View ↩