Hey, thank you and welcome back for, what are we on, week eight of our journey together, walking with Jesus. I hope you're growing and enjoying yourself and hope every day you're getting closer and closer to knowing just how loved you are, how accepted you are, and how much you belong in this family as much as I do and everyone else in the body of Christ does. And I want to dig in a little bit more today on the subject of being a son or a daughter, what it means to really getting comfortable with the idea that God's your father, that God loves you as you are, God loves as you're going to be. He's loved you since before you were created in your mother's womb.
And I want to dig in a little bit on looking at what it looks like if we hold on to a mindset of an orphan, even when we are now an adopted son of God. So we'll explain what that means as we go through. But if you ever noticed how in all the big stories, the hero of the story or the heroine of the story, it seems like they always are missing one or both parents. You know, Cinderella is living with a stepmother because her mother, I don't know what happened to her mother and we never find that out. The hero always seems to be an orphan of some sort.
And it's those kind of stories that get told over and over again tend to be reflective of our values as a culture and how we feel as a culture. So isn't it amazing that all the big heroes have no parents? And I believe that that speaks to the condition of our heart. When we lived separated from God, we really adopted a mindset and a way of life that is like how orphans think. So John, who was one of Jesus' disciples, he wrote a gospel and he wrote some letters. And in one of his letters to his friends, he wrote this, See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God. Imagine that for a minute.
The Father in heaven. Imagine if you were just going on an earthly basis. You have a father who's a multi-billionaire, most famous and loved man in all the world. And that's your father. I think you'd probably be really proud of that, wouldn't you? You'd go around and be glad when somebody asks, hey, what family are you from? And you name your father, and if they would say, wow, that's your dad, that would kind of be a source of joy for you, or maybe a source of pride for you. But fathom for a minute that the God, the Lord of heaven and earth, calls you son.
He calls you daughter. That could be a little hard to grasp. And I believe the reason why it's so hard to grasp is because we've grown up under a mindset where God is not the kind of father that I would want to have. Many of us grew up in a household where, you know, maybe our father was awesome. Maybe our father wasn't so awesome. Maybe he was somewhere in between. And so even when I use the word, the word father, it brings up certain memories or certain connotations to it. And hopefully in the next week, two or three weeks, we're going to be in on this father thing.
We can change how we view the father in heaven, that he is the sum total of all the best things we love about earthly fathers. He is not like any of the things we don't like about our earthly fathers. And you might be here and you were abandoned by your father or abused by your father or never knew who your father was. There's all of that, especially in our culture today. Or you might be somebody who says, you know what? I had a really good dad. He wasn't perfect, but he was a good dad.
God, wherever you fall in that, God's better than we imagine. Always, this is kind of a thing to put into your spirit. Always God's better than you can imagine him to be. So are you afraid of a father? If that's the case, then it might be hard for you to hear that God is your father and you're no longer an orphan out there who's fatherless and motherless in the world, but you're now an adopted son. So here's a question for you. And you can think about this. If you were to say which part of God you find the most comfortable.
So the Bible reveals God as a father, God as a son, and God as the Holy Spirit. Most people, when answering that question, they tend to go toward God as father. He seems like the Lord God Almighty, this scary, you know, like the mighty and powerful Oz. And he's just, man, if you get too close to him, he's going to smoke you and he's going to take you out to the woodshed if, you know, you get when he finds out what you did. And so the father's usually a scary kind of, you know, figure. The Holy Spirit, most people who don't really understand the Holy Spirit think it's kind of weird and flaky and, you know, like the wind blowing all around and don't really connect so much with the Holy Spirit at first. Most people that I've asked that question to will say, well, God, the son, Jesus, he's relatable.
He seems like he's a, he's fun. He seems like he's compassionate and merciful. He seems like he gets me. I mean, there's a whole commercial series now. He gets us, which he does. He, that he, he seems like the guy I could sit down with around a fire and talk and I'd be really comfortable pouring out my heart to him. So most people will say the son. So when we talk about relating with God as our father, we have a problem if we think the son's the one we'd rather connect with.
And it's, we're not going to get into the whole doctrine of the Trinity today. Okay. And just for now, pocket it in the, it's a mystery. We'll work it out at some other time. But for now, here's a revelation that Jesus gave us. Thomas at the last supper asked Jesus, you know, why don't you show us the father already? And Jesus looks at him and he goes, have you been with me all this time? If you've seen me, you've seen the father. In other words, you want to know what God's like?
You've been living with him for the last three years. I am what God is like. If God had skin and became incarnate, which is what Jesus was, this is what he's like. He's actually fun-loving and merciful and loving and compassionate. Oh, he's firm. He'll take care of wolves and that thing that would harm his kids. He'll deal with that as well. But toward his children, toward those that he loves and that love him, he is all of the things that Jesus is and then some. And so he said at the last supper to his disciples, I will not leave you as orphans.
I will come to you. Now, why would he be talking about being orphans? He's with these guys. He's taught them the Lord's Prayer, our Father which art in heaven. And he said, but he said, I'm not going to leave you as orphans. I will come to you. And he was speaking. It's as if he knew, which of course he did, that inside your heart, although you've been with me, you've become my friends, you've heard my teaching, you've experienced my life together with you, Jesus said, I know what's in your heart and I know that you're going to struggle to connect with the Father directly, which was Jesus' entire purpose in ministry.
He came to show us the Father. So all of us could be adopted back into the family of God and not live like we're orphans, not live as if we don't have a God who loves us and cares for us the way a perfect loving father would care for his own children. So Jesus fulfilled that promise when he sent the Holy Spirit. How did he say, I will come to you? Well, we don't physically have Jesus with us right now. He's not going to walk into church service on Sunday morning and say, here I am, everybody. Messiah has come back.
That's not going to happen. So how does he come to us? Through the Holy Spirit. I want to read you a scripture in Romans chapter 8. We're going to spend one whole week in Romans chapter 8. It's the best chapter in the New Testament. A friend of mine introduced me to a term. He said, when you're feeling bad, just go and romanate for a little bit. In other words, read this passage over and over again and remember who you are and whose you are. But the part I want to read to you today starts in verse 14 of Romans chapter 8.
And it says this, for all who are being led by the spirit of God, these are the sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you've received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, Abba, Father. Father, the spirit himself testifies with our own spirit that we are, in fact, children of God. And if we're children, then we're heirs. We're heirs with God, heirs with Christ, and we're going to be glorified with him. So he fulfills, Jesus fulfills his promise that I'm going to come to you and I won't leave you as orphans by giving us a spirit that allows us to recognize deep inside our inner man. It may not yet make sense to the mind because we know what we've done.
And there we are, the younger son again, who's gone off and squandered his inheritance. We know what we've done. And so it can be hard. And sometimes it takes just plain faith to believe, you mean you actually love me? You've actually accepted me to be one of your sons? Oh yeah. As you are, and then to become what you were always meant to be. Hence the name of our series, Restored. He is going to restore everything that you lost and everything that was taken from you. That's just the kind of God he is.
So right out of the gate, he says, you haven't received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again. There's that fear thing again. Fear is whatever we think is going to happen in the future that keeps us from stepping into something. And in this case, that keeps us from approaching God. Remember why Adam and Eve hid from God after they ate from the tree in the Garden of Eden? God said, Adam, where are you? He said, I was afraid of you, so I hid. And we've been afraid of God. We've been in this thing where fear has been our motivation instead of faith.
And we are going to learn how to walk by faith and live by faith. So when we're afraid, we live as slaves. Remember, that was the older son. He didn't understand the father's heart. He lived as though he were a slave, even though he was a son. Could have had a party any day of the week. Remember, we saw that in the story last week, but instead he stayed outside and he just did what he had to do to earn his way to maintain his status in his father's house. That's not what our God's like.
God has given us instead a spirit by which we cry out, Abba, Father. Now, Abba is a Hebrew word. It made its way into the New Testament. It was written in Greek. But Abba carries over from the Hebrew language. And it would be the first way. I used to think Abba was just a band from the 70s. You know, take a chance on me. Sorry to get that song in your head. And that's what I always thought it was. But it's just the Hebrew word, not just for father, but it's actually like we would say in English, daddy.
Daddy. I've got six kids. One of my favorite moments of each of them when they were growing and learning how to speak was that first moment that they would say, da-da, da-da. And, you know, people would try to say, well, they're just saying da-da-da-da. It doesn't mean anything. But there's a look. There's a look your baby gives you when they look you right in the eyeball. They say, da-da, da-da. And they know that's your name. That's what I call you, da-da. And it's this adoring term that just says my whole world right now is safe.
My whole world is amazing right now because I have a da-da. I have an abba in my life. In the Hebrew language, kids will say abba, abba, abba. That would be their first word. And that's what the Spirit of God in us cries out. God's not just a father. If my kids today, and they do this to mess around with me when they get older, and they say, father, may I have dinner now? It's, you know, it's so stiff. It's so formal. It doesn't really ring right. So we say abba.
Ah, it's that intimate, I know that right now I have a God who loves me intensely, and I love him back intensely. Our Spirit knows this already. Most of all of what we're learning in discipleship and what we learn as we read the Word of God together is to help our minds catch up with what our inner man already knows. So our Spirit testifies with the Holy Spirit that we are children of God. There are going to be times when, you know, we doubt. There'll be times that we're not sure we can trust God. We're looking at walking by faith, right?
There are times that we're not quite sure how things are going to pan out. And as we grow with God, we learn how to trust Him more. But it begins by just acknowledging, I'm not an orphan any longer. I'm a son. Orphans think a little bit differently than other people. We have families in our church that do foster care. And I've heard some stories from them over the years. And one family in particular really has a heart for taking in teenagers that are still in the foster care system. Teenagers in the foster care system tend to be and often are ones who have been bounced from foster home to foster home over the years.
And so they've learned not to attach to people or to hyper-attach. But they learn not to attach to people because it's just going to, the rug's going to get pulled out from under me again. And I'm no longer going to have a safe place. And we live many times like an orphan lives. So the way that they would do things is like they would have these kids in their house. And the first night or two, the kids aren't sure if they're going to stay or not. They just got dropped off by a social service agency.
And they're there in the house now. And they'll begin to hoard food or things from the house. And one of the kids, or it was a pair of brothers who came to their house, they had ice cream for dessert, ice cream sandwiches. So they put the ice cream sandwiches in their coat pocket because just in case they got kicked out that night or moved somewhere, they wanted to make sure they had ice cream sandwiches. The point is that the orphan mindset is so wrapped up in self-preservation that you almost can't receive real human love anymore and certainly aren't ready yet to give real human love anymore. And so we've now been adopted to be sons and daughters of God.
We're not orphans. We're not foster care children who are going to be bounced from one house to another. If God says, I'm adopting you, we have the spirit of adoption in us, we just read, that testifies we're God's children. We're not going to be kicked out of the house. No matter what we do, we cannot unsun ourselves. I don't know if I introduced that term last week or not, but it was something a friend of mine said. In other words, God will always view you as a son or as a daughter.
The only thing that will change the nature of our relationship with God is whether we choose to respond and remain in the house with him or we choose to walk out the door and go our own way yet again. And we have that choice. That's the blessing of freedom that God's given us is that we have a choice. We're not slaves to have to stay in his house. We're just not. We have an option of leaving. Just like Adam and Eve had an option when they were in the garden. They could stay with God and walk with him in the cool of the day every day of their lives, live in paradise, or they could eat from that other tree and introduce all kinds of other things into the world that are not going to be helpful for them.
So we have that choice. Sons have a choice. We're not slaves. So that's the only way that we can be disconnected from God is if we walk away. It'll never change his heart toward us. It'll never change his love toward us. He's always going to be like the father. In that story we read last week, he'll always be looking down the road and he'll always have a fatted calf ready to restore us when we're ready. But in the meanwhile, we do have the ability to walk away. Now, this passage refers to us as adopted sons, right?
A spirit of adoption as sons. And that may in some ways sound like a second-class citizen of heaven, you know, that I'm not full-on a son. I'm an adopted son. But actually, if you think about it, being adopted is even more powerful than being a biological child. Why? Why do I say that? Well, an adopted child was chosen by the parents. And I say this every time one of our foster families adopts a child. I'll share this with them just to encourage them that you're not like a second-class member of the family you just got adopted into.
Actually, don't tell us to the other kids, but you're even a little bit more special than them because they were born into this family and the parents kind of stuck with them from that day. But you, you were chosen. They didn't have to take you in their family. But they looked at you and they got to know your life. And they said, we want this one to be our son. We want this one to be our daughter. And that's what God did when He chose you and He chose me. Took us out of darkness and into His household.
And He chose us in that. God, the amazing thing is He chose us while we were in our sin and knowing everything that we would do following that. And He still chose us. Because adoption in the days that the Bible was written under Roman law, it was the Roman Empire days, under Roman law, adopted children had to have all the rights of all the other children in the house. You were not permitted to adopt a child unless you planned on treating them just like one of your native-born or natural-born children. In fact, it was so strong that you could be disowned if you were a biological child of the family.
But once a family chose to adopt you, you could not be unadopted. So in that sense, it was more powerful than a birthright. You could be rejected if you went off the deep end as a son and disinherited. But once a family chose you and adopted you, they could not let that go. It was like a contract for life. And so nobody went about it lightly. God didn't go about it lightly when He chose you and me. And so what has to happen now is to come to grips and come to rest with that we are permanently adopted sons and daughters of God.
And it's time to learn how to leave behind our old ways of interacting with God and with one another and start to learn some new ways of interacting as chosen children of God. When we are secure in the fact that God chose us, that we have eternal life in Jesus, that for the rest of eternity, we're going to live as sons and daughters in the house of the most magnificent Father that there could possibly be. It really does change everything about the way we live. And we're now rooted and grounded. And no storms can take us off. No rejection of people can take us off. Nothing that we do that we think disqualifies us can take us off.
No accusations or lies or half-truths that try to make us feel like less than citizens of heaven and sons and daughters of the house can ever remove us from this status. We are in it for life. So it's like God says, I'm stuck with you, but I'm happy to be stuck with you. And hopefully He can see that you're happy to be stuck with me too. Sorry, there's another old song for you today. Like, like, for a minute, shall we? And see if any of these ring a bell to you.
Orphans get their identity by what they do, not whose they are. So an orphan's always trying to prove himself, always measuring his success in life based on how well he's doing. If I got an A on my report card, I'm doing well. If I got an F, I'm a failure. And I don't deserve to be in this family anymore. Orphans are prone to sibling rivalry because they're insecure. And so if somebody else is being praised, it detracts from them somehow. Instead of joining in and saying, yeah, you're awesome. I know I'm awesome.
I know that the Father loves me and His love is in decrease just because He's praising you right now. So that's where sibling rivalry comes from. If we have a heart that gets easily jealous of others or, you know, we feel less than because somebody else is being promoted, then we're carrying a bit of an orphan spirit. Orphans, and this is spiritual orphans now we're talking about, of course, believe everything has to be earned. Nothing's free in life. So I can't receive a blessing from you without thinking, how am I going to repay you for what you've done? And in fact, if we really have a strong orphans mindset, we won't accept blessings from other people unless we can pay them back for it.
I heard a story from one of my favorite preachers who shared about how somebody blessed him with $32,000, just handed him a check for $32,000. It was a wealthy man in his church and this, you know, this brother was struggling at the time financially and that happened to be exactly what he needed to pay off a debt that he couldn't repay. And it just blew him away. It blessed him. So he had, he got this money and paid off the debt. And then he found himself curiously avoiding the man who gave him that check. He'd see him down the aisle at church and he'd go down another way and, and he realized he found himself avoiding this man.
He said, what is wrong with me? This guy just blessed my socks off and now I'm treating him like nothing. And I can't even look at him in the face. What is wrong with me? And he recognized that he, because he's carrying that mindset of an orphan, because he could never repay what was given to him. He's now avoiding the one who blessed him. If we treat God like that, he's given us things that we can never repay. If we lived a million lifetimes, we can never repay all of what God's given to us.
Now we have an orphan mindset or an orphan spirit, as we call it. Orphans are prone to a victim mentality and view the world as everybody's out to get me. The amazing thing with a victim mindset is that you can find evidence for it, wherever you look, every little glance or turning away. Somebody doesn't, you know, look at you when you talk to them. Somebody doesn't laugh at your jokes. Somebody doesn't come and sit next to you at the lunch table. You know, it's all, all of those kinds of things where we're looking for rejection everywhere that we look.
And we believe that we're a victim, that people have made me who I am. And so we tend to blame others for mistakes that we make. A victim always has an oppressor, right? So you're looking around the world for oppressors, people that are holding you down. You can blame the man, you can blame racism, you can blame sexism, you can blame whatever, your financial status. And we tend to look around with an orphan's mindset. Who can I blame so that I don't have to carry responsibility? The responsibility of freedom is intense.
We're going to look at that in the weeks ahead because now what God's given back to us is we're not just along for the ride. We're carriers of the divine nature. And now we have a responsibility to do something with that. More on that later on. Orphans are self-preserving, not generous and open-hearted. And we kind of looked at this a little bit already. It's like I'm in protective mode right now because I don't know if anybody will respond to my love. So I'm not going to put myself out there in relationships.
I'm going to sabotage relationships even. And you find this. Maybe you find yourself doing this. As soon as the relationship gets a little bit too close for comfort, you drop a bomb in it. You say something offensive, you do something really unkind. And it's almost like I'm going to test your love and see if you'll stick around after I do this. But it's sabotaging the relationship. It's a mindset that says I'm going to reject you before you even get a chance to reject me because this is too good to be true.
Nobody gets this for free and it just can't be right. And so we're in self-preservation mode if we're in this orphan spirit. And in the bottom line, it's that we never feel truly accepted. An orphan mindset, somebody who maintains an orphan way of thinking will never be, never feel accepted even if they are. You could be surrounded by people showering you with love and showering you with blessings and grace. God himself is doing all of those things. And yet because we have an orphan mindset, we just can't accept that I'm actually, I belong here.
We maybe, you know, like an orphan spirit will sit in a church and look around and say, oh man, all these people are so spiritual. They're so blessed. They're so much better than I am. I'll never be accepted here. Even though there's a dozen people coming over and hugging on you and loving on you and inviting you over their houses and whatnot. So that's an orphan spirit. How do we overcome the orphan spirit? We'll look into this a little bit more next week. But it begins with taking first baby steps with God, believing what the word says about who you are.
And that'll be in our devotions this week to really get in the word and just accept what it says is true. That behold the manner of love that the father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God. He calls you his child, calls you his son, he calls you his daughter. And that's just who God sees you to be. So you can argue with God if you want to, but he's right. He's right. And it's true. So baby steps with God to just relax. Don't strive.
You don't have to earn your way deeper into the family. You didn't earn your way in in the first place and you can't earn your way into a better status. It's not like working your way up the ladder to be closer and closer to God. You can't get any closer than you already are. He is in you. You are in him. That's as close as you can get. So there's nowhere closer to get. There's only a deeper understanding and a deeper rest and the love that God's given to us. That's what we're after.
And that's what growing in the spirit looks like. The second thing is to begin to take baby steps with people. Most likely, if we struggle with an orphan's mindset, it's because we've been rejected before. We have a track record or a history of people getting close and then pushing us away, finding a fence with something. We have, you know, in our history, we have all these broken relationships. And if that's the case, then it could be harder and harder for some to really learn how to be relaxed and intimate with somebody. Somebody said intimacy is when we say into me see.
So if we've been guarded because we've been wounded before, it's going to make it really difficult to have a real relationship with anybody. So I'd encourage you to take some baby steps in this area. Find somebody that's already in your life that you think you can trust. Somebody who appears to be trustworthy. You trust God and you can even ask, God, would you show me some people that I can trust and I could begin to hang out with them. Ideally, you've been walking with them for eight weeks now as you watch these videos and do the devotions and talk with one another. Hopefully you're finding a safe place where you could just say, I really just want to live like a child in this family.
You know, the greatest success for parents in a household is when all the kids get along in the house and you get together at Christmas or birthday party and everybody's laughing, everybody's enjoying one another and nobody feels left out. And that's what we want in the body of Christ. So do your part to connect with one or two people at first. You'll find that the more secure you get in God's love for you, the more confident you are that even if people don't like everything about you or say something unkind or even reject you, that you're not going to be rejected because you haven't been rejected by the Father in heaven.
And you can rest in that and then have some really good healthy life-giving relationships. And finally, and we are going to definitely take some time in this in the weeks ahead, to begin to practice some forgiveness. You could begin to do that this week. The reality is that the orphan spirit comes from making judgments about people based on experiences we've had with people in the past. So we say things like, well, I can't trust, you know, I'll never trust men. You know, women who have been abused by men have said, you just can't trust men. And so now no man can ever get close.
There might be some forgiveness necessary. Maybe it's parents who need to be forgiven. Maybe it's a sibling who needs to be forgiven or a teacher or somebody who needs forgiveness, not for their sake, but so that you could be free to open up your heart to real love relationships. Again, I just kind of said that now because you can take some time with the Lord and ask, are there people I haven't forgiven? Is that the reason why I'm having a hard time trusting you? Because I have these judgments in my mind about you because of what people did to me. If that's the case, then this would be a great time for you to take some time with Jesus and say, help me to let that go and not let that become a hindrance to me getting close to you.
Well, I hope this has been helpful for you today. God bless you. And I pray that you will experience the joy of knowing that you're adopted, chosen, and you can't be unchosen. You can't be unadopted. So you may as well just relax, settle in and enjoy the ride. I love you. Have a great week with Jesus.