“For all those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, ‘Abba,  Father!’ The Spirit himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children, and if children, also heirs—heirs of God and coheirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In his magnum opus, Knowing God, author and theologian, J.I. Packer, argues that adoption is the single most important lens through which we should understand the New Testament. It is the theme that lies at the heart of everything else we find there. Without that idea, none of the rest of it makes the kind of sense it should. And in making this argument, he points most emphatically to this passage. God loves us so much that He wants us to be a part of His family. Let’s explore what Paul introduces to us here and why it is so critically important to understand.

My dad is an adoption attorney and a good one. He’s helped hundreds and hundreds of children get connected with a loving family who will care for their needs and give them the best chance at a successful life that they can.

As much good as my dad does, though, the fact that this profession exists in which he has become such an expert is not a good thing. Adoption itself is a good thing, but the fact that it exists at all is not. It is a sign that things are not as they should be. No child finds herself in need of being adopted because everything is as it should be.

Adoption is unfailingly a sign that something has gone devastatingly wrong. A child in that situation has experienced a tragedy or violence or abuse of some kind that is of a sufficiently grievous nature that remaining at home with the parents who brought her into this world is no longer an option. Sometimes the parents have been taken by death, but more often the parents are the source of the problem.

What is abundantly clear from the Scriptures is that God has a special place in His heart for those who have been made orphans for one reason or another. He expresses over and over again how important it is for His people to care for them the way He does or face the consequences.

Well, God is nothing if not consistent with His word. He tells us to care for physical and relational orphans. He cares for spiritual orphans. The truth about spiritual orphans is that we are all spiritual orphans. We rebelled against our Father and declared ourselves independent of any spiritual authority. We cast ourselves adrift without anchor or paddle to either direct our lives or else at least hold them in place. And then, like the prodigal son, we discovered that life on our own isn’t all we imagined it would be.

The good news of the Gospel is that our heavenly Father didn’t give up on us when we rejected Him. Instead, He started working immediately to adopt us into His family once again. In Christ, those plans were finally and fully put into action. When we place our faith in Him, we become a part of His family once again. We know and experience this, Paul has already told us, because He gives us His Spirit. That is, His Spirit comes to dwell in us.

When we live by His Spirit, we will live indeed. That’s where we stopped the week before last. What Paul says going forward here is to reaffirm our sonship and daughtership when we are led by God’s Spirit. “For all those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons.” When Paul says, “sons,” he means “children” more generally. The point is that those who have placed their faith in Him, receive His Spirit, and are being led by His Spirit are a part of His family.

Having clarified this, Paul next reminds them what they left behind, of what they don’t have. “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear.” Remember that apart from Christ we are all slaves to sin. A life of slavery is a life of fear. The slave lives in constant fear of his master. This fear isn’t necessarily constantly experienced, but we deal with it by striving to please our master. Thus the sinner lives in sin. He keeps returning to sin. He strives to please His master.

In Christ we have a new master, but we are not slaves. We are not given a spirit of slavery simply of another kind. There is no need for fear. In fact, as the apostle John would later write, the perfect love of Jesus casts out fear. Instead of fear from living as slaves, in Christ, we are made children in God’s family. As Paul puts it, “Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, ‘Abba,  Father!’”

Think for a minute about the weight of that statement. In Christ we can call the one who created the world and everything in it “Father.” And this is no mere impersonal title like a parishioner may use with a priest she’s never met. This is the cry of a young child with her beloved daddy. There is an intimacy here that is hard to fathom. The balance between the intimacy Paul speaks of here and the transcendence of the God who made and sustains all things is hard to manage. But try we must because it is the clear and consistent position of the Scriptures. Both truths are held in tension, but without letting go of the other even for a second.

And if this feels hard to maintain in our hearts and minds, that’s okay. It is. But we have help. Look at what Paul says next. “The Spirit himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children…” We talked before about how we can know we belong to Christ. One of the pieces of evidence we mentioned is the internal, personal conviction that comes from the Spirit Himself. Perhaps the best way to put this is that we know because we know. There are some things we know to be true simply because we know them to be true. There’s no amount of empirical evidence that somehow contributes to our knowledge. When I first realized that I was in love with my wife, I simply knew it.

The assurance we have that we are indeed God’s children is better and stronger than this. Not only do we simply know it, we also have this confirmation from God’s own Spirit. That is, we know it, and God’s Spirit gives us an additional assurance that we are correct in our knowing. Now, this isn’t going to be something that’s somehow measurable. Indeed, how do you measure conviction? But we know it with His help all the same. That being said, there will be some evidence of the truthfulness of this in a transformed life. The fruit of the Spirit will manifest themselves in and through our lives with greater consistency than they did before, for instance. But this internal assurance from God’s Spirit is what matters most in the equation.

The good news here goes beyond our simply being God’s children. We are not children in name only. We are children in the fullest sense of the word. When God adopts us into His family, it is not so that we can be consigned, Cinderella-like, to be seen and not heard and treated as overlooked servants who have no place or position in the house. When God adopts us in Christ, He makes us full heirs of His goodness and glory. We are coheirs with Christ of all the riches of His grace. “…and if children, also heirs—heirs of God and coheirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”

That last part there seems out of place, except that it isn’t. If we are full heirs with Christ, adopted children of our loving heavenly Father, then the world is going to see us as God’s children just as He does. My next-door neighbors growing up were both adopted. They were not the biological children of their parents. But I never saw them as anything other than their daughters. Well, when the world sees us as children of God, siblings of Christ, it is going to treat us accordingly. It will tell us how stupid are the things we profess to believe. It will insist they are evil. It will assure us that our heavenly Father is no good at all. It will accuse us of all sorts of vile things like child abuse and the like. It will persecute us where it has the chance. It will seek to make our beliefs illegal even as it denounces them as immoral. In other words, the world will hate us just like it did Jesus. We will suffer even as He did.

Do you know what all that is? It’s nothing more than further confirmation that we really are children of God. The criticisms are all nonsense and the result of ignorance, some of which is innocent, but much of which is willful. Of course, we dare not live down to the accusations we receive, but when we follow the apostle Peter’s counsel by making sure we are living lives of holiness that reveal the obviously nonsensical nature of the bile being spewed at us, we will be the ones standing in the end. We will be the ones receiving glory alongside Christ when the final day arrives. Our adoption into God’s family will be forever confirmed.

So then, with what are we left here? If you are a follower of Jesus, you have been adopted into the family of God. Anyone can receive this. It is only a matter of recognizing what is most true about the world and adjusting your life accordingly. And when you do, you will be born again into a new and permanent, heavenly family. The Gospel is good news indeed.