I'd ask you to turn with me to the Book of Galatians, chapter 3, page 1386 in the Pew Bible. I'll be starting with verse 22 and be skipping around a little bit, but I'll read a portion of Galatians. So if you would listen, this is the Word of the Lord. I will be reading, by the way, from the New King James Version. But the scripture has confined all under sin that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the law. We were kept for the faith which would afterwards be revealed. Therefore, the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise. Now I say that an heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is the master of all. He is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the Father. And even so, we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of this world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who are under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because you are sons, God sent forth His Spirit, the Spirit of His Son, into your hearts, crying out, Therefore, you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. And I will be skipping a section and moving forward to chapter 4, verse 22. Chapter 4, verse 22. For it was written that Abraham had two sons. The one was born by a bondwoman, the other by a free woman. But he who was the bondwoman, he was born according to flesh, and he who was of the free woman, was through promise, which things are symbolic. For these are the two covenants, the one of Mount Sinai that gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar. For this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem, which is now, and is in bondage with her children. But the Jerusalem from above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, Rejoice, O barren woman! For it is written, Rejoice, O barren woman, you who do not bear, break forth and shout, you who are not in labor. For the devil hath many more children than she who has a husband. For we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise. But as he who was born according to the flesh then persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless, what does Scripture say? It says, Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free woman. And so then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free woman. Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with the yoke of bondage. And so we'll stop the reading of God's Word. I'd like you to join me in prayer. Our Father in Heaven, we thank You for Your Word and Your Spirit that applies this Word to our hearts. Lord, we pray You would simply give us a clear mind to understand what it is that You are saying through Your Word to us, Your people here in Bloomington at this time. These things we ask that Jesus Christ, Your Son, may be glorified in us. In His name we pray these things. Amen. And we were talking about what to do about it, and as an elder, one of the things you always worry about is that suddenly two people will suddenly be struck down with leprosy and not be able to make it here, leaving, you know, me. And I always have a sermon in the hopper, and so I've had this sermon in the hopper for quite a long time. And Rich and I talked about what to do when Bill was gone, and I thought, I think I better take this thing out of the hopper before it gets moldy. Now, this is a long introduction, and basically what I'm saying is I'm not sure why this has been on my heart and on my mind, but I do think it is an appropriate thing to talk about. The topic I want to talk about is adoption. Now, again, I'm not sure why it's on my mind, but I know it's come up over and over again several times over the past year in discussions with people, and suddenly I realized that maybe our experience My experience with adoption is not the same as yours. We don't really have a lot of it in this particular community's network that we are here. But in the community I grew up in, it was just everywhere. Lots and lots of people had adopted children. In fact, it was sort of a joke that, you know, there's a weird strand of the De Young clan that was Korean. Because there's, I think, four different cousins have independently adopted Korean children. So, when we go to family reunions, they just kind of get together and everybody looks the same, right? Just like a family reunion. Well, there's that streak in our family, and I thought, is this odd? Yeah, I think this is actually odd. Now, I'm not a cultural anthropologist, mind you, so I don't really know about what goes on in other cultures, but I tumbled to a strange thing, and I had a conversation with a student of mine, who was a Korean student, in fact, and we were talking about my brother, and it slowly dawned on me that They don't do this sort of thing. I mean, they will take in children of relatives, but to go halfway around the world to pick up somebody and take them into your family is exceedingly odd. It's just something they don't do. And like I said, I'm not a cultural anthropologist, but I have a suspicion this is a very odd thing that we do, that at least the people around where I grew up do, and there are people around here who do it as well. I think that there is a link. There is a reason for this, and the link is to portions of Scripture. There is something which is in our background as Western Christians, as Christians, which understands the notion of adoption in a way that is strange, totally strange to other cultures. It seems totally unnatural in other contexts. But I think that the Christian faith has had an impact on what people do in this matter. Now, this is not going to be an ad for doing adoption, and it's not going to be an announcement either. Rather, what I want us to do is to look at the Scripture and see what it says about the idea of adoption. And there is an amazing set of truths there that I think that we just really must not miss. Mind you, the image of adoption as it's practiced in our culture is far from an excellent image. It's far from what goes on in the Scriptures. And I'll have a few comments on that as we go along, but I do want us to look at what the Scripture says and to really take in what it says when it's talking about these things. So tonight, what I want to do is not look so much at adoption the way it's practiced in our culture, but to look at the real thing as it is in Scripture. And I want us to understand it. and I want to live it. Okay, Paul's message, if we turn to the book of Galatians, picking up in verse 22 where we started it off, he's getting to his message here. And his message is fairly, I won't say it's straightforward, but it's very forcefully stated in this book. And the point that he makes in verse 22 and following is that faith, the Christian faith, what it is that you possess as Christians is not about over-conformity. It's not about getting you to do certain kinds of things. It's not a trick to get you guys to be nice. That is not what it's about. And in fact, I might be late for this, but the fact of the matter is, in our culture, that is the prevailing viewpoint. That faith is a trick to get people to be good. It's not really true or anything, but it's just a trick. Well, Paul goes on beyond not just saying it's not just a trick. He also says, look, it's not about being good. That's not what faith is about. Instead, the law and its conformity to the law, what its job is, according to this passage, is to correct us and to direct us and to protect us as we move forward into the real thing. The law isn't the real thing. but it's protecting us the way we protect our children, it's directing us the way we direct our children, it corrects us the way it corrects our children, with a view toward pointing us toward someday running into the real thing, and that real thing is Christ. That's the real thing. And so the way it works is that for a time, you're under the law, and what it does is it convicts you of sin, it convicts you that you are in deep trouble, you have serious needs, and that is to drive you forward. Not to try to correct the problem yourself, but to go to Christ to have it corrected. And so there's an aspect to this whole picture that Paul develops here, which is forward-looking. It's driving you forward toward a future time. And he gets at this later on when he talks about the promise, being children of the promise. The promise is something which is future-directed, it's going to come in the future, and so you're looking forward. But then by the time he gets to verse 25, he says, after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. That tutor is going to be the law. And so at the same time, it's also right now. That is to say, you are not under the law, but you have met Christ, and you are in some sense there. Okay? So that's the background. That's what Paul is doing here. And so what he's doing is he's developing an analogy, right? And the analogy is, you're in school, you've got a tutor, and the tutor is looking over you and, you know, keeping you from doing things and just making sure that you do your lessons and, you know, continue on out, right? And so while you're in school, what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to do what the teacher tells you. Right? Yeah. You're supposed to do what the teacher tells you. That's what you're supposed to do. Well, what happens then when you graduate and you don't have a teacher? Then what? Hmm. Okay, I'll leave you with that and let's move on to verse 26. In verse 26, he says an extremely striking thing. He says, for you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. This is a very, very striking thing, because what he's saying is that by having faith, by means of the faith, you have become children of God. That's adoption. Right? I mean, that's adoption. And we're so used to hearing this passage that it just kind of goes blue, and we don't really think about it very much. But it's a radical and striking thing. This is what the Scriptures are talking about. Taking somebody who's a stranger, some strange person—all of us are strange people, right?—out there, and then bringing them in, and making them as if they were naturally born, into a family. So that's the idea of adoption. And the thing again, I think we as Westerners have some sense of loss and understanding of just how radical, how crazy this idea is. And again, I can point to lots of examples. Back in the 1800s, there was a really common way of talking that made people think, well, everybody is a child of God, right? I mean, people used to talk about the brotherhood of man, right? And we're all brothers under God's fatherhood. Right? That was really common. And again, it's throughout the culture. If you talk about people being children of God, right? You ask somebody who they think the children of God are, I'll bet you 90% of the people you run into will say, they're everybody. Right? We're all children of God, right? But that's not true. That's not what the Scripture is saying. He's saying those who are adopted into God's family are God's children. And that is not normal. It's not the normal situation. It's striking. It's really unnatural. And you see, this is where this image of adoption as its practice comes in. You see the picture, right, of a family that sees a child with no parents. Right? We used to have lots of orphanages just stuffed with these kids, right? And they were just kind of out there on their own, somebody madly trying to take care of them all in a big pile. And parents would go to these places and sort of pluck them out of there and bring them home. And then, once they were home, in the ideal situation, they would just become their kids. And they would grow up, and eventually, there you go. They're just their kids. And we lose the fact that something happened between point A and point B that is not where they started. And that's the amazing thing about what goes on here. Now, there's all kinds of bad things that have happened over the last few years. I have to confess this. I've had discussions with several of you about this. You know, there's a huge market for kids nowadays. I mean, it's a huge financial market. It's a very lucrative business that some lawyers get into. They're basically marketing children. I ran into a case like this where a couple was looking to adopt a baby and so they went through a lawyer. The lawyer found somebody who was willing to pick them out of the portfolio and all of that stuff. And so they got the child home and it worked out so well that the mother offered to make him another one. I'll let that sink in, right? I don't know why when I heard about that, but that just really made me sick. There's something really wrong about that. Something really wrong about that. Similarly, international adoptions, again, I don't want to poke around too much in there, what's actually going on behind the scenes, but there's a huge financial game that's going on with international adoptions. It's the same thing. People are profiteering off of this image. And you see, I think one of the things that makes me so sick about it is that it's parasitic on this notion of who God is in what he's doing, when we do something that looks like it, but isn't what he's doing. Right? First of all, children and people are not a commodity. There's nothing good that goes into this process of adoption as God does it. Second of all, it's not a service that we provide that God sort of somehow needs us. Right? That's not what's going on. God just looks down and takes us. There's no service for the parents, right? It's just a free gift of His grace. You see, so our image of what goes on in adoption, I think, can be really skewed. It can be really messed up because what goes on here is a really shaky vision of what goes on So let's turn a little closer to the Scriptures again, and to think more carefully about what does God say about what's going on in this passage. If we go to verse 29, for instance, He points out actually before this in verse 27 and 28, for as many as you are baptized into Christ, you are put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. You see, the point of this is it doesn't really matter where you're from. It does not matter where you come from. What matters is where you're going, and where you're going is into God's family. Now, the way it's expressed in this passage next is, if you're a Christ, then you're Abraham's seed. You see, in the context here, what he's saying is that there's not a difference between Jews and Greeks. It's not like the Jews are Abraham's seed, and then the Greeks are persona non grata. By God's grace, it doesn't matter where you're coming from, because God is not taking things that are given to him somehow through genetics or something like that. But he's constructing a family. He's building a family by bringing people in regardless of where they're from. Okay? And you see, this is the image of someone coming from nowhere, right? And being conducted into Abraham's family. And what's more, it's not just sort of that they come from somewhere, they get taken into the family and they get cared for. They become part of this larger organization. They become part of this unit of mutual care and concern. But even more, what he says in verse 29 is even more amazing. If you are Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according Now, of course, there's again that point of the promise pointing forward, but the idea of heirs. That is to say, not only do you get taken in, not only do you get the name and the status of being part of this group, not only do you get acceptance, and all of the things that we have gotten through our families by God's grace, we get another thing, which is the family fortune, right? That, there is much more out there, even beyond what we can see right now. Now, what is this family fortune? Family fortune is, he develops that just a little bit. He goes in through verses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on, of chapter 4. I said here, as long as he's a child, it doesn't differ from a slave. Though he is a master of everything, but is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the Fathers." He's developing this picture again some more. And so it is. We, when we are children, are under bondage under the elements of the world, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law that we might receive this adoption as sons. And then he goes on to verse 6 and 7, and he talks about a little bit more of what this means. And I think that this is the inheritance that we're talking about here. He says, Because you are sons, God has sent his Spirit, the Spirit of his Son, into your hearts, crying out, Abba, Father. And so you're no longer slaves, but you're a son. And if a son, then an heir of God. So what is the family fortune? I think it's right here. And in order to unpack it a little bit more, I want to look at a parallel verse in Romans, Romans 8, that's page 1347 in your Bibles, where he expands on this just a little bit, and he lays out the bits and pieces of this. By the way, if you want to find it, you should just drop your Bible, and it'll probably land open to Romans 8. I actually did that. I dropped a Bible this morning, and it landed on—it naturally falls open to Romans 8. I think it's been open there a few times before. But Romans 8, these are very commonly read passages. Starting in verse 11, to pick up on what he's given you. The first thing that says that God has given you is His Spirit, and in Romans 8 verse 11 it reads thus, But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. So the first thing that's in this inheritance is life. That's the first thing we get by being members of God's family. And you see, actually if you think about it, if you're going to bring somebody into your household, this is the first thing you do is you feed them and clothe them and take care of them, right? And this is what God does with us. He takes us into His household, He feeds us, He clothes us spiritually, and He takes care of us. But more, it says in the Galatians passage, not just the Spirit, but the Spirit of Jesus Christ. So there's more to it than just being taken care of and having life given to us. And in Romans 8, verse 12, it picks up and goes further. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. You see, it's not just being taken care of. that he's giving to us, but he's giving us the spirit of his son, that is to say, the spirit that drove and informed what Jesus did while he was here. Right? It's the spirit that leads us away from the way of death that we live in to a new life, and a new way of living, and a new way of doing things. You see? And again, the idea of adoption does fit in here as well, because not only do you give food and clothing and sustenance to someone when you take them into your family, you also, by sense of this over an extended period of time, you give them a name. You give them a family. You give them a certain way of doing things. You give them a certain way of thinking. You give them an identity. much more than just care. You actually give them a direction for their lives. You give them a way of understanding what it is that they should be doing and who they are. You see? That's the spirit of Christ. But, we still haven't really gotten to the big thing, and that's in the inheritance. So if we go back to the Galatians passage, it says, because you're sons of God, he sent forth the spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying out, Abba, Father. And again, in the Romans 8 passage, it says, for you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, Abba, Father. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ. Indeed, if we suffer with Him, we may also be glorified together. And ultimately, not only do you get life and care, not only do you get an identity and meaning to your life and an understanding of where you're going, you actually get, as the crowning jewel of the inheritance, God Himself. That's what this little phrase says, right? The Spirit of Adoption says, Abba, Father. What does that mean, right? What could that possibly mean? Well, what that means is, you know that this is a term of endearment. That the Spirit causes you to address God in a way in which you're intimate with Him. You see that? That is the crowning jewel of the notion of adoption, and that is having God Himself. God shares His self with you. And you see why, if you continue on, I'm trying to understand what Paul was saying about what's wrong with living by the law. What's wrong with that? Well, what he's saying is because the law is not what we're about. What we're about is God Himself. That's the relationship that we're after, not about outward conformity. You see, the problem is a lot of people... it's a very subtle and very difficult temptation that many of us face, and that is that we like to have rules and everything to tell us exactly what it is we should be doing at any given time. We like that. Now, you guys might say, well, I don't think we like that. But I think that we do, in some ultimate sense. Because we have a feeling that as long as we do X, Y, and Z, as long as we do X, Y, and Z, we're cool. Everything's good. Right? What's the alternative? The alternative is that you actually have to deal with God Himself. You see? We follow the rules so we don't actually have to run into God. Instead of seeing Him as something that drives us to Him, we actually use it as insulation to keep Him away from us. Now, I don't know how many of you struggle with this, but I'm convinced that many people do struggle with this understanding. That you read through Scripture, and what you really want is, you know, a light little instruction booklet. Because that way I can just sort of, you know, look at this thing and I can take care of all business I have to take care of, and then, you know, God will take care of me. It's kind of a good deal, right? So God takes care of me, tells me what to do, and I have, you know, my marching orders, and everything's all great. But nowhere do you actually have to deal with God Himself in this whole picture. And what Paul is pointing out is that, no, you missed the point completely. What this is going to do is it's going to drive you to God. And you have to deal with him. And that is the notion of adoption, that when you deal with him, you aren't dealing with him in judgment because of Christ's work. You're dealing with him in a relationship of intimacy. A relationship which is pictured here in terms of the relationship between, as it was in the Psalms, a father and his children that he takes care of and pities. and has love for her. That's the crux of the image of adoption. And so, fundamentally, this idea of adoption really is central to Paul's point, right? You have to understand that faith is not about fitting in, but faith is about being in a relationship with God himself through Christ in relationships of the most intimate kind, in a relationship which is totally unnatural. It's not the way things would happen if God himself did not come out and take initiative and pull you out of the world and bring you into his family. You see that? Now, let me... I've been developing this for quite a bit. Let me try to develop a couple of practical points that will flow from this, from these two passages. The first is sort of complicated, but it's in the Galatians 4, verses 22 and following passage. There's this long analogy, which I won't take the time to develop. It's this idea of the children of Hagar and the children of Sarah, right? So basically, the story in the Old Testament is that Abraham had these two sons with different mothers—bad idea—and they fought with each other. And eventually, God told Abraham to get the one out of there. Now, why? Because he was a bad kid? Well, I don't know that Isaac was necessarily the greatest kid either, right? I mean, we don't really know a lot about the dynamic there, but I can imagine it probably wasn't a terribly great situation. Now, the point is that God has set his promises on Sarah, and Isaac was the child of those promises. And the general picture you get from this is that, you know, in God's, quote, family, let's say the external family, there are children of two types. There's children of the promise, and there's children of bondage. There's children who see God as Father and have a relationship with Him. And there's children who are there because of some other reason. And you see that what Paul is saying in this passage is quite simply, you need to not be children of bondage. You are children of God Himself, who have a relationship and inheritance with Him. And you have to cling to that. You have to think forward, through the promises of God, to where you're headed, and to press on. And if we go back to the Romans 8 passage, it also develops this, and it's a real similar sort of picture here. It says, and again, you guys probably know these passages quite well, beginning at verse 18, it says, If heirs of God join heirs of Christ, where does he go from here? He says, For I consider the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which will be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God." I mean, what this is saying is the whole world is looking and waiting for God to do this work. This work of adoption in His people. So where does that leave us? I think that leaves us, as Christians today here, recognizing a few basic points and living on the basis of them as we go out from here. The first thing is that we are not natural children of God. By nature, we are children of wrath. And that means that you cannot just live your life as if, well, this is just the way things are. You know, God just kind of does this kind of stuff and, you know, that's the way He is and I kind of get this thing out of it. No, it's not. It's a direct act of His grace where He picks out certain people and pulls them out. And the second point is that you need to consider what it means to be members of God's family, to consider those around you. We talked about the terms brothers and sisters in Christ that's rooted in this notion. You need to think through that again. What does it mean to be part of a family together with others that God has pulled out? And finally, throughout this week, don't let anything get in the way of this picture of God presenting Himself to you as your Father, as the One who brought you into this intimate relationship with Him. All this other stuff that you might be involved with is not what it's about. There are many important things in this world. There's many, many things which we're going to be busy with throughout this week. But do not let anything get in the way of that picture. And I guess that's how I would leave us tonight. If you would join me in a word of prayer, that He would send His Spirit, the Spirit of His Son, to work this in us. Our Father in Heaven, we thank You for Your grace that You have given to us through Your Son Jesus Christ, that You took us out of a strange place a place which was estranged from you, that we were aliens and foreigners in this world that you are creating, and you took us out of it. Lord, we thank you for that, and we pray that your Spirit would impress that upon our hearts, that we have a great debt that we owe to you. And also, Lord, we pray that you send your Spirit, that it would be the Spirit of Christ, that even as Jesus gave himself up, For His people, we would do so as well, that our eyes and our hearts and our minds would be open to what You are calling us to do, that our hearts and minds would be open to the cries of Your people, and that we would serve one another with clear hearts. And finally, O Lord, we pray that You send Your Spirit in our hearts, causing us to cry out to You, cry out to You as our Father, the One who comes and dwells with us, his people, amazingly through his Son, through your Son, Jesus Christ. We pray, Lord, that thou would sustain us and direct us and redirect us throughout this coming week that our priorities and our thoughts and all our plans, you would be working in them to make us more and more children of the promise that we be more and more like your Son, the first fruits the eldest and the only begotten, our Lord Jesus Christ. In His name we pray these things. Amen.