Buenos dias. It's good to be here with you this morning. I'm going to introduce myself because as I look out among you, I see a lot of faces that I don't recognize. Typical Southern California kind of transient population. People come, people go. There's many of you that we haven't had the privilege of meeting yet. So my name is Matt Leighton and I'm here today with my wife, Nuria. I'm from a small mountain town in Colorado called Georgetown. It's about an hour west of Denver on I-70. And my wife is from Barcelona, Spain. We have five kids. Dan is 22. John is 20. Tanya is 18. They're not here with us today. Two of them are in Mississippi, and one's in Colorado. They're all working summer jobs, so they couldn't come. We brought with us our two youngest. Alex is 14, and Mark is 12. So it was mentioned earlier, we've been on a year of what's called home assignment. It's funny because people ask, how's your year-long sabbatical going? Or how's your vacation? And that's not what we've been doing for the last year. We've been mostly in Colorado, visiting churches that already support us, raising new support for ourselves, raising support for the seminary, where I teach in Spain, working on writing projects, networking, recruiting, and a little bit of rest. It's been a good year in a lot of ways. It's been challenging for sure, but God is good. We're grateful for his provision, and we're grateful to be here with you today. So we were sent out to Spain by Grace Bible Church in 2002. After two years of interning here, I was studying at Westminster, we interned here and we lived in one of those apartments over there, which was a huge blessing for us. It was my job to vacuum the entire church. And I have to say, the carpet that's here today is in better shape than the carpet that was here in the year 2000. I found my way around the church, up and down the halls, and participated in the intern program with other seminary students. And we were blessed tremendously by the ministry here at Grace at that time. So in 2002, like in May or so, we came up here. And the elders and the deacons came up and laid hands on us and sent us out. to Spain. Went back in 2002 and since then we've been in Spain. I've been teaching. I do two things mainly. I teach at the Evangelical Seminary in Barcelona. Teach all different kinds of classes. One of our Old Testament professors just left. He took a call to another church on the other side of the country and they asked me to teach Biblical Hebrew again. So, Aaron, where's Aaron? Don't let your, where's our seminary intern, don't let your Hebrew get rusty like I have. I'm going to have to go back and kind of start all over to get ready for that. I teach there. I'm on the board. I have different administrative responsibilities and leadership responsibilities, but I count it a tremendous privilege to be teaching young men and women who are excited about going into ministry in Spain. The other thing I do is I elder pastor at our local church, which is in my wife's hometown. I've been a pastor there for coming up on It's 2005, so coming up on 20 years. And Nuria is very involved in the church, leading the children's ministry, and also actively participating in the worship ministry. She translates songs, like the songs that we've sung this morning, not into Spanish, but into Catalan. Amen. All right. Yeah, so she translates songs and her dream one day might even be to have perhaps a website where she can publish these translations of songs into Catalan that she's been working on. So we're going to be here with you for the next three Sundays. I'll preach today and again next week Lord Willing and Robin mentioned the update on the 27th, I think Saturday the 27th. I'll give a longer update with a PowerPoint with pictures and tell you more about what the Lord's been doing in our ministry in Spain. So anyway, it's great to be here with you this morning and I think I should probably preach a sermon, right Mark? That'd be all right. Okay. Sunday morning is a good chance to hit the reset button. What do I mean by that? Well, certainly all of you have devices, phones, tablets, computers, and sometimes those devices get scrambled and they get confused and they don't work properly. And in order to fix that, the first thing you do is you hit reset. You reset that phone, and a lot of times it works wonderfully after that. Well, we as believers, as we go throughout our lives, we get scrambled, we get confused, and we don't think rightly about God. When we come to church, partly, maybe largely, to hit the reset button, we need God to help us to reorient our thinking about who He is, about how He works, our lives, about who we are before Him. So this morning, I want to give us all a chance to hit the reset button. And to ease into our topic for this morning, I want to share this following idea with you. If you're like me, you know how it feels to sin against God and then find it difficult to turn back to Him in repentance. Repentance is hard, isn't it? We sin and We need to turn back to God, and a lot of times we find that difficult. Why do we find that difficult? Well, sometimes it's because we're ashamed of what we did. I think that is pretty typical. Other times, we know that if we repent, we're gonna have to make restitution. So, for example, if I've lied to somebody, if I'm truly repentant, turning away from that sin and turning back to God, I need to go to that person that I lied to and tell them the truth. I need to bear fruit in keeping with repentance. But there's another reason why I think sometimes we hesitate or we find it difficult to turn back to God. And that is that when we think about repenting, we think that as we turn back to God, what we're going to see is God in heaven looking down on us, scowling. Perhaps wagging His finger at us in an accusing way. And I know if I turn back to Him that He'll forgive me, but sometimes I think that maybe He does so grudgingly Maybe he's going to growl at me a little bit, or he's going to give me a lecture to try to keep me from committing that sin again. And the truth of the matter is, if that's how we're thinking about God, repentance is all the more difficult. But I want to suggest to you this morning that that is not the image that God wants us to have of Him. It's not how He wants us to understand our relationship to Him. So to hit reset this morning in our thinking about God, and to reprogram and renew our minds just a little bit, I want to talk to you about the doctrine of adoption. The biblical doctrine of adoption. So this is a truth that's taught in the Bible. And we'll start with the basics. I think we all know what adoption is, at least generally speaking. Adoption is about being included in a family from which you previously were excluded or you didn't belong. When you're adopted, you're included into a new family. That's what adoption means on the most basic level. And the Bible says that God adopts everybody who believes in Jesus. Now, that may sound a little strange because you may be thinking, well, aren't we all children of God just by virtue of being born into this world? I mean, we're all his creatures. Isn't everybody a child of God? That's a very common idea, but it's incorrect. In Acts chapter 17, you don't have to go there, but you'll remember Paul preaches this famous sermon, and in his sermon, it's Acts 17.28, he says that we are all God's offspring. So Paul does say that, and sometimes people appeal to that to say, no, everybody's a child of God. It doesn't matter what they believe. It doesn't matter even if they're a Christian. Everybody's a child of God. But that's not what Paul means. What Paul means in that context is that everybody owes their existence to God. Everybody's been created by God. Everybody is a creature of God. That's true. But this same Apostle Paul, a few years after preaching that sermon, he wrote a letter to the Ephesians, and he said, by nature, we're not children of God. We're children of wrath. Now you might think, wow, Paul, that's a little rough. The Apostle Paul was having a bad day when he wrote Ephesians 2. What about Jesus? Well, Jesus says something that's even harsher. Jesus, one time, he was talking to some Jews that didn't believe in him. They were rejecting his teachings and his person. This is in John chapter 8. And he said, you don't have God as a father. Your father is the devil. So we see that just by virtue of being born into this world, we're not automatically children of God. To be a child of God, to be adopted, is a spiritual blessing. doesn't depend on physical birth, it depends on spiritual birth. It depends on being born again. So in that same Gospel of John, chapter one, another really well-known passage, it's to those who are born of God, who receive Christ, who believe in his name, and only to those does God give the right to become children of God. So without Jesus, Without Jesus, it's impossible to be a part of God's family, to be adopted into God's family. If we're going to be part of his family, we have to be adopted into it, because initially we're excluded from it, we have to be included into it. How does that happen? Well, we could think that in order for God to adopt me, maybe we better get our acts together. God adopts good people who are worthy who are capable of carrying their load in his family. Is that true? We could think that, and maybe that kind of fits with some human instincts. When I was preparing this sermon, I learned something. It turns out that in the ancient world, adoption didn't work like it does today. When I say the ancient world, I'm thinking about the first century, when the New Testament was written, when Jesus was teaching. In the first century, people didn't adopt babies, or infants, or young children. Typically that's how adoption works today. And today even, people who already have natural children for love and compassion will adopt more children. But that's not how it worked in the ancient world. Adoption existed, but adoption was usually practiced by childless couples who were getting up in age, realized that they weren't going to have natural offspring And so they would try to adopt a child who would inherit and would carry on their family line. Were they adopting babies? They weren't adopting babies or small children. They were adopting even teenagers, perhaps even older boys, usually, after an interview process, after vetting their character, after making sure that they would be worthy of carrying the family name and perpetuating the family line. That's not how God works when he adopts us. He doesn't interview us first. He doesn't adopt good and powerful people. He adopts rebels. And he adopts the weak. How can that work? Why would he do that? The Bible tells us that God adopts us, not because we deserve it, but in spite of who we are. We're included in his family. And we participate in the inheritance. And it's not just that we don't deserve it, we deserve the opposite. How does that happen? Well, adoption connects to another biblical truth or doctrine that's called justification. So there's this barrier between me and being a part of God's family. I'm born by nature, a child of wrath. I'm not a child of God in the sense of being part of his family. that keeps me from entering that family, and that barrier is my sin. So before God adopts me, He has to do something about my sin, and this is where the doctrine of justification comes in. In justification, God declares me to be righteous, meaning I'm now worthy to be in His presence. He declares me to be worthy to be accepted by Him favorably as a friend. And that didn't happen because I made myself worthy. That happened because Jesus did two things. He died on a cross, taking on the punishment that I deserve so that my sins could be forgiven. But it's not only that, my sins are forgiven, but I didn't fulfill the law like I should have. Jesus lived a perfect life in my place. And God credits that righteousness to me. So he looks at me and he says, you're righteous. Why am I righteous? Because I'm in Jesus, I'm trusting him. And I'm wearing his robes of righteousness. Justification. The doctrine upon which the church stands or falls. Foundational teaching in the Bible. Foundational to our salvation. But I'm gonna say something now that's provocative. And I'm going to do it because two of the elders are gone. Another one's on crutches. And the other one could probably take me down, but I think I could outrun him. Maybe? I don't know, Mark. We could have a foot race in the parking lot later. Or not. Oh, I pulled my hamstring already. Here's what I'm going to say. Justification is foundational to our salvation and to our existence as Christians. But the crowning blessing of the Christian faith is not justification, it's adoption. The climax of our experience as Christians is not justification, it's adoption. Wow. I didn't come up with that. You know where I found that? I found that in J.I. Packer's book, Knowing God. Anybody know that book? You have that book? How many of you read it? Classic. He's got a chapter in there about adoption that's just wonderful, 20-something pages. well worth the read. One of the things that Packer says is that the crowning blessing of Christian salvation is adoption. And here's what he means. He explains it. He says that in justification, I know God as a judge in his courtroom. But in adoption, I know God as a father in his family room. Now, I honor the Judge, and I'm eternally grateful for what He does for me when He declares me righteous because of Jesus. But I don't have intimate communion with the Judge. I don't have a tender relationship with the Judge. It's not the Judge who cares for me every day, who provides for all my needs, who guides my life. That's not the Judge. It's the Father. I don't think I've said anything heretical. relationship with God is multifaceted. That's our big word for the day, right? So we relate to God in different ways and we experience him in different ways in different moments in our lives. But one of the things that Packer is really keen on emphasizing is that new horizons of enjoyment in our relationship with God open up as we contemplate the doctrine of adoption. He's saying don't Don't take this out of context. Don't settle with just justification. There's more. Justification is the gateway to adoption. I'll give you an example. You don't have to raise your hand. Does anybody here have a closet in their house that they're afraid to open? Because if they do, who knows what's going to fall out on top of them? Anybody? Well, imagine salvation as a closet. And it is so full of blessings that if you open it, blessings are going to tumble out immediately on top of you and just overwhelm you. Salvation's like a closet in that regard. Now, the closet has a handle, and I could want that salvation and go up and try to open it, and I can't do it. I mean, I can just, you know, just hork on that handle. I can put my foot up on the door jamb and pull, and I can't open it myself. God's going to have to open that closet for me. And he does it with a key. What's the key called? Justification. Slides the key, it fits perfectly in that doorknob, opens it up, door opens, and all the blessings of Christian salvation fall out on me immediately. One of those is adoption. That's how those two doctrines fit together. But that blessing of adoption is wonderful. And I want to talk to you about some of the benefits of adoption this morning. I've got four or five things that we'll run through here. What makes adoption so wonderful? Well, in the first place, thanks to adoption, we have communion with our Heavenly Father. I think sometimes we go throughout our days and we don't really think about just the simple fact that I can enjoy my relationship with God. Like I enjoy a relationship with another person, with a very good friend, with my wife. We can talk. I pray. And he responds to me through his word. The relationship is personal in that regard. Speaking of devices that need to be reset. Come on. There it goes. Turn the page. All right. But my relationship with God as my father is richer and more tender than any human friendship that I could ever experience. Because when I pray, I'm praying to my perfect Heavenly Father. He's perfect, and He's my Father, and that gives me confidence to draw near to Him. He's a perfect Father, which means that He is always happy to see me. He is always interested in what I have to say. He pays attention to me. He always helps me. Maybe not quite the way that I thought he should, but in ways that are the best for me. Do you think about God like that? He's always happy to see you. He's always interested. He doesn't ignore you. So you could ask one of my two boys who are here if I ever ignore him, and the answer is yes. And I don't do it on purpose. I'm just getting older, and I'm busy with my work, and in the background, there's this, Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa. It gets louder and louder. I don't turn my head until he says, And that gets my attention. Am I right? There's one of the two that's laughing harder than the other. That's the one. We have a perfect, loving, heavenly Father. Now maybe it's a little difficult for some of you to imagine God in that way. A couple times I've been told when I was teaching on the Lord's Prayer once, for example, One time I was teaching on the Lord's Prayer and I had a lady come up to me afterwards and she said, you shouldn't put so much emphasis on the fact that God is our Father because there's some people that have had horrible earthly fathers who have abused them and they're incapable of imagining a good father. And you don't want to associate that image with God. Do you understand the objection? I don't remember what I said to her. I know what I should have said to her. I should have said Jesus himself invites us to think of God as our Father. So Elise read for us from Matthew 6. In Matthew 7, if you want to look this up, I want to read to you a couple verses from Matthew 7. So we're still in the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus precisely invites us to think of God as our Father, in spite of bad experiences that we might have had with other fathers, or the poor example of a father that some of us are. This is powerful. Matthew 7, we're gonna read verses 9 through 11. Jesus says, which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? Now get this, if you then, he knows the people that he's speaking to, if you then who are evil, Jesus knows that lots of dads are deadbeats. He knows that many earthly fathers are complete boneheads. He knows that. If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, by contrast, by contrast, even rotten fathers give good gifts to their children. Then Jesus says, how much more will your Father, who is in heaven, give good things to those who ask Him? Jesus knows perfectly well all the experiences, good and bad, that we've had with our earthly fathers. But he knows that we can all imagine what a perfect heavenly father must be like, even if it's by contrast. And that's how Jesus wants us to think about God. So in the first place, we have communion, tender, loving, secure communion with our heavenly father. In the second place, our heavenly father protects us, he provides for us, And when we need it, he disciplines us. So what does a good father do? You're a good, good father. It's who you are. I'm not going to sing it. Chris Tomlin, where's Chris Tomlin? We could sing the song. What does a good father do? He protects and he provides for his children. Matthew chapter 6, the passage that Elise Read for us in verse 31, therefore, don't be anxious about anything, saying, what shall we eat, what shall we drink, what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and, here it comes, your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. A good Father, and God is our Father, He cares for us in every way imaginable. All these things will be added unto you. He protects us. He provides for us perfectly. And He even disciplines us when we need it. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 6, the Lord disciplines the one He loves and chastises every son He accepts. Now, does this mean, if God disciplines us, does this mean that God is scowling at us when we disobey? Is He growling from heaven? The answer is no. God is profoundly displeased with our sin. There's no doubt about it. But we have to remember that in a good Father, discipline and profound affection are not incompatible. In fact, it's because of God's love for us that He disciplines us. He doesn't discipline us out of spite. He doesn't discipline us because we've inconvenienced Him. He has no need in and of Himself to discipline us. He disciplines us for our own good. It's out of love. So, even when we disobey, God never ceases to treasure us. And even when we've turned our back on Him, He never ceases to long profoundly for restored communion with us. And what that means is, when I turn away from my sin and back to God, what I see is not a God shaking His finger at me, I see Luke 15, the parable of the prodigal son, a God who's smiling at me with his arms open, receiving me again, back into full communion and fellowship with him. Does that make you want to repent? Helps, doesn't it? Hit the reset button. What is God really like? What's his attitude toward me, even in my sin? He's a loving Heavenly Father who longs for restored communion with us. We have a right to an inheritance, another privilege of adoption. So it's a family privilege to be an heir. And sometimes inheritances are great. Houses, cars, money, sometimes, not always. That could be a real blessing. But earthly inheritances are temporary. My guess is that most of you, all of you maybe, know somebody who spent their inheritance poorly. Lost it. Maybe you know others who managed it very well. That's great. That's a blessing. But guess what? At some point, all that inheritance is going to go to somebody else. Because we're all going to die. It's all temporary. But having God as our Heavenly Father, being members of His family, means that we have an eternal inheritance that cannot be lost. 1 Peter says, this is 1 Peter 1, that an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance is being kept in heaven for us. And that inheritance isn't a million dollars. Actually, we need to up that. A million dollars doesn't get you very far anymore, does it? Especially here in Southern California. That inheritance is not ten million dollars. It's reflecting and bearing Jesus' glory in heaven as we're perfectly conformed to His image. I mean, Jesus is better than 10 million bucks. Can I get an amen? All right. Not in the least because the inheritance that we have in Him lasts forever. It will never fade. It can never be spent improperly. It never has to be left to somebody else. It's yours forever. parentheses, I'm going to preach on that next week, so y'all have to come back. Leave you in suspense. 1 Peter 1, that's what we're going to work on together next week. Our heavenly inheritance is perfectly satisfying, and we start to enjoy that right now. Not fully, but we enjoy it now, in a real way, even if partially. That takes me to the next point. How can we be sure that we're going to have that heavenly inheritance that we don't fully possess right now. How can you be sure? Well, one of the ways you can be sure is the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Now this is really interesting too. In Romans chapter 8, Paul calls the Spirit, the Spirit of Adoption. Did you ever notice that? He's the Spirit of Adoption. Why is he the Spirit of Adoption? Because it's by the Holy Spirit that we are enabled to call God Father. And that same Holy Spirit, who enables us to call God Father, testifies to our own spirit that we are indeed children of God. He gives us assurance. This is the beginning of the inheritance, by the way. The spirit is like a down payment. It's part of the inherit. He is. Oh, I said it's. Oh my goodness. I might get rushed off the stage. He is part of the inheritance. And even now he's ministering to us and assuring us of our, the security that we have of being part of God's family. So Paul talks about this same thing in Galatians chapter four. You don't have to go there. I'll just summarize it for you, but you could look at it maybe later today. In Galatians four, Paul gives this really interesting example and he compares what it's like to be a non-believer and to be a believer in the presence of God. He wants us to imagine a really big Mediterranean house. The Leightons have a Mediterranean house, but it's not really big. So you can come see us, but not all at once, please. Imagine a big Mediterranean house. Wealthy family with children in the house and slaves. Both. And it might be the case that some of the slaves and some of the children are of the same age. But get this, the relationship that the slaves have to the master is not the same as the relationship that the children have to their father, even though the master and the father are the same person. Now why is that? Well, the slave in the house, their relationship is, their stay in the house is contingent on fulfilling expectations. The slave needs to obey. Because even if their master is a good person, if the slave disobeys, they can get kicked out of the house. They're gone. So the slave lives in perpetual fear and concern. Will I still be a part of this household tomorrow, next week, next month, next year? But the child, the natural born child's experience is completely different. The child is secure in his or her relationship with the father. That son has to obey his father, but not because he runs the risk of getting kicked out of the house. He obeys the father because he loves his father. Because he takes pleasure in obeying. Because he enjoys his relationship with his father. You see, the dynamic is completely different. And it's based on assurance. Adopted children of God have assurance that the eternal inheritance will be theirs because it does not depend on them. It depends on Jesus, and his work is perfect. The price has already been paid. That's precisely what we're going to remember when we celebrate the Lord's Supper. The last blessing or privilege of adoption that I want to mention is that we have a family. So my main goal in this sermon is to help us all hit the reset button and think better about God, about who he is, and about how he works in our lives. But hitting that reset button also helps us to think better about who we all are together. The Bible says that we're brothers and sisters as believers in Jesus Christ. And the Bible also calls the church a family, and that's not on accident. It's all part of the same image. I mean, if we're all adopted children and God's our father, we're part of a family. And that means that we are members of an amazing community. And this is really important. So I was listening recently to a podcast with an evangelist, a professional evangelist and apologist, and the guy said that it's important, as we talk to non-believers, to tell them why they should want to be Christians. And he said that because in our secular age today, a lot of times people don't even care if Christianity is true or not, they just think it's irrelevant. How in the world could A story about some guy hanging on a cross 2,000 years ago helped me in my life. And what this guy's point was in this podcast was we should tell people that the gospel responds to everybody's deepest needs and desires. And the gospel responds to those needs and desires better than any other story out there. And what he said about community was this, specifically, everybody longs to be part of a community. One weird way that that shows up are all these virtual communities. You can be a community with people that you've never met in person. That's what a lot of people do today. It reflects a desire that God created us with to be part of a community. The church is the best community that there could possibly be. Do you believe that? Look around at everybody. It's my family. Well, it is. And the reason why is because it's spiritual. We're all so different. And yet at the same time, we have a lot more in common with each other than people who are members of the same political party, or the same fan club, or the same whatever, because we're all, by the power of the Holy Spirit, united to our older brother, Jesus Christ. And we're being transformed into his image, and we're serving one another along the way. What an amazing privilege to be a part of a community like that, a better community, can't be found. How long do I have? I'm just rolling. Just keep going. Yeah, Mark says I can keep going. All right, a little more. Some people are like, no, Mark, come on. So, being adopted into God's family doesn't mean only privileges. There's also responsibilities. We'd be remiss if we didn't think about that. Being a part of any family implies responsibilities. So as a Christian and a child of God, I should be proud of my Heavenly Father, and I should make every effort to represent Him well in the world. I should live in a way that honors Him. And I should live in a way that helps other people see just how great He is. I mean, imagine a little boy who's just so proud of his daddy. that he runs around telling everybody else how great his daddy is. That's normal, that's healthy. And that's how we should be as Christians. That little boy imitates his dad. We should imitate our Heavenly Father. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. And you know, that's what it means to be a child of God. When we're adopted into God's family, that doesn't mean that somehow biologically or ontologically we're like God. We're always going to be creatures. Never going to be omniscient, never going to be omnipotent, but we can bear His likeness as we imitate Him in our lives. So how does all that fit with what we said earlier about God adopting us in spite of who we are? Didn't we just say, We're rebels without a cause, and yet we're included in the family, and how am I going to reflect the image of my perfect father? Well, the thing is, when God adopts us, he doesn't leave us unchanged. So that same spirit of adoption who testifies to us and tells us that we're children of God, he transforms us. And Packer has a really interesting expression in that book, Knowing God, he says that the Spirit puts in us the instinct to trust and obey our Father. Isn't that interesting? When you're born again, and then throughout the rest of your Christian life, as the Holy Spirit is working in your heart, He's putting in you the instinct that you didn't have before, and you wouldn't have otherwise. The instinct to trust and obey your Heavenly Father. It's the Holy Spirit, that Spirit of adoption, who enables us to bear the family resemblance and to fulfill our responsibility. Okay, so let's bring this in for our landing. Reset, reset. Attitude adjustment this morning. Trying to think better about who God is and what our relationship with Him is really like. And I think this will help us live our Christian lives with more happiness and holiness. I want to try to summarize everything I've said with one more example. So, how do you think God sees your efforts to obey Him? How does He receive your attempts to do good works? So if you're a believer, you know that as you try to obey God, even your best efforts to serve God, to serve your neighbor, are marred with sin. even the best things we do still bear the marks of some selfishness, some pride, some greed, whatever it may be. How does God view those works that we offer Him, tainted by sin as they are? Well, we could imagine God being like that father whose little boy studies really hard for his math test, And he gets a 95% on the math test, and he goes home with the test, and he puts it in front of his dad and says, Daddy, look, I got a 95 on the test. And the dad says, what about the other 5%? Sometimes I think maybe we imagine God to be like that. Is that little boy then motivated next week to study hard? He might try a few more times, but his dad's going to crush him eventually. But I want to suggest to you this morning that that's not at all. how God sees our good works, tainted by sin, as they are. Our Father, our Heavenly Father, receives our obedience lovingly, and here's why. Justification. We're back to justification again. In justification, our sins are forgiven. Past, present, and future. And so that means, when I present to God a good work, the sins that came along with it, they're all forgiven. And what's lacking in righteousness in that good work is covered by the righteousness of Christ. 1 Peter 2, there's language about how our good works are sanctified. And because of Jesus, God is pleased with our good works. So we should imagine God, not like the father who says, where's the other 5%? But more like the father who has maybe a four or five year old son, who's learning to write, and the son's writing. He's got his paper and his crayons, and he's writing. It looks like chicken scratch. And it's dirty, and it's not even legible. And he gives it to his daddy, so happy. And the dad, instead of saying, that's not good enough, what does he do? He takes it, and he pins it up on the refrigerator so the rest of the family can see it. He takes it to his office, and he pins it on the wall, and his co-workers see it. And his co-workers think it's just dirty paper. But the father is proud. He displays that work in spite of its imperfections because he loves his little boy. He's proud of his efforts and his progress. Now, he's going to help that little boy learn to write better, isn't he? He's going to work with him. And over time, the little boy is going to improve. He's going to grow. But in the meantime, the father will always forgive the defects of his work and is thrilled to receive those dirty papers with the chicken scratch on it. That's how I think we need to imagine God accepting our obedience as Christians. He rejoices over it. In fact, I'd say we have to think that way if we're going to be motivated to obey God in spite of all the difficulties of this world. So, to conclude, I want to encourage all of us to meditate on our adoption. It's a wonderful blessing. May the Spirit assure us more and more of our eternal inheritance. May He increase that instinct in us to trust and obey our Heavenly Father. May we be more desirous of and be diligent to show other people who aren't in God's family yet just how wonderful our Heavenly Father is. And may we live with more joy experiencing our Heavenly Father who guides us, protects us, and who smiles at us. Amen? Let's pray. Father, we're grateful for the many passages in Scripture that talk to us about your love and your care and your concern for us. As a father, loving your children, we're grateful for justification, for the forgiveness of our sins, for the righteousness of Christ that clothes us in all of our imperfections. And we're grateful that you adopt us, that you include us in your family, and that ours is wonderful communion with you now in the present, a perfect eternal inheritance that will never fade. We pray, Lord, that you would work in our hearts so that we would increasingly more and more bear the image of our older brother, Jesus Christ, that we might give you glory. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.