Our Adoptive Family

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As a matter of fact, over the next several weeks, I want to talk to you a little bit about word pictures in the New Testament. You see, word pictures and comparisons, analogies, these things are all tools that we use, and sometimes we use it without even realizing we’re doing it, to help us learn and to help us understand our world. I’m not sure my grandfather was doing it on purpose, But when I was a kid, he’d say, it’s raining cats and dogs.

And I remember the first time he said that that I remember, I got up and ran to the door of their house to see all these animals. And, Papa, there are no dogs out there. No, it’s an expression.

And eventually I realized it’s an expression that, you know, you’re pointing out something unbelievable happens. You know, cats and dogs don’t rain out of the sky. It’s a picture of something unbelievable in the sense of you won’t believe how much it’s raining.

So it helped me to learn that when somebody says it’s raining cats and dogs, it’s an unbelievable amount of rain. Comparisons and pictures, these things help us to learn. I know a couple of years ago, my kids were listening to the news with me in the car, and we got to the restaurant we were going to for lunch, And Benjamin said, Daddy, what are taxes?

So I picked up his hamburger, ate 40% of it, and handed it back to him. So he would understand. I got him another one, but I was explaining to him how taxes work.

These word pictures help us to understand. As a child, some people in our world think that Satan’s a fun guy, somebody you’d like to party with. They think there’s going to be a party going on in hell.

the verse that Peter wrote that said Satan walks about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. I remember being taught that verse as a child and it painted a very clear picture in my mind that Satan is not somebody you want to have fun with. Satan is somebody you want to stay as far away from as possible because he wants to destroy you.

You know, these, as I’ve repeated over and over, these pictures, these word pictures, they help us understand our world. They help us learn. so for the next few weeks I want to look at some of the word pictures in the New Testament that are used to describe the church because there are several metaphors that are used in the New Testament for the church we talk about some of them with some frequency and there are others we don’t talk about at all as a matter of fact I was trying to keep this to about a six-week series and as I was doing my studying I realized there are more than six of these and it was kind of hard to cut down But we talk from time to time about the body of Christ, and we talk about the bride of Christ. We’re going to talk about those.

Did you know that God used the idea of a candlestick as a picture of the church? Now, unfortunately, I didn’t have enough already to make a full message out of that one, but that was an interesting study for me, that God used the image of a candlestick, something that raises up the light of Jesus Christ wherever it is. That’s why he told the churches in the book of Revelation that he would remove their candlestick.

He’d remove their lampstand. You know, if you’re not going to use it anyway, I might as well take it back. There are several of these pictures, several of these metaphors that the New Testament uses to illustrate things about the church, to help us understand some aspect of what the church is supposed to be, some aspect of how the church is supposed to function, some aspect of how we’re supposed to function as people within the church, as members of the body.

And this morning, the first one I’ve chosen to start out with is in the book of Galatians, if you turn there with me, to the book of Galatians chapter 3. And we’re going to look at the very end of Galatians chapter 3 and the very beginning of Galatians chapter 4. Fear not and let not your heart be troubled.

We’re not doing two full chapters this morning. But the thought begins at the beginning, at the end of the chapter and continues on to the beginning of the next one. But the image that is given to us here of the church is one of a family.

Now, as we get into this idea over the next several weeks of these pictures that the Bible paints of what the church is supposed to be, there are some things that we have in our minds that the Bible never says this is what the church is supposed to be. In any of these metaphors, you will not find an illustration of the church as an activity, just an activity that we add to our lives. Something I do on Sunday mornings, you will find nothing in the scriptures to indicate the church is just a once a week activity, or even a two or three times a week activity.

You’ll find no picture in scripture that portrays the church as a place we go. There’s nothing wrong with the building. There’s nothing wrong with having a building and using the building.

God has blessed us with a building, and we ought to use it to do As a matter of fact, I submit to you, we ought to find ways to use it to do ministry seven days a week. But the Bible doesn’t portray the church as a place we go. And I catch myself saying that, yeah, I go to such and such church.

No, I don’t go to Trinity. I belong to Trinity. God has made me a member of this church.

But the church is not just a place we go. As a matter of fact, in the early days, they didn’t even have buildings. They met in people’s houses.

And in none of these pictures do we see the church portrayed as a part-time thing. We kind of compartmentalize our lives sometimes. And I think some of that we have to do for our sanity.

Those of you who have or have had stressful jobs, you don’t want to go home at 5 o’clock or whenever you go home and continue to think about that and be in that world all through the evening and all through the weekend, do you? No, you want to leave that alone until you come back to it and go enjoy your family. So for our sanity, I think sometimes we compartmentalize our lives.

This is my work life. This is my home life. We can’t do that with our commitment to Christ and to his church.

That’s something that’s supposed to permeate every other one of the compartments. We don’t see the idea in Scripture that the church is a part-time thing. So we’re going to see through this series some of the things that God does want the church to be, Some of the things that he gives us these pictures to help us understand what he wants the church to be.

And as I said, the first one is the picture of family. And in this passage, you’ll probably notice too, the Apostle Paul writing to the churches at Galatia, he never comes right out and says, the church is a family in this passage. But I think we get the idea from it.

I think the idea, well, I shouldn’t say I think we’ll get the idea. The idea is there, and I think it will become clear to you as we read through it. So we’re going to start in Galatians chapter 3, starting in verse 27.

And we’re going to read through chapter 4, verse 7. It says, For those of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, since you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs, according to the promise.

Now I say that as long as the heir is a child, he differs in no way from a slave, though he is the owner of everything. Instead, he is under guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. In the same way, we also, when we were children, were in slavery under the elements of the world.

When the time came to completion, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So you are no longer a slave, but a son.

And if a son, then God has made you an heir. So he starts out with this idea of being in Christ. He’s talking here to believers. And he says that if we’re in Christ, we’re part of this family.

We’ve been adopted into God’s family. Now I want to be real clear from the get-go that just because I’m talking about being adopted into God’s family, those in the church are adopted into God’s family, this does not tie church membership to salvation. This does not teach.

Nowhere in the Bible does it teach that you have to be a member of the church, of the local church, to be saved. Now I do believe you have to participate in the local church in order to be obedient. And I’m not just saying that because I’m the pastor and it looks good for me if there are more people here.

This is something I’ve always believed. That’s why even before I became a pastor, I was actively involved in my church because I believe the Bible teaches in order to be obedient as a Christian, we have to be involved with a community of believers. We are not meant to do this alone.

But this does not tie church membership to salvation. It’s assuming that everyone who is in the church is going to be a believer. Now, that may not always be the case.

Sometimes people slip in under the radar. I read a survey, the reports of a survey years ago, that said as many as half of the people that sit in the pews of an average Southern Baptist church every Sunday morning may not actually have been born again. Now, I find that a little hard to believe.

I don’t know where they got their numbers. I’m just telling you, church membership doesn’t make you saved, and not being a member of the church doesn’t make you not saved. But there was the assumption that if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, you’re going to go be part of the church.

In their day, in some cases, you had to cut your family ties, or your family cut their ties from you when you came to Christ. And you would gravitate toward that family of believers. There’s no idea really in Scripture of a lone ranger Christian. I just want to be very clear that this is not saying, oh, be a member of the church and then you’re part of the family of God.

That’s short-cutting the process. That’s not how that happens. But if you’re a member of the church, it’s expected that you are supposed to already be a believer in Jesus Christ. And so he’s writing to people that have professed faith in Jesus Christ, and he’s saying to them, to this gathering of believers, get out of our minds the idea of the church as the building, The entity, it’s the gathering of believers.

He’s writing to this gathering of believers and telling them they are the family of God. They are part of the family of God. Because the church is supposed to be comprised of those who belong to him.

And so he started out with that idea in verse 27 of talking to people who are in Christ, who belong to Christ. And in verse 27, I’m sorry, in verse 28, he tells them, There’s no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, since you’re all one in Christ Jesus. We come into the church. We come into his gathering of believers.

We come into his family as believers from a diversity of backgrounds, don’t we? And we’re all on equal footing at the foot of the cross. This does not mean when he says you’re no longer Jew or Greek, bond or free, male or female, he’s not saying actually that we stop being those things.

you didn’t stop being a woman when you came to Christ. You didn’t stop being a man when you came to Christ. What he’s saying here, he’s making this point of there being equal footing at the foot of the cross. Because for some, they thought because they were Jews, they were closer to God, and the Gentiles had a harder time coming to God through Jesus Christ. He said, no, that’s not the case. Some of them thought women were inferior to men and would have a hard time getting close to God.

And he says, no, that’s not the case. You’d probably, if you were a free person, you would probably think the slaves, they’re lower than us, they’re going to have a harder time being acceptable to God. And Paul says, no, no, you’re all one in Christ Jesus.

And I think one of the points of application of that verse is that when we come into the family of God, as believers, this idea of the church being the family of God, we are in the family of God and adopted in from various backgrounds, but the point is when we come into that family, the old loyalties and the old identities are not erased, but they’re supposed to be eclipsed by our identity in Christ. Does that make sense? It doesn’t erase who we were before, but our identity in Christ eclipses who we were before. I saw a little clip this week of a message by Priscilla Shire.

Am I pronouncing that correctly, LaWanna? Priscilla Shire. I know that some of the ladies here have done some of her Bible studies.

And I loved this clip that I saw. And she was talking as an African-American woman. She said, I am not a black woman.

Don’t get mad at me, I’m quoting her, all right? She said, I am not a black woman. I am a Christian woman who happens to be black.

I was like, that’s good. And she talked about this at length about race. Then she got around to politics and started meddling.

And I sat there and listened to her and I thought, she’s right. She’s right on everything she’s saying. You know, our attitude should not be, I’m a white man or I’m a black man.

Or you know what, I’m pretty proud of my Choctaw heritage. I’m an Indian man. I don’t look like it.

But you know what, I’m a white man or a black man or a Native American man. I’m not any of those things. I’m a Christian who happens to be born in that shell.

Here’s the other thing. Some of us talked about this a little bit on Friday. I am not a Republican.

I am a Christian who happens to see the world in certain ways. Folks, if you’re a believer in Christ this morning, you’re not a Democrat. You may be a Christian who votes Democrat, but our identity is not with our party.

It’s not with our race. It’s not with our social class or our income. Our identity is in Jesus Christ. And if I feel more affinity, okay?

Party is such a, politics is such a big nasty business right now. So let’s just take that. I’m two things.

You know, I belong to Jesus Christ and I’m a member of a party over here. If I feel more affinity toward a non-believer who shares my political views and my political party, than I do towards someone who shares my standing in Jesus Christ, a fellow believer who does not share my political views, if I feel more affinity towards somebody over their political views or their race, than I do feel closer to them because of Jesus Christ, I’m doing it wrong. I want to make sure that’s clear that I’m saying what I mean to say.

I should not walk into a Republican convention and say, these are my people finally, more than I walk into my church with Republicans and Democrats and say, these are my people. These should be my people. Forget all the other artificial things.

Forget race and social class and politics. Jesus Christ, the people who belong to him, are our family. Those old loyalties and identities are supposed to be eclipsed, and we’ve got to find a way to get along with each other without getting so hung up on those secondary earthly things.

Now, I’m not trying to come down on any of you. I’m preaching to me, because I get a little wound up sometimes during election season. We need to remember our identity is in Jesus Christ. You’re no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.

You are all one in Christ Jesus. We’re brought into that family through Jesus Christ, not any earthly attribute that we could assign to our names. I could spend the whole rest of this morning on just this verse.

You know what? We come into God’s family, and those other loyalties and identities are supposed to be eclipsed by our identity in Christ and our loyalty to Him. And this idea of us being part of His family, we need to remember we ultimately belong to God, and we ultimately belong to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. Now look at verse 29.

He said, and if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs, according to the promise. Now God had made promises to Abraham, and this doesn’t necessarily mean that as Christians we are inheritors of every promise that God made to Abraham. Again, I’ve given you the example before, I love my children, I don’t want them as numerous as the sand on the seashore, alright?

Because they all eat, and I have a finite amount of money, and it just, you know, that’d be a big leap of faith there for me. I don’t necessarily at this point want to inherit the land that God gave to Abraham. No knock on Israel whatsoever.

I like Oklahoma, all right? This is not saying that God has made us as believers in Christ inheritors of every single promise that God gave to Abraham. And yet there were promises relating to salvation, promises relating to redemption that people thought they were only going to receive if they were Abraham’s descendants.

Some of the early problems in the Christian community were over this issue because some people said, you know, we’re descended from Abraham, so we’re already closer to God. We’ve got a leg up here. I don’t know how you’re going to get to heaven.

And the idea crept in of Jesus plus the law. Jesus plus works. Jesus plus something else.

Jesus plus anything is always wrong. Any teacher who starts telling you, you need Jesus and they are lying to you. Don’t believe that because I said it.

God’s word says it. In Galatians 1, the apostle Paul said, if anybody comes preaching any other gospel, let him be accursed. And he says it twice so we know he’s not just getting hotheaded.

He really means what he says. It’s not Jesus plus anything. It’s just Jesus.

And so some of them had the idea that because they were physically descended from Abraham, They were closer to God and they had a better shot of getting into heaven. But we need to realize, the Apostle Paul tells us here, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that if we’re in Jesus Christ, we become the heirs of the spiritual promises that God made to Abraham. Because what got Abraham close to God wasn’t his genetics, it wasn’t his DNA, and it wasn’t his adherence to the law, it was Abraham’s faith.

You go back to the book of Genesis, and the Bible says, Abraham believed God and he accounted it to him as righteousness. It was Abraham’s faith. That’s what God was looking for.

And by our faith in Jesus Christ, by believing in the promises of God, just like Abraham did, even though we know more of the promises of God than he did, just because more time has passed, when we believe the promises of God that he will save us through Jesus Christ, when we have that faith in God like Abraham had, then we become heirs of the same promise of salvation. Not necessarily all the material benefits, but we become heirs of salvation just like Abraham. We become the heirs of his promise.

See, for us to be in God’s family, and him to say, yeah, I’ll let you be one of my children, but you’re not an heir. You’re not quite on par with the other children. I mean, that’d still be pretty good.

We get to be God’s children. Even being a second-class child of God would be a good deal. that God says, no, no, you’re heirs to the promise. You’re going to be treated just like everybody else in the family.

And that really leads us to the verses in chapter 4 that tell us when we come to God’s family, we become equal participants in it. We become equal participants in God’s family. He points out in verses 1 through 4 that we start out our lives kind of like slaves.

And we were indeed, before Jesus Christ, enslaved to the world, enslaved to sin. Before people come to Christ, they think, oh, I’m free. I can do what I want.

No, you’re a slave to sin and just don’t realize it. You sin because you can’t help yourself. We’ve all been in that same boat.

And he said we were enslaved to the world. We were enslaved to sin. And he points out that even a child in the family goes through this process of becoming a full heir.

He says when you’re born into the family, even though you’re the heir and you own everything because you’re a child, You’re no better off in your standing than a slave because what person in their right mind is going to let an eight-year-old inherit the whole family fortune and have access to it, right? If I just, you know, forget dying. If I just gave Benjamin the checkbook this morning, I mean, he and Madeline would go crazy buying water guns and bubble gum and Ninja Turtle things, and we’d be broke.

You know, nobody in their right mind turns over the whole estate to a child. I know some people who’ve left their children money in their wills and they’ve said they have trustees and they don’t have access to it until they’re 40. I know of one family with a son who’s almost 50 and it’s set up in the will that siblings get to decide when he gets his inheritance.

You know, there’s a point of saying, okay, technically you’re the heir of everything, but you’re not there yet, and so you have access to nothing. He said even the children naturally born into a family go through that process. And he said it was like that for us.

We’ve come out of slavery and into being full heirs of his promises. And as we have read through verses 1 through 7, he points out that the whole reason for it is because of Jesus Christ. The whole reason we are adopted into the family of God, the whole reason we’re brought in and we’re given access and we’re given an inheritance, the whole reason for this is because of Jesus Christ. We start out as slaves to the world. We start out cut off from God and his family.

We start out cut off from his inheritance. But Jesus redeemed us so that we could be adopted as children. It says in verse 4 and verse 5, when the time came to completion, when the time was right, God sent his son born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption as sons.

It was Jesus who purchased our way into the family. He redeemed us. And then the Holy Spirit draws us into ever closer fellowship with Him.

It says we’ve been given His Spirit. If you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, you’re not just a long lost family member off in some far flung corner of the country. You know, a lot of families have that family member they haven’t seen in 20 years because they moved off somewhere, and we all still love them, but they’re not really part of us because we don’t know them anymore, and they don’t come around.

We gladly welcome them back, but we just don’t know where they are. A lot of families have that person, but in the family of God, there’s no such thing. God gives us His Spirit that draws us toward Him, and it says in verse 6, because you sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father.

If you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, you’ve not only been adopted into God’s family, His Holy Spirit indwells you at this very moment, leading you ever closer to Him to the point where you can cry out, Abba, Father. And I know I’ve talked about this before, but just a reminder, that word Abba in Aramaic, in the language Jesus spoke was how you’d say daddy. It wasn’t father.

It wasn’t even dad. It was daddy. Okay.

That’s an intimate term. You don’t just go around calling everybody daddy. It would creep them out.

You know, when we take the kids somewhere, like I took Carly Jo a couple of weeks ago to get her shots. There’s a nurse there that I’ve known since Benjamin was a baby, you know, eight years. You’d shots and she said, okay, dad, now if you’ll hold her arms, I wasn’t upset about having to hold her arms. It just hits me wrong that you called me dad.

And I guess she may not remember my name. Sir works too. Only four people get to call me dad.

All right. Now some of y’all are going to do this just for honoring us on the way out this morning. Remember, I may or may not be armed.

All right. You don’t just let anybody call you daddy. There are four people in this world that get to call me that.

And they get to call me that because they’re my children. And I know them. And they know me.

And God said, think about this. We started out as the enemies of God. We started out as slaves to sin.

We started out separated from him and everything in his family and in his household. And yet, because of what Jesus did, God has brought us in close to where we are no longer his enemies. And we’re not just the servants in his household.

He draws us in close by his spirit and tells us we can call him daddy. We can call him Abba. He desires to have that relationship with us.

The church is a family because those who belong to Jesus Christ are the family of God. We are his sons and his daughters. We’re no longer his enemies.

We’re not merely his servants. We are his sons and daughters and we are equal sons and daughters. We’re full participants in his family.

And this is reiterated in verse 7. so you are no longer a slave but a son and if a son then God has made you an heir. Paul repeats himself sometimes just to make sure we get it just to make sure we get it.

What we need to understand this morning from all of this is the church is portrayed in scripture as God’s family because God adopts us as his own through Jesus Christ. We’re able to be in the family of God because we’re adopted into the family of God. And we’re able to be adopted into the family of God because Jesus paid the adoption fee. So if you’re a believer this morning, God paints this picture in scripture of the church as being his family because he wants us to understand that he didn’t save us just for us to go on with our average everyday lives just doing what we were doing.

Now he saved us because he didn’t need us, but he desired that relationship with us. He desired for us to come be drawn near to him like little children. Like when my kids still climb up in my lap and they want to put their arms around my neck.

Or sometimes Charlie wants to put his hands around my throat. Depends on how much I’ve told him no that day. You know, they want to sit in my lap and they just want to be close to me.

God desires a close relationship with us. And so to help us understand what he wants, to help us understand what the relationship with him is supposed to be, he paints this picture of adopting us into his family so that we will understand, so we will get it. God could tell us all day, I want a close intimate relationship with you.

And we’d say, oh, isn’t that nice? But there’s something about that picture. There’s something about the picture that he uses of adopting us into his family and drawing us close and saying, you can call me daddy.

It takes our minds back to those times of childhood or those times of raising our own children and helps us really understand what God wants the relationship to be. And this morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your savior, you’re not yet part of the family of God. And I don’t say that to be mean.

I hear all the time, we’re all God’s children. No, we’re not. We’re all God’s creations.

But this idea of being God’s child comes from being adopted into his family. The way that works is the same way it worked for Abraham, believing God. I’m not talking this morning about just believing that God exists, not just believing that God’s real or that God’s powerful.

I’m talking about believing the promises of God when it comes to salvation. God so loved the world. God loved the world in this way that he sent his only begotten son, that whoever would believe in him would not perish but have everlasting life.

God sent Jesus Christ to shed his blood and die on the cross as a perfect sacrifice for sins, to open the door for sinners and enemies of God, to be welcomed with open arms as sons and daughters.