Orphan vs. Child of God?

Please join with me as I read two scripture passages this morning.

The first one found in the Gospel of John chapter 14 and then the second in Romans chapter 8.

John 14 · chapter mention Romans 8 · chapter mention

The scripture passages are listed there in the bulletin, and if you don't have a Bible with you, you can find the first passage on page 901, and then the second on page 944.

So John 14.

I'm going to begin reading in verse 15, reading through verse 18.

John chapter 14.

John 14 · chapter mention

If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and He will give you another helper to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.

You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you.

And then in Romans chapter eight.

Reading through verse 17, Romans chapter 8.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Again, you can find that on page 944.

So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.

For if you live according to the flesh, you will die.

But if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we have by whom we cry, Abba Father.

The Spirit Himself bears witness with our Spirit that we are children of God, and of children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may be glorified with him.

This is God's word.

I do want to remind you, if you don't own a Bible, please take that Pew Bible home with you.

It is our joy and privilege each week to give away Bibles, and we would love for you to have that this morning.

As Greg mentioned, this will be the last Sunday that I stand in this pulpit as your senior pastor.

And I've prayed and thought about what is the one thing, if there was one thing that I could say that's on my heart, that I would want to leave with you.

If there was one thing that I could tell you, what would it be?

And it would be this you're a mess, and your heavenly father loves you.

Let me share an illustration, an extended illustration, so bear with me in this.

In the movie Dead Man Walking, the lead character is on death row, and he's brought from his cell down the hallway to the death chamber where he's to be electrocuted.

It's a picture of each one of us.

We are walking down the hallway to our death.

We live in death row.

All of us are dead men walking.

However, God's justice and our sin demand something far worse than the electric chair.

We deserve the eternal wrath of God.

Amazingly, as we're taken down the hallway, we discover that we've been brought into a great courtroom instead of a death chamber.

The jailer shuts the door behind us and we look up at this very impressive-looking judge sitting behind the bench.

He says to us, You know that each of you are on the way to the electric chair, don't you?

Each of us nods our head in acknowledgement.

Well he says, I'm going to pardon you.

Would you like to be pardoned for your many crimes, your sin?

Would you like to be forgiven so that there's no more guilt, no more condemnation for your crimes?

Of course, each one of us says, Yes, Your Honor.

At that moment, the lights in the courtroom flicker and become dim.

The judge explains, someone loves you more than you can ever imagine.

And he has been electrocuted in your place.

He goes on saying, Consider yourself pardoned by the power that is bestowed on me.

You are forgiven.

The judge looks at us and says, I know that when you leave this courtroom, people, even your own family and friends, are going to consider you guilty.

So I'm not merely going to forgive you.

I am going to give you a gift, a new reputation.

This new reputation means that you are completely right.

I am declaring that you have no blemish, no sin, and no guilt.

So not only are you pardoned and completely forgiven, but now you are completely righteous.

You will leave this courtroom with the new reputation.

There's one other thing that the judge does after that.

When he says to us, you've been pardoned and declared righteous.

I'm going to let you go free.

But you probably don't have a family to go to.

So with that, the judge stands up and he takes off his outer robe and he steps down from the bench and he stands in front of you.

And he puts his arm around you and he says, Would you like to come home and live with me?

Would you like to be my child?

Would you like to be adopted into my family?

I have room for you in my mansion.

I will provide everything that you need for life.

You will have countless brothers and sisters there.

You will, they will love you and you will love them, you will be loved, and I will make you an heir of everything I own.

How on earth is this possible?

We ask.

He lived a perfect life so that you could have his perfect record.

He suffered terribly for you and rose again for your justification.

All of this he did for you.

And for this reason, once I adopt you, I will view you exactly as I do him.

Sinless and holy, since you are adopted into my family, I am making you co-heirs with him.

What's more, I am going to give you all the help you need to live in my family.

Friends, to what end were you saved?

To what end were you rescued from your sin in God's judgment?

Why did God call you to Himself?

J.I.

Packer in his book, Knowing God, says adoption is the highest privilege the gospel offers, higher even than justification.

He goes on to say, if you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being a child of God and having God as his father.

If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity that well at all.

Why did God save you?

Now, surely God saved you ultimately for his glory, but in what way does God receive glory from you?

God saved you so that he could express his lavish love on you for all of eternity as his child.

That is the end to which you have been saved, that you have been forgiven and justified and declared righteous, so that you can be adopted into his family to be his child forever.

God saved you so that you could be the object of his affection.

And in 1 John chapter 3, verse 1, it says, See what great love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God.

1 John 3:1

In the Gospel of John chapter 1, it says, He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.

John 1 · chapter mention

But to them that received him, he gave the right to become children of God, even who those who believe on his name.

And so this morning I want to ask you one question, and I want to think through it with you.

Share what God has done in my life in this area.

And that is this are you living like an orphan?

Or are you living like a child of God?

Jesus told his disciples, I will not leave you as orphans.

An orphan feels abandoned, feels forsaken, an orphan feels neglected as if no one is looking at me, no one is paying attention to me, no one is noticing me.

An orphan feels forgotten.

An orphan feels unloved and uncared for.

An orphan feels rejected and alone.

An orphan has to go it alone, figure it out by himself.

I hear stories of street children in third world countries, of children that have no one to care for them, no one to love them, no one to hold them, no one to look after them and to teach them and to train them and to guide them.

They are truly all alone.

They have to figure everything out by themselves.

They have to learn how to get by and survive.

There's no one to watch out for them, no one who cares, no one who will come to their rescue if they're in trouble.

Life is hard and there's danger at every side.

And that is the life of an orphan.

There is no one there who is with me and for me.

I am on my own.

I am all alone.

It's up to me to survive.

And so, are you living like spiritual orphans today?

Or are you living like a child of God?

Let me explain what I mean by asking if you're living like an orphan.

Spiritually, we can live like orphans.

We forget.

We forget the love of the Father, we forget his care.

We don't believe.

We mistrust, we we lose faith, our confidence in God.

Uh God's care is shaken.

Maybe we don't understand why God allowed something to happen in our lives, and because of that, we've built doubt and mistrust in our lives.

We have had an illness or a sickness or a loss or a death, and we begin to question the goodness of our Father.

Does he really care for us?

Does he really know?

Does he really understand?

Is his eye really on us?

And our hearts begin to harden, and we begin to think that if we're going to make it, we have to do it on our own.

Our faith begins to grow cold and our hearts wither.

We go through the motions, but we don't have trust anymore.

What does it look like to live like an orphan?

Inside of your bulletin, if you received one, there's a sheet like this.

On the inside of that sheet, I encourage you to look on.

Look on the right side of the columns on the on there, the on the left page, the left column under orphans on each page.

What does it look like to live like an orphan?

And here are some of the things that uh Jack Miller and others have written on that.

It says, when you live like an orphan spiritually, this is how it works out in your Christian life.

You feel alone, there's a lack of vital daily intimacy with God.

You're full of self-concern.

You worry about life and the future.

You're anxious over felt needs, your relationships, your money, your health.

I'm all alone.

No one cares.

I'm not a happy camper.

An orphan lives on a success-fail basis.

We need to look good and be right.

We are worried about impression management of controlling our image, controlling what people think about us.

We need to be right.

We're performance-oriented because we feel like others are going to judge us, and our self-worth and our value is based on that.

We feel condemned and guilty and unworthy before God and others.

We don't understand our forgiveness and our status before God and the weight of guilt and shame bear down on us.

We labor under a sense of unlimited obligation.

We're always trying to please others and do a little bit more so that we can look better, so that people might think well of us and our reputation might increase.

We try hard to please and we burn out.

An orphan is defensive.

We can't listen well.

We bristle at the charges of being self-righteous and prove the very point that we're defensive against.

We need to be right, safe, secure.

We're unwilling to fail, unable to tolerate criticism and can only handle praise.

Our egos are frail and fragile and shallow.

We're excessively self-confident or self-loathing.

Either we deny the reality of sin in us and we begin to believe we're better than we are, or we get a glimpse of our sin and we feel the condemnation of that.

We're discouraged and defeated and lack spiritual power.

We're unbelieving effort.

We rely on our gifts and our abilities and our talents to get by in ministry.

And quite honestly, we're relatively prayerless in private.

Prayer is a last resort.

Sometimes we'll pray in public, but rarely, seldomly in private.

We tend to be ungrateful, we complain, we're bitter.

We have a critical spirit and we tear down others.

Orphans gossip, confessing other people's sins.

They need to criticize others to feel right and often justify by saying, I have the gift of discernment.

An orphan tends to compare himself to others, leading either to pride or to depression, that we judge ourselves based on others and we find people that we think we're better than or further along, and so we puff ourselves up, or else we see ourselves less than others and we become depressed.

Orphans feel powerless to defeat the flesh, has no heart victory over pet sins.

We live in a cycle of defeat and promise and defeat and promise because we don't understand love and forgiveness.

We need to be in control.

We have no sense of being a big sinner, even though we struggle greatly with sin.

We wish people would see things our way.

We need to be in control of situations and other people.

And we look for our satisfaction and possessions and positions or pacifiers, our idols.

They can be people or things or our status or our responsibilities.

Something other than Jesus makes us feel worthy and worthwhile or justified.

And so we live like orphans.

I've lived most of my Christian life as an orphan.

I've been a Christian now for 31 years.

I've been in full-time ministry for 21 years.

I graduated from college with a 3.98 GPA summa cum laudi.

I graduated from seminary with a 3.89 magna cum laudi.

I've read thousands of books over the course of my lifetime.

And I don't say that to brag.

I say that to say, I missed it.

And I lived most of my life like an orphan.

I missed it.

Please don't misunderstand me.

I'm not saying that knowledge isn't important.

God has given Himself to us through His Word to understand.

And so study and learning and understanding are important, but they're not the end to which we do that.

And I missed it.

Many of my shortcomings as a person, as a Christian, as a father, as a pastor, as a leader flow from orphan living.

Much of the pain in my life and the pain that I've caused to others is because I was living like an orphan rather than trusting my Heavenly Father.

Almost exactly two years ago this week, God broke through through a series of circumstances in my life to allow the blinders to fall off and to begin to see myself in light of the reality of who I really am in Christ and the love of my Heavenly Father.

I was at a pastor's conference and I was coming back from it, and I was talking with a friend of mine, Luke Hershey, who was in the college ministry here.

And we were talking about this and just wrestling with a lot of things.

And he quoted a verse in Zephaniah chapter 3, verse 17, and talking about the delight of the Father.

Zephaniah 3:17

That passage says, The Lord your God is in your midst, the mighty one who will save.

He rejoices over you with gladness, he will quiet you by his love, he will exult over you with loud singing.

I've lived most of my life on a performance basis trying to please God in some misguided way.

I would never admit this, but trying to earn his favor of believing myself to be somehow a second-class citizen in his kingdom.

I felt as if God was distant and aloof and disinterested in me, that quite honestly, that the Father was in some ways displeased and angry at me.

And if it wasn't for Jesus running interference, God would put the smack down on me.

And I never would have said that, I never would have admitted that.

If you had given me a quiz, I'd get 100% on all of the doctrinal truths, on the attributes of God, but in my heart of hearts, I lived like an orphan.

The next day after this conversation, I was sitting in on a lecture on the Puritans of all things, listening to a lecture on John Owen and his book, Communion with God.

And in this lecture of this man who lived 450 years ago in this book, he talked about the love of the Father, and he said, the greatest problem with most Christians is that we don't see God as our loving heavenly Father, and we think he's disappointed and angry with us.

And I sat there and I listened to this lecture, and God pricked my heart, and I thought, that's me.

And I began to weep.

And I just cried and cried and cried.

And I said, God, I don't believe that you really love me and care about me, and that you're for me and not against me.

I don't believe that you delight in me.

You know me and my sins and my struggles and my background.

We don't see God as our loving Heavenly Father.

We get Jesus, we see the gospels.

But it's so hard to believe that our Father loves us, that our Father, that my Father loves me.

But what we forget when we look at Jesus is Jesus came to reveal to us the heart of the Father.

Jesus touched the untouchable lepers.

He had compassion on people who were like sheep without a shepherd.

He allowed the unclean woman to touch his garments.

He went to the house of tax collectors and sinners.

He was indiscriminate in his love.

He cared for those who the world rejected, and he called them his friends.

He was kind and compassionate and gracious and merciful and loving.

And the Bible says that Jesus came to show us the heart of our heavenly Father.

John says later in chapter 1, no one has seen God, the only God who is at the Father's side.

He has made him known.

Talking to his disciples in the upper room in John chapter 14, and he's asked, Show us the Father, and he says, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

John 14 · chapter mention

How can you say, show us the Father?

Hebrews 1:3 says he's the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of his nature.

Hebrews 1:3

If you want to know who your heavenly father is, look at Jesus.

We struggle with the concept of father.

And some people suggest, well, maybe we should just try to find a different understanding of who God is.

Maybe you've had an abusive father, maybe you had a distant father, maybe your father abandoned the family.

And when you think of father, the last thing you think of is somebody who loves and cares for you.

And so when you come to the idea that God is your heavenly father, you immediately begin to recoil at this word.

Don't look at your earthly father.

Maybe your father was great and loving and caring, but he was still a sinner who was fallen.

And sometimes we project on our heavenly father the faults and the deficiencies and the sins of our earthly father.

And I would challenge you that sometimes when we think of our Father in heaven, we need to think of him in contrast to what we experienced here on earth.

And we can understand that this isn't the way it ought to be, and that's not who our heavenly father is.

We do it all the time.

Maybe your parents had a bad marriage, but when you grow up and you say, I know the bad marriage that my parents had, and I'm not going to be like them because I know there is something else.

I know there is something better.

And when you come to your heavenly father, you realize when you look at the deficiencies and the sins and the faults and the failures of your earthly father, to say to yourself, My heavenly father is not like that.

I know that he is someone who is infinitely good and loving and compassionate, and that's who my heavenly father is.

And maybe it's by way of contrast rather than comparison.

But God, the Father, loves you.

And he wants you to live as his child.

What does it mean to live as a child of God?

What does it mean to truly understand and apprehend the reality that God is your heavenly father?

Look at the other side of the chart for a moment.

This is what it looks like to live as a child of God.

Has a growing assurance that God is really my loving Heavenly Father.

To believe and know that God loves you, to trust the Father and have a growing confidence in his loving care.

Being freed up from worry.

Learning to live daily, consciously, part in partnership with God, of not being fearful.

That you feel loved and forgiven and totally accepted because Christ's merit really clothes him.

To understand the gospel, to say that Jesus Christ lived that righteous life and that was credited to my account, and so that I am clothed with his righteousness, and all of my sin and all of my guilt and all of my shame has been born on the cross.

There is no more anger that the Father has.

Prayer is the first resort.

I'm going to ask my daddy first.

And daddy is such a shallow word, but the word Abba Father, there's an intimacy of a love that's there.

Open to criticism since he consciously stands in Christ's perfection, not his own.

He's able to examine his unbelief.

We can face our sins squarely and rightly because we know the love and forgiveness that we have in Christ.

Able to take risks and even fail since his righteousness is in Christ needs no record to boast in, protect, or defend.

Confident in Christ and encouraged because of the Holy Spirit's work in him.

Trusting less in self and more in the Holy Spirit, a daily conscience reliance.

Prayer is a vital part of the day, not confined to a quiet time.

Relies on the Holy Spirit to guide the tongue, praises, edifies, gives thanks, encourages.

Is able to freely confess his faults to others, is finding that he's often wrong and is eager to grow.

Stands confident in Christ.

His self-worth comes from Jesus' righteousness, not his own.

As he rests in Christ, he's seeing more and more victory over the flesh.

He sees himself as a big sinner, but that's okay because he has a big gospel.

Becomes Christ control, loves others in the power of the Spirit, not in strength of his own of his sinful nature.

Christ is his meat and drink.

God truly satisfies his souls, and having him I desire nothing on earth.

God is your heavenly Father who delights in you.

He rejoices over you in love.

He quiets your heart.

He sees you as his child whom he loves.

God is for you and never against you.

The Bible says, if God is for us, who can be against us?

He who did not spare his own son.

Catch that.

The Father who did not spare his own son but gave himself up for us all.

How will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

Your heavenly Father knows what you need.

In Matthew 6, Jesus says, Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear?

For the Gentiles seek after these things.

And your heavenly father knows that you need them all.

He is the father who runs to his son who was caught up in sin and was filthy and unclean.

The story of the prodigal in Luke chapter 15.

Luke 15 · chapter mention

This son who is in the filth and the muck and the mire of uncleanness goes to his father and hasn't been able to clean off and thinks, I only want to be a slave.

And his father sees him in the distance and runs to him and embraces him and lavishes his love on him.

It says it in the Greek.

He buries his face in his neck and he holds him and he calls him his own and he exalts him to the place of his son.

And that is who your heavenly father is.

And God the Father loves you.

You are a mess, and you will be a mess.

And by God's grace, he is cleaning you up and moving you along to be more and more like Christ, but you will have sin in your life your entire life, even as you pursue Christ.

But your Father loves you.

Let me end with a quote from Packard.

He says, Do I, as a Christian, understand myself?

Do I know my own real identity, my own real destiny?

I am a child of God.

God is my father.

Heaven is my home.

Every day is one day nearer.

My Savior is my brother.

Every Christian is my brother too.

And then he says this: say it over and over to yourself, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, as you wait for the bus, any time when your mind is free, and ask that you may be enabled to live as one who knows it is all utterly and completely true.

This is the secret of the Christian life and a God-honoring life.

And these are the aspects of the situation that really matter.

May this secret become fully yours and fully mine.

Are you living as an orphan?

Are you living as an orphan?

I challenge you to go through this list sometime today in the quietness of your heart and all of the other things going on today.

Get alone with God and go through the list and prayerfully say, God, where am I in each of these categories?

Where is my heart?

Where is my belief that you are my heavenly father?

My father loves me.

He knows me.

He knows my reputation.

He knows my sin.

He knows my struggle.

But he wraps his arms of love around me and he says, You are mine and I am yours, and I am with you till the end of the age and for all of eternity.

Are you living as an orphan?

Are you living as a beloved child of your heavenly father?

Let's pray.

Father God, we're a mess.

We sin so much.

And yet you love us.

You are for us and not against us.

You see us as we really are, even when we lie to ourselves and we don't want to admit the depth of depravity in our own hearts and the residing indwelling sin, and yet you love us.

And even in your discipline, you love us.

There is not a moment of our lives that you are not lavishing your love upon us because of Jesus, and that we are your children.

Oh Father, may the reality of what the gospel brings to our lives, may that penetrate our hearts, and if we remember nothing else, that we are your children, that I am your child, and that you lavish your love on me.

Father, impress that on our hearts and our minds.

May it guide everything about our Christian life.

Father, by your Holy Spirit, may we live as your children.

Who we truly are in Christ.

Amen.