Orphaned to Adoption - Leaders' Talks

Hey, I'm Pastor Steve Hole.

I want to empower you today to walk in your true identity as a worshiper and warrior.

Embrace the power of God's Word and the Holy Spirit.

Today, be encouraged with a word from my guest speaker.

Welcome to the Born for War podcast.

I almost did a Father's Day message just on the Lord's Prayer from Jesus, but felt that uh God took me a little bit of a different direction.

Today's theme passage for today, we're going to get into Ephesians 1, and we're going to be marinating between 3 and 11.

Jump in, and here's Paul writing, all praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ.

Pause here.

Paul is saying that we have an inheritance right out of the gates because of our connection and inheritance and relationship to Jesus Christ.

He's giving us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united as sons and daughters with his Son.

Verse 4, even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.

You have to pause here because even before he made creation with us in mind, he made us to be without fault in his eyes through his son.

That's going to be controversial to the script and narrative that our great adversary wants to deploy on our minds and our hearts.

So often he wants to rip off that identity, that value, that purpose, God's true intent before he made this earth for us to rule in dominion and have dominion over.

Counterintuitive to that, the enemy's narrative and script is the exact opposite.

We're not adopted, we don't have a home.

God doesn't really love us, doesn't want to know us.

But that is not the scripture.

God chose us for adoption before he even made the world.

God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ and Calvary.

This is what he wanted to do.

And it gave him great pleasure.

Man, if we could just hang on those two verses, four and five, every day we would get out of bed and we would just renew our mind, soul, and spirit with that truth that we are adopted, beloved, chosen before the beginning of time and creation by God the Father to be reunited without fault, without the sin that the enemy tries to leverage and hold us hostage in, the great disappointments of ourselves.

So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear son.

He is so rich in his kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his son and forgave our sins.

Period.

There's no other parentheses, there's no added text.

Period.

He purchased our freedom with the blood of his son and forgave our sins.

He has showered us with his kindness on us along with all wisdom and understanding.

There's the other thing that we get as inheritance through our Savior Christ Jesus.

We get all understanding and all wisdom, but we don't tap into that.

We become Christians and we accept that initial exchange, but just like sometimes, very rarely as a dad for sure, do we ever pay the full price of the buffet and just stop at the salad bar?

We go all the way through, maybe sometimes two or three times, to the chagrin of our spouse or our kids.

We're like, where are you gonna put all that, Dad?

And then you start finishing their plate.

But no, we don't do that as Christians.

We leave, we stop at the salad bar.

We don't fully go through the rest of the line and receive all the goodness, all the understanding, all the wisdom that God has for us.

God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ, which is to fulfill his own good plan.

And this is the plan.

At the right time, he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ, everything in heaven and on earth.

And furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance and makes everything work out according to his good plan for us.

If we would just trust that narrative, we would just press into that place in our hearts and trust that what Paul is saying here is actually true.

But there's something that we've grabbed a hold of, even if we've had good parents, even if the wound in our life where the enemy has come around through that cut, through that place where we got hurt, where the enemy comes in and starts to fester and infect that place and build the greatest narratives of our life that we can't come through.

We don't have what it takes.

Especially as men, that rings true to us, and we struggle at some place in our being.

Most people have some feeling of being orphaned, especially men from their fathers.

That's a commonplace.

Deal with an aspect of an orphan spirit.

This is primarily due to the fact that our fathers, at least in Western culture, were uninitiated men themselves.

It's not their fault, it's just that they didn't have initiated hearts and they did not know how to initiate ours.

Most of our dads lacked not only the intentionality that it takes to initiate a boy to a man, but also the experience they themselves missed in a rite of passion, in a rite of passage to be invited into that sacred circle of initiated men.

This was so pressing on my heart that my wife and I worked together for a good season here at the road for many years, working with moms and dads, to come alongside and initiate the hearts and minds of young men and women to bring them up into this understanding of what it is to be beloved, things that we have to give away.

There's something so true that it does take a man to initiate a man.

Truly, moms have to give some things to a boy's heart, but it takes a man who's initiated, who has those things spoken on his heart to initiate another man.

And I would pray over fathers at the beginning of the semester.

Have you had a father's blessing in your life?

Has your dad blessed you and given you a father's blessing?

And Steve and I would go through and we would bestow a fatherly mantle and a blessing over them.

And these fathers would weep oftentimes because they hadn't heard the native tongue of their heart spoken to them.

They're courageous, they're strong, they have what it takes, they can come through.

God's designed them for a purpose, and they have something to give away.

But something's been castrated, something's missing.

And I want to look at 2 Corinthians here 6.18 because this is a reference that Paul's writing that goes back to the Old Testament and a conversation between David and God as it's going to relate to his son Solomon and what's going to take place as there's a transition in leadership and power and authority in the kingdom of Israel.

And he writes, This is God speaking to David, and I will be your father, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.

2 Samuel 7:14, the reference here in 2 Corinthians is this I will be his father.

2 Samuel 7:14

This is the Lord talking to David about Solomon, and he will be my son.

If he sins, I will correct and discipline him with a rod, like any good father would do.

Because a good father chastens us, he comes after us.

And if we're not disciplined by our Father in a gentle, kind, loving way, that the way that our Heavenly Father does, then we are orphaned because we're not allowing ourselves to be disciplined.

And this is what I believe truly set David apart as he was considered a man after God's own heart.

It was due largely to the fact that David allowed and invited the Lord to father him.

He was indeed fathered by God in a very deep and intimate way and walked closely with him all of his life.

He has the greatest sin resume that we can see in any text.

But yet he's considered a man after God's own heart.

And we puzzle that a little bit.

But it was his obedience and repentance that brought him back into alignment time and time again.

He made plenty of big mistakes.

But God still chose him to set him up and his throne forever to have a place in God's kingdom.

And he says this and he promises him, because you have loved me as your only God and you've allowed me to father you, your line, your lineage will always have a place on the throne of Israel.

Knowing fully well that his descendants are going to blow it.

They're going to have other gods before him.

They're not going to be singular in their focus, but God makes a pact, he makes a covenant with man, because that's what he does.

And he never lets his side down of the bargain.

Even though we do neglect and we and we regress on our side of the covenant, he's such a faithful, loving father to bring us back in.

Basically, orphaned by his earthly father Jesse, David would walk with God in the cool of the day in the hills and the pastures of Bethlehem.

Jesse all but forgot he had David out in the field watching after his flock when Samuel came to call and anoint the next king of Israel.

I think it would be easy to imply a father wound by Jesse to David here, but we don't hear it in the scriptures so much about that, but rather we hear far more about how David walked closely with God.

George MacDonald said this the hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to cry, Father, from a full heart.

The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair.

The inability, the one central misery.

If we're honest with ourselves, we've struggled there.

We struggled with that space sometimes in our lives where we could truly believe and press into the fact that there is a God who made us in his image, who appointed us before time began to call us his children.

And to step into that place and fully receive all that we have.

David walked in complete knowledge of his place in creation and the full awareness of an inheritance as a son of God.

He knew that there was always a place at the Father's table for him.

If he was weak, he knew that he could be taken beside still waters and he would be restored.

He trusted in that.

Even on the hills in Bethlehem, to getting wounded in the courts of Saul, who I think he wanted fathered too.

He was probably looking to his king to fill a little bit of a father figure for him.

Instead, he got spears thrown at him.

And then he was the object of Saul's wrath and aggression, and he was hunted in the wilderness.

Gotta be a father wound there.

But he walked in the full knowledge of his place and inheritance as a son of God.

And he trusted God with that.

Even when he would blow it big time.

And we'll get into how that looked later and what he does.

But essentially, David left, and this is what I love about David is that yes, he probably could have had a full-time counseling staff in the kingdom based on the way that he fathered a lot of his kids.

You read the scriptures, there's some family issues going on, there's some family dynamics.

But at the end of it all, he's getting ready to transition his life and his throne to his son.

And he does something here that if we're not, if we're not careful, we miss a father's heart and what it means to leave a legacy and an inheritance for our children.

And it's beautiful and it's laid out according to what I think we are called to as men and fathers to do for our children.

And it's interesting because I'm haunted by the end of Ephesians a little bit where God says that he's going to work all things out for our good.

And he takes the greatest mistake of David's sin resume, and he chooses Solomon, who came from Bathsheba, to usher in and establish his throne.

That's how loving of a father God is.

And so this next piece is what I like to call from David's tent to Solomon's temple.

See, life happens unintentionally to us if we let it.

Life will unintentionally initiate you.

It will unintentionally initiate you as a man, as a woman, through the culture and through the messaging of the enemy.

He will come alongside and build some false identity through brokenness, hurt, and pain, and initiate our hearts in a very false way.

This quote from Umberto Echo, who I actually don't agree with, but it's sadly it is probably true to our culture.

I believe what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments when trying not to teach us.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

I think that is true.

Because we're not intentionally initiated.

We're not being intentionally initiated by mom and dad.

This was my story.

And it was only because they themselves were uninitiated.

They didn't know what that meant to walk in that way.

But as David lays it out in 1 Chronicles 22, 7 through 14, here's a father's heart.

David's greatest desire and his own identity wasn't that he was a warrior or the king of Israel.

In the Psalms, he refers to himself as the great psalmist of Israel.

He's the great worshiper of Israel.

He wants to write songs to God and worship from a deep place.

And that's his identity.

And therefore, his greatest desire after bringing the ark into Jerusalem, he has a tent there, and he's giving 24-7 worship around the ark is to establish a temple worthy of God's glory and presence so that we can go and Israel could have sacrifices and experience and encounter the presence of God.

But this conversation that he has with his son is so precious, and there's a lot to be caught here.

So we're going to flip back to Second Chronicle or 1 Chronicles 22, 7 through 14.

My son, I wanted to build a temple to honor the name of the Lord my God, David told him.

But the Lord said to me, You've killed many men in the battles you have fought, and since you have shed so much blood in my sight, you will not be the one to build a temple to honor my name.

But you will have a son who will be a man of peace.

I will give him peace with his enemies in all the surrounding lands.

His name will be Solomon, and I will give peace and quiet to Israel during his reign.

He is the one who will build a temple to honor my name.

He will be my son, and I will be his father, and I will secure the throne of his kingdom over Israel forever.

Now, my son, may the Lord be with you and give you success as you follow his directions in building the temple of the Lord your God.

And may the Lord give you wisdom and understanding that you may obey the law of the Lord your God as you rule over Israel.

For you will be successful if you carefully obey the decrees and regulations that the Lord gave to Israel through Moses.

Be strong and courageous, my son.

Do not be afraid or lose heart.

I love that passage as a father's message to a son's heart.

He initiates him, he recognizes strength and courage, do not be afraid.

And he gives him a purpose.

I have worked hard to provide, this is what he does now.

He gives him the legacy here.

I have worked hard to provide materials for building the temple of the Lord, nearly 4,000 tons of gold, 40 tons of silver, and so much iron and bronze that it can't be weighed.

I have also gathered timber and stone for the walls, though you need, uh may you may need to add more.

You have a large number of stonemasons and carpenters and craftsmen of every kind.

You have expert goldsmiths and silversmiths and workers of bronze and iron.

Now begin the work, and may the Lord be with you.

And then David ordered all the leaders of Israel to assist Solomon in this project.

They too would contribute wealth and be a part of the process.

What is David doing here?

Fathers in the room, you've got to hear this.

I think he lays out establishing a legacy and an inheritance for your children.

And there's three parts to it.

And for you man who go to the gym and work out, I put it in an acronym that I hope you can remember, and I put it as rep.

R.

E.

P.

The first one.

You can do some reps to get your dad's strength on.

Okay, you gotta leave some inheritance for your men, for your young ladies and for your men.

Leave them resources.

R.

Number one is resources.

Leave them resources to get started in life.

Material resources and wealth.

Financial vehicles.

David stored up wealth to complete the temple, to give that to his son.

I worked in the trust field, and I will say that I saw resources, great resources, being passed from generation, one generation to the next.

What lacked so often were the other things that are required in a true legacy and an inheritance.

They would get resources, but they weren't given an example and they weren't given a purpose.

So point two is you've got to give an example to your young men and women in your house.

Leave them the example to follow.

Show them by your actions the discipline of walking with God in the areas of prayer, worship, and study.

David models worship and his love and his singular love for God his whole life.

Solomon, no doubt, knows this example and can see his dad modeling that for him.

He knows that the greatest goal of David's life would be to build this temple.

And he also sees probably somewhere the lament, even though David stays obedient to God.

Kind of like when Moses doesn't get a see, you know, he gets to deal with these people all for 40 years, but then he doesn't get, you know, the promised land.

You got David on one hand, who's been a steward of God's people, brought the 12 tribes together, but now he can't see the full culmination of his kingdom come together with the great purpose of his life in his heart.

He has to pass that purpose on to his son.

And so, purpose.

You all have a mission, men, something we're called to do that ignites our hearts.

Share it with your kids.

Have them get caught up in what God's put on your heart.

And maybe invite them in if it's appropriate.

And you see God igniting them, or they get passionate too, and they want to join into your world.

David's purpose was to walk with God and to dwell in his house all the days of his life.

He says that in Psalm 27.

If that's his greatest purpose and goal, and he just wants to be in God's presence, then it's got to be building the temple.

But like a good father who can't see that work completed, so faithfully stewards the process on to the next generation and gives it to Solomon with all the tools to succeed.

Men, fathers, grandfathers, I'm calling you out to say, step up your game if you're not doing this in the areas that you have influence and you all have something to give away.

God's put something on your heart, He's written something on your heart with desire.

But you gotta allow him to father you first.

Come into that sweetness.

Let him speak to you.

As a son of God and a husband and father, model the purpose of your life in these areas and do it with intentionality.

Have a God-focused life.

Have a God-focused marriage.

And have a God-focused mission and work that you do.

Galatians 3.26 says, For you are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ.

I lost my dad to leukemia at the age of 21, and we were close, and he was a good dad.

We had adventures together.

He spoke things to my heart.

We went skiing, he taught me how to golf.

He taught me about lessons of life.

I saw him lament in his heart losing his marriage, from which I don't think he ever fully recovered.

And so I saw a brokenness in my dad.

And when he died, I felt orphaned and alone, and I was trying to answer the masculine questions of my own heart.

And I would look to guys to father me in that place.

And I'd see movies about where the masculine hero comes through, he has what it takes, he's got the strength in the moment.

And my heart would come alive, but it would also ache because I wanted that, and I wanted something to speak to me.

And as young boys, all of us have to have that question answered.

There's a pecking order.

Are you tough?

Are you brave?

Do you have courage?

Are you strong?

And so we had a ninja club.

Stupidest things I've ever done.

I can't believe I'm still here talking to you right now.

We do dumb things.

And it was like, who can climb the highest tree?

Who can jump out of the branch?

You know, we would actually take our shirts off and see whose BB gun was powerful, and it was like reverse revolutionary war.

We'd face backwards and back up.

Boom! And then whoever could get the BB lodged was like, oh, that's the man of the day.

You're like tough.

You're like dumb.

Like, who does that?

But it's in there, it's written on our hearts.

And then we'd like, okay, and it was always like up in the next thing.

It's like, okay, fine, man.

Like, alright, we're gonna run through that like thistle patch.

First guy runs through, yeah, cut up.

Next guy's like, all right, dude, I'm doing it without my shirt.

Boom, run through, cut up, torn up, bleeding.

You're like, ninja club, bro.

You're in, man.

You get it.

I'm not doing that, but you're in.

It's gonna be the founder.

You can set the tone.

I've been there, done that, don't need to do it again.

The founder of Dubai, Sheik Rashid, was asked about the future of his country, and he replied, My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, and my son rides a Land Rover.

My grandson is going to ride a Land Rover, but my great grandson is going to ride a camel again.

Why is that?

He was asked.

And his reply was this You see, hard times create strong men.

And strong men create easy times.

Easy times create weak men, and weak men create difficult times.

Many will not understand it, but you have to raise warriors, not parasites.

And so in the heart of every man is this amen.

Amen.

In a culture that wants to rip off and castrate true godly masculinity, we have to fight for that in a healthy way.

Not from the broken place of how Hollywood is depicting us, but living as a true son and daughter of God, because it's getting twisted up on both sides in our culture today, church.

And we have a requirement and a calling from God and an authority and mantle placed over us as mothers and fathers to cultivate that heart in our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and the orphaned.

And to give that truth away to them, to establish them on that firm rock that when the storms of life come against, they will be able to withstand.

Galatians 4, 5 through 7, God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law so that he could adopt us as his very own children.

And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, Abba, Father.

Now you are no longer slaves, but God's own children.

And since you are his children, God has made you his heir.

We are fully adopted in.

A great depiction of this is in the movie Last of the Mohicans.

An orphaned English boy by the name of Nathaniel is adopted in and given the name Hawkeye.

He's initiated by his Indian father, Chingachuk, adopted into the tribe and trained in all their sacred ways of honor and tradition.

And he is fully alive, his heart restored and intact and living from the truth about his own ability and strength.

Jesus models sonship and walking closely with the Father.

And we only have to look to John 5, 19 through 20, red letter Jesus talking to us.

That this would be our mantra as we look to Calvary and fully receive and get all the way through the buffet line.

I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself.

He does only what he sees the Father doing.

Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.

For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything he is doing.

Paul gives us an insight that we might also walk with the Father and hear his voice and call out to him, Abba Daddy.

If we are living in unity with the Holy Spirit, his spirit attaches to our spirit, and there's this initial push to call out Abba Father.

His Spirit walks with us and directs us towards the Father.

It's so natural the connection of the Trinity.

And if we allow ourselves to come into kingdom alignment with the Holy Spirit, He and us, and we and Him, we have access to the full power, authority, and inheritance of God's kingdom.

We pray, Holy Father in heaven, let your kingdom come on earth in our world as it is in heaven today.

My son Sawyer brings me all of his broken toys.

He takes his problems to dad, and some of them can be fixed.

I consider myself the domestic engineer of super glue and duct tape.

But some of them are beyond repair and they have to go to the graveyard.

And in that, God's fathering me, and he says, Your son brings his cares and worries to me so consistently.

Do you doing that with me?

Are you allowing me to come in and give full access to your world and let me father you completely?

The way your son looks to you to do that in his life, in his world.

In Romans 8:13 through 15, if we, but if through the power of the Holy Spirit you put to death the deeds of your sinful nature, you will live.

Romans 8:13–15

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

So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves.

Instead, you receive God's Spirit when He adopted you as His own children.

Now we call Him Abba Father.

George McDonald also writes this because we are the sons and daughters of God, we must become the sons and daughters of God.

You're already made to be that, church.

Now you have to step in through freedom of choice and fully receive.

And it goes beyond the initial love and repentance and the beauty and the love of the Father that draws us initially to Calvary, but then to fully go grasp all that he offers you as a beloved son and daughter, the full inheritance of his kingdom.

In a minute, we're going to step into worship.

But I don't want to remit, I don't want to omit or even be obtuse in the understanding and knowledge that many of us carry some wound that we've allowed the enemy to come around and fester and infect and impact the core of our identity, our belief.

And in somewhere deep inside of us, where we still wrestle with this thought, this belief that there's this orphan spirit that the enemy continues to want to put into your heart to rip you off.

But we're released from that spirit of bondage and slavery.

If I could just encourage all the fathers in the room today, from the words from Samuel Brangel, he was a leader for the Salvation Army.

He writes this on leadership, but when I read it, I replaced the word leader with father.

And I hope this encourages you today because I think it's so true of the plight, of the journey, of the adventure, and of the diligence and intentionality that it takes to be the father that God is calling us to be in this generation for our children and for our kids and for our grandkids.

It is not won by promotion, but by many prayers and tears.

It is attained by confession of sin and much heart searching and humbling before God, by self-surrender, a courageous sacrifice of every idol, a bold, uncomplaining embrace of the cross, and by eternally looking unto Jesus crucified.

It is not gained by seeking great things for ourselves, but like Paul, by counting those things that are gained to us as lost for Christ.

This is a great price, but it must be paid by the Father, whose power is recognized and felt in heaven, on earth, and in hell.

I pray that your impact as fathers would be felt in all of those areas.

God has bestowed a mantle on us to initiate, to be intentional, that we would be fathered by Him, that we would set the invitation and allow Him to father all of us today.

To open our hearts up to receive that and where we're where we're restrained and where we're not being obedient.

Give it back.

Trust that beauty, that sweetness, and see what he brings as he brings out the great aroma of your life.

The sweet juice that he wants to bring through the expression of hardship and pain and suffering that we endure this side of eternity, but the blessing and love and mercy and grace that flows from that over your family is your legacy and inheritance.

We hope today's message has empowered you to make a difference in your world.

To connect with Pastor Steve's sermons, books, and blog, visit Steve Holtonline.org.

God bless.