Pastor David Kalamen | Adoption and identity | March 29th, 2026

Well, good morning, family.

Nice to be in the house of the Lord with you this morning.

Pastor Brian called me up a number of weeks ago and said, We'd like you to talk about identity.

He said, You seem to have a word of the Lord on that.

And I said, Well, God's been good.

He's given me insight and a revelation.

He says, Well, I'd like to talk about identity and adoption.

And I went, whoa.

Talk about laying a subject title on me.

And this week uh I spent a lot of time in prayer about it.

And I want to tell you, the Holy Spirit just I hope I can do glorify the Father.

This morning He's worthy.

Christ's entire heart was, I've come to glorify my Father.

So I saw something in the word that probably I haven't linked together for years.

Last time I was preaching here, I said that God sent his son for two particular purposes.

One was to go to the cross on our behalf, and we'll be celebrating what Jesus has done on our behalf.

But I said also he came to establish his church, to build his church.

Saving you without providing a family for you is incomplete.

But I want to tell you, God's shown me something else.

And I want to dig into that with you this morning because I believe it will.

If it penetrates your heart, and I pray for a revelation of the Spirit of God to come this morning, where you will rise up in your own spirit, heart, maybe even in your own pew or seat, and say, Abba, Father.

For we welcome the spirit of adoption into this house.

Someone who is just like me, and he will be with you.

He won't be limited to geographical space.

He won't be in Jerusalem.

He'll be in every heart that welcomes me.

And the same spirit that raised from Christ from the dead is here today in you and will bring revelation to your heart about who the Father actually is.

And so I pray in the name of Jesus that the spirit of adoption would come and bring a revelation into your heart that may never have been there and may unclog and defeat the enemy's designs and deception and lies over your life that have kept you back from being able to walk in the joy of a relationship with Heavenly Father.

Would you stand one more time, please, as we read the Word of God?

There's a little bit of a text mistake here.

When I say when if you had put up that first verse, right after the proper time had fully come, God sent his son.

Okay?

So if you would read that together with me this morning from Galatians 4 and Ephesians 1.

But thanks, but when in God's plan, would you read that with me?

The proper time had fully come, God sent his son.

That we who believe might be adopted as sons, as God's children, with all rights as fully grown members of a family.

And because you really are his sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, Abba, Father, therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son.

And if a son, then also an heir, through the gracious act of God through Christ.

He chose us in Christ.

Is that portion up there?

Okay.

He chose us, I'm reading from Ephesians, he chose us in Christ, selected us for himself as his own before the foundation of the world.

Can you get that in your heart?

He selected you and chose you.

You are not an accident.

He selected you and chose you in Christ before he formed the world.

He formed you in his heart before he formed the earth.

So that we would be blameless in his sight.

In love, he predestined and lovingly planned for us to be adopted to himself as his own children through Jesus Christ in accordance with the kind intention and good pleasure of his will.

This was not an accident.

It wasn't something that Jesus was forced to do.

It was according to his will.

Would you say this with me today?

God chose me before the foundations of the world.

Would you say his plan was to adopt me?

God sent his son, the spirit of his son into my heart to cause me to cry, have a father.

Would you say that?

And lastly, would you say it?

The Father was not forced to do this.

He chose to based upon his great love.

Father, thank you for your word.

Your word has spirit and life.

Your word is inspired.

Your word separates between what is soulish and fleshly and what is spiritual.

And it establishes things in us that cannot be done by anything else.

You give us life through your word.

And so we receive it this morning in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated, the Lord bless you.

Any cursory reading of the news or listening to news channels would tell us that we're in a highly engaged ideological war, a war of ideology, a civil war of ideology.

It's happening in Canada.

Every generation has entered into that war.

And it's not about genetics, although it is race, politics, region, religion, gender, even philosophy, because all of that has changed and grown and morphed over the years.

It really has centered on who the father is.

The greatest battle of your life will be on you defining in your heart who the Father is.

In Genesis, in chapter three, when humanity was created, and of course God did not create an Adam and Eve to fail, he created them to succeed.

It was a paradise, it wasn't hell.

And we find that when they were created, the war began with thoughts and ideas that were contrary to the truth.

And Adam and Eve fell into a trap of the enemy's strategic making of undermining the very character, slandering the very character of the Father.

He basically said, Well, Heavenly Father is not good.

He's keeping you back from certain things because he really doesn't want you to be like him when in reality God sent his son Jesus so that you would be conformed and recreated again back into the image of God.

His heart has always been for you to be like him.

The enemy said he really doesn't want you to be like him, yet he does.

The enemy said, what he's saying is not trustworthy.

You can't trust him.

And so, right from the very beginning, man chose the lie over the truth.

Man's nature shifted.

We find out in that text that as a result of sin, man fled from the presence of God when they used to walk with God in the garden.

They hid in fear, they hid in shame, in guilt, they began to blame shift.

So something happened to them on every level.

Spiritually, there was a separation, soishly, emotionally, mentally, everything began, and even the body was affected through sin.

And instead of taking personal responsibility for sin, man made God the object of cursing.

Instead of reconciling with God and asking forgiveness, man, even to this day denies that God even exists.

He makes God the object of the superstitious.

He refuses to acknowledge belief in him matters at all.

And ultimately, the ones that were created in the image of God, who through sin their image was broken, began to create God in their own image.

And so we have the landscape filled with gods that have been created by humanity to reflect what they want.

One of the primary reasons that I now see for Christ's coming was to restore the image of the Father, to break the slander and the deceit and the lies of the enemy, and to reveal who the Father was and to reconcile humanity back to Heavenly Father.

God hadn't sinned against humanity, humanity had sinned against God.

God hadn't turned his back on humanity, man ran from the presence of God.

Jesus provided a way for our sins to be forgiven through repentance and faith in what he had done at the cross, and forgiven and a relationship restored to the Father.

And we read about that in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, when Paul writes this, he said, if anyone is in Christ, and Christ is in them, grafted into Christ, and has faith in the Savior, he is a new creature, reborn and renewed in the spirit.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

The old things, the old moral condition has passed away.

Behold, new things have come because spiritual awakening has happened within.

But all these things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through sending Christ and made us acceptable to him through the cross and gave us the ministry of reconciliation so that by our own example we might bring others to him into relationship back to the Father.

So it's all about being restored to the Father.

When his disciples asked, Show us the Father, Jesus replied and said to them, He and the Father were one.

He said, To know him was to know his father.

To hear him speak was to hear his father speak.

To watch him do things was to watch the Father do things.

He said, I only do what I see the Father doing.

He said, Not only am I in the Father one to know me is to know the Father.

Then he said, I want you to know the Father so well.

I want you to pray this way.

And I want to encourage you, this is important.

It's not a matter of just sort of like a combination of words.

Jesus said, When you pray, don't say God, don't say Jesus, don't say, hey, buddy, up there.

Say our Father.

Our Father.

Okay?

We address our prayers to the Father because Jesus was all about you developing a relationship back to the Father.

Jesus paved a way for humanity to be adopted as his own children, just as intensely and as really and intimately as his own son.

I want you to get that into your heart this morning.

The relationship that God wanted restored, wanted brought to bear was a relationship that would be similar to and equal to his own sons relationship to him.

What an incredible level.

Even the angels in heaven marvel at the grace that God has shown towards us by giving us joint seeding with Christ.

Now the world has a warped view of Heavenly Father.

They might say God.

Let's just throw God into the mix.

But they have a warped view of the Father.

And I don't know what view or vision or idea that you have struggled with or grown up with.

Maybe you saw God as the concoction of religion.

Maybe you saw God as a superstitious idea, not really a person, but a philosophical myth.

I don't know how you saw God.

Maybe you saw it as a psychological coping mechanism that people had to have.

Maybe you saw God as impersonal and unapproachable and removed from everyday life.

I don't know how you saw God when you were brought up.

Maybe the idea of God made you angry, fearful, even resentful as you tried to make sense of the pain of life, because there is a lot of pain and injustice and dysfunction in life.

Maybe your ideas started when you were young and grabbed a hold of you then and you shut God out of your life.

Maybe they were ideas about God that were molded in your life by parents who had their own hurt towards God and raised you up in a way that you would never even think about going to church or raising a prayer to heaven.

Maybe it happened in school as atheism and agnosticism reigned.

Maybe it emerged as a result of feeling the injustice of life all around you and trying to make sense.

I get it.

I understand that we've all grown up with that.

But this is why Jesus came.

Right from the very beginning, God is trying to get it to humanity a revelation of who He is.

I'm Jehovah Jirah, the Lord will provide for you.

I'll go ahead of you and make a way so that when you get there, you're going to find my provisions already made for you.

I'm the God of breakthrough for your life so that when you come to facing things in your life that you can't handle, you can call on me and I will break through on your behalf and make a way where there is no way.

I'll level the mountains, I'll fill the valley, I'll make the strip the crooked straight.

I'm the God who's there for you.

And so this revelation of God was going throughout the Old Testament, and the prophets began to teach about who the Father was, but humanity didn't get it.

And so the Bible says that God so loved the world.

God so loved the world that I he had to send his very own begotten, only begotten Son.

The only way that you're going to see who he was was by sending his son.

And it was in his son that Jesus closes the distance between heaven and earth.

It's in his son and in through the cross that the vertical touches the horizontal, the hidden, what was supernatural, what was spiritual becomes manifest in human flesh.

Jesus brought his Father into ordinary human life, eating with sinners, reaching out to the marginalized, bringing mercy to justice, helping those who had no help.

In Christ the Father comes close to us, not far away.

He's God with us.

Not just Emmanuel, God with us, but God in us, God for us, God surrounding us with shouts of deliverance, God over us, God undergirding us.

God so intensely wants to be intimately connected to your life.

We're talking about the Father having a relationship to Heavenly Father.

Present help and trouble.

Saving us from ourselves, answering our prayer before we even uttered them.

In Christ the Father, seen as forgiving us, not condemning us.

He's touchable, and he's touched by our infirmities.

That's why Jesus.

That's why Jesus.

Jesus expoused and exposed, I mean, he exposed the distorted images of God that surrounded his father.

He broke down the power of religion to corrupt our view of God, saying that God only loves those who do right.

How many of you know that's a religious concept?

It's not a biblical one.

God came, even Jesus came and said, I haven't come for the healthy, I've come for the sick.

Maybe that outward appearance is more important than the heart.

That's another religious design.

For God looks not on the appearance, he looks at your heart.

In Christ the Father, shown not to be a distant observer.

He's a lover of the sinner.

He's a part of the solution for your life.

In Christ the Father says, Come to me.

Don't be afraid.

Sins can be forgiven.

There's hope.

There's hope.

There's hope.

The very fact that Jesus, the miracle worker, was rejected and betrayed and mocked and crucified in exchange for a thief.

That tells you how deeply interwoven into the culture of the day there was against the image of the Father.

No one came to his defense at his trial.

No witnesses stood by him for all of the good he did.

The silence of history is deafening.

And all Jesus wanted to do was to reveal.

What his father was like to humanity.

He cared.

He loved.

He forgave.

He was merciful.

He was involved.

He was relevant.

Jesus reshaped the view of humanity.

And when humanity was at its worst, the Father was at his best when he sent Jesus.

Loving, sacrificial, forgiving, present, truthful.

You see a God with a father God with open arms, waiting for the prodigal to return.

He doesn't come, Jesus doesn't come to teach about his father, but to reveal his father, so that the spiritual attitudes of the day and the spiritual, the mental uh what I would call strongholds that had gripped the culture would be broken.

And people would get a view of who the father was by looking at Jesus.

Now, it's wonderful that he went to the cross, but I'm beginning to understand in my own heart today that the primary reason that Jesus came was to reveal his Father.

It wasn't the cross.

Because someone had to pay the price for our sin, and Jesus became our substitute, our Savior.

He paid the price for our sin so that when we stood before the Father, we were justified as if we never sinned at all.

And we had the opportunity to come back into a relationship with Heavenly Father.

The cross was necessary to bring you back into relationship with Heavenly Father.

It was all about the Father.

Get that into your heart this morning.

That's wonderful to be forgiven.

We're saved.

We raised our hand and said, Jesus, come into our life.

It's great to be saved, great to be forgiven, great to have our lives redeemed in our past, forgotten, judgment lifted, condemnation gone.

Oh man, those are wonderful thoughts, wonderful feelings.

But that wasn't the extent and the reason for his coming.

This is what the angels marveled at.

I'm not just interested in saving you.

I want you as my son.

I want you as my daughter.

I want intimate relationship.

I want family.

Spiritual, eternal family.

And when we begin to look at this, we go, this grace is amazing.

It's not just like I'm forgiven and so I don't get have to go to jail.

That's great.

That's wonderful.

But he went so far beyond saving you.

He provided the venue for you actually to come into a relationship with him that Jesus has with him.

Can you imagine that?

He sent his son to bring many sons to the Father.

I'm not trying to be gender specific.

Understand when I say sons is daughterhood and their sonship.

We sit at the right hand of the Father, being given joint seating with Christ Himself, and we have the right to call out to Abba Father.

Ask him anything in Christ's name.

Just like Jesus asked the Father.

Accepted in the beloved.

Embraced by God, not tolerated, not just forgiven and forgotten, but forgiven and embraced and brought into relationship with Father.

For eternity.

Not just for here, not just for right now, but for eternity to have that relationship.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

And how did it happen?

Jesus said, I'm going to send the Spirit of God to you.

He's going to be a friend to you.

He's going to be a helper and a comforter to you.

And he's going to be what you've missed when I left you.

But the spirit of the Son will be in the Holy Spirit.

And Paul writes, he says, You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back in fear, but you've received the spirit of adoption as sons.

And we cry out.

We literally cry out in our spirit, Abba, Father.

Because we have a revelation of the relationship that's come.

We don't attend church thinking that we're just we're just uh we're we're we're congregants, we're just filling a seat.

This is the Father's house.

We're his family sitting at the table, and we're going to be sitting at that table for all of eternity.

This refers to the work of the Holy Spirit by which believers are brought into a real relationship to the Father, not merely forgiven as slaves to sin or outsiders, but welcomed as part of God's family.

Adoption is not a metaphysical sentimentality, it represents a legal, relational, and spiritual change of status.

In the Roman culture, if you were adopted, you couldn't be unadopted.

You were a son, a natural-born biological son in that family, you had rights.

You were an heir.

But if you were not a son, you were a slave, and the head of the house said, I want you to be my son, I'm going to adopt you.

You were given legal status, and that could never be removed from you.

You became an heir.

That's what Jesus is saying.

That's what happened to you.

You became a legal heir, a joint heir, given joint seating with Christ beside the Father.

I don't know if we understand that, which is why we cry out, Abba, Father, unbelievable, unbelievable, Dad, Papa, I can't believe it.

Jesus came to break the hold the enemy had over the culture of the world at that time about who the father was.

Abba, father.

Abba, father.

The new birth is one thing.

When we give our life to Jesus Christ, that that shifts something.

It speaks of how our life got started.

But that's not our identity.

Our identity is adoption.

We've been adopted as sons and daughters.

It's a big difference between being born again and understanding adoption.

I think there's a lot of people that give their life to Jesus and never ever come into a revelation of their adoption.

I've given my life to Jesus.

He knows me, I'm a Christian.

Hopefully I will go to heaven when I die.

Okay.

That's really not something to be motivated about.

What motivates me is not the getting there to heaven, but the living here now as his son.

Adoption speaks directly to relationship and legal standing and inheritance and belonging.

The apostles were saying, you're not a mistake.

You're not the run of the litter, the leftover, the forgotten.

He was thinking about you before the foundations of the world.

His plan was to provide a way for you to know him again.

Ah, you weren't there in the Garden of Eden.

That's true.

You and I weren't there.

We didn't know him that way, be able to walk with God like Adam and Eve walked with God.

But God has made a way for you to walk with him today.

You can know his voice.

You can walk with him.

You can be led by the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, live life in the Spirit.

And the spirit of adoption keeps helping us to cry out Abba Father, know your relationship, know your relationship, know your relationship.

You're not asking as an orphan, you're not asking as someone who's who's deficient, you're asking as a as a child of God.

He predestined us for adoption according to the purpose of his will.

Failure doesn't nullify our status.

Will we fail?

It doesn't nullify that relationship.

He loves us.

Sin affects fellowship with God, but not sonship.

A child can grieve his father, but they do not stop being a child.

God disciplines his children, but he does not disown them.

Discipline demonstrates that you're his child.

Nothing can separate you from God's love.

Nothing.

We can abandon God, but God will never abandon us.

So what do we see?

And what is the thing that is in my spirit, and I think the Lord's spirit this morning.

If you never knew him as a son, you never knew the father as a daughter, never knew him as a joint heir, never knew him as being given joint seating, never knew him as belonging, never knew him as family, but always there to serve.

We serve, yes, we obey, but we obey out of love.

We serve out of love because of our relationship.

It's not a matter of religion, it's out of relationship with him that we do what we do.

The enemy has perverted the idea of God in our culture.

Jesus came to once and for all destroy the works of the evil one and to restore to us an understanding of who the Father was.

He went to the cross to save you.

He built his church to put his family in a place of community in preparation for heaven where we'll be together forever.

But if you haven't come to a grasp and an understanding of sonship, today's the day.

Today's the day to understand it.

Move from salvation as a sinner to redemption and inheritance as a son.

Hallelujah.

If we can get the worship team up here, I want to say this to you from my heart today.

I really do believe there are people in this house that have been under the deception of the enemy and been blinded to who the Father is by buying into ideas of who he is that are untrue.

When you look at Jesus, it changes the paradigm and the way in which we look at the Father.

That's why Jesus.

That's why it was important for him to come.

So this morning, as I've been speaking, maybe the Holy Spirit's been moving upon your heart.

Maybe you don't know him.

I'm here today to tell you that Jesus came to open up an avenue for you to have relationship back with the Father.

I'm telling you that today.

And that venue, that avenue has been opened up for you.

You didn't do anything for it.

It's called grace.

You couldn't make the way, you couldn't do it.

God had to do it for you.

You sent his son.

And if you don't know him, you can come to Christ this morning and be reconciled to the Father.

But I'm not happy with that alone.

It's great to have relationship restored, but we've got to see ourselves as much more than saved, forgiven.

We've got to see ourselves as sons and daughters.

We have a relationship.

I was crucified with Christ.

Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.

And the life that I'm living now, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave his life for me.

He came inside me to help me develop the relationship to the Father that he has.

So I cry out, Abba Father.

I have a deep, intimate relationship with him.

I have access.

I have access to the God of the universe to walk in and express my heart.

And he will not turn me away.

He will not abandon me.

I belong there.

Some of you know that we've been going through health issues in our family.

We do need a miracle in Carline's life.

There's been challenges of whether she's going blind now.

A lot of it related back to chemo with cataracts and neurological issues, stigmatisms, bone density.

She's got a year of oral surgery ahead of her just to be able to eat.

So you understand just getting around is now complicated.

She's on my side.

She's been that way for 54 years.

She's going to be that way until we both see heaven, right?

Sometimes I wonder, but this week I've been praying.

And I've been saying, Father, you said that healing is the children's bread.

Healing is the children's bread.

We have the right to cut off that loaf.

Eat of that bread.

I don't know about you this morning, but I know that healing has come in my life as I prayed for the healing of others.

And as my wife is listening this morning, I want you, if you've got issues of that need that touch of God and healing upon your life, I want to tell you that healing is the children's bread.

You have a right to it.

You're not entitled because of who you are, you have a right because of who he is and what he's done.

But if you've got a healing need in your life right now, I want you to put your hand on wherever it is or lift your hand to heaven if it's more deep than that.

Why don't you do that?

Because we're gonna cry out, Abba Father, because we have a relationship with you.

We have a relationship with you.

We're the children of God to our faith.

We're sons and daughters of the most high.

We've been given joint seating at the right hand of the Father.

We are joined heirs together of the resources of the Father.

And so tonight and today, in the name of Jesus, we receive the spirit of adoption and we cry out, Heaven Father.

We're coming to you right now.

You paid for our bodies with your precious blood.

They don't belong to the world or to the enemy, they belong to you.

You send anyone who would touch that body, which is the temple housing the Holy Spirit, you would deal with it.

So deal with the enemy of our body.

We choose to eat the bread that belongs to the children of God, and the healing is the children's bread.

In Jesus' name, I release that healing into the body of Christ right now.

Spirit of sonship come.

Establish an understanding of your fatherhood and of their right to what Christ has come to access the grace of God today.

Grace for healing.

Grace for life.

Hallelujah.

We cut off the spirit of death over people's life when they don't want to live anymore.

I cut that spirit off because we have been given life in Christ.

Hallelujah.

Father, you embraced us and we embrace you.

Thank you for Jesus.

Thank you for Jesus.

Jesus made us come in love with you, fall in love with you.

Glorify your son as we glorify you, Father.

In the mighty name of Jesus.

And everyone says, Amen.

God bless you this morning.