Our worship services start again on the 7th of February, when we will continue our sermon series on the book of Romans.
So far we have looked at God’s promise of a Saviour, His promise to bless all nations, and last week we looked at God’s special or saving grace, as He grants mercy and forgiveness to His elect through the sacrifice of Jesus.
Today we will take a brief look at how God not only forgives and restores us, but how He goes even further by adopting us as His own children.
Most of us grew up learning the Lord’s Prayer which Jesus taught to His disciples. It is an incredibly deep prayer. Countless sermons have been preached and hundreds, if not thousands of books have been written on this wonderful prayer, and as Jesus taught this prayer, He sets the scene with just the first two words: “Our Father.”
Jesus teaches that we are able to address the creator of the universe, the eternal and all-powerful God as our Father.
Now, it is true that God is spoken of as a Father in the Old Testament, but when Jesus taught His disciples what we have come to know as the Lord’s Prayer, He takes this concept to a much higher level. He is calling us to a deeper and more intimate fellowship with God. The theologian J.I. Packer wrote in one of his books, “the revelation to the believer that God is his Father is in a sense the climax of the Bible.”
Calling God “our Father” is something we are very comfortable with. Most of us first learned the Lord’s Prayer as children, so it is easy to overlook just how significant and how wonderful this privilege really is. God Himself has chosen to adopt us as His own, and as we read through the Bible we are able to see the story of this adoption unfold, and we can see this principle as we look at three stages of our development as Christians.
The first part is guilt.
In Luke’s genealogy of Jesus in chapter 3, he calls Adam the son of God. Adam was God’s first son, in that he was the first man God created. As we read the first two chapters of Genesis, we see that initially, Adam and Eve had a perfect relationship with God. They knew God, and they talked and walked with Him. Our first parents lived under God’s authority, and they recognised their purpose was to love and obey the God who gave them life. God was not aloof and distant from them. On the contrary, He was very near as He provided and cared for Adam and Eve’s needs. He gave them rules and directions, and in many ways, God was a Father to them.
Of course, things changed the moment they fell into temptation and sin. They rebelled against God’s authority and rule, and as a result, God ejected Adam and Eve from not only the Garden of Eden, but more significantly, from His presence. Because of sin, the human race no longer had a perfect relationship with their heavenly Father.
Sin had entered the world through Adam, and as Romans 5:12 says, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” Sin, and its disastrous consequences have been passed down to every human being. Sin is in our DNA.
This is what Paul is talking about when he quotes from Psalm 14 in Romans 3:12 when he writes, “there is no one good, not even one.” The stain of guilt and the pollution of sin defiles every single person because of the original sin of Adam.
The result of all of this is that we are spiritual orphans, because our relationship with our creator has been ended, and no matter what we try to do in our own strength, no matter how hard we may try, there is nothing we can do to repair the damage done by our sin.
No amount of obedience to the law will help. Romans 3:20 says, “By works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” Our problem is that no matter how hard we try, and regardless of how sincere we may be, we will always disobey and fall short of God’s rules.
If this was where the Bible ended, we would have a serious and an eternal problem, but the good news is that God has provided a means for us to deal with our guilt issue, and that means has a name: Jesus Christ.
God has provided a way for us to be saved from the wrath and punishment we deserve. We’ve just looked at Romans 3:20, but Paul says in the next two verses, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it - the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”
The Gospel message is that even though we are guilty before God, we can be forgiven and declared righteous if we believe in Christ, and this is the second part of the story we are considering today. Though we are guilty, God shows us His grace.
The good news which holds the entire Biblical narrative together is this: Despite our guilt, God offers us grace. When we believe in Jesus Christ, we are saved. The big question is, how does this work?
It is possible because Jesus succeeded where Adam failed. Jesus was fully human as He entered our world, but because He was fully God at the same time, He was born without the sin DNA we all inherit from Adam. Born of a human mother, but conceived in the womb by the Holy Spirit, Jesus was born without the original sin and guilt that all descendants of Adam inherit, and because of this, Jesus lived a life of perfect obedience to God.
The wonderful news of the Gospel is that this perfect righteousness, which we need in order to be saved, is given or imputed to us in exchange for our sin guilt on the cross. This is what we looked at last week - remember that great exchange which took place as Jesus suffered and died for us. His life of perfect obedience covers our sin and guilt.
But it goes even further than that. God’s grace doesn’t stop at Calvary. He doesn’t merely provide a way for us to escape judgment. He doesn’t just do the bare minimum for us to gain entrance into Heaven when we die. God goes far above and beyond what we deserve by graciously blessing us in every possible way.
Ephesians 1:3-6 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the Beloved.”
Not only are we forgiven, but God has chosen us as His own to be part of His family, just as it was for Adam and Eve before the Fall. Christ has reversed the curse of sin and its consequences.
In Jesus Christ we receive a new identity. We are children of the living God. In Christ, we have a renewed relationship with our creator, and this means that no longer is God a judge to be feared. He judged His own Son on the cross, so now He is a loving, patient, forgiving, caring Father.
It is so important for us to understand just what God’s grace has done for us. Because of His grace, and because He is our loving Father, we are now set free from the guilt and shame of our sin. We can now live our lives with gratitude and praise for what He has done for us. This is the joy of knowing we have been adopted as His children, and this is what now shapes our lives as Christians.
The Christian life is not about obeying a long list of do’s and dont’s. We have been set free from guilt and our hearts are now filled with gratitude for what God has one for us.
It is thankfulness and joy for God’s grace which now marks the life of God’s children, which is the third stage we’re looking at today. Because of the Gospel which saves, we move from guilt, to grace to gratitude.
God did not need to adopt us as His own. Forgiveness itself would be enough, but He does not stop there. He has drawn us to Himself as He adopts us as His children, and it is this blessing, and living in this absolute assurance that He is our loving Father which changes not only how we live, but why we live the way we do. Paul writes in Romans 8:12-15, “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 cry, “Abba! Father!”
What this means is that now we are in Christ, we have been set free from slavery to sin. No longer are we like hamsters on a wheel, just going around and around with no end in sight on a constant quest to be good enough for God to accept us. Now we live as God’s children under grace.
However, and this is important - living under grace does not mean we can do whatever we want. Our quest now is to live holy lives, to obey God, and to no longer live under the bondage of sin. We live for Christ out of gratitude for His grace, and because God has called and adopted us as His own. We don’t obey God because we are fearful of the consequences if we fail. No, we obey God out of gratitude for who He is, and what He has done. This is what it means to live the Christian life.
Will we still be tempted and fall into sin? Yes. But when we do, we fall to our knees in repentance before our loving Father.
As Christians, we obey God not because we hope that He will allow us to be His children, but because we already are His children.
When we live under grace, the law points us not to condemnation and guilt, but to living life the way God created us to live. We strive to obey God’s law, because that is what pleases our Father. We are His - chosen by grace and transformed by the power of the Gospel.